This below from David Harris' "Dreams Die Hard" seems crucial. Although I was not privy to them at the time, other conversations of Dennis’s after his return from Washington made it apparent that his enthusiasm for The Resistance strategy was waning. The idea, he said, had been to break the peace movement out of its... Continue Reading →
What IS it about libraries and archives that affects me so much?
The emotions of archives, their "affect" - presumably someone's done an autoethnography of that? (Yes - see further reading!) Of the joy of handling papers that haven't been looked at for decades/centuries? Of the rituals of the getting of the entrance card, furtling around in archives, of visiting, of becoming adept at the various rituals... Continue Reading →
FT Magazine letter: orbs, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton
Published in the FT Magazine, 19 August 2023
“Prolier than thou” bullshit, 1967…
Two quotes from the excellent book "Dreams Die Hard" by David Harris... He'd co-founded a draft resistance outfit (called "The Resistance" and within a year it was being outflanked by groups wanting/needing to edge-lord it. Steve, holding the fort in Berkeley, favoured the latter. Before leaving for the Northwest, we had agreed with him to... Continue Reading →
“Dealing with bureaucracy like wrestling with a vat of jello…”
"Frankly, it had also pretty much peaked. Dealing with the university bureaucracy was like wrestling with a vat of jello, and my “radical” proposals were all soon lost in a morass of committees and commissions, being “studied” into oblivion." Harris, D. 1982) Dreams Die Hard, p.157 Yep. Again, a feature not a bug. See also... Continue Reading →
Serious consequences for dissent having a chilling effect? That’s a feature, not a bug…
But we keep being surprised, it seems... The discussion that followed was somber, even frightening. The first thing on everyone’s mind was the penalties involved. The Selective Service Act of 1948 called for up to five years in prison for simply not having a draft card in your possession. Induction refusal carried a five-year maximum... Continue Reading →
When words lose their meaning, we are left effectively speechless, mapless. And words are STRIPPED of their meaning, by time and bad-faith actors…
The latest from "Dreams Die Hard", the 1982 memoir about the sixties and one of the aftermaths (an assassination). "It is hard for me to describe us and what we were about that summer without lapsing into what now sounds trite. The intervening decade and a half has reduced much of the language we then... Continue Reading →
“Authenticity” can win elections… which may become a problem, obvs.
So this is from "Dreams Die Hard". David Harris (author of the memoir) was an anti-Vietnam War activist who stood in Stanford University's student union election, not expecting to get more than a respectable 30 per cent of the vote (or less). Then some frat boys jumped him, cut his hair and he got a... Continue Reading →
Bob Moses – “who wields power and what shape is it?”
So, Bob Moses (who died a little while back) was a very big deal in the early 1960s as part of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee - a black-led activist group trying to fight for Civil Rights in the Deep South (which was a very very dangerous thing to do). This below is a clip... Continue Reading →
Liberals, losers and air-conditioned meetings with Important People
I remember discussing, 30 years ago, what Martin Luther King was doing the night before he was assassinated. He was talking to sanitation workers about their strike and the upcoming poor people's march on Washington. One of the two people in the conversation was scoffing, saying that wasn't real politics and that he should surely... Continue Reading →
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