Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 02:53:28 -0700
From: David Brown <recall-AT-eskimo.com>
Subject: Daily Bleed: 5/22 CLAUDE McKAY


Web version, in full, 64 of 'em:
http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/0522.htm

Excerpts:

MAY 22

CLAUDE McKAY
Black American writer, Harlem Renaissance mainstay.

Islam: NIGHT OF THE TREE OF EXTREMITY. This
tree has a leaf with a name on it for every person on earth.
On this night it is shaken. If your leaf falls, you will die
in the coming year. Many prayers said in mosques.


12 - Daytime meteor shower, possibly Zeta Perseid,
observed in China.

1337 - Constantine the Great is great no more.

1703 - Can't Take A Joke?: British author Daniel Defoe
is fined, imprisoned, later pilloried for his ill-timed satire,
“The Shortest Way with Dissenters”.

1805 - Esoteric poet, proto-surrealist Gerard de Nerval lives, Paris.

1807 - Burr-in-the-Saddle?: former Vice-President Aaron Burr on
trial for treasonably "assembling an armed force...to seize the
city of New Orleans...&  to separate the Western from the
Atlantic states."

1813 - German composer, anti-semite Richard Wagner lives.

1828 - Here's Lookin' At You?: Albrecht Grafe, pioneer eye
surgeon, founded modern ophthalmology.

1845 - American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt lives.

1856 - Democracy in Action?: Congressman Preston Brooks of South
Carolina visited the floor of the U.S. Senate & beat Senator
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts unconscious with a gutta-percha
cane, as two Georgia senators stood idly by.  Sumner was
incapacitated for three & a half years.

1859 - Arthur Conan Doyle lives (1859-1930). British writer, best
known for his creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes. After
his son died in World War I, he dedicated himself to
spiritualistic studies. An example is “The Coming of the Fairies”
in which he supported the existence of "little people" & spent
more than a million dollars on their cause.
http://www.ultranet.com/%7Erogerc/doyle.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/acdoyle.htm

1868 - First train robbery in the world, in Indiana, when the
Reno gang makes off with 98,000 buckaroonies.

1871 - France: "Bloody Week" -- the brutal suppression of the
Paris Commune -- enters its second day. Delescluze declares the
hour of revolutionary war has sounded:

"Au peuple de Paris, à la Garde Nationale, Citoyens, assez de
militarisme, plus d'états-majors galonnés et dorés sur toutes les
coutures! Place au peuple, aux combattants, aux bras nus! L'heure
de la guerre révolutionnaire a sonné."

<LI>http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/talks/paris.html
<LI>“Theses on the Paris Commune”, Guy Debord, Attila Kotanyi,
Raoul Vaneigem http://www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/Pariscommune.htm
<LI>CLR James on the Paris Commune,
http://www.compulink.co.uk/~jplant/revhist/otherdox/james1.htm
<LI>http://www.pitzer.edu/~dward/Anarchist_Archives/pariscommune/
Pariscommunearchive.html
<LI> See also Eugene Schulkind (ed.), “The Paris Commune of 1871:
The View from the Left”

     Remember now there were others before;
     The sepulchres are full at ford and bridgehead.
     There will be children with flowers there,
     And lambs and golden-eyed lions there,
     And people remembering in the future.

   — Kenneth Rexroth,  excerpt, "From the Paris Commune to the
        Kronstadt Rebellion" (1936)

1884 - One-armed baseball pitcher Hugh Daily fans 13 hitters.

1885 - Victor Hugo dies in Paris. Mourned as a national hero &
buried in the Pantheon.
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/9640/
http://www.ewl.uky.edu/~achico/hugolife.html

1892 - France: Inauguration of Bourse du Travail in Paris. In
federating with the provincial bourses, under the strong
anarchist influence of  Fernand Pelloutier, a formidable
proponent of  revolutionary syndicalism.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/sinners/PelloutierFernand.htm
http://texts.anarchosyndicalism.org/pelloutier.htm
http://www.maitron.org/maitron/Dico/synd3.htm

1894 - Italy: The trial of the anarchist Oreste Lucchesi & his
companions, begun in Florence May 2, concludes. They were charged
with assassinating the Livourne editor of  "Il Telegrafo," on
July 1, a  newspaper whose articles resulted in the repression &
arrest of numerous anarchists. Lucchesi & Amerigo Franchi
received prison sentences of 30 years each.

1895 - Railroaded?: Eugene V. Debs imprisoned for his role in the
Pullman railway strike, Woodstock, Illinois.
http://www.discovery.com/area/history/pullman/pullmanc1.html
http://www.spcc.com/ihsw/evdebs.htm

1895 - Indian religious leader Jiddu Krishnamurti lives. (or
5/12?)

"Truth is a pathless land, & you cannot approach it by any path
whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless,
unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be
organized; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or to
coerce people along any particular path."

1901 - Gaetano Bresci found dead in prison, "suicided" by his
guards. An Italian-American anarchist who assassinated Umberto I,
King of Italy. See the Anarchist Encyclopedia,
http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/sinners/BresciGaetano.htm

1906 - Wright Brothers patents an aeroplane.
http://koolpaperairplanes.hypermart.net/
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/1817/

1906 - US: Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman travel to Chicago,
where the two anarchists are followed by the press. Newspaper
falsely reports that Goldman & Berkman have married.

1925 - Gertrude Stein writes F. Scott Fitzgerald about his novel,
“The Great Gatsby”:

"This is as good a book [as This Side of
Paradise] & different & older, & that is what one does,
one does not get better but different & older & that is always a
pleasure."

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gstein.htm

1925 - Surrealist painter, sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925-1991)
lives.

1930 - Birth of gay rights activist Harvey Milk. Killed by whacko
Dan White,  who got a couple years in jail using the famous
"it was the Twinkies I ate made me do it" defense.
http://www.backdoor.com/CASTRO/milkpage.html
http://www.planetsoma.com/sf1970/scene/harvey.html
http://www.sbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/harveymilk.html

1937 -- Spain: A plenary session of the CNT's Local & Comarcal
Federations hears a proposal that the Friends of
Durruti be expelled.

1938 - Warren S. Van Valkenburgh (1884-1938) dies of a heart
attack. American anarchist editor ("Road to Freedom" & "Spanish
Revolution") & devoted friend & correspondent of Emma Goldman's.

1939 - Despite success as playwright & poet, Ernst Toller hangs
himself in his Manhattan hotel room, convinced his plays are
passé. A German Expressionist involved with other writers &
anarchists in forming an insurrectionary Bavarian government.
Forced to flee Nazi Germany. Wrote “Man & the Masses” (1920).

                   "History is the propaganda of the victors."

                The anarchist pacifist Ernst Friedrich helped form a
                "Revolutionary Pacifist Group" whose membership
                included such figures as Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Mehring,

               & the Expressionist writer Ernst Toller.

               (Julian Beck, his wife & partner Judith Malina & The
Living
                Theatre would perform "Masse Mensch" in the late
                1970s).

1939 - Hitler & Mussolini sign "Pact of Steel."
http://www.pagesz.net/~stevek/europe/lecture9.html

1947 - The manifesto “Freedom is a Vietnamese Word”,
published in the anarchist paper "Le Libertaire", signed by
the surrealists Bonnefoy, Bousquet, Breton, Peret, Tanguy &
10 others, condemning the French imperialistic adventure in
Indochina.
http://csl.tao.ca/anarquia/surrealismoya.html

1948 - Black American writer Claude Mckay dies,
Chicago, Illinois.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

http://www.cyberramp.net/~kb2iqs/claude1.htm

1952 - Jan Todd woman power lifter, once lifted 545.6 lbs in a
squat,  after being goaded by a jilting ex-lover with "you can't
do squat," lives.

1954 - Mine's Bigger than Yours?:
Bobby Zimmerman is Bar Mitzvahed.

"A friend of my mother's who attended Minnesota during Dylan's
frat boy days... [said] he met Dylan more than once, & all he
ever talked about was how he had the biggest Bar Mitzvah in the
history of Hibbing."
http://www.well.com/user/yudel/Tangled.html

1955 - Cops in Bridgeport, Connecticut cancel a scheduled dance
headlined by Fats Domino, because, authorities say "rock & roll
dances might be featured."  They justify their action noting "a
recent near riot at the New Haven Arena," where rock & roll
dances were featured.
 http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/costello/472/

1955 - Roger Noel, aka Babar, of Alternative Libertaire, Belgian-
French critical magazine, lives.
http://users.skynet.be/AL/

1957 - Heads Up, India!: 10 megaton hydrogen bomb accidentally
fell from a bomber in an uninhabited area near Albuquerque owned
by the University of New Mexico. Non-nuclear explosives
detonated, blasting a crater 12 feet deep & 25 feet across. Its
10-megaton nuclear charge miraculously does not detonate,
narrowly averting horror for New Mexico. The bomb is hundreds of
times more powerful than the one that had leveled Hiroshima. No
one was injured, but radiation was detected in the crater.

1962 - Roger Maris walks 5 times (record 4 intentionally) in a 9
inning game.

1967 - Hoods?: Premiere of Public Broadcasting System's longest-
running children's program, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood".
http://www.concentric.net/~Moviebam/mrrogers.html

1968 - France '68: In the Latin Quarter of Paris the police (the
"forces of order") & the students clash.

1968 - US: NY City police raid of student occupations at Columbia
University results in 998 arrested, over 200 injured.

1968 - H. Rap Brown of SNCC convicted for carrying weapon across
state lines.

1968 - In one of the worst U.S. civilian helicopter accidents, a
passenger helicopter bound for Disneyland from LAX disintegrates
in mid-air & crashes near Paramount, California, killing all 23
on board. The explosion was triggered by a Mickey Mouse fix.

1969 - Langston Hughes ("I, Too, Sing America") dies in New York.
A foremost champion of the black experience in the United States
& poet of the Harlem Renaissance. A target of that august body,
HUAC.
http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/blacklist.htm
http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/11-17-97/boston_books_2.html
http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/0896/08096a.html

1969 - Columbia University: 100 (SDS) students flee two buildings
after warrants are served. Their protest occupation demanded no
military recruitment on campus, end to ROTC, black studies
program.
http://www.neravt.com/left/jacobs1.html

1970 - Mel Stottlemyre sets record by walking 11, but wins 2-0.

1970 -- England: Bomb discovered at the new Paddington police
station in London: during the later trial, the prosecution claim that
this is the first "Angry Brigade" action. Major Yallop (head of
laboratories at Woolwich Arsenal) admits to forensic work on
1,100 bombings in England between 1968 & 1971. Busy days indeed.

1972 - British poet laureate, C. Day-Lewis, dies.

1972 - In an effort to deflect from the Vietnam War & tumult at
home, Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader ("I am a pacifist") Dick
M Nixon is first US President to visit Moscow, where rumor has a
commie in every bed.  A week of talk culminated in a strategic
arms pact.

1978 - 4,000 protesters occupy Trident nuclear submarine base
site, Bangor, Kitsap County. BleedMeister Auntie-BaseDave is
waving at you.

1984 - Declaration of Five Continent Peace Initiative.

1996 -- You’ve Lived the Life — Now See the Movie!
GUY DEBORD’S
“The Society of the Spectacle”:
 ____________________________________________________

90 minutes. French videocopy. Pacific Film Archive,
Berkeley, Wednesday, 22 May 1996, 7:30 p.m.

http://www.slip.net/~knabb/PS/Debordfilm.htm
____________________________________________________



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