Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 21:38:46 +0200
From: Ze Sprout <anarchie-AT-buelinckx.net>
Subject: Re: nomadology (book)


"Gone to Croatan. Origins of North American Dropout Culture", Edited by Ron Sakolsky & James Koehnline. Autonomedia/AK Press, 1993.

In there are also essays by Peter Lamborn Wilson, who is, if i am not mistaken, the same person as Hakim Bey.

"America" was founded as a land of drop-outs. Almost at once it began to produce its own crop of dissidents - visionaries, utopians, Maroons (escaped slaves), white and black "Indians", sailors and buccaneers, tax rebels, angry women, crank reformers, "tri-racial isolate" communities - all on the lam from Babylon, from control. Their self-liberation was carried out under the sign of Wild(er)ness and its guardians, teh "Natives". having disappeared from "History", they have ever since been ignored by the Consensus and its guardians, the academics.
Now here they are agian, coming back at you, claimng to have been the real "America" all along. They speak from the past, through the mediumship of radical historians, and in the present, in their own voices. They are speaking of other possibilities - speaking for a romantic becoming - for an insurrectionary moment - for a restoration of teh unknown.

(from the back cover)

That's all i can say about it, since, as with so many books in my collection, i never found the time to read it.

As for Hakim Bey being a fraud: well it's not because one uses a pseudonym, he is a fraud. I had my doubts about him (mainly because his overintellectualisation and subsequently me not understanding a word of it), but i recollect that in one of his later works he acknowledged f.i. anarcho-syndicalism as a revolutionary and liberatory force. As long as we don't forget the individual. This sets him apart from many neo or other post-leftists which threw all away, child and bathwater alike.

And i also remember vaguely Freddie putting my straight not to make cheap judgments about a person when you don't really know him. She was personally acquinted with Bey, i think.
-- 

===========================================================================Ze Sprout  <anarchie-AT-buelinckx.net>
amour & anarchie & amour & anarchie
===========================================================================