Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Sep 16
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–), the famous beat poet, has long identified as a philosophical anarchist and a pacifist—it was only two weeks after Nagasaki was bombed that he, as an American solider, visited the ruins. In the ‘50s he started the City Lights bookstore and publishing company in San Francisco, where he published Ginsberg’s Howl and was therefore arrested and charged with obscenity. With the help of the ACLU, he won and set a legal landmark for other publishers of sex and drug literature. In addition to his poetry, he wrote two novels: Her (1960), a surreal and semi-autobiographical novel, and Love in the Days of Rage (1988), about a bourgeois anarchist caught up in the May ‘68 uprisings in Paris.
Félix Fénéon
Sep 16
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) was an art and literary critic in turn-of-the-century Paris, the coiner of the term “neo-impressionism,” and openly identified as an anarchist. In 1894, he and 29 others were acquitted of conspiracy to bomb and assassinate political leaders. He wrote Novels in Three Lines, a piece that redefined the idea of story-telling. The book is formed from a series of newspaper headlines that he wrote in 1906 for a paper, but taken together they paint a dark vignette of Parisian life.
Tags: Dead, French, Journalist
Max Ernst
Sep 16
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Max Ernst (1891–1976) was an active participant in both Dada and Surrealism and was a visual artist who worked in collage, paintings, and sculpture. He was also one of the early creators of wordless novels, such as his Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), a collaged dark piece that follows a bird-man in a dark and surreal world. It wasn’t hard to discover he was politically radical (as most dadaists and surrealists were), but it was from Conversing with Cage, a collection of interviews with anarchist composer John Cage edited by Richard Kostelanetz that I discovered Ernst as an anarchist. In one interview, Cage is talking about his own anarchist influences and mentions, “I said something about anarchy to the widow of Max Ernst and she said that Max was an anarchist.”
Tags: Dada, Dead, German, Graphic Novel, Poet, Surrealist
Mattias Elftorp
Sep 16
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Mattias Elftorp (1978–) is a comic book author from Malmö, Sweden. A politically involved anarchist and cyberpunk, he is the author of the Piracy is Liberation books, which he describes as “Political theory, filtered through autobiography, masked as fiction in the form of cyberpunk postapocalypse.” Although most of his work is in English, he’s done recurring “Arg Kanin” (Angry Animals) short comics in Swedish that are printed in different publications and are used on political fliers. He recently did an exhibition “Violence,” on police brutality, that coincided with the EuroSocial Forum being held in Malmö.
Author’s website:
Tags: Graphic Novel, Living, Swedish
J. G. Eccarius
Sep 16
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
J. G. Eccarius (1818–) is, according to his publishers, an anarchist vampire born in Germany and currently residing in Mexico and California who is a prolific writer of fiction. If his publishers, III Publishing, are to be believed, Eccarius was involved with both the First International and the IWW. His short stories have appeared in a number of magazines including Fifth Estate, and his novels include the curious The Last Days of Jesus Christ the Vampire.
Isabelle Eberhardt
Sep 16
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), raised by a nihilist and anarchist, was a cross-dressing sufi and writer who traveled and wrote extensively throughout northern Africa before dying suddenly in a flash flood at the age of 27. She was accused of assisting indigenous resistance to French occupation, and generally had many strange adventures. She wrote short stories, journalism, and journal entries, most of which survive. Although she became more invested in sufism and Islam than in anarchism proper, I feel it is safe to consider her the anarchist she was raised to be.
Tags: Dead, Muslim, Queer, Swiss
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Kevin Doyle (1961–), a member of Ireland’s anarchist Worker Solidarity Movement, has been a writer of fiction and non-fiction for years. His stories have appeared in a number of magazines, his interview with Noam Chomsky has appeared in Chomsky On Anarchism, and he has an unpublished novel, Step F. He’s been involved in a number of campaigns over the years from pro-choice battles to No Borders campaigns. When I told him about this book project, he had some interesting things to say:
I think fiction is very important in our lives and in how we understand the world we find ourselves in. I think it is important to encourage and promote more writing from below. Some regard the writing process as “waffle” and a “waste of time”—maybe even “a diversion from the real struggle.” I wouldn’t agree at all. Writing from below is an essential part for me of creating an alternative culture and vital if we are to move anarchism into the broad center of world politics where it must be one day.
Author’s blog:
Jim Dodge
Sep 16
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Jim Dodge (1945–) is a bioregionalist theorist, an anarchist, and a writer. His novels explore a sort of modern folklore, often including magic amidst otherwise real-world events. In his bioregionalist essay “Living by Life”, he says that anarchy is an intrinsic value to bioregionalism, and says: “Anarchy doesn’t mean out of control, it means out of their control.”
Tags: American, Essayist, Living
Joseph Déjacque
Sep 16
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Joseph Déjacque (1821–1864), born in France, was the author who coined the term “libertarian” to distinguish anarchists from liberals (in a letter to Proudhon, whom he criticized for opposing feminism). Among other things, he wrote the fictional utopia L’Humanisphère: Utopie anarchique, which includes in its introduction the lines: “This book is not written in ink, and its pages are not sheets of paper … it is a projectile, that I throw thousands of onto the streets of the civilized.” The utopia was first serialized in Le Libertaire, the US’s first anarcho-communist journal. Joseph was exiled from Napeleon’s France for publishing radical poetry, and retreated for a number of years to the US before returning to France and dying in Paris.
Voltairine De Cleyre
Sep 15
2009
From Mythmakers and Lawbreakers:
Voltairine De Cleyre (1866–1912) was a poet and theorist who converted to anarchism in 1887 after the Haymarket trial shattered her faith in the American justice system. She was an early believer in “anarchism without adjectives,” which meant that she didn’t choose to identify specifically with communist, mutaualist, or individualist anarchism. She fought voraciously for the rights of women. The most famous piece of her fiction is “The Chain Gang,” a short story included in The Gates of Freedom.
Tags: American, Dead, Essayist, Poet
0