MONTREAL ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR 2012
Two days: Saturday, May 19 & Sunday, May 20
10am-5pm on both days
The Anarchist Bookfair will take place in two buildings across from each other in Parc Vinet, a short walk from Lionel-Groulx metro:
– Centre d’éducation populaire de la Petite-Bourgogne et de St-Henri (CEDA), 2515 rue Delisle
– Centre Culturel Georges-Vanier (CCGV), 2450 rue Workman
Pursuant to my earlier questioning of the deployment of porn stars and sexualized imagery by PETA…
An excerpt from Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality by Gail Dines.
The reality is that women don’t need to look at porn to be profoundly affected by it because images, representations, and messages of porn are now delivered to women via pop culture. Women today are still not major consumers of hardcore porn; they are, however, whether they know it or not, internalizing porn ideology, an ideology that often masquerades as advice on how to be hot, rebellious, and cool in order to attract (and hopefully keep) a man.
You can read more from the excerpt on Scribd.com or order the whole book from Powells.com or Amazon. Here’s the summary of the book from Powells.com:
Professor Gail Dines has written about and researched the porn industry for over two decades. She attends industry conferences, interviews producers and performers, and speaks to hundreds of men and women each year about their experience with porn. Students and educators describe her work as life changing. In Pornland–the culmination of her life’s work–Dines takes an unflinching look at porn and its affect on our lives. Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it’s no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. But, as Dines shows, today’s porn is strikingly different from yesterday’s Playboy. As porn culture has become absorbed into pop culture, a new wave of entrepreneurs are creating porn that is even more hard-core, violent, sexist, and racist. To differentiate their products in a glutted market, producers have created profitable niche products–like teen sex, torture porn, and gonzo–in order to entice a generation of desensitized users. Going from the backstreets to Wall Street, Dines traces the extensive money trail behind this multibillion-dollar industry–one that reaps more profits than the film and music industries combined. Like Big Tobacco–with its powerful lobbying groups and sophisticated business practices–porn companies don’t simply sell products. Rather they influence legislators, partner with mainstream media, and develop new technologies like streaming video for cell phones. Proving that this assembly line of content is actually limiting our sexual freedom, Dines argues that porn’s omnipresence has become a public health concern we can no longer ignore.
The
5th Anarchist Bookfair will take place in Dublin the weekend of 29th May.
Doors open at 10.30 on Saturday the 29th of May in Liberty Hall, Dublin, there are also events on Friday and Sunday.
This May sees the return of the annual Anarchist Bookfair to Dublin, our fifth Bookfair to take place in the city to date. Starting from humble beginnings in the St. Nicholas of Myra Hall in The Liberties five years ago, last year’s Bookfair was arguably the most successful to date. Over one thousand people passed through Liberty Hall during the day with ten different meetings and workshops held discussing a wide range of topics ranging from Palestine to Left Unity, Iran to Shell to Sea, Social Centres and beyond.
Note: This event notice is being passed along in solidarity. I won’t be there and have nothing to do with the groups involved. I would go if I were in Dublin, but here I am on the wrong side of the globe… I’d be particularly interested in catching the discussion of “Revolutionary unions in Spain” and the talk by the Iranian feminist activist.
Even if you don’t consider yourself an anarchist, or have no idea what the hell an anarchist is, if you have never been to an anarchist bookfair, I highly encourage you to get along to one – if not this one in Dublin, then one in San Francisco, or Seattle or Toronto or wherever. The strangeness and hope and community you will find may change your life – and they are great places to meet and flirt – intercourse both intellectual and otherwise is always on the table, right next to the pamphlets on alternative parenting and making your own beer.
Schedule of events below…
Men Who Hate Women (Män som hatar kvinnor) is the original, Swedish title of Stieg Larsson’s phenomenal bestseller, published in English as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – the first volume of “The Millennium Trilogy.” All three books in the trilogy have been incredibly successful. Unfortunately, Larsson never got to enjoy this success – he died before the books were published. Posthumously, though, he was the second biggest selling author in the world in 2008.
Wednesday, April 14th at 7:30pm
Jack Bowen reading from his new book analyzing bumper stickers and the philosophies underpinning them:
‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’
Are you worried about global warming? Furious about GM crops? Sick to death of human rights abuses, unaffordable housing, junk food, airport enlargement, or just the way your neighbour’s dog doesn’t clean up after itself?
Step-by-step, journalist Bibi van der Zee reveals just how easy it is to launch, publicise and fund a campaign and put pressure on businesses and politicians to start your own revolution.
Do the schoolbook publishers of America have standards? Courage? Ethics? In what sense do they stand behind their product? For “product” they sometimes produce, and not textbooks in the traditional sense. I ask these questions for a reason.
Right-wingers from Texas will be deciding what will be added and taken out of the textbooks of America’s school children. They form the majority of the 15-member Texas State Board of Education. They believe current textbooks are slanted toward a liberal viewpoint, and that discussion of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which one member describes as “hooey,” wrongly excludes a consideration of Creationism.
Read the rest from Roger Ebert…
And see also…
Posted in Current Events, Politics, Social Change
Tagged books, fundamentalists, radical right
An Anthology of Primary Texts From The North American Anarchist Black Bloc – 1998-2005
Edited and compiled by David Van Deusen & Xavier Massot of The Green Mountain Anarchist Collective
Table of Contents and more info
!!!The second edition of the Black Bloc Papers is now available as a free PDF book. We are asking people to make a donation to help cover costs including the future publication of the book in paper form. We suggest that folks donate $10. If you donate $10 or more, you’ll be able to get the paper version of the book at less than half the cover price.
Posted in Reading List, Social Change
Tagged Anarchism, Black Bloc, books, downloads
William I. Robinson (UCSB): Theories of Globalization. Alex Evans (NYU), Bruce Jones (Brookings) and David Steven (Demos): Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization: Risk, Resilience and International Order. From Globalization, Agreement Lathi Jotia (Botswana): Globalization, Education and the Birth of a Democratically Active Global Citizen; and Kathleen R. Smythe (Xavier): The Dangers of Teaching About Globalization. Nayan Chanda (Yale): Runaway Globalization Without Governance. From The Globalist, Stephan Richter on the future of globalism after Copenhagen. A needier era: An article on the politics of global disruption, and how they may change. Globalization on the rocks: David Ransom argues that a corporate shipwreck lies behind the collapse of financial markets. Trade and militarism: Daron Acemoglu and Pierre Yared on the political limits to globalisation. From The National Interest, the increasing disorder of our world will lead eventually to a sort of global ennui mixed with a disturbingly large dose of individual extremism and dogmatic posturing by states. The scary new rich: The global middle class is more unstable and less liberal than we thought. Kidnapping in the developing world is a grim byproduct of globalization, and a strange and shadowy ransom industry has grown to protect and retrieve the victims — but are all the consultants and insurers really just part of the problem? A review of Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed by Gregg Easterbrook (and more and more and more). In praise of hybridity: Ales Debeljak on globalization and the modern western paradigm. Towards global diversity: The combination of high technology and the market has produced new kind of economy and culture. Globalization unchecked: A look at how Western media suffocates real culture.
via globalization without governance – bookforum.com / omnivore.
Support Left Bank Books!
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Friends of Left Bank Books!
As you (hopefully) know, Left Bank Books is still alive and well, after 36 years in the Pike Place Market. We are still run collectively, and we still carry a wide variety of general books, while specializing in left-wing and anarchist materials.
HOWEVER—as you know, several independent bookstores have folded recently, both because of the economic crash, and competition from Amazon, etc. The demise of independent bookstores would also spell the demise of small presses, whose publications are ignored by the corporate chains.
In this brilliant account of how the U.S. economy has been driven over the cliff, the author of the bestseller “Liar’s Poker” explains how the free fall of the American economy occurred and who, exactly, is to blame.
via The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis – on Powells.com.
I, for one, could do with a fun-to-read “global financial crisis for dummies” – and while this seems to have a narrow focus on the US crash, it sounds like it might be a good beginning.
Studies during the current and past recessions show that when they feel their wallets under siege, consumers tend to switch from premium, name brands to cheaper brands, generic and shop brands, and from high-end retailers or regular stores to discounters – in other words, from Advil to generic ibuprofen or a store brand; from Macy’s (USA) or David Jones (Australia) to Target and Wal-Mart.
16 March at 7.30pm
To celebrate the publication of two new books discussing the state of ‘the movement’ in this current age of ecological and financial meltdown, what does it mean to win, and how we might actually do so, the panelists will provoke a discussion on these weighty topics of the day..
Panellists include:
Tadzio Mueller and Gifford Hartman of the Turbulence Collective
Sasha Lilley, editor of ‘In and Out of Crisis’ and the new Spectre imprint.
Andrej Grubacic, historian, fellow-traveller with People’s Global Action and co-author of ‘ Wobblies & Zapatistas’
Moe’s Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue Berkeley
(510) 849-2087
moesbooks.com
Posted in Events, Social Change
Tagged Berkeley, books, climate change, event, financial crisis
the bad days will end is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
the bad days will end 