12th Annual Anarchist Book Fair

Damn, I wanted to make it to this year's conference. Ah well. We'll drop the Loompanics bomb on them next year I suppose. This article isn't all that great but I couldn't find many reports on how the Fair actually went. Here's an entry about the first day from The SF Book Fair's website, complete with the first day's interviews on video with some radical individuals. See you there?

by Jen Thomas, staff writer for The Golden Gate Express Online.

Hundreds of anarchists, socialists, and activists gathered at the SF County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park this weekend for the 12th annual Anarchist Book Fair.

Attendees, mostly in all black attire and some sporting blue mohawks, began pouring into the park at 10 a.m. on Saturday, where thousands of books were available for purchase. Titles included everything from the uncensored version of "The Jungle" to "Chomsky on Anarchism".

The fairground’s cafeteria also housed a medley of free controversial literature. Entire books were photocopied and touched on topics such as homemade guns and ammunition, driving techniques for escape and evasion and setting fires with electrical timers.

“I bought some cheap Dostoevsky, but I’m here more for the free stuff,” said Neil Smith, 24, a first time attendee of the anarchist event. “But I avoided the free bootleg books on how to make home explosives.”

Bookstores, college outreach programs and other volunteer groups sold books at the fair, for a profit or to raise money for a positive cause.

Students from Sonoma State University manned a booth and sold literature on issues they deemed underreported on in the media.

“The genocide in the Congo is neglected by journalists,” said Andy Roth, professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University. “Serious business interests are protected by suppressing this issue.”

Keith McHenry passed out free pamphlets to promote his all-volunteer organization, Food Not Bombs, which provides food and supplies to survivors of terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

“We were the people who fed Katrina,” said McHenry. “We had a kitchen set up in New Orleans two days after the hurricane.”

The event, which spanned both Saturday and Sunday, doubled as a forum for panelist discussions.

Author Josh MacPhee held a discussion on his book, "Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority", in the cafeteria, which served as the auditorium for the event. MacPhee views his book as an instrumental conceptual tool, and hopes it will incite discussion on anarchist art.

“There are very few people involved in the dialogue,” said MacPhee. “And I think that needs to broaden and change.”

Despite the events' name, not all in attendance considered themselves anarchists.

“I definitely hold some anarchist beliefs,” said Kevin Stolle, 22, communications major at Sonoma State University. “But I don’t know if I fit the anarchist definition.”

Anarchism was widely viewed, at the event, as the absence of an oppressive government. Attendees sought to dispel the common conception that anarchy definitively equates to lawlessness.

“[Anarchism] is not necessarily about chaos,” said MacPhee. “It’s largely about organization. The society we live in now is actually more chaotic.”

College Fraternities vs. the Textbook Industry

This site's rather odd but they have some interesting material. http://www.lewrockwell.com/

"If you were an executive with a large book publishing company, and you were in charge of the college textbook division, how would you deal with this multi-phase problem?

(1) The bid/ask arbitrage opportunity: College students must pay 10 to 15 cents per page to buy new textbooks that cost a penny a page to print and deliver. College bookstores receive a mere 10% to 15% discount. This is the most captive market in publishing. It is the ultimate cash cow, and has been since 1946. Cash cows are tempting to milk.

(2) The technological revolution: A scanner costs $70. A copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro costs $450, but about $250 in a campus bookstore. With these two products, you can make a clear digital copy of any book: a PDF file.

(3) The World Wide Web: A document can be posted on-line, anywhere on earth, and can be accessed in seconds from anywhere on earth. Server space is cheap. For example, I have almost 100 books on-line, which costs me $5/month (www.freebooks.com). I could have 500 or 1,000 books on-line for that price. My server is in Germany, I think: www.1and1.com. All it takes for a search engine to find a searchable PDF file is an HTML link to the file. This can be posted anywhere on the site.

(4) The division of labor: A fraternity member could scan in a textbook in about 8 hours, depending on the speed of the scanner. Recently initiated members could be required to do this as part of initiation week. There are lots of campuses and lots of fraternities. They are bound by oaths of silence.

...

There are about 15 million full-time college students in the United States. They would no longer be a captive audience. How long would it take for word to get out? There would be blog sites monitoring the appearance of new sites, updated sites, moved sites, and the latest textbooks.

As a book-publishing executive, what could you do to stop this?

If companies are not forthright with investors about a practical counter-strategy, investors should conclude that the stocks of these firms are likely candidates for shorting.

There would be one great winner. Hewlett-Packard's toner cartridge division would become even more profitable.

CONCLUSION

The copyright laws are not going to survive in their present form. Neither is the publishing industry.


Read More...

The Dragon's Take on Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook

I always like the Dragon's 'tude when he posts. Plus Anthony Bourdain kicks ass. Word up to Tod and his chef buddies in Seattle for turning me onto his delectable culinary arts and nefarious wit. Oh, and Dragon? Don't ever mention Borders again or we'll dismember you and flavor some sea water with yer bones. Arrrrhhh!

...By way of explaining my personal aesthic to other creative friends, I use to say that I wanted to be the love child of Captain Kangaroo and William S. Burroughs. I want to synthesize a certain sense of whimsy, with a darker, edgier side. In the culinary arts, Alton Brown represents the geeky, playful side of that equation. The edgier, more punk side is best represented by Anthony Bourdain. And fortunately for me, Borders had his Les Halles Cookbook in stock.
Now, I've never really had any aspirations to master French cuisine. I always viewed it as hoity-toity and pretentious. My predilictions have always been towards simple, basic peasant fare, with perhaps a little something extra added, but built on a solid working class foundation. Of course, the more I have managed the kitchen in our household, the more this working class frugality has led me to do things like save every bone that comes off a plate. I'm using more and more stock in my cooking, and it seems ridiculous to pay the exorbitant prices grocery stores ask for what tastes like sea water with a hint of meat flavor...Read More...

Big Postal Changes Don't Sit Well With This Independent Bookseller

This does not bode well for the independent book world, good old HR6407, Bush's Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act: Bush's Postal Signing Statement - Great, so now they can just open our mail without a judge's warrent?

" No letter of such a class of domestic origin shall be opened except under authority of a search warrant authorized by law, or by an officer or employee of the Postal Service for the sole purpose of determining an address at which the letter can be delivered, or pursuant to the authorization of the addressee.

The intent of Congress seems to be to ensure that domestic mail remains a private communication. But in the signing statement, President Bush said he would ignore the law and 'conduct searches in exigent circumstances.'

What is an "exigent circumstance"? It's a legal term, and it means, in lay terms, "emergency." Interestingly, Attorney General Gonzales noted in 2005 that only in a rare circumstance could the government open mail in 'an emergency.' "

Could you be a little more confusing?

More here: Fight Bush & management's attacks on postal workers!

Add to that Boing Boing's disturbing/funny reportage of the sudden absence of clocks in 37,000 of our nation's post offices and I smell an over-arching conspiracy. Or maybe my girls just have shit in their diapers again.

But I've always considered postal employees to be the pinnacle of government workers and members of the least corrupt and most efficient government organization on the planet. No wonder Bush wants to take power away from them too, he must be jealous!

Seriously though, when my rebellion gets rollin' I'm recruiting all the postal employees right off the bat. Get them and the dock workers and the young parents and you've got yourself a revolution!

Darwin's Origin of Species now an Audiobook!

Thanks Boing Boing.

All hail the flying spaghetti monster!