Mary is seven. Homer
Is her favorite author.
. . . She says, “Aren’t those gods
Terrible? All they do is
Fight like those angels in Milton
& play tricks on the poor Greeks
& Trojans. I like Aias
& Odysseus best. They are
Lots better than those silly
Gods.”

— Kenneth Rexroth,
fishing while his daughter reads Homer

WINTER SOLSTICE 1:35 PM EST (18:35 GMT / UT).

http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usxx&c=holidays&sc=yule&id=1900
http://www.knowth.com/winter-solstice.htm

First of the month of Nivose (snowy) in the French revolutionary calendar.

CHAOS DAY. Eat wontons.

England: ST. THOMAS' DAY. A Tradition of "Thomasing," begging gifts, door-to-door.

---

1375 -- Giovanni Boccaccio dies at 62 in Certaldo, Italy.



1549 -- Margaret of Angoulême dies in Odos-Bigorre. Queen consort of Henry II of Navarre, a patron of humanities & religious reformers & an author. Her most important work, Heptaméron, is constructed on the lines of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, (who died on the same day), consisting of 72 tales (out of a planned 100) told by a group of travelers delayed by a flood on their return from a Pyrenean spa. The stories, illustrating the triumphs of virtue, honor, & quick-wittedness, & the frustration of vice & hypocrisy, contain a strong element of satire directed against licentious & grasping monks & clerics.


1620 -- Forefathers' day celebrates landing at Plymouth Rock.

Pilgrims first land at Plymouth Rock. It's not a very big rock, but then they weren't very big Pilgrims. The Mayflower, with a contingent of Puritan separatists from the Church of England, landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. It had set out 15 September from Plymouth, England; its original destination was Virginia.

1790 -- US: Samuel Slater's thread-spinning factory goes into production, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution in America. The workers at his machines are 4 to 10 years old.


1799 -- William Wordsworth & his devoted sister, Dorothy, take possession of Dove Cottage at Grasmere, Westmorland.


1804 -- British statesman / novelist, Benjamin Disraeli lives, London. His novels are closely related to his political career which includes two stints as prime minister (1868 & 1874-80).

"Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret."

1805 -- Manuel Bocage, dies in Lisbon. Portuguese neoclassical lyric poet who dissipated his energies in a stormy life.


1845 -- India: Battle of Ferozeshah takes place, during the first Sikh War.
http://allaboutsikhs.com/events/aswar1_4.htm
http://www.thewardrobe.org.uk/historyto1881.php3

1858 -- Anthropologist Franz Boas lives, Minden, Germany.


1859 -- Gustave Kahn, French poet/literary theorist who claims inventing vers libre, lives in Metz.

Today 50 Modoc Indians hold off 329 U.S. troops in the battle of Land's Ranch. The Modoc Medicine Man, Curley Headed Doctor, places a magical rope around Captain Jack's stronghold in the Lava Beds of Northern California. Foggy conditions, green troups, fatigue & inept leadership all played a role.

The victory convinces Captain Jack's Modocs that their magic is strong enough to protect them against the white man's bullets. The two sides fought at a distance of about 50 yards in one spot. No Modocs were killed, 24 soliders were killed & at least another dozen were wounded.

Source: Thanks to daver@flag.blackened.net who typed & provided this text to the Daily Bleed http://ceres.ca.gov/geo_area/counties/Modoc/landmarks.html

We live, not feeling the country beneath us, Our speech inaudible ten steps away, But where they're up to half a conversation — They'll speak of the Kremlin mountain man. His thick fingers are fat like worms... — Osip Mandelstam, We Live, Not Feeling, 1934? http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/ http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture10.html

1892 -- Author Rebecca West lives, London.


1899 --

"Take me this way: a stray guest, a bird of passage, splashing with salt-rimed wings through a brief moment of your life — a rude & blundering bird, used to large airs & great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence."

— Jack London to Anna Strunsky, December 21, 1899;
first published in The Masses, July 1917

http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/walling/london.htm
http://london.sonoma.edu/Images/search.cgi?Caption=Strunsky&type=and


1902 -- Black surrealist artist, the High Sheriff of Hell, musician Peetie Wheatstraw lives, Ripley, Tennessee. See below, 1942.

1903 -- Lawrence Treat lives. Pseudonym of Lawrence Arthur Goldstone; American detective writer, frequently called the "father" of modern police procedural novel, although he refused the honor.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/treat.htm
http://www.litweb.net/biogs/treat_lawrence.html
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes.html

1905 -- British novelist (12-volume series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time) Anthony Powell lives, London.
http://www.anthonypowell.org.uk/

Santa María School slaughter A strike committee headed by Jose Pariggs was formed - Luis Olea was also an important member of the committee and both were remarkable anarchist militants. The strike headquarters was established at the Santa Maria School. Overall there were around 4,500 strikers and supporters in the school and another 1,500 or so camping in tents around the square. The army were called in by the bosses, martial law was declared, stores were locked and on December 21st at 3.45 pm the slaughter began. The first to be shot were the members of the committee. Chilean, Argentinean, Peruvian, Bolivian and European workers were slain with an astonishing ruthlessness, with their wives and children. All dead. The number of victims was reckoned to be up to 3600. Luis Olea was murdered by Roberto Silva Renard's gun (now known as "Carmicero de Iquique" - The Butcher of Iqueque). Chile: Massacre of miners working in Santa María, Iquique. A hard blow against anarchism was the Santa Maria School slaughter...The nitrate workers, led by known anarchists, went on a strike from their mines in the pampa (a grasslands region in South America), to the nearest city of Iquique, where they were all shot with artillery, leaving an uncertain number of dead workers, somewhere between 2000 & 3600. http://flag.blackened.net/blackflag/213/213chile.htm http://www.patriagrande.net/uruguay/eduardo.galeano/memoria.del.fuego/19071221.htm http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos336/ainfos06626.html

Bonnot Gang, a group of anarchist bandits, pulls off the first bank robbery using an automobile, in broad daylight, in the midst of a populous Paris district.

Boll's works reflected his central concern with the abject failure of State, Church & Home.

"The continual need to defend the individual & the family fired both Boll's creative energy & his trenchant criticism of politicians & journalists who seemed to care for neither. His solidarity with the young & the disadvantaged, his refusal to indulge in cold-war politics & his more recent presence at mass demonstrations in the Federal Republic against nuclear weapons brought him much public ridicule & detestation. The award of the Nobel Prize in 1972 was greeted in some quarters with undisguised dismay, & as recently as 1983 Boll was invited by the Kulturminister of Baden-Wurttemberg to consider emigration."

His books include Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953, Aquainted with the Night) & Gruppenbild mit Dame (1971, Group Portrait with Lady).

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/boll-brief-bio.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hboll.htm
http://nobelprize.org/

1917 -- Russia: The Bolsheviks decriminalize sex between men.


1917 -- US: The Russian warship "Shilka" unexpectedly stops at Seattle, causing consternation.



1919 -- US: At dawn, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman & 247 radical aliens set sail on the S.S. Buford ("The Soviet Ark"), deported to Russia from the "Land of the Free."

Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader J. Edgar Hoover advanced his cross-dressing secret police career by implementing to the fullest extent possible the government's plan to deport all foreign-born radicals.

[Details / context]

Units under the command of the Generals 'El Campesino', Lister & Modesto entered today the city. Machinegunners covering windows & doors, while dynamiters advance to blow up strong points. The soldiers are seizing lower floors of buildings, whose upper stories are defended to death. As in the University City Madrid 1936, grenades & oaths are hurled down stairwells, water pipes & wiring is being destroyed, soldiers are wrestling & bayoneting one another in the darkness.

Dead soldiers at Teruel, December 21
http://lacucaracha.info/scw/diary/1937/december/

Zappa looks down at the audience & declares the event "a load of pompous hokum...All year long you people have manufactured this crap, now for one night you're gonna have to listen to it!"

Zappa later remarks, "We played the ugliest shit we could ... That's what they expected us to play."

http://www.zappa.com/

"Miss Krapivnitskaya, the fastest of them all, was at the tape. Just as the starter was about to fire his gun, a man on a motorcycle snatched up Miss Krapivnitskaya & sped away. He turned out to be the coach of a rival team. But Miss Krapivnitskaya refused to surrender.

She broke away, dashed toward the river, jumped into a boat, & began rowing. She reached the opposite bank & began a race against time to reach the track before the race began.

Miss Krapivnitskaya lost the race, but she & her team were promised justice."

"RELAY MISCHIEF": MOSCOW, International Herald Tribune

Dec 21, 1965 The Class Struggles in Algeria, SI poster/leaflet distributed in Algeria; reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10, Paris. Dec 21, 1966 Exclusions of Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray & Donald Nicholson-Smith, English section. "Vient de paraître" (Coming Soon), flyposter of détourned comics announcing the publication of The Society of the Spectacle & The Revolution of Everyday Life. Resignation of Ndjangani Lungela, French section. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]

By the time Elvis was buried, his eyes bulged out, ripping the stitches that once held them shut. Elvis' grossly swollen tongue stuck out from between his lips, his mouth still mostly screwed shut. After a week, the pungent discharges from his body stained the coffin's once opulent lining, which began sagging & tearing under the strain of so much rotting meat.

1974 -- US: "NY Times" reports massive, illegal CIA domestic surveillance operations against the antiwar movement under the Nixon administration.



1976 -- "Hi Nabor Week," whose purpose is to spread good cheer to those confined in institutions, begins.




1978 -- US: Police in Des Plaines, Illinois, arrest John W. Gacy, Jr. for his clowning around.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/gacy/gacy_1.html



1978 -- France: Roger Caillois — philosopher, anthropologist, natural scientist, renegade Surrealist — dies.

His idiosyncratic work brought together literary criticism, sociology, & philosophy by focusing on subjects as diverse as gems and the sacred. Instrumental in introducing Latin American authors to the French public (Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, et al). Spent WWII exiled in Argentina, & active in fighting the spread of Nazism in Latin America as an editor & author of anti-Nazi periodicals. With Georges Bataille & others attempted to shift the focus of Surrealism from the dream life of little old rich ladies to the social arena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Caillois

Says a White House aide of Laxalt's statement, "When we heard it, we all cracked up."

"The White House has always attracted the mentally ill." — Secret Service agent Vincent Charles

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, & water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

— Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dan_Quayle

http://shs.ee.msstate.edu/mswm/MSWritersAndMusicians/musicians/King.html
http://www.cascadeblues.org/History/AlbertKing.htm
http://www.albertking.org/
albert.king.html


1993 -- Russia: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Boris Yeltsin abolishes the KGB (Now for the CIA & the rest of the alphabet soup).


1994 -- Liberia: Warlords sign cease-fire pact.


2001 -- US: Larry Mayes, 52, is released from an Indiana prison after serving 21 years for a rape he didn't commit; he becomes the 100th innocent American convict freed by DNA evidence. Justice is indeed blind.


2005 -- Italy: Paolo di Nella street in Rome, named after a fascist, is re-named Viale Timur Kacharava, to the memory of a young anti-fascist murdered November 13 in St.Petersburg, Russia.

[Details / context]

---

SAPPHO 1997 SAINT
The original Lesbian poet.

---

NEGRO:

Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed — not by its residents — Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

       — from The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan

3002 --

"Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle ... mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle."

       — Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid

3600 --

"Where there is authority, there is no freedom."

       — Prince Peter Kropotkin

4000 -- On this day December 21 anarchists Peter Kropotkin, Bonnot Gang, Erich Muhsam, Libertaire

---

anti-CopyRite 1997-3000, more or less
Subscribe to daily email excerpts/updates (include 'subscribe bleed' in subject field),
or send questions, suggestions, additions, corrections to:
BleedMeister David Brown

Visit the complete Daily Bleed Archives

The Daily Bleed is freely produced by Recollection Used Books

Unique visitors since May 29, 2005 (220,000+ page loads)

anarchist, labor, &radical books

See also: Anarchist Encyclopedia
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/gallery/galleryindex.htm
Stan Iverson Memorial Library
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/
Anarchist Time Line / Chronology
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/indexTimeline.htm