A panel exploring some of the themes of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new collection Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?, with some of the book’s contributors: Jaime Cortez, Debanuj DasGupta, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, and Horehound Stillpoint – hosted and facilitated by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it’s an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention!
For more on the book: http://www.akpress.org/2011/items/whyarefaggotssoafraidoffaggots
Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it’s an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention!
For more on the book: http://www.akpress.org/2011/items/whyarefaggotssoafraidoffaggots
Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it’s an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention!
For more on the book: http://www.akpress.org/2011/items/whyarefaggotssoafraidoffaggots
Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it’s an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention!
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore will be at the Claremont Colleges to do both a lecture (1/26) and a workshop (1/27).
For more on the book: http://www.akpress.org/2011/items/whyarefaggotssoafraidoffaggots
Last week we gave you this year’s Top 10 bestselling new titles from AK Press publishing; this week we’re back with our Distro Top 10: our bestselling new titles this year from our distributed indie publishers. It’s been a great year and, as you can see below, there have been some excellent new releases. If you have missed any, now’s the perfect time to take another look!
The Top 10 AK Press Distribution Titles of 2011 are:
1. 2012 Slingshot Organizers [Slingshot Collective]
The Slingshot Organizer pretty much always tops our distro bestsellers list, and for good reason: they’re practical, they’re cheap, and they’re fun. They have more personality than your iCal could ever dream of. Available in a rainbow of colors, and two sizes: the pocket organizer and the spiral-bound desk planner. Don’t have your new calendar or organizer yet? Get yours now, and get organized!
2. What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: Being An Adventure Of Your Own Choosing [Margaret Killjoy / Combustion Books]
Remember those “choose-your-own-adventure” books you read when you were a kid? Well, here’s the politically-charged grown-up version, full of goblins and gnomes and vice, from the author of our own Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction. It’s awesome—and if you don’t believe us, maybe you’ll believe Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing review!
3. Work: Capitalism. Economics. Resistance. [CrimethInc.]
This latest arrival from CrimethInc. takes on not just work itself but also the larger forces of capitalist economy that make it possible (and seemingly necessary) for most people to work our whole lives with nothing to show for it. If you’re familiar with CrimethInc.’s other popular books—Days of War, Nights of Love; Recipes for Disaster; and Expect Resistance—some of this will seem like familiar territory, but with its particularly timely focus on dismantling capitalism (and thus work as we know it), it goes in some interesting directions.
4. The Listener: Memory, Lies, Art, Power [David Lester / Arbeiter Ring Publishing]
From the author of The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism (which is also great!) comes this compelling graphic novel that tells a startling story of Germany in 1933, interwoven with scenes from the life of a modern-day artist. Paul Buhle says, “Speaking as a reviewer of comic art since 1970 and historian of comic art, in some way, for the last thirty years, I can say that no one has captured better this dilemma of the politically-inspired artist.” That’s pretty high praise, eh? See what others have said, and then check it out for yourself.
5. Fair Game: A Strategy Guide for Racial Justice Communications in the Obama Era [Praxis Media Productions / Praxis Project]
A new workbook-style guide from some of the same folks who were involved with our own Talking the Walk: A Communications Guide for Racial Justice! Introduced at the US Social Forum, and now updated and available to the general public. This guide is designed to help its readers navigate new political waters, explore proven strategies, and consider long-term strategy. There’s lots to chew on here, for anyone committed to racial justice.
6. SteamPunk Magazine: The First Years, Issues #1–7 [Ed. Margaret Killjoy & C. Allegra Hawksmoor / Combustion Books]
A recent arrival, but this one was such a big hit at the holidays that it’s already a bestseller! This anthology collects all published issues (so far!) of SteamPunk Magazine, including plenty of fiction and artwork as well as pieces on music, fashion, politics, history, and mad science. Over 400 large-format pages of awesome steampunkery at a very reasonable price!
7. Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language [Jila Ghomeshi / Arbeiter Ring Publishing]
We’ve all heard self-appointed “language police” bemoan today’s sloppiness, imprecision, and a general disregard for the rules of grammar and speech. For sure, we at AK are sometimes guilty of being sticklers for proper grammar (it kind of comes with the territory). But this book is a valuable counterpoint, demonstrating what the insistence on “proper” use of language reveals about power, authority, and social prejudices. Listen to this radio appearance by the author to hear more about the book… and then get a copy for yourself or your favorite grammar nerd.
8. Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh [Anne Elizabeth Moore / Microcosm Publishing]
A USA Today reviewer called this “the best travel book I read all year.” Anne Elizabeth Moore (also author of the excellent Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity) brings her experience in the American cultural underground to Cambodia, where she teaches young women to make zines and in the process learns more than she’d bargained for about women’s rights, globalization, the failures of democracy, and justice.
9. Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination [David Graeber / Minor Compositions]
From the author of our own excellent collection, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (and one of the most articulate voices coming out of the Occupy movement—check out this recent piece!) comes a timely new book of essays explores the political imagination. Capitalism as we know it is over. In our current political landscape, where can we find signs of hope and possibility? How can we come together to create a new language, a new strategy, a new set of expectations?
10. Art Gangs: Protest & Counterculture in New York City [Alan W. Moore / Autonomedia]
An important new contribution to the study of art history, from an art historian who knows what he’s talking about. From the Art Workers Coalition through Art & Language, Colab and Group Material in the 1980s, in Soho and the Lower East Side, the collectives described in this book built the postmodern art world, and in many ways laid the foundation for today’s radical art collectives. This is the essential background story of the politicized international art world.
Honorable Mention: Debt: The First 5,000 Years [David Graeber / Melville House]
Even though this one isn’t exclusively distributed to the book trade by AK Press (as all of the above titles are), and even though it’s a giant $32 hardcover, it still made our bestseller list. Why? Because it’s just that good. Do yourself a favor and read it. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it could not have come out at a better moment in history. Check out the New York Times review!
It’s also worth noting here that there were a whole bunch of great new titles released near the end of the year that didn’t make it onto this list just because they didn’t have time to become bestsellers YET—but they’re still worth checking out! Among the year-end bestsellers: Practicing Feminist Mothering (Fiona Joy Green / Arbeiter Ring Publishing); Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars (Ed. Ryan Conrad / Against Equality Press); Communization and its Discontents (Ed. Benjamin Noys / Minor Compostions); and many more! New titles arrive every week… Why not sign up for our e-mail list to make sure you hear about them?
If you should happen to find yourself in the mid-Atlantic or the Northeast in January or February, I strongly recommend you make time for a detour to Reading, Pennsylvania for the improbably located Surrealism in 2012 exhibition: a never-before-exhibited-together collection of surrealist material created since 1960. NO, surrealism didn’t die out in the 50s with the death of Andre Breton. A quick survey of the surrealist titles we carry in the AK Press distribution catalogue–most of them published by Charles H. Kerr/Black Swan Editions–drives this point home where writing is concerned, but surrealists around the globe have continued to produce art objects at a frenetic pace over the past fifty years, and poet and photographer Joseph Jablonski has culled together the largest, most diverse surrealist exhibition since the 80s. In Reading, PA. Of all places.
Surrealism in 2012: Toward the World of the Fifth Sun
January 6 – February 19, 2012
GoggleWorks Center for the Arts
201 Washington Street
Reading, Pennsylvania
The opening reception is January 6, 2012 from 5:30 – 7:30PM. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this lovely piece by my friend and mentor Franklin Rosemont, the great surrealist poet and historian, who helped to organize the World Surrealist Exhibition of 1976, from whose catalogue this essay is drawn.
Freedom of the Marvelous
Caught upon an emotional precipice between the irretrievable and the unhoped for, men and women today rarely recognize each other, or even themselves. Ask them who they are, what they are doing, where they are going; they stare blankly, stammer, look the other way. No one dares to be happy: too many wars, too many suicides, too many unemployed, too many priests, too many cops; too many “troubles” of every sort conceivable and too many that are scarcely conceivable at all. The exceptions prove the rule. The traffic is always heavy, the weather is always bad. No doubt about it: life today is only five percent of life, and day by day the percentage goes down. (more…)
AK Press has an immediate opening for a new collective member. More specifically, we’re looking to expand our publishing department by hiring someone who has a passion for books and ideas, requires little sleep, and knows the difference between Lucy Parsons and Lady Gaga. Read on for more explanation.
The publishing department at AK Press oversees the acquisition, development, production, and promotion of roughly twenty new titles every year, in addition to managing our extensive backlist catalog and seeking new sales avenues for our titles. Ideally, our newest hire will work out of our Baltimore office (but if we can’t live without you then we’ll consider making space in the Oakland warehouse). Our new collective member will be unreasonably organized and efficient, have a sense of humor but take the work of AK Press as seriously as it deserves, and they will spend their time:
The day to day tasks revolve around the functions of the publishing department but as a member of the collective you’ll be self-managing the largest and most productive anarchist publishing house and distribution center in the world. Our jobs are tremendously fun, but remember, this is hard work.
Required skills include some combination of:
Recommended skills include:
The position is full-time (40hrs per week plus additional nights and weekends, as necessary). We offer comprehensive health care, twenty-four paid vacation days a year (in addition to May Day, our only official holiday), and a salary of $27,500.
Still interested? Please send a resume and cover letter to jobs@akpress.org with the subject line: ATTN Publishing Position | YOUR NAME. All queries must be received by January 15. Your cover letter should address why you want to work with AK Press, and highlight your ideas about reaching people with the books and ideas we publish – send us your manifesto for making AK Press books dinner table conversation around the country and beyond. Let us know what you have to offer, and where you’ll take us as a member of our collective.
Thanks in advance for your interest and we look forward to hearing from you!
This year, the conference of the North American Anarchist Studies Network will be happening in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on January 7-8. I’m deeply bummed that I can’t make it, but there will be a table full of AK books there, with a lovely person standing behind it. In the meantime, here’s an interview with the conference organizers (from the Rekolektiv blog). |
 |
—
On Organizing the Conference
Q: Interest in having Puerto Rico host this conference began a long time ago – I know that in Toronto last year the idea was certainly floated around, and people on the listserv began suggesting it immediately afterwards. What was the initial reaction to the idea among Puerto Rican anarchists? Who picked up and ran with the idea in the early stages?
A: We cannot speak of a concerted reaction among Puerto Rican anarchists because although there’s an always evolving non-written history of organizing, there isn’t that much of an anarchist milieu going on from where to draw any explicit opinion. Nevertheless, there are certainly some moderately small groups with different agendas, in addition to anarchists in other socialist organizations as well as individualists, who have nodded their heads in agreement, recognizing the importance of opening spaces for the discussion of such thinking on a bigger scale. At first, members of the ad hoc NAASNPR committee presented the project of housing the third NAASN conference to other groups akin to anarchist thought, but since they were mostly focused on other projects it was put on hold. The first formation of the organizational committee structured the foundations of what would be the conference itself (booking the first venue, the call for papers, the announcing of the event, etc.) and eventually other comrades got in touch to help volunteer with issues such as food, artwork, planning, logistics, writing, and transportation, among others.
Q: The website and organizing you’ve done so far is very impressive. You definitely have a talented group of artists, scholars, activists, and organizers in Puerto Rico. How did you all find each other and what has it been like to bring your efforts together?
A: It has been great. Even though we have known each other for a while, the process has been an excellent opportunity to bond as individuals. The actual organizational committee is made by two teachers, a farmer, an artist, a student, and a poet. We’ve also had help from people from different backgrounds. Even though our main goal is the conference and we get together at least twice a week to work with it, it also gave us a space to discuss our ideas and create future plans that go beyond the conference.
Q: Obviously this conference benefits from a history of organizing in Puerto Rico. What previous anarchist organizations or affinity groups have come together to help put this conference together? Do many of the organizing collective’s members have previous experience with anarchist groups?
A: Even though Puerto Rico has a rich history of organizing and resistance, we have done this without the direct support of any organization. There are members of other collectives or socialist groups that promote the event and spread out the word and will be participating but the organizing aspect has been done by a small group of people. Radio Huelga, a collective that was born as a pirate radio during the strike at the University of Puerto Rico will be working with us to transmit the event live through their webpage.
Nonetheless we cannot deny the impact all this history of struggle has had in ourselves as individuals. Even though all of us have been part of past struggles in an individual aspect and only two of us had been part of an anarchist organization, but not for long, we are learning from our interactions with the struggles in Puerto Rico and with the contact with other socialist and progressive organizations.
Q: In September the original venue cancelled after the Rector of the institution discovered the political leanings of the gathering. How did this affect the organizing? Was it easy to find a new space?
Is the AteneoPuertorriqueño more receptive to your politics?
A: When we first started looking for a venue the options available were quite limited. For practical reasons, the conference had to be hosted within the metropolitan area (San Juan specifically), due to serious problems and deficiencies in public transportation on the remainder of the island, and a lack of spaces with the minimum requirements for the purpose intended. In addition to this, we wanted a space that would be open for the discussion of any political idea so we were looking for spaces outside the academia.
Paradoxically, we settled for the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe because of its convenient location and accessibility for everyone. After a few weeks of phone calls, emails and personal visits we were given the heads up; there was only some bureaucratic paperwork left to do, but we were told anyhow not to worry, and decided to start promoting the conference. When the Rector of the institution found out about the activity they cancelled it on the basis of miscommunication and conflicts with the dates. They said they were having an Art Symposium that was going to last two weeks; out of which we still haven’t seen anything announced, and certainly just a made up excuse for censorship. This put us in a precarious situation and left us back at the beginning of our organizing efforts. After an intense week of searching for a new space we thought the Ateneo Puertorriqueño would be the most appropriate venue for the event.
Two things must be said about the Ateneo Puertorriqueño. Even though it springs from liberal ideas, it welcomed us without ever questioning our purposes and was excited to have us there. Even though the Ateneo closes down for the holidays and resume their labors after the dates of the conference, they agreed on opening the space for us within the time span of their holiday vacations, not only for the event, but for the venue’s preparation days earlier; something which was highly appreciated since the probability of getting those same dates on other public or private spaces were null for different practical or cultural circumstances. Furthermore, the Ateneo has been an open forum for all the ideologies that have taken part in the political debates in Puerto Rico, from far right conservatives to the radical left. Being a cultural, educational and historical institution founded in 1876, it receives funds directly from the government but their open politics has won them the hate of the current administration which wants to transfer its yearly pay of $500,000 to a children hospital in the grotesque fashion of putting people who could oppose between the sword and the wall, as if one had to choose between cultural endeavor or agonizing children; using among many of the excuses, the hosting of an anarchist conference; this of course from the distorted cartoonist perspective of being wreck advocates. Even after this attack on the Ateneo (they got already paid) they have decided to keep on going anyway they can, even without the economic support of the government if those funds happen to be withdrawn or transferred.
Just putting the finishing touches on the warehouse for tomorrow’s Holiday Book Sale. Drop by between 2:00 and 7:00 for a cold drink, snacks, and the best radical literature on the planet at great prices. Select books are $1, $3, and $5 and everything else is 25% off. See you then.
