READING BOOKS!

From Little Black Cart

Welcome to the “What’s New” newsletter of Little Black Cart. It has been a few years since our last update! We will try and post more regular updates on what is happening with us. Below is a brief update on some news and events along with four new recently-published titles from the PNW to Ireland, featuring sabotage, of language, of prison, of identity. Welcome to our June.

News and events

This past spring we tabled both The San Antonio Anarchist Bookfair and the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, got to see lots of new faces and old friends, which is the perfect mix. You know who you are!

On this coming Saturday, June 25 there is a memorial for our dear friend Aragorn! in Oakland, California. You can find out more here: Aragorn! Memorial.

New Titles

Black Blossoms at the End of the World

by Invecchiare Selvatico, $8

book cover

One of the more prolific of the editors of Green Anarchy magazine (RIP), who wrote under various names, is back with his inimitable style of rants and poetry, thoughts and feelings, reflections on the day and on former and current friends and relations. Included are songs from what promises to be an upcoming album by Nazel Pickens. These are personal polemics, if such a thing exists, and vibrant post-activist reading.

Authentic freedom, essentially, has always been the anarchist project to understand and to live. It is a quest that has meaningfully united and divided in both idea and practice, which has brought me to the obvious conclusion that only in radically-decentralized affinity-based relationships is authentic freedom even possible.

Purchase here

Opposing Torture

by Sean Swain, $8

book cover

Sean Swain's third book, following (with Travis Washington) Last Act of the Circus Animals (a parable), and Ohio (lessons in a life, in history, and in theory), is a collection of examples of how prison officials in general, and a few very specific ones, treat prisoners badly, and some of the many ways that prison bureaucracy works in tandem with some terrible people to instigate and maintain torture, and the remarkable tactics that Sean has employed over the years to fight back.

Sean continues to be an amazing example of how to remain active and difficult even under some of the harshest conditions that the u.s. can bring to bear.

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain's first hand account of domestic torture that the FBI and Ohio prison officials never want you to see.

With a foreword by CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the u.s. torture program in Iraq, and our most in-your-face cover yet.

Purchase here

Breaking the Alphabet

by Sascha Engel, $6

This small booklet is a reflection on the tyranny of writing as a rigid practice (from the act of writing to what we're allowed to write), and what it would mean for our way of writing to be as liberating as what we're trying to say. Pictographs! Breaking out of ruts! The text is reminiscent of some big anarchist names in its push to re-think things that we take for granted every day, but it's more fun and also more practical (in a playful, imaginative way) than other more theory-heavy essays.

Perhaps learning how to write letters is most openly and nakedly the point where iteration itself is at stake. Perhaps it points to the essential and primary movement from joyful exuberance to iterative drudgery. "The repetitive nature of patterns," with which children start to learn how to draw letters, "emphasizes the rhythmic movement which we aim for when writing," This tames the children's muscles, helping to "maintain the consistency of size."

Practical, provocative, poetic, this text points out one of the many ways that we are trained, and perpetuate, in our own subjugation, and then offers some ways to do things differently.

Purchase here

Black Seed: Where the Absence is

Various Authors, $12

This, the second volume of Black Seed reprints, shows the arc of the journal over its various iterations, from starting out as a project taking up conversations that had ended with Green Anarchy magazine, moving through a spiritual emphasis, and finally ending with a strengthening of and emphasis on indigenous anarchy. Here there are anarchists questioning the assumptions of motherhood-as-negation, of sex-as-necessarily-empowering (or even a good thing), of romanticizing animals-as-innocents, and more.

Since the journal ended with the death of its inspiration and founder, and since the journal was on newsprint and will run out, these two books (the first is Not on Any Map) are our "Best Of" and homage to this unique and exciting project.

Purchase here

The Rest

Internship
In a program that we're really happy with, LBC hosts a new intern every three months. If you are interested in becoming a close friend with LBC and being exposed to the ideas and personalities around the project and our environs, if you've been wanting time and encouragement to work on or start that awesome anarchist project you've had in mind, feel free to reach out to us for more information.

We have a living space (and good company and dogs) in Berkeley, California to offer someone who wants to intern with us and work on exciting anarchist projects for three months time frames. Contact us at our primary email (listed below) for more information and logistics.

Live the anarchy. Attack!

Want to help?

Are you in the Bay Area and would you like to help make LBC projects happen? Please contact us.

Are you a writer?

Send us your manuscript proposals.

Social networking

Silly stuff, our Twitter account: https://twitter.com/littleblackcart

Contact Us

Snail mail address:
Little Black Cart
PO Box 3920
Berkeley, CA 94703

Electronic mail: info [at] littleblackcart [dot] com

Comments

anon (not verified) Tue, 06/21/2022 - 18:54

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Producing and selling stuff is not the defining aspect of capitalism. Selling stuff at a profit isn't even the defining aspect of capitalism, but it's definitely in there. LBC might turn a profit on their wares, but knowing what I know about publishing (radical and mainstream), whatever they generate is certainly negligible. If LBC paid its workers and authors, then for sure they'd operate at a substantial loss. Without profit beyond what it costs to maintain the machines, there's no actual wealth generated. Wealth generated through profit is capital; without wealth there can only be maintenance, not growth. You need growth, the expansion of wealth, to have anything that can meaningfully be called capitalism. LBC, like other radical publishers, just doesn't qualify. There might be any number of reasons for you to find LBC unpleasant, but being capitalists is not one of them.

anon (not verified) Tue, 06/21/2022 - 20:10

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Aragorn himself even said on numerous occasion that LBC was a capitalist endeavor. You can hear him say thing on episodes of the Brilliant and Anarchy Bang. Of course the term was being used the the colloquial sense and not the literal.

anon (not verified) Tue, 06/21/2022 - 20:51

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Aragorn himself clearly had no actual understanding of capitalism. This should come as no great surprise since most (especially American) anarchists rely on a generally instinctive disgust for capitalism; most anarchists can't be bothered with anything resembling an actual analysis of capitalism any more than an actual analysis of the state or statecraft. Too many self-declared anarchists who actually talk about anti-capitalism are so wedded to marxism (looking at you, Wayne) because most anarchists are too lazy to come up with their own analyses. So we get anarchists championing the idiotic Labor Theory of Value and sounding like left-social democratic economists (looking at you, Noam). Incidentally, the communization crowd isn't much better.

anon (not verified) Tue, 06/21/2022 - 21:44

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Totally agree with you, Aragorn was stuck with a general broad labor theory of value within a mechanistic social hive structure devoid of any holistic analysis of psyche developement and alternative market systems.

anon (not verified) Wed, 06/22/2022 - 12:57

In reply to by anon (not verified)

I hope this is fake news. Unpaid internships are a typical flavour of classist exploitation catering only to the privileged who can afford them. Anarchist employers, business owners, and landlords should know better. Makes you think.

anon (not verified) Wed, 06/22/2022 - 15:10

In reply to by anon (not verified)

This imagery of LBC with slaves in the basement making t-shirts. "Get back to work! This is anarchy"

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a href hreflang> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul type> <ol start type> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
h
&
f
h
m
B
D
X
Enter the code without spaces.
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.