Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture is an alternative American history. It is a collection of essays, poems, and art, documenting America’s lost drop-outs, rebels, and other undesirables. The majority deal with the revolutionary period.
The book has its ups and downs. Some pieces are crafted in such a way that I only skimmed through them, others enthralled me. I recommend it for fans of Hakim Bey.
These men cannot live in regular society. They are too idle, too talkative, too passionate, too prodigal & too shiftless to acquire either property or character. Finding all their efforts vain, they become at length discouraged and then under the pressure of poverty, the fear of a gaol and consciousness of public contempt, leave their native places, and betake themselves to the wilderness.
-Timothy Dwight
I find myself standing in the midst of an eternity, a vast and inexhaustible present. The whole world rests within itself — the trees at the field’s edge, the hum of crickets in the grass, cirrocumulus clouds rippling like waves across the sky, from horizon to horizon. In the distance I notice the curving dirt road and my rusty car parked at its edge — these, too, seem to have their place in this open moment of vision, this eternal present. And smells — the air is rich with faint whiffs from the forest, the heather, the soil underfoot — so many messages mingling between different elements in the encircling land. … Things are different in this world without “the past” and “the future,” my body quivering in this space like an animal. I know well that, in some time out of this time, I must return to my house and my books. But here, too, is home. For my body is at home, in this open present, with its mind. And this is no mere illusion, no hallucination, this eternity — there is something too persistent, too stable, too unshakable about this experience for it to be merely a mirage…- David Abram
According to Clamor, American Apparel has prevented their workers attempts to unionize and the company’s founder has had three different sexual harassment charges filed against him by workers. (Article preview here) So, there’ll be no more purchasing of their products by me. I recommend No Sweat.
Sadly, this also means I can’t buy from Proletarian Threads anymore (they print on American Apparel shirts).
Today I finished reading The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a book about the author’s time with a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco. The book has its ups and downs, becoming boring at times with the attention payed to the parrots’ every action, but, overall, it’s a good read.
