Queen Victoria's Goddaughter

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/25/queen-victorias-goddaughter/

Working Class Fiction--Not Just Surplus Value

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/20/working-class-fiction-not-just-surplus-value/

From Ginsberg to Gonzo

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/22/from-ginsberg-to-gonzo/

The Madness of Reason

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/22/the-madness-of-reason/

Review of All the Sinners Saints from Michael Schiffman (auf Deutsch)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B01dj5QyuLDeM0J2U1NLNU5TeVB3WnlzUzFTb2ZCTkFMUGhR/view?usp=sharing

Reading in Burlington, VT.

three part invention 4

Fomite authors read from their works

• Ron Jacobs - Seventies Trilogy (novels)
• Tina Escaja and Kristin Dijkstra - (poetry - Tina reads in the original Spanish, Kristin reads the English translations)
• Jack Pulaski - Love’s Labours (stories)

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Off Center for the Dramatic Arts

294 N Winooski Ave, Burlington

7:00 pm

Time Slips Into the Past...And the Future: A Review of Greg Guma's Dons of Time

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/22/time-slips-into-the-past-and-the-future/

Excerpt from my novel The Co-Conspirator's Tale

http://www.stateofnature.org/theCoConspiratorsTale.html

Nothing Left To Lose

Back in the mid-1970s a lover and I hitchhiked from Maryland's D.C. suburbs to Orange County, California. We lasted a week in that Republican purgatory, then hitched up to Berkeley. Within a couple weeks, my friend and I were collecting unemployment, living in Oakland and familiarizing ourselves with the street scene along Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue and San Francisco's Haight Street. Although I had been quite involved with various anarchist and communist radicals in the DC area, I was primarily interested in participating in what remained of the counterculture by the time I moved to Berkeley. Politics had both worn me out and disillusioned me.

Yet, politics wouldn't leave me alone. I ran into former Black Panthers, White Panthers and leftover Weather Underground types while I did bong hits. One of my friends was a communist organizer who knew lots of radicals from all over the Bay Area. Soon, several other friends from the suburban tracts we had left behind had joined us. We got an apartment. My lover and I eventually went our own ways while remaining housemates.

A couple close friends of mine who were quite political asked me if I was interested in joining their cell. What, I asked, would this entail? I was told that I would have to share everything with them and be willing to undertake "armed" activities. We had several long and deep discussions. I seriously considered their offer, but declined for political and philosophical reasons. We remained good friends and they decided not to engage in so-called armed actions. I was relieved for a number of reasons.

The people I met and hung out with on Telegraph Ave. were some of the most colorful and free individuals I have ever known. Some paid for their freedom with their lives. Some traded it in for something else. Some lost it to the law. Nonetheless, they did have some freedom to lose. Maybe, because (let me refer to a rock tune) they had nothing else left to lose.

The Co-Conspirator's Tale is motivated partially by these experiences. It is something of a speculation about what might have happened if my friends and I had decided to create that cell and engage in bombings, etc. Simultaneously, it is a contemplation on the nature of a system where (as Mick Jagger sings) "every cop is a criminal," and a sanctioned one at that.

My previous novel Short Order Frame Up examines similar aspects of our society, although it is the racism of the system and the cops who work for it that are called into question. The corruption in The Co-Conspirator's Tale does not even have the tawdry principles of a racist pair of cops to dignify it. In fact, the only motivation is to protect and preserve a system built on lies and maintained by deceit and power.

The Co-Conspirator's Tale Now Available

http://www.fomitepress.com/FOMITE/Co-Conspirator.html

1979.  When Peter Somers fell in love with a girl named moonshadow on the Berkeley pier, little did he know that she was a member of a group of wannabe revolutionaries.  After an undercover cop is killed and another friend is falsely charged with the murder, the cell disappears.

2007.  Somers ends up back in Berkeley after receiving a letter describing the arrest of his friend on murder charges.  He joins forces with a lawyer and others in an attempt to clear his friend's name.  The authorities have something else in mind. 

There's a place where love and mistrust are never at peace; where duplicity and deceit are the universal currency. The Co-Conspirator's Tale takes place within this nebulous firmament. Crimes committed by the police in the name of justice. Excess in the name of revolution. The combination leaves death in its wake and the survivors struggling to find justice in a San Francisco Bay Area noir by the author of the underground classic The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground and the novel Short Order Frame Up.

There are no hero cops or private eyes in The Co-Conspirator's Tale, just a couple of folks who don't trust the world as it is to provide justice. The battlefields are the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area and the psyches of the accused, their accomplices and their accusers.