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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (106101)	3/26/2005 4:05:09 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793914

Here's one for you, LB...No wonder we haven't visited for a few years: ~~San Francisco Literary Underground Celebrates Decade of Dissent By Justin M. Norton Associated Press Writer Mar 26, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Ten years after it started, the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair has become a popular rallying point for the far left, thanks to shared enemies like the Bush Administration and the Patriot Act. What originally was a few radicals getting together to talk politics has become the focus of an entire weekend of dissident cultural events, from punk rock concerts to soccer games. "The Bush era has been good for anarchist consumerism," says Joey Cain, 50, a longtime supporter. All 75 merchants' tables were sold out in advance of Saturday's fair in Golden Gate Park, making the fair one of the largest such events in North America, along with Montreal's "Festival of Anarchy" each May. Vendors come from as far away as Europe to sell rare anarchist and other political books. Enthusiasts see it as part of a tradition of dissident literature in the San Francisco Bay area, where Jack London, a professed socialist for much of his life, learned to write and City Lights Books owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti faced obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Beat-era poem "Howl." "There is a literary underground in the city that keeps renewing itself," said Adam Cornford, who heads the poetics program at the New College of California, a local progressive liberal arts school. "There have been waves of counterculture in the city all the way back to Jack London and the Beats. Serious committed anarchists have been driving force in the literary scene since the 1940s." One of the biggest displays at the fair each year is by Oakland-based anarchist publisher AK Press, which has seen a 10 to 20 percent annual growth in its business, including spikes in sales during such polarizing events as the World Trade Organization protests, the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the leadup to the Iraq war. "We haven't hit a wall yet," crowed Ramsey Kanaan, who works for the publisher and volunteers at the fair. "It seems like the number of people interested in this literature has grown every day." The publisher recently cracked Amazon's top 100 list with firebrand activist Ward Churchill's book "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," which includes his essay about the terror attacks. Churchill was among the many authors in town for the fair. Many of the works sold at the fair were little more than self-published pamphlets, but these authors can only benefit as the nation turns harder to the right, organizers say. Many classics of underground literature started out as pamphlets, said Cornford, citing San Francisco author Robert Duncan's 1944 statement of gay liberation "The Homosexual In Society" as an example. "People will suddenly become famous because they get banned or clamped down on," he said. For Chris Carlsson, a self-employed, self-publishing San Francisco book designer, the fair is a place where "people with contending and antithetical views can talk, share literature and denounce each other." That's just the spirit organizers hoped to cultivate when the first fair was held in 1995 by the Bound Together Anarchist Collective, a fixture in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. After all, when civilization as they see it is falling apart, it's time for anarchists to get together. "They are inclined to rebel anyway," Cornford said. "They look around and see the world is going to hell." -- On the Net: Bookfair: www.bayareaanarchistbookfair.org AP-ES-03-26-05 1547EST This story can be found at: ap.tbo.com