!Summer reading --- agk's diary 21 July 2023 @ 16:10 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 on Model M keyboard at roommate's writing desk --- The box fan rumbles. It exhausts hot air out the window over the driveway, draws cooler air from the shady backyard. Low tones of grandpa's voice from first daughter's room, a 35-year-old cassette tape reading her fairy stories and nursery rhymes he once read me: Snow White and Rose Red, Jack and the Beanstalk. The timbre of his voice slowly changes. Tape degrades at naptime and bedtime. One day the stories will be unintelligible. Yesterday we biked to the library for toddler time and books, Bugz' house for a book, creek on the way home. Daughter slipped on slick wet slate, fell--- splash!, laughed, slipped carefully to low water- fall wet and muddy. To minnows holding formation in a dapple of sun she said "Hi fishes I love you!" I started Adolph Reed's new book The South. Books for summer reading in this diary entry are in two categories: true adventures, 1930s anarchist/ communist fiction. 1930s proletarian fiction ------------------------- B. Traven (1934) The Death Ship [(1926) Das Toten- schiff] Written in English, first published in German. Narrator's a sailor purportedly from New Orleans stranded in Antwerp, deported around Europe after WWI. While shipboard, nationality papers became essential. He left his on a ship that sailed. He signs to a coffin ship, so decrepit it's worth more in insurance payout than afloat. Labor cond- itions are hell; the crew without papers can't leave. All know one day the ship will sink & they will die. The writing's sharp, clever, humane; adventure tense and expansive. Such ships still exist. Fielding Burke [Olive Tilford Dargan] (1932) Call Home the Heart I finished Das Totenschiff a few days ago, just started this proletarian novel. Its Kentucky writer was moved by the 1929 Loray Mills strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, and made fiction of it. A bright young girl's ground down by the demands of maintaining her big destitute mountain family. Everything sucks so she heads to the textile mills. I'm here for this. Lynd Ward (1932) Wild Pilgrimmage; (1937) Vertigo I flipped through these 'novels without words' (composed entirely of woodcuts) over the five years since Nancy gave them to me. This summer I 'read' them to first daughter, speaking my inter- pretation of the pictures with words. They became deeper, richer, more tragic. Wild Pilgrimmage follows a guy who, fed up with the factory, roams. Many men roamed at the time. He worked on farms, slept in hay, misused a woman and moved on. The red woodblock prints are his inner life, black his objective life. Vertigo's complex. Ward represented impersonal social forces that led to and resulted from the depression. We follow the intertwined stories of a girl who plays violin and the elderly gentleman whose insurance company employed her husband. There are strikes and breadlines, a suicide attempt and refusal to scab, Pinkertons and board meetings, the search for work and for profit. True adventures --------------- Alan Weisman (1997), Gaviotas a village to reinvent world Gaviotas ecovillage was established by Colombian engineers in los llanos (harsh savannah across the Andes) in 1971. Their concern was initially population growth, then energy crisis that led to the boom in adult cycling, earth day, the first green tech subsidies. Weisman narrates technical and social challenges of living and inventing in the most inhospitable Colombian ecosystem. The inventions capture sun to heat water, steril- ize water, cook food; wind and children's energy to raise water from wells deeper than previously possible; flowing water's energy to raise water and generate electricity; muscle power to stabil- ize banks, compress earth, grind cassava; mycelia to grow rainforest in los llanos. Gaviotas tech was installed large-scale in cities and countryside for residential, public, and ind- ustrial use. They started appropriate technology movement; survived narcotrafficantes, paramilit- aries, FARC, and the end of import substitution/ green tech subsidies. Some tech they were contr- acted to install had to be put in stupid places & fell apart. They're still there. Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil (1994), Rebel Radio: the story of El Salvador's Radio Venceremos [(1991), Las mil y una historias de Radio Venceremos, Mark Fried, trans.] This fast-paced, white-knuckle story of FMLN's guerilla pirate radio station was given me by the woman who got me into amateur radio. I shared it with my radio-nerd friend Kirsa. It became her favorite book. How do you broadcast cultural, news, political education content during guerilla war against a US-backed dictator as death squads and an air- force try to kill you, shut down your signal, and kill your listeners? Initially with a modified marine radio lugged into the bush, and constant movement. It's awesome to watch the struggle to power the station, deploy and quickly tear down powerful clandestine antenna setups, escape targeted aerial strafing and bombing, and stay a step ahead while making entertaining, ascerbic, informative, uplifting shows to maintain situat- ional awareness and morale of the guerillas and embrace the people. Ivan Papanin (1939) Life on an Ice Floe [Zhizn' na l'dine] [^1] Gaviotas's nerds did heroic deeds in isolated nearly uninhabitable tropics. Rebel Radio's nerds did heroic deeds in total war. This is the diary of a scientist as his team did six months of hydrology and radio research living on an errat- ically floating Arctic ice floe in the stinkin' 1930s! Solderpunk turned me onto this one. The environment's so treacherous, unstable, un- known, and hard to resupply it might as well be low earth orbit. The guys don't just survive it, they do ordinary, slow, physically exhausting science day after day. And they're sadistic to the dog, cook with gasoline, move food caches and tents so they don't sink wetly into the sea, confront impossibility with curiosity. It's un- imaginably cool. These guys are carried by devotion to Stalin, laid on more heavily in the Russian text than the English. It made me think about Barefoot Doctors in the 1968 Chinese Cultural Revolution doing the impossible (universal primary healthcare practic- ally overnight for a huge rural long-underdevel- oped country). Barefoot Doctors were trained to mix a little Western regular medicine, Classical Chinese Medicine and folk medicine, and healing power of Mao-thought when nothing else worked. Their ideology might look goofy in retrospect, but is an important part of the story. I paused halfway through, because I was reading aloud with Evy's scientist sister amid amazement and laughter, but she's been busy. Jonathan Kozol (1978), Children of the Revolution: a Yankee teacher in the Cuban schools Kozol, educator from Boston wrote important books on racial/economic inequality in US education. This adventure: the 1961 Literacy Campaign. Cuba decreased illiteracy from 25% to I think 6% in nine months. Teachers were mostly teens from cities. They went out with one primer each, hammock, and lantern to the countryside and taught with Paolo Friere's approach, building literacy with what Kozol calls dangerous words. Literacy meant reading and writ- ing at second-grade level. The hundreds of thous- ands who participated in the campaign were endur- ingly, enormously proud of what they did that year. Teachers labored all day with learners, generally in fields; taught before dawn or after dusk by lantern. The 1961 campaign was followed by a 1962-1968 campaign to get everyone in the country to a 6th grade reading level. There's so much excitement in the air, the world changing at its core. As a reader I was swept up, skeptical but inspired. Later in the book, Kozol discussed the '70s Cuban education system, as if to address my skepticism. He debated teenagers about what 'freedom' means, cited UN stats, hoped what Cuba did the US could. My life-experience leads me to doubt the possibil- ity of educational revolution without political- economic one. 'To be a revolutionary doctor, there must first be a revolution,' Che Guevara told the first post-revolution class of graduat- ing Cuban doctors. I imagine same for teachers. In revolutionary situations, the future's clearly unwritten. It's unclear what old obligations remain. For a moment of civic outpouring, every- thing's possible. Having lived through such times I love reading exhilirating stories of others' recollections of unbelievable massive civic out- pourings, buoyed by pride and faith. First daughter's awake. --- [1]:Life on an Ice Floe's hard to find. En/Ru www: tracciabi.li/~whiterabbit/Life_on_an_ice_floe/index .html litvek.net/chitat-online/501944-kniga-ivan-dmitriev ich-papanin-zhizn-na-ldine-chitat-online?p=1