I’ll be tabling at Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in Asheville, September 27 and 28 with Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

This week’s Cool People episodes discusses the anarchist who invented foosball and the socialist who invented air mail. They’re fun episodes. On Cool Zone Media Book Club, which has its own feed now (with art by the amazing Jonas Goonface), I’ve been reading Hermetica by Alan Lea.

This week I finally joined the crowd and read the first two Murderbot books by Martha Wells and they’re great, short reads. I see what all the fuss is about. I’ve been watching Pokerface and enjoying it.

Our Hands Are Empty Save For History

When I was a baby anarchist, nineteen years old and full to overflowing with a lust for life, I couldn’t imagine getting lost in the past. The media we consumed (zines, mostly) kept admonishing us all to not get hung up on the “glory days” of anarchism a hundred years in the past. That was good advice, but completely unnecessary. What would I care about the Spanish Civil War when I was busy spending my nights breaking into buildings to sleep without rent, when I was helping organize protests that shut down major cities, when I was chased by cops and occasionally—when we got really lucky—chasing them right back?

These days, of course, I read history books for a living and I think about the Spanish Civil War more days than I don’t. But I’m not interested in history as dry facts, nor am I interested in it as pure nostalgia. I’m interested in how the understanding of history places me so directly and firmly in the present. History tells me that I’m part of something that is more than a flash in the pan. I’m part of a movement that has existed as long as there has been oppression.

Not being a flash in the pan is important to me. When I was first caught up in protest and rebellion, time stopped for me. The first summer I dropped out of college to hitchhike and fight cops lasted longer than a lifetime. The first year after that was another eternity.

It’s strange that lifetimes, that eternities, eventually end. When the endless time ended, when the alterglobalization movement and the antiwar movement petered out, I looked around and wondered what was left for me. I had ...