Was sorting out books to chuck or give to Sue Ryder (can’t be fucked with all the hassle of eBay for £2-3) and came across “The Floodgates of Anarchy” by Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer. Christie was a barrowboy who got banged up for trying to blow up Franco; he passed away last year. Meltzer was a boxer from Hackney who ended up stuffing his ears with a black and red scarf during a Whitehouse gig at the Centro Iberico (a squatted school in West London, set up by exiled Spanish anarchists). How did we go from such cool to the fucking cringe that’s Portland Antifa?
Anyway, this is a good book, if not perfect (what is?). “The great are only great because we are on our knees” – anarchos always had snappier quotes than the commies, and there’s no boring stuff about ‘praxis’ or dialectics. I howled laughing at the chapter with the pie charts (which I’d always skipped before) – were they being serious or having a laugh? Guess we can’t ask them now. If you read it, you might see what I mean. Still the closest I’ve come to a political philosophy I’m down with. Also, contra 1,000,000 people on the internet, those quotes on the back of the Clash’s ‘White Riot’ 7” are from this book, NOT “Society of the Spectacle”.
Also read “Timon of Athens” by Shakespeare (citation needed). Wow, when Timon gets shafted by his fake mates, he doesn’t hold back. Check this out:
Plagues incident to men,
Your potent and infectious fevers heap
On Athens, ripe for stroke. Thou cold sciatica,
Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt
As lamely as their manners. Lust and liberty,
Creep in the minds and marrows of our youth,
That 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive
And drown themselves in riot. Itches, blains,
Sow all th' Athenian bosoms, and their crop
Be general leprosy! Breath infect breath,
That their society, as their friendship, may
Be merely poison! Nothing I'll bear from thee
But nakedness, thou detestable town!
Imagine if he’d watched the bogroll panic buyers last year. He also tells a prostitute he hopes a horse shits over her face – but this play’s much bleaker than I’m making out. I enjoyed it, any road, but I’m a bit of a Diogenes fan. Hard to find much detailed info on this, some have questioned whether it was even performed in his time.