I spent our week of record heat digging around in various archives, when I would much rather have been concentrating on writing, as well as getting a few things ready for my weekend of tabling. And then I’ve spent the last week playing catch-up on the writing and attempting to process the lessons of the weekend. In the end, it’s made for a very productive few days, as all of that came together. Even after splitting the issue, LeftLiberty #2 will be at least twenty pages longer than the first issue, and it should also be far superior in almost every way. You can check out the contents at the Corvus store, and pre-order a print copy if you so desire. The release date is August 15, and this time I have done all the hard formatting stuff up front, and can spend the next week fine-tuning the text and adding on to the chapter of The Distributive Passions (which has naturally been the hardest thing to produce on demand. The section of “The Anarchist of Approximations” deals in some depth with that notion of “approximation.” “Mutualist Musings on Property” draws together some of my blog and forum posts with new framing and connective sections, and sets the scene for the “New Approximation” that begins in issue #4. This issue’s “on alliance” is a look back at my early posts on the blog of the same name, as I try to come to productive terms with my recent secession from the ALL. The Distributive Passions chapter is mostly set in the 305th Century, AD, when the world has been perfected, roughly on Fourier’s timeline, and it’s all downhill from there. Playing Julian West in this Looking Backward-and-then-some is Kali, a damaged and thoroughly disgruntled cyborg soldier, whose suicide attempt 28,000+ years ago seems to have had world-historical consequences. For her, picking up the pieces will require finding out what happened in the interim, which will take us back to 2005, and so on. I hope all of the issue will be as fun to read as it has been to write.
I’ve added eighteen new pamphlets to the Corvus Editions archive and shop today. After doing a little organizing of my in-progress stuff, I find I have thirty more titles just about ready to go, and I will probably post a list of those here, with the thought that I’ll finish them as they are requested (since “just about ready” means, “couldn’t be bothered to write back-cover copy” in a number of cases, and the rest are nearly that close.) The new titles include labor fiction, syndicalist and anarchist-communist theory, quite a number of essays reprinted from Benjamin R. Tucker’s “Radical Review,” including several of those he himself pamphleted. I’m working to reprint a number of key pamphlet “libraries,” including those published by Mother Earth, Free Society, and the anarchist-communist Liberty, and raiding Charles H. Kerr’s socialist periodicals for the most libertarian material. It’s been exciting to work back through material I haven’t looked at in years, and digging into some that I’ve never had a chance to look at.
I’ve started to add bundles of the free pamphlets for tabling and distribution, in quantities of 50 or more, roughly at cost, starting with a pamplet of Tucker’s “Who is the Somebody?” put together by James for the Tulsa ALL. More of that sort of thing soon…
