Occupy! The Book by Rachel Hurn
On December 16th, the eve of OWS’s three-month anniversary, some two hundred people came to 20 Jay Street to celebrate the launch for Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America. Occupy! is a collaborative new book out from small press Verso, whose sprawling 10th floor Brooklyn loft hosted the event. The book is based off of n+1’s OWS-inspired Gazette.
reason-reason
Off On a Tangent: North Korea in Literature
I’ve had something of a latent obsession with North Korea for a while and feel compelled, in light of the death of Kim Jong-Il, to assemble a list of novels and nonfiction works that help further understand this oppressive dictatorship that was often stranger than satire. There isn’t a lot; feel…
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Occupy! The Book by Rachel Hurn
On December 16th, the eve of OWS’s three-month anniversary, some two hundred people came to 20 Jay Street to celebrate the launch for Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America. Occupy! is a collaborative new book out from small press Verso, whose sprawling 10th floor Brooklyn loft hosted the event. The book is based off of n+1’s OWS-inspired Gazette.
Astra Taylor greeted at the door. One of the main editors for n+1’s Gazette, Ms. Taylor explained that after visiting Zucotti Park on September 17th, the first day of OWS, she hooked up with Keith Gessen, n+1’s founding editor, and developed a core group of people interested in writing about the movement.
“I did a lot of writing and commissioning for writing,” Ms. Taylor said. “It occupied my life.”
According to Jacob Stevens of Verso, n+1 offered “Exponentially the best writing on the movement.” Stevens approached the editors to see about collaborating on a book, and an impressive six weeks later, Occupy! was born.
The first two n+1 Gazettes form the basis of Occupy!, along with some additional contributions. According to Ms. Taylor, the writing was meant not to be rhetoric, but was meant to come from someone situated in the movement, someone sympathetic.
“When I first started handing out the Gazette, people were offering me $10 a copy when it was free,” she said. “The zeitgeist of OWS is print. It seemed appropriate to have a text-based project.”
The Gazette trilogy was laid out on a side table, distinguished by primary colors — red for the first issue, blue for the second, and green for the third. Scenes from Zucotti Park projected against a white wall. The Occupy! book lay on a different table, on sale for $5 a copy. Most people were nursing $2 Brooklyn Lagers, two-stepping across the floor in various versions of the same leather boot. There was no food, but people seemed happy. A DJ played music so loudly that a group of girls started dancing in the middle of the room.
Over four hours all two-hundred plus books were sold. An Occupier wearing barefoot shoes was thinking of purchasing a copy, but not for himself. “I don’t think I’ll have time to read it,” he said, “but my mom will.”
by me
kaffe in katmandu: Captcha Poetry by Chris Galvin
Eretoruaby Chris Galvin
Eretorua –somewhere in the land of the Māori
where I arrive with plans to birdel for a few days
I wander into the primal forest and azaib
the Osirko trees ’round me vimble maddeningly
Deeper into the woods I swashay
I do not fear these m3nasing trees
I…
by me
Part of a series of watercolours focusing on decay, disease, the body, and doubling.
something cool!!!!!!
nope
(Source: niallthecrocodilee)
Seaburn Bookstore, Astoria’s only independent bookseller, to close this month
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“I feel quite awful about it,” Chekwas said of the closing. “We gave it all we had. … The sales were just not there to justify it.”
More and more customers were coming in asking for digital books for their NOOKs and Kindles, he said, and he simply couldn’t compete.
“Where we are is a high-rent area where you really have to sell a lot of books,” said Chekwas, who has had a hard time competing with online merchants such as Amazon.com, which sell books at a fraction of their cover price.
“In 10 years from now, kids that are born today may not have a need for paper books,” he said.
This is a really huge bummer and not just because of the whole print books vs. e-books bullshit war. I lived about thirty seconds from Seaburn last year and would stop in pretty much whenever I walked anywhere on Broadway. They’re surprisingly cheap for an independent book store ($5 hardcovers, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?) and would order anything that they didn’t have. In that one year I probably bought 50 or so books from them. I also donated about the same amount and in exchange they’d sometimes give me cheaper (or, in one case, free) books next time I bought something which is incredibly nice and kind of means a lot when you are broke and in a weird place and just want some books to read to get your mind off things.
Also everyone who works there is SO nice and they obviously let me hold the Drunk Spelling Bee/Tumblr meet-up there last summer which was a) incredibly fun and successful and b) unbelievable that they not only agreed to let a bunch of idiot drunks from the internet haul six boxes of wine/who knows how much beer into their bookstore to make a bunch of noise and spell stupid words and get smashed but they also totally invited us back to do it again and use the space for free and it sucks that we can’t and ugh I wish I had all of the money in the world so I could give it to them to stay open forever and I could just hang out there and read all day.
