Remembering John Lennon (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980)

“Playing With Fire”

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (August 1, 1837 – November 30, 1930)

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, c1902 November 4. (Library of Congress)

An excerpt from the book
Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliott J. Gorn:

Her contemporaries marveled at her. “She is a wonder,” the poet Carl Sandburg wrote of Mother Jones during World War I. “Close to 88 years old and her voice a singing voice; nobody else could give me a thrill just by saying in that slow, solemn, orotund way, ‘The kaisers of this country are next, I tell ye.’” Clarence Darrow, America’s greatest trial lawyer of the early twentieth century, wrote that “her deep convictions and fearless soul always drew her to seek the spot where the fight was hottest and the danger greatest.” The feminist author Meridel Le Sueur was only fourteen years old when she first heard Mother Jones speak, but she never forgot it: “I felt engendered by the true mother, not the private mother of one family, but the emboldened and blazing defender of all her sons and daughters.”

President Calvin Coolidge and "Mother" Jones, 1924 Sept. 26. (Library of Congress)

Jazz for a Sunday afternoon

“Jack and the Bean Stalk”

New York City W.P.A. Art Project. Date stamped on verso: Mar 24 1941. Aida McKenzie, artist. (Library of Congress)

Remembering John Lennon (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980)

Red House

Jimi Hendrix

(November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970)

A Thanksgiving Prayer

By William S. Burroughs

For John Dillinger

In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts
Thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes
Thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through
Thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces
Thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers
Thanks for laboratory AIDS
Thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs
Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business
Thanks for a nation of finks — yes,
Thanks for all the memories all right, lets see your arms you always were a headache and you always were a bore
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

If you’re here on Thanksgiving, you have time to listen to an interview of William S. Burroughs from February 1984.