Wobblies and Bong Shops

6-10-06

Last night, I was reading the graphic novel style history that Joel gave me for my birthday, Wobblies!, edited by Joel's Sixties Without Apology teacher, Paul Buhle, which I am really enjoying– it’s doing what I like a history book to do, getting things I’d read about (those Utah mine strikes) in perspective, Emma Goldman’s relationship to the Wobblies, why they liked Eugene Debs but not Samuel Gompers, and on and on. Brief life of Joe Hill. I'm starting to sing "Solidarity Forever" and "Rebel Girl," but mostly “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.” Especially intersted in Lucy Parsons (see photo at left) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (subject of Joe Hill's "Rebel Girl.") Ah those good old days, except for the fact that I would probably have died in infancy or childbed or the Influenza.

Some of what I have to say about politics and art and history is in my new story that's going to be published shortly in the Saranac Review, "Triangulation." I had fun with that one, plotting positions with my grandmother, Emma Goldman, and Gustav Klimt.

So last night I was reading Wobblies! in bed, and I closed the book and turned off the lights, and the phone rang, and I sat up, grabbed it, always fearing the worst from midnight phone calls. Andy picked up too from his office, and it was Joel on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco, on his way to dinner– calling to tell us there’s a Gap clothing store there!

But a bong shop a few doors down.