Grooving with Miles—The Birth of a Legend

May 28

by Quincy Troupe

From Miles & Me: An interview between Dan Simon and Quincy Troupe

With a Spotify playlist of Troupe's favorite Miles Davis tracks at the end of the interview

Dan: In his introduction to this new edition of Miles & Me, former Village Voice and Spin magazine editor turned celebrated film producer Rudy Langlais shares how you first came to get to know Miles, as he remembers it. We wanted to start with Rudy because that takes us all the way back, kind of to the beginning, 1985.

Quincy: Rudy tells the history, where we met and all that. Which is cool with me, because he was talking about me as a writer, which took me a little off guard, and because he left it to me to talk about the book.

Dan: Miles & Me feels so natural, because the friendship between you and Miles propels the story forward. How did this book happen?

Quincy: When I first spent time with Miles, it was to interview him for Spin magazine. But almost from the first meeting, it was bigger than that. And it was kind of strange because, how Miles was, well, he was very idiosyncratic. I had a bad knee at the time, which he didn't know of course, but he liked to test people, find out what you were made of, so he made me wait, standing upright, on my feet, for about a half hour while he was drawing.

Miles and I had met before. He had said he liked my sense of style. But he didn't rememebr that. So for him, this was our first time meeting. Of course, I knew him as a musician. We were both from St. Louis—East St. Louis, Illinois, in his case, St. Louis, Missouri, across the Mississippi River, in my case. The first band he played in, when he was about seventeen or eighteen, was my mother's first cousin Eddie Randle's band. Eddie was an undertaker, one of the leading undertakers in St. Louis, but also a great musician. And I loved the music, but I don't think I ever met Miles back then.

So when I went over to Miles' apartment in New York City, standing, waiting for him to be ready to be interviewed, that really pissed me off. So, finally, he invited me to sit down. He was staring at me from behind his sunglasses. Then all of a sudden he reached across the table with his long fingers, and grabbed all the hair in my dreadlocks, and said, "How did you get your hair likes this, is this your real hair?" First off, I was shocked when he grabbed my hair like that, and since I didn't like anyone invading my personal space, I slapped his hand, just by reflex. And he pulled his hand back, and he said, "Motherfucker, are you crazy? Why you hit me like that?" And I said, "No, I'm not crazy." And I pointed at him and then at myself, and I said, "Miles' space, Quincy's space. Just because I'm here to interview you, and you're a famous person, does not give you a right to invade my space." And then I repeated it again, "Miles' space, Quincy's space." And then his mouth flickered a little, kind of like he was thinking a smile but the smile hadn't completed the journey yet. And then he said, "Motherfucker, where are you from." And I said, "St. Louis." And he said, "Now I know you're crazy." And I said, "Not only that, the first band you played in was my cousin Eddie Randle's band." And he said, "Eddie Randle is your cousin?" And he took his glasses off then, and he said, "Well then, motherfucker, ask me a question."

Dan: I don't think I've ever heard of an interview that started like that.

Quincy: I was supposed to be there for one hour and a half. He only gave one or two interviews a year to American journalists. When Rudy Langlais, my editor at Spin, asked me who was on my wish list to interview for Spin, I had told Rudy Miles Davis was at the top of my list, followed my Michael Jackson and Chuck Berry. But Miles was at the top. The publicist at the time for Columbia Records was Sandra Trim-DaCosta, who happened to be one of my former students. So when Rudy put my name in and it came across her desk, among the probably hundreds of requests to interview Miles at that time, she plucked my name from the pile, which is how that all happened, a little luck came into play in that way.

So she told me I'd have an hour and a half, then she told me Miles lived at 79th and Fifth Avenue, on the fourteenth floor. So a week or so later I drove down in my bronze 1983 Saab, and went up.

Dan: Now that you were sitting down, and had Miles' attention, what happened next?

Quincy: I started to talk to him and ask him my questions. After a while, he said, "You want some food?" I said yes and he ordered in for us. "Do you want to hear some music?" And we did that. After a couple hours, Sandra came in to see how we were doing. And she suggested that we wrap up. But Miles said to her, "You ain't my fuckin' mother, we cool." So she left, and we kept going. And I was there that day for thirteen hours, and back the next day. And I had the tape recorder on and we just kept going. I had to call home to tell my wife, Margaret, that I wouldn't be there for dinner, and she asked me, "Can I speak to Miles?" And when he said yes and came on the phone she called him Mr. Davis, but he said, "Call me Miles." When I had to leave, he asked me if I could drop him off downtown on my way home. And when he sees my car, which I was proud of, he said, "What kind of piece of shit is this?" And I said, "It's the piece of shit that's going to take you downtown if you shut your mouth." He laughed and said, "All right, Quincy." And then he asked me if he could put something in the tape deck. And I said sure, and he put in the music that would become Tutu. After two tunes, he asked me what I thought. And I said I didn't like them. "You didn't like them?" And then he played some more of it, and I liked those.

Before I dropped him off, I asked him if I could call him if I had any more questions. So he gave me his New York and LA numbers, but he told me not to give them to anybody, and I teased him about that, saying, "Oh, you don't want me to give them to everybody?" And he liked that I teased him like that. And that was the first day, the first of many when we spent real time together, but it was a very long meeting, and by the end we knew each other, in the sense that we knew we could trust each other.

Dan: I get that.

Quincy: So, later on, after I transcribed everything and dropped it on Rudy's desk, it made a sound like a gun going off, because there was more than enough for a whole book right there, and after Spin published the two-part article, and Miles loved it like he did, he didn't want anybody else to write about him but me. So when the publisher called about doing Miles' autobiography, saying Miles wanted me to do the book, I didn't want to do it at first, but then I did it. In the autobiography, you don't see me in that book anywhere. I decided that I was going to write that book in his voice only, because he had a unique voice and I thought I could capture it and make it the book he wanted it to be. He was a great storyteller and I thought I could capture that too. I had no thoughts of mine in it. That was the way to do that book, and I'm really glad I did it that way.

So this book, Miles & Me, would be about our friendship. I wanted the readers to see another side of Miles, through my eyes, and as honest as I could make it. No holds barred. How he talked about me, and to me. And what kind of person he was. Because Miles was a beautiful person. He was very shy. He did not trust people. But if he trusted you he was very generous. Like, for example, he asked me to go talk to Jimmy Baldwin. Now James Baldwin was a friend of mine also, I didn't know Miles knew him as well as he did. Miles wanted me to talk to Jimmy for the autobiography. Miles thought he would have something to say that would be important. I said, "But he's in France." And he said, "Yeah, I know he's in France. I'll pay for your airfare, first class, and I'll cover your hotels and give you some money to spend while you're there." So he made a call and gave me five or ten thousand dollars in spending money for my trip. And he gave me names of people to see and Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where Baldwin lived. This was all for the autobiography.

And after the autobiography came out, he said, "I know you want to do a book about me, but don't write about me for a while." And I told him I wouldn't. And so, I waited, like he wanted, until after he died in 1991.

Dan: Friendship takes so many different forms. There's not one way. But I feel the strength of your friendship was all in unexpected ways in which you have helped each other, and that the autobiography and this book are both examples of that.

Quincy: Later, I went out to teach at the University of California, San Diego. Miles still was alive. And I was going up to LA to see him. And the book had come out and had been very big. It happened that I had to go to Minnesota for a residency to do some readings. And when I got back Margaret was at the airport in San Diego waiting for me when I got in, and she said, "I have to tell you, Miles had a stroke. And his sister wants to know if you want to come up to see him." And so I called Dorothy up at his house in Malibu. And I asked her how he was, and she said not good and that he was all wired up and unresponsive, strokes ran in their family, and that she didn't think he was going to make it. Miles and I had been talking about doing a project together, a musical, with me doing the libretto and him doing the music. And our last conversation, that very week, we'd been laughing and talking about the project on the phone when I was in Minesota. So, no, I told Dorothy I didn't want to see him in that state. I wanted the last memory to be of our last conversation that had been so good.

Dan: I'm sorry, Quincy. Let's take a break, and come back in a few.

***

Dan: What's funny is that Miles & Me is not a sad book. You knew and Miles knew too there was going to be this other book, and that it would be different from the first one you did together. What was your process going into it?

Quincy: What happened was, sometime in the nineties, 1993 or 1994, around there, I got to thinking about what kind of book I would do if I were going to do something on Miles.

So I made a deal with myself. I decided I would write a foreword and an epilogue, and then see where I was at with writing something about Miles and my relationship with him. I knew if I could get the beginning and the ending, then it'd be okay.

So I started to think about how he played, and that he was such a great player and that he could play in all kinds of ways. Like, some people couldn't play tender the way he could, and then play fast. So I tried to describe that in this prologue. And I came to this place where what I said was that he was a great poet on his instrument, and I decided to put that first. And I remember where he said, "Yeah, I don't like poetry, I don't read poetry or none of that shit, but I'm like a poet. "Really?" I said. "Like how?" And he said, "Well, I hear that poets write with an economy of words. And I know that so many musicians play too many notes, but I don't do that. I like to play with economy, like a poet does."

And I had interviewed all the guys who were living who knew him in East St. Louis, all the guys in the band, who are mostly dead now, and I'd put what they said into his voice in the autobiography. They had told me that he was odd. All his life he was odd, an eccentric. But they gave him space, because they knew that he was a genius. So they gave him space, and he always treated them with respect.

And he had always told me that he had heard this old lady's voice out in the woods of Arkansas when he was walking out of his uncle's house, an old woman's voice singing in a country chuch that he heard that time. He never saw her. Only heard her when he was walking in the woods. And that was the sound he chose to imitate when he made Kind of Blue.

In the night air, the trains never seem to stop whistling past . . . The voice of the old black woman floats . . . disembodied yet whole . . . birds circling above . . . The voice also circles . . . Achingly real.

And if you had the privilege of hearing that voice . . . [Miles & Me, pg. 3]

He heard that voice, and he tried to get it, especially on Kind of Blue. That was his big influence.

So I tried to capture that in my prologue. See, Miles' voice, his sound, wasn't specifically that of a trumpet. He loved Louis Armstrong. But he had the genius to understand that he could transfer that human voice, that voice of people, to his horn. And when you're in the woods and you hear the sound of the singing from the church in the air, that's everything you need to convey, it's musical and it's something more than music too.

And Miles tried to perfect that sound as he grew as a trumpet player. He kept that idea, that aim, his whole life.

So you couldn't pursue Miles. He had to choose you. And he chose me to write his autobiography. That was such a personal choice on his part.

Dan: Do you know why he chose you?

Quincy: I can tell you what Miles told Gary Giddens, the jazz critic and author: that he chose me because I'm black, and I'm from St. Louis. He was from East St. Louis and only the Mississippi River separated the two cities, but the culture amongst the black people was the same. In many ways I was like he was, so I could finish his sentences, and understand him spiritually.

Dan: You wrote the prologue and then you moved all the way to what would become the last thing in the book, the epilogue, and wrote that next?

Quincy: Yes. So for the epilogue the idea was to recapture his life force if I could, the power of what I called "an unreconstructed black man."

Unreconstructed black men don't have the manner of their reconstructed "Negro" brethren, who are always trying to put on a 'civilized' face on their blackness, especially in the company of white folks . . .

Unreconstructed black men don't submit to power games . . .

Unreconstructed black men go their own way . . . [Miles & Me, pg. 167]

I miss him and so the goal of the epilogue was to see if I could conjure him up, bring him back in terms of remembering him in some way that would be meaningful to me—like could I, by writing about him, remember something I might not remember in the same way if I didn't write about him?

Dan: And you found you could do that, do that in the way you're describing? It was a very beautiful and high bar you were setting for yourself.

Quincy: Yes. I found as I wrote the epilogue that Miles as I knew him felt close again. So I knew I could do this book. I wanted to talk about him as a musician. About how important he was. And the periods where he was searching and wasn't always that good. Like after his five-year absence, his chops weren't as good. So when he came back in 1980, he was not up to par. But you know what, in time he did get up to par again, through constant work and practice.

I loved that fact that he wanted to get back. And toward the end he really did get there. And that was wonderful.

And throughout the book I wanted to talk about how Miles was as a person. He could be an asshole. And he could be very generous. In times of personal difficulty, you could count on him. I always found that. Miles would call, even if he was overseas, to tell me that whatever I needed I could count on him. He was loyal and generous—not halfway, not three-quarters of the way, but all the way.

You seldom find people like that. And I wanted to convey that in this book.

And how funny he was. People need to know that about Miles. And how shy he was. He was not a racist at all. He didn't care what race you were. He could like or love someone of any race.

After telling the story of the autobiography from Miles' point of view—you can't find me in there, not even for a single word—I guess I really needed to write about the experience I had with Miles in a way that included my experience and who I am. Miles was too important to me, our friendship was too important, for me to leave that story unwritten.

—New York City, May and June 2018

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This compelling look at history is an educational eye-opener for history buffs of all ages, and offers clarity on one of the most turbulent periods of US history. This new paperback edition features a new introduction by historian Robin D. G. Kelley.

Boldly weird, cool, and confident, this YA novel of LGBTQ+ teen artists, activists, and telepathic visionaries offers hope against climate and community destruction. From the National Book Award–longlisted author of Out of Salem.

James Goldman, self-described neurotic goth gay transsexual stoner, is a senior in high school, and fully over it. He mostly ignores his classes at Cow Pie High, instead focusing on fundraising for the near-bankrupt local LGBTQ+ youth support group, Compton House, and attending punk shows with his friend-crush Ian and best friend Opal. But when James falls in love with Orsino, a homeschooled trans boy with telepathic powers and visions of the future, he wonders if the scope of what he believes possible is too small. Orsino, meanwhile, hopes that in James he has finally found someone who will be able to share the apocalyptic visions he has had to keep to himself, and better understand the powers they hold.

An entertaining and accessible introduction to the radical philosopher of freedom of thought and religion is the only biography of Spinoza for young adults.

April 12

Remembering Abbie Hoffman (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989)

Abbie Hoffman — national provocateur, political activist, founding member of the Yippies, defendant in the trial of the Chicago Seven, and author of Steal This Book, Revolution for the Hell of It, and Fuck the System — died on April 12, 1989. He was 52.

To celebrate his memory, we are proud to share the late Paul Krassner's foreword to the book Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, written by Abbie's brother, Jack Hoffman, and Seven Stories Press publisher Dan Simon. Krassner's foreword, written a few weeks before his death in July 2019, perfectly conveys the contradiction of Abbie Hoffman — his unbridled silliness combined with a fiery political activism and passion for justice, creating a figure that simultaneously antagonized, amused, and terrified the highly conservative leaders of the era.

Dan Simon wrote of this contradiction, so pivotal to the living memory of Abbie Hoffman, in October 2020, soon after seeing the film The Trial of the Chicago Seven:

Maybe the most important idea in Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, the biography of Abbie that I wrote with his brother Jack, appears in the very first paragraph of chapter 1. It’s the idea that a sense of futility was the source of Abbie’s remarkable energy and optimism, and that in the end his deep optimism held the same tragic seed as our despair. What prompted Jack and me to go there was the derailed life of his brilliant aunt Rose, a diagnosed schizophrenic who spent most of her adult life institutionalized. So in that opening paragraph it wasn’t our despair but his aunt Rose’s. No matter.

After I watched [The Trail of the Chicago Seven], I found myself thinking about Abbie and his aunt Rose, and the relationship between despair and optimism. Despair and optimism may share the same seed, and this may lead in the direction of optimism, a kind of optimism that doesn’t hide its kinship with despair, or maybe, to name it more accurately, a kind of faith in people. After Abbie died, we published the book that he and I had worked on together. He had envisioned it to be like the “Best of” albums that the musical artists of his era made—Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Dead—and gave it the title The Best of Abbie Hoffman—his three ’60s and early ’70s books in one volume. We had buttons made: “Abbie Lives.” I still have a few. And he does.

FOREWORD

by Paul Krassner

I think it was 1967.

“What is this, we’re huddled together like in a fuckin’ ghetto, afraid to watch a fuckin’ parade,” Abbie Hoffman was saying.

We’d decided to confront the Armed Forces Day Parade coming down Fifth Avenue. There were a lot of us.

But then a police captain approached someone in our group and said, “I’m gonna have to give you a summons for holding a meeting without a permit.”

“We’re merely having a conversation, Officer. And why are you singling me out?”

“You seem to be leading the meeting,” the captain replied.

Although I was there as a reporter covering this action for the Realist, at that moment I crossed the line that separated observer from participant: “Excuse me, Officer, we’re both leading the meeting. You’d better give me a summons too.”

Right away, Abbie looked around and spoke up: “Who else is leading this meeting?”

Hands went up.

“I am.”

More hands.

“I am.”

It turned out that about fifty people were leading the meeting.

“Okay, I’m not gonna give you a summons, but the next time you hold a meeting—”

“You mean,” I interjected, “the next time we don’t hold a meeting—”

“—you better have a permit.”

“I’m sorry, Officer, we can’t continue this meeting any longer without a permit.”

The Armed Forces Day Parade began making its way down Fifth Avenue. The marines marched by and we chanted, “Get a girl, not a gun.”

The navy marched by and we sang “Yellow Submarine.”

Green Berets marched by and we shouted, “Thou shalt not kill!”

The Red Cross marched by and we applauded.

A missile rolled by and we called out, “Shame!”

Military cadets rode by on horseback and we advised, “Drop out now!”

The Department of Sanitation swept past and we cheered.

Then this horde of pacifists and hippies left the area and entered Central Park, followed by what seemed like a whole division of police. We romped past the statue of Alice and her friends playing around a giant mushroom; some lingered to present flowers to the Mad Hatter. The cops ordered them off the statue, surrounding Alice as if they were guarding a fortress.

When it was all over, I left with Abbie. Our paths had crossed at various meetings and events, but we’d never really hung around together. Now, over soup, he was telling me about the time he had taken one of my “Fuck Communism” posters to a symposium on communism, and how influenced he was by the Realist, the satirical magazine I had founded.

I asked, “Do you think it’s an ego trip for me to be concerned about whether the readers of the Realist think I’m on an ego trip?”

He laughed and said, “You only ask a question like that because you’re Jewish.”

“But I don’t think of myself as Jewish. I’m an atheist. I mean, Christ was Jewish.”

“When I was at Brandeis,” Abbie said thoughtfully, “I asked this professor, ‘How come in one part of the Bible Jesus says to God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” But in another part of the Bible, Jesus says to God, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”?’ And the professor says, ‘You gotta remember, the Bible was written by a lot of different guys.’”

Abbie tempered his fearlessness with a gift for humor that was sharp and spontaneous.

On a particularly tense night on the Lower East Side, we were standing on a street corner when a patrol car with four police in it cruised by. Abbie called out, “Hey, fellas, you goin’ out on a double date?” These were some of the same cops from the Ninth Precinct that he liked to beat at pool at what I call the “laughing pool table” because of how Abbie made the cops laugh.

Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman does a meticulous job of capturing the marvel that was Abbie Hoffman as I knew him. It’s an indispensable book about an indispensable hero of the sixties’ near-revolution in America that Abbie helped lead with such incredible imagination. Dan caught the tale end of the movement as a red-diaper baby growing up in Boston: his mom taught with Howard Zinn at BU, and his dad once joined a mission to deliver medical equipment to Bach Mai Hospital after it was bombed during the Vietnam War. With Abbie as one of his heroes, Dan worked with the Attica Brothers Legal Defense while in high school. Later, he edited and published The Best of Abbie Hoffman, Abbie’s last book. Jack of course was Abbie’s little brother and sidekick through the years, more a businessman than an activist, but he loved his older brother and lived in his shadow.

Back on that first day of our long friendship, I told Abbie, “You’re the first one who’s really made me laugh since Lenny Bruce died.” Lenny Bruce had been in many ways my closest friend, and I had written his autobiography with him.

“Really?” Abbie replied, genuinely impressed. “Lenny Bruce was my god.”

— DESERT HOT SPRINGS, CA, JULY 2019

PAUL KRASSNER (1932–2019) was co-founder with Abbie of the Yippies and one of Abbie’s longest standing friends and collaborators. The founder and longtime editor of the Realist and the author of many books, including The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, One Hand Jerking, and Impolite Interviews, he lived with his partner, Nancy Cain, in the desert in Southern California. Paul Krassner died on Sunday, July 21, 2019, in Desert Hot Springs, California.

March 31

“Native Liberation: The Way Forward” by Nick Estes

With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.

This week's excerpt adapts Nick Estes' is speech from the first annual Native Liberation Conference, held on Saturday, August 13, 2016 at the Larry Casuse Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The stated goal of this conference, organized by The Red Nation, is to "orient, update, and educate the collective membership of The Red Nation and general public on local, regional, and international movements for Indigenous liberation."

A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.

Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.

Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, is a cofounder of The Red Nation, an organization “dedicated to the liberation of Native peoples from capitalism and colonialism.” Here is part of his speech at the first annual Native Liberation Conference at the Larry Casuse Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Nick Estes, “Native Liberation: The Way Forward”
(August 13, 2016)

The Red Nation formed in November 2014 out of a collective desire to create a platform for revolutionary Native organizing and to fight back against this settler colonial system that seeks our annihilation. That very summer, two Navajo men, our relatives Allison “Cowboy” Gorman and Kee “Rabbit” Thompson, were brutally murdered by three non-Native men. The story is familiar to most of us. Our relatives—our aunties, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and even ourselves—are cast as outsiders, exiles in our own homelands in places we call border towns, the white-dominated settlements that ring Indian reservations where persistent patterns of police brutality, rampant discrimination, and violence against Natives define everyday life. The men who murdered Cowboy and Rabbit later admitted to committing similar violent acts against fifty others in a one-year period. They told investigators they were looking for a “good time,” and Native people were their playthings, just like the white boys in Farmington who attacked and murdered Navajo men “for fun” in what they call “Indian rolling,” or like how rich, racist white men like Dan Snyder, the owner of the infamous Washington football team, use Natives as playthings for entertainment and mascots that celebrate the scalping and mutilating of Native bodies.

Natives become entertainment objects for sport and killing because in this society we are unreal and not fully human. Cowboy and Rabbit’s killers spent more than an hour mutilating their bodies to the point they were unrecognizable. It was so bad authorities could not identify them and neither Cowboy nor Rabbit carried personal ID. All-too-common among Albuquerque’s unsheltered community, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) confiscated and destroyed the men’s IDs—which included drivers’ licenses and CIB cards—to prevent them from buying alcohol or receiving basic human rights, such as access to housing, food, medical care, and employment. Even before they were killed, the APD and this settler society had marked and sentenced Cowboy and Rabbit to a certain kind of death, a social death, where they were excluded, like most Natives, from the realm of the living and relegated to a place where they were considered killable and disposable.

When we founded The Red Nation, this was our primary concern, to address the common experience of Natives: four of every five Natives lives off-reservation in border towns, which include places like Gallup, Farmington, Winslow, Albuquerque, Denver, Rapid City, and Phoenix, to name just a few. Why is this significant? Typically, Natives living off-reservation are considered unauthentic or somehow less Native. They are derisively referred to as “Urban Indians.” The truth is that reservations were created as open-air concentration camps, to contain and limit our movements across land that was rightfully ours.

Our ancestors did not choose reservation life; it was forced upon them. Natives who “went off the reservation” were the revolutionaries and rebels who refused confinement. In those days, those who willfully crossed the reservation borders were considered renegades, outlaws, or hostiles. They were usually hunted down, summarily shot, hanged, or imprisoned by law enforcement or by vigilantes. In other words, Natives off the reservation have always been deemed criminal, deviant, and in the way. Today, the recent police killings of Loreal Tsingine, Allen Locke, Sarah Lee Circle Bear, Jacquelyn Salyers, and many more are evidence that the criminalization and extermination of Native life is fundamental to settler society. And border towns literally thrive on Native death.

This is our common experience and our common struggle. This is why we formed The Red Nation.

In fact, police killings of Natives have increased in just the last year and some predict that number will double by the end of 2016, unless we take action now. Native women make up 30 percent of all the police killings of women just this year, even though Natives make up barely 1 percent of the national population. On top of this, Natives are killed by police at the highest rate. Some attempt to parse out these horrible statistics to suggest that Natives have it worse than other groups, as if being murdered by the police is a competition. The truth is that Natives, Blacks, and Latinxs have historically been the targets of the racist police state, the colonial system that enslaved Blacks for their labor, killed Indians for their land, and created a cheap, exploitable labor pool from Indigenous-descended people, now called Latinxs. And because of this reality . . . the Red Nation stands with all victims of police brutality. We recognize that undoing the system that oppresses everyone requires multinational unity and class solidarity among the racialized poor, colonized, and working-class peoples.

To understand why the Native struggle is essential, then, we must first begin with why Natives are targeted for elimination: to gain access to territory. Despite popular belief, Natives are not targeted and killed for our culture, spirituality, religion, or civilization. We are eliminated so that corporations and the settler state can gain access to our territory and resources. That requires the liquidation of our societies, the forced removal of our people from the land, the creation of a blood quantum system that dilutes our identity and decreases our population, the confinement to reservations or prisons, the breaking up of our land base and collective identities, and the hyper-policing of our people.

Elimination also requires that Natives in border towns like Albuquerque are seen as nuisances and are commonly referred to as “drunk Indians” or “transients.” Both stereotypes are criminalized, although by definition neither is illegal. Police and settlers often tell us to “Go back to the reservation!” or “You’re not from the community!” In those moments, Natives become a criminal element, as if we’re the ones who don’t belong. It’s what Native bodies off-reservation represent that makes us a threat. Native bodies off-reservation represent the unfinished business of settler colonialism; we’re physical reminders that this is not settler land—this is stolen Native land. Despite their best efforts to kill us off, confine us to sub-marginal plots of land, breed us white, or to beat or educate the Indian out of us, we remain. We remain because we resist.

We remain as evidence that this is still, and will always be, Native land. We represent a challenge to the legitimacy of the colonial project of border towns and cities because we refuse to quit being Indians when we leave the reservation. We refuse to obey colonial borders. We refuse to disappear and to be quiet.

The Red Nation represents the unification of Natives outside of the institutions of power—taking the struggle back where it belongs: in the hands of the people. Our ancestors did not establish corporate foundations and boards. They fought for their dignity, lands, and lives. They expect the same from us. Corporate and colonial state institutions still dominate our present condition and, as a result, they structure and contain the free will and humanity of Native people. We have to transcend these power structures that, by design and intention, ultimately limit and strangle our lives. To achieve this new humanity, we have to refuse the false promise of capitalistic development—which is commonly disguised as tribal economic self-determination—and state-sponsored colonial reconciliation—which is commonly disguised as community healing and individual self-fulfillment. You cannot heal from a system that continues to violate and kill the land and our relatives unless you dismantle that system. Although seductive, these “solutions” do nothing more than carry on, and carry out, the same power structure that Native people have been resisting for the last five centuries: colonialism and capitalism. The healing of our wounds can only happen if we annihilate profit-making and colonial enterprises.

Instead of nonprofits, we need anti-profits organizing independent of corporate influence and state co-optation, and embedded in the true power of every society: the common people. The poor. The oppressed. The marginalized. In the Lakota language, we call our common people ikce wicasa. In Native societies, our common people are those who face the highest rates of violence and discrimination: our youth, our women, our LGTBQ, and our poor relatives. In other words, the broad swath of Native societies today. This is the common experience of Native people.

The current landscape of struggle pits organizations and groups of people against each other, vying for control over resources made scarce by austerity measures and corporate monopolies. Our struggle is not for funding streams or profit-making off the misery of the powerless. We see how organizations and movements mimic corporate and bourgeois competition over brands, logos, name recognition, clientele, and power. We refuse to participate in this corporate model that dominates community organizing. Instead, we organize according to a principle of unity to unite Native peoples and all oppressed peoples in a common struggle beyond national borders and racial and gender identities. That’s what separates revolutionary organizing and Native liberation struggles from entities that pit marginalized populations against each other, to compete for funding and resources, without attacking the true source of our collective misery: colonialism and capitalism.

We share an enemy that we must unite against. This is the organizing philosophy of The Red Nation.

Capitalism is the enemy of all life. Climate change, because it envelops the entire planet, makes all life precarious. Poor, oppressed, and Indigenous peoples, however, bear the brunt of rising seas, record droughts, and abnormal weather patterns. As Native people, our kinship with human and nonhuman relatives is fundamental to our being. As I speak, an alliance of Lakota and non-Lakota are laying their bodies on the line to halt a crude oil pipeline from crossing the major fresh water source for millions on the Great Plains, the Missouri River. Our relatives and allies are enacting the sacred duty of the Lakota belief of Wotakuye, or kinship. Kinship, in this way, is unconditional because it is revolutionary love. It is the love for our human and nonhuman relatives and the love for the land that will always trump profit. But the land can no longer sustain us if capitalism continues to stalk the earth in search of new markets, bodies, and resources. For life to live on this planet, capitalism must die. For us Lakotas, it is the owe wasicu, the way of the fat-taker capitalist, that must die for our people to live.

The Great Spirits have declared: capitalism is organized crime and must be destroyed. It is our obligation to act accordingly.

As Native people, we possess an essential tradition to sustain us—a tradition of resistance. From this tradition of resistance arises The Red Nation. In Lakota, we call ourselves and all Native peoples, Oyate Luta, the Red Nation. We are red because we come from the red earth. We are a nation because we have our own laws, language, territory, and customs that have persisted since time immemorial. We claim the land and the land claims us. . . .

Four of five Natives do not live on reservation lands, but that doesn’t mean that they have relinquished their treaty rights or their sovereign political identities as Native peoples. It means that we exercise our rights to live where and how we want in our own homelands because that is the ultimate definition of self-determination and sovereignty, collective independence, and autonomy. It is important to remember that no people in the history of this world were ever granted their freedom by begging for it from their oppressors. They had to fight for it. They had to win it. Freedom is actualized not given. . . .

It is time to name the systems that kill us—capitalism and colonialism—and call for their destruction so that our people may live. We will not apologize for this, relatives. It is the only right thing left to do. The Red Nation is a movement for life, not death. And for us to live, capitalism and colonialism must die.

Join us in this movement for life!

In the spirit of Popé and in the spirit of Crazy Horse!

Hecetu Welo!

NICK ESTES is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. In 2014, he co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization. For 2017-2018, Estes was the American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

Estes is the author of the book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019) and he co-edited Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota, 2019), which draws together more than thirty contributors, including leaders, scholars, and activists of the Standing Rock movement.

Estes' journalism and writing is also featured in the Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, The Funambulist Magazine, and High Country News.

March 28

Celebrate Nelson Algren with 30% off

To celebrate his birthday, take 30% off all books written by or about Nelson Algren!

One of the most neglected American writers and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN wrote once that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” His writings always lived up to that definition.

He was born on March 28, 1909, in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. His first short fiction was published in Story magazine in 1933. In 1935 he published his first novel, Somebody in Boots. In early 1942, Algren put the finishing touches on a second novel and joined the war as an enlisted man. By 1945, he still had not made the grade of Private first class, but the novel Never Come Morning was widely praised and eventually sold over a million copies. In 1947 came The Neon Wilderness, his famous short story collection which would permanently establish his place in American letters.

The Man with the Golden Arm, generally considered Algren’s most important novel, appeared in 1949 and became the first winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in March 1950. Then came Chicago: City on the Make (1951), a prose poem, and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), a rewrite of Somebody in Boots.

Algren also published two travel books, Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Voyage. The Last Carousel, a collection of short fiction and nonfiction, appeared in 1973. He died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

His last novel, The Devil’s Stocking, based on the life of Hurricane Carter, and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, a 1952 essay on the art of writing, were published posthumously in 1983 and 1996 respectively. In 2009 came Entrapment and Other Writings, a major collection of previously unpublished writings that included two early short story masterpieces, “Forgive Them, Lord,” and “The Lightless Room,” and the long unfinished novel fragment referenced in the book’s title. In 2019, Blackstone Audio released the complete library of Algren’s books as audiobooks. And in 2020 Olive Films released Nelson Algren Live, a performance film of Algren’s life and work starring Willem Dafoe and Barry Gifford, among others, produced by the Seven Stories Institute.

Foreword by Colin Asher
Introduction by James R. Giles

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems.

The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm “Algren’s defense of the individual,” while Carl Sandburg wrote of its “strange midnight dignity.” A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope.

Seven Stories Press separately publishes the critical edition of The Man with the Golden Arm, the first critical edition of an Algren work, featuring an extra 100+ pages of insightful essays by Russell Banks, Bettina Drew, James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, William Savage, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.

Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Wright
Afterword by Daniel Simon
Contribution by H.E.F. Donahue

Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author's only romance, the novel concerns Bruno Bicek, a would-be boxer from Chicago's Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. "It is an unusual and brilliant book," said The New York Times. "A bold scribbling upon the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest." This new edition features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and an interview with Nelson Algren by H.E.F. Donohue.

Foreword by Colin Asher
Introduction by Tom Carson
Afterword by Studs Terkel

Nelson Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that don't fade away.

Among the stories included here are "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and "The Face on the Barroom Floor," in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death—the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning.

Also collected are the World War II stories that found their final expression in the novel The Man with the Golden Arm, as well as “So Help Me,” Algren’s first published work, and "The Captain Has Bad Dreams," in which Algren first introduced the character of the blameless captain who feels such a heavy burden of guilt and wonders why the criminal offenders he sees seem to feel no guilt at all. And then there is "Design for Departure," in which a young woman drifting into hooking and addiction sees her own dreaminess outlast her hopes.

As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, "The Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career — the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the idiosyncratic, bedevilled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his times."

Edited by Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon

Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places.

In Entrapment and Other Writings—containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays—Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren's lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diverse range of interests are revealed and celebrated.

Foreword by Herbert Mitgang

The Devil's Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren's last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career.

Afterword by Dan Simon

Notes by Dan Simon and C. S. O’Brien

Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." It is also about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards … [where there] are still … defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope."

In Nonconformity, Nelson Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren says here.

Nelson Algren’s two books of travel writing describe his journeys through the seamier side of the international social and political landscape of the mid-1960s.

Algren at Sea brings both books together in one volume on the centenary of Algren’s birth.

Aboard the freighter Malaysia Mail in Notes From a Sea Diary, Algren offers a gritty account of his time among his down-and-out fellow sailors and the underground port life of Kowloon, Bombay, Pusan—yet an account softened by his discussion of Hemingway, Hemingway’s attitude toward the world of literature (and the world of literature’s attitude toward Hemingway), and the role of a writer in modern America.

Who Lost an American? takes us on a whirlwind spin from the world of the New York literary scene to Dublin, Crete, Paris, Seville, and more, with Algren commenting on everything from Simone de Beauvoir to bullfights to Playboy key clubs to the death of Brendan Behan—and, as always, Chicago, Algren’s eternal touchstone of American brutality.

Foreword by David Mamet

They met in 1949 when Art was a reporter for Life. Shay followed Algren around with a camera, gathering pictures for a photo-essay piece he was pitching to the magazine. Life didn't pick up the article, but Shay and Algren became fast friends. Algren gave Shay's camera entrance into the back-alley world of Division Street, and Shay captured Algren's poetry on film. They were masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools. Chicago's Nelson Algren is the compilation of hundreds of photos—many recently discovered and published here for the first time—of Nelson Algren over the course of a decade and a deeply moving homage to the writer and his city. Read Algren and you'll see Shay's pictures; look at Shay's photos and you'll hear Nelson's words.

March 24

Jesse Hagopian: “I’m Not Alone in Pledging to #TeachTruth”

With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.

This week's excerpt adapts Jesse Hagopian's speech that he delivered to the #TeachTruth rally in Seattle, Washington, on June 12, 2021, a National Day of Action during which teachers in more than forty cities demonstrated in opposition to a slew of new state laws aimed at banning teachers from educating about institutional racism, gender inequality, and other forms of oppression. In the piece, Hagopian reiterates his commitment to teaching accurate history, regardless of the laws passed intending to curb his students' rights to learn.

A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.

Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.

On June 12, 2021, teachers in more than forty cities joined a National Day of Action to #TeachTruth in opposition to a slew of new state laws seeking to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory and about institutional racism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression. Educator Jesse Hagopian, who works with the Zinn Education Project and Black Lives Matter at School, delivered this speech at the #TeachTruth rally in Seattle, Washington.

Jesse Hagopian, “I’m Not Alone in Pledging to #TeachTruth”

(June 12, 2021)

Racists are scared these days, y’all.

You can tell a scared racist because when they can’t win a debate, they just try to make it illegal for you to say—or teach—anything that challenges them. I’m proud to stand with all of you today in the #TeachTruth movement.

I want to begin by acknowledging that we are on homeland of the Duwamish people—land that was colonized by the United States. We live in a city named after a Duwamish Chief and yet the Duwamish people still don’t have federal recognition . . . And, now, wait a minute . . . If I was in Tennessee, would it even be legal for me to acknowledge that I was on Native American land that was colonized? That’s really how far things have gone these days.

These laws banning the teaching of structural racism, sexism, and oppression are impacting every classroom—because even in states where there isn’t yet a bill, this legislation is emboldening people to attack teachers who want to teach the truth. And everyone should know that our neighbors to the east, the state of Idaho, recently passed a bill that declares, “Social justice ideology poses a grave threat to America and to the American way of life.” What? They are literally arguing that it’s social justice that poses a threat, not racism and sexism.

But you can’t understand our country without understanding racism and its intersections with sexism and heterosexism. Consider these facts:

- The average white family has ten times [more] wealth than the average Black family.

- A Black woman is three times more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes than a white woman.

- Black students are over three times more likely to be suspended from school than white students.

- Anti-Asian hate crimes have surged over 169 percent so far this year.

- At least forty-four transgender and gender non-conforming people were violently killed in 2020, with Black transgender women accounting for two-thirds of total recorded deaths since 2013.

Despite these glaring examples, in Iowa, they recently passed a bill which bans teaching that “the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.”

According to Merriam-Webster, “fundamental” means: serving as an original or generating source. The original source of our country was the genocide against Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people. So you literally can’t teach about the founding of this country or its long history without talking about systemic racism.

In Missouri they proposed a bill that would ban teaching the 1619 project—which frames US history in terms of the enslavement of African people who were brought to North American colonies in 1619. And it bans the Zinn Education Project. And it bans the Black Lives Matter at School curriculum.

But I want to tell you all here today that the fact is they wouldn’t be passing these laws to ban the teaching of structural racism and oppression if they weren’t scared of something.

So, what are they scared of?

They are scared of the fact that activists built the broadest protest in US history over the spring and summer in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which shook this country and exposed the structural nature of anti-Blackness to many.

They are scared of the fact that [the] BLM at School movement tripled in size this school year.

They are sacred of solidarity. The bill in Arkansas actually suggests banning the teaching of solidarity!

And they are certainly scared of students who can think critically.

The summer uprising was led by youth. The media likes to talk about learning loss from summer break or from remote schooling, but the truth is the students have learned—and taught—the nation so much about the nature of structural racism. These youth who can think for themselves and challenge injustice really scare racists.

But informed Black people have always scared racists.

This isn’t the first time that frightened racists have tried to ban education. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion 1739 in South Carolina and it made writing illegal for enslaved African people.

But from the time it was illegal to be literate until today, Black people have always led a struggle for racial justice and education.

Enslaved Black people snuck off plantations to teach each other how to read and write, even though it was illegal—they called it “stealing a meeting.” The punishment could be maiming or even death if you were caught reading or writing, but Black people did it anyway.

During the Reconstruction era, Black educators built the public school system across the south because they knew there was no full emancipation without education.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Freedom Schools were organized, especially during the “Freedom Summer” campaign of 1964. During Freedom Summer, more than three thousand Black students attended a Freedom School—and the final exam was going and registering to vote or organizing others into the movement—not bubbling in answers on standardized tests.

Then there was the proliferation of the Afrocentric schools around the country in the 1970s and the Black Panther Party’s Liberation Schools—like the Oakland Community School that was run by Ericka Huggins.

Today we have the Black Lives Matter at School and other movements for racial justice in education.

It’s important to look at this history to help us understand the way forward. But I want to be clear about something. While today’s racists may not be so bold as to ban the reading of the word—as they did for my ancestors—they do want to ban the reading of the world.

But I am telling you all that I am going to teach my students about how to read the world —because it desperately needs changing. And I refuse to be intimidated from teaching about the people throughout history who have helped make these needed changes. I am going to teach my students about the ideas and practice of people like Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, and Claudia Jones, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ella Baker, and Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis. Because a world where kids learn about these freedom fighters and put their ideas in action will be a world with less oppression and more empathy, more dignity, more equity, more democracy.

I’m pledging to you all today that I will refuse to lie to kids—no matter what the laws tells me to do. And I’m so glad I’m not alone.

Jesse Hagopian is a high school teacher in Seattle and has taught for over a decade at Garfield High School–the site of the historic boycott of the MAP test. Jesse is an editor for the social justice periodical Rethinking Schools, is the co-editor of the books, Black Lives Matter at School, Teaching for Black Lives, Teacher Unions and Social Justice, and is the editor of the book, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing. Jesse serves as the Director of the Black Education Matters Student Activist Award, is an organizer with the Black Lives Matter at School movement, and is founding member of Social Equity Educators (SEE).

March 20

Truth is the First Casualty of War: 30% off books about the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
THE U.S. INVASION OF IRAQ, 20 YEARS LATER

Truth — as Howard Zinn demonstrates in his classic text Terrorism and War — is the first casualty of war, and one can see evidence of this from the beginnings of the American empire, through our military operations around the world today. By March 2003, less than two years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. war machine of military propaganda reached a fever pitch with “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq. Now, 20 years later, we can see the truth of the matter: that we should have never invaded Iraq in the first place, and that doing so led to millions of unnecessary deaths, incalculable trauma for survivors and their families, and widespread environmental and socioeconomic destruction.

On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, we are offering 30% off our "Iraq War, 20 Years Later Reading List," a timely selection of titles on U.S. imperialism, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and the so-called War on Terror.

March 20

“I want you to know” by Mona Damluji

From Mona Damluji, author of Together with illustrations by Innosanto Nagara, a poem for her children, an attempt to explain the Iraq War as a family with roots in Iraq and Lebanon:

How do I speak with my children about war? I have no idea. And yet I struggle to find the words to begin. Twenty years ago today the United States invaded Iraq. I offer this poem as a way to begin.

I want you to know that you came from a people and a place that was beautiful. I want you to know that your ancestors loved and laughed and danced and played and worked and cared in this place surrounded by their own beauty. That they called this place home.

I want you to know that they weren’t perfect, your ancestors, because no one is. But they lived in dignity.

I want you to know that what took it away, what made this place unsafe, was greed. The greed of people from another place who already had more than they need. Those people who had it all, and still wanted more. They made war. They made horrible, ugly, impossible war.

The war took away buildings. Took away homes. It took away families. Made it unsafe to breathe. Unsafe to drink. Unsafe to stay. Made so many leave.

And the thing about war is that it does not end when the generals say so. War keeps burning. It burns in the hearts, in the minds, in the pockets, in the limbs. It keeps burning in all those who witnessed, all those displaced, and all those who remember. It burns in our questions. It burns in our pain.

The war is a fire that set ablaze to the street my grandparents called home. It turned off the lights. It made day into night. And so they left, like all those who left before.

That fire burns inside of me. The fire that made it unsafe to stay, that keeps me from returning one day.

And it’s inside of you too. I want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because if you don’t see it, it might still grow.

However far away we are now, however many miles, however many years, I want you to know you are still of the place that your ancestors know. The one that they called home.

—Mona Damluji

March 20, 2023

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A post shared by Mona Damluji (@mona_damluji)

TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
THE U.S. INVASION OF IRAQ, 20 YEARS LATER

Truth — as Howard Zinn demonstrates in his classic text Terrorism and War — is the first casualty of war, and one can see evidence of this from the beginnings of the American empire, through our military operations around the world today. By March 2003, less than two years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. war machine of military propaganda reached a fever pitch with “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq. Now, 20 years later, we can see the truth of the matter: that we should have never invaded Iraq in the first place, and that doing so led to millions of unnecessary deaths, incalculable trauma for survivors and their families, and widespread environmental and socioeconomic destruction.

On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, we are offering 30% off our Iraq War, 20 Years Later Reading List, a timely selection of titles on U.S. imperialism, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and the so-called War on Terror.

March 16

Ianne Fields Stewart: “Today Is the Last Day of Trans Oppression”

With the forthcoming publication of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century, a new collection edited by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, we are proud to share a series of excerpts from the book, which will be published individually each week on the Seven Stories blog until the book's release.

In this excerpt, adapted from a speech addressed to the 15,000 marchers at the 2020 Brooklyn March for Black Trans Lives, Okra Project Founder Ianne Fields Stewart explores what it would mean to truly eradicate transphobia, to "bring that violence into the light and crush it beneath our feet."

A new companion to the classic collection edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century brings together more than 100 activist texts on social and economic justice that have shaped the last 22 years. The editors, Arnove and Pessin, offer a curated collection of voices of hope and resistance from Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the struggle for Indigenous liberation, activist groups for immigrant rights, environmentalist movements, disability justice organizing, and frontline workers during the global pandemic who spoke out against the life-threatening conditions of their labor.

Included in this new book are writings by Angela Y. Davis, Nick Estes, Colin Kaepernick, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Smalls, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Howard Zinn, Rev. William Barber, Bree Newsome, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tarana J. Burke, Dream Defenders, Sins Invalid, Mariame Kaba, Naomi Klein, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Linda Sarsour, Chelsea E. Manning, Chrishaun “CeCe” McDonald, Julian Brave NoiseCat, H. Melt, and others. Together, their words remind us that history is made not only by the rich and powerful, but by ordinary people taking collective action.

Ianne Fields Stewart is a Black transfeminine actor, storyteller, and activist and is the founder of The Okra Project, which works to address food insecurity in Black transgender communities. Stewart gave the following speech before a crowd of fifteen thousand people at the 2020 Brooklyn March for Black Trans Lives, the largest such gathering to date.

IANNE FIELDS STEWART, "TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF TRANS OPPRESSION" (June 14, 2020)

Good afternoon. My name is Ianne Fields Stewart. I use they/them/she/her pronouns.

Today I call upon each and every one of you to make a commitment. Today I urge you to commit, that today is the very last day that transphobia will claim the lives, loves, and joys of Black trans people!

For too long, Black trans people have fought for our humanity, and for too long, cis people have been acting like they don’t know what the fuck we talking about.

So today is the last day that a Black trans woman fears for her life, when she names and claims herself, in front of a man, whose hatred of himself is stronger than his love for her.

Today is the last day that a Black trans man fears occupying physical space because he can’t find his binder or is without it, and he fears that, because he fears being misgendered, because he fears brutality. It is the last day.

Today is the last day that Black nonbinary people feel forced to fake themselves into a binary that doesn’t exist.

Today is the last day that cis people use trans people as an encyclopedia when Google is right there.

Today is the last day. And today, I demand that you commit that there will be no more hashtags. There will be no more elevated rates of incarceration, housing insecurity and unemployment for Black trans people.

Today I demand that the state be held accountable for our murders.

Today I demand that the state be held accountable for continuously ignoring us, abusing us, while profiting off of us in the shadows.

Today we bring that violence into the light and crush it beneath our feet.

To summarize I have one simple thing to say: transphobia ends today. And it doesn’t end because your nonprofit made a grant off of it. It doesn’t end because you put a trans flag on a credit card. It doesn’t even end because you said to your white family that trans lives matter. It doesn’t end because you fuck us and still misgender us to your friends. Transphobia ends today because if you ain’t with us, you are learning today what it means to be against us.

IANNE FIELDS STEWART is a black, queer, and transfeminine New York-based storyteller working at the intersection of theatre and activism. Their work and she are dedicated to interrupting the exclusivity of luxury by making things like entertainment, nourishment, and self care accessible to the most marginalized in their community. In a world that is constantly traumatizing Black bodies she believes that Black queer and trans people should have the space and time to center collective emotional, physical, and sensual pleasure.

March 15

Excerpt: No More / C’est Tout by Marguerite Duras

To celebrate the paperback release of our bilingual edition of No More / C’est Tout by Marguerite Duras, we are proud to share an excerpt from the book: a short portion from the beginning of Duras’ final text, paired with introductory notes by translator Richard Howard and French publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

It was Chateaubriand who initiated a literature explicitly from the other side, posthumous writing, d’outre-tombe. There are subsequent French instances — Drieu La Rochelle’s Récit secret, Gide’s mortuary pillow-book Ainsi soit-il, some late Jouhandeau, quite a lot of Montherlant, perhaps Céline’s last three volumes — the mere instancing of these ominous names suggests the ethical risk of such an enterprise. Who makes book here — isn’t there always someone else, someone not entirely to be trusted who will have to collect the disjecta verba, to straighten things out —in Duras’s case her last young lover, appearing so mysteriously as a gruesome interlocutor, the angel of death masked as the last coital gasp, drowning out all foregoing competition during these inter-comatose manifestations of that special literary fanaticism which asserts not merely that this is happening (after all, Duras has written a hundred works, novels, stories, plays, films; expression is her trade) but that this is happening to me!

No attempt will be made to please, to beguile the (loathed?) reader. Nor to identify anything so trivial as circumstance. We are in the abstract — and perhaps fraudulently dated — halls of Dis where only glints of consciousness, when they come, will suffice: angry, dismissive, these are the intermittences not of the heart, as in Proust, but of the spleen. Baudelaire indeed is the plausible prototype, though what scorn M.D. would have for all his formal scruples, his attention to the classi cism of ruin. Here is nothing but what the French call hargne (surliness, resentment, bad temper . . .), tense and often mocking observations of the still-articulate soul, betrayed by the still-longing body. This is one of the fiercest little books in our culture, the converse of the Stoic manual of proper dying. Give it the last inch on your bedside table to remind you (like the slave whose function it is to slap the victorious Roman general before he sets out on his Triumphal March) of the degradations of mortality: greedy, illicit, profound. Odi et amo.

—Richard Howard
Spring 1998
New York City

FOREWORD

It was toward the end of August 1995 that Yann Andréa brought me the beginnings of C’est Tout: a few typed sheets which went from November 20, 1994 to August 1, 1995. We published them right away, and Marguerite Duras was able to see the book. Everyone knew at the time that she was mortally ill. Then a few days after her death on March 3, 1996, Yann gave me the pages which end on February 29. In the notes she herself wrote or in those retranscribed by Yann, the striking thing, for anyone who knew Marguerite Duras toward the end of her life, is that immediately recognizable voice, her outrageous and powerful way of forcing the language to obey her thought, a way which has here become lapidary, on account of the urgency of the message and the fear of silence. She spoke exactly as she wrote, or the other way around. It is for what they say, and also for her will to speak to the very end, that I ﬁnd these pages — poorly typed on an old machine, not even an electric typewriter — so overwhelming. And also because the whole of her work is to be found in them, in fragments and ﬂashes and echoes, as always reworked and revisited, this ultimate time, truly the last.

Grooving with Miles—The Birth of a Legend

May 28

by Quincy Troupe

From Miles & Me: An interview between Dan Simon and Quincy Troupe

With a Spotify playlist of Troupe's favorite Miles Davis tracks at the end of the interview

Miles & Me

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FORTHCOMING LITERARY FICTION AND MEMOIR

FORTHCOMING POLITICAL NON-FICTION

Abbie Hoffman — national provocateur, political activist, founding member of the Yippies, defendant in the trial of the Chicago Seven, and author of Steal This Book, Revolution for the Hell of It, and Fuck the System — died on April 12, 1989. He was 52.

Dan Simon wrote of this contradiction, so pivotal to the living memory of Abbie Hoffman, in October 2020, soon after seeing the film The Trial of the Chicago Seven:

FOREWORD

by Paul Krassner

I think it was 1967.

“What is this, we’re huddled together like in a fuckin’ ghetto, afraid to watch a fuckin’ parade,” Abbie Hoffman was saying.

We’d decided to confront the Armed Forces Day Parade coming down Fifth Avenue. There were a lot of us.

But then a police captain approached someone in our group and said, “I’m gonna have to give you a summons for holding a meeting without a permit.”

“We’re merely having a conversation, Officer. And why are you singling me out?”

“You seem to be leading the meeting,” the captain replied.

Although I was there as a reporter covering this action for the Realist, at that moment I crossed the line that separated observer from participant: “Excuse me, Officer, we’re both leading the meeting. You’d better give me a summons too.”

Right away, Abbie looked around and spoke up: “Who else is leading this meeting?”

Hands went up.

“I am.”

More hands.

“I am.”

“I am.”

“I am.”

It turned out that about fifty people were leading the meeting.

“Okay, I’m not gonna give you a summons, but the next time you hold a meeting—”

“You mean,” I interjected, “the next time we don’t hold a meeting—”

“—you better have a permit.”

“I’m sorry, Officer, we can’t continue this meeting any longer without a permit.”

The Armed Forces Day Parade began making its way down Fifth Avenue. The marines marched by and we chanted, “Get a girl, not a gun.”

The navy marched by and we sang “Yellow Submarine.”

Green Berets marched by and we shouted, “Thou shalt not kill!”

The Red Cross marched by and we applauded.

A missile rolled by and we called out, “Shame!”

Military cadets rode by on horseback and we advised, “Drop out now!”

The Department of Sanitation swept past and we cheered.

I asked, “Do you think it’s an ego trip for me to be concerned about whether the readers of the Realist think I’m on an ego trip?”

He laughed and said, “You only ask a question like that because you’re Jewish.”

“But I don’t think of myself as Jewish. I’m an atheist. I mean, Christ was Jewish.”

Abbie tempered his fearlessness with a gift for humor that was sharp and spontaneous.

Back on that first day of our long friendship, I told Abbie, “You’re the first one who’s really made me laugh since Lenny Bruce died.” Lenny Bruce had been in many ways my closest friend, and I had written his autobiography with him.

“Really?” Abbie replied, genuinely impressed. “Lenny Bruce was my god.”

— DESERT HOT SPRINGS, CA, JULY 2019

Nick Estes, “Native Liberation: The Way Forward” (August 13, 2016)

This is our common experience and our common struggle. This is why we formed The Red Nation.

We share an enemy that we must unite against. This is the organizing philosophy of The Red Nation.

The Great Spirits have declared: capitalism is organized crime and must be destroyed. It is our obligation to act accordingly.

Join us in this movement for life!

In the spirit of Popé and in the spirit of Crazy Horse!

Hecetu Welo!

To celebrate his birthday, take 30% off all books written by or about Nelson Algren!

One of the most neglected American writers and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN wrote once that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” His writings always lived up to that definition.

Algren also published two travel books, Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Voyage. The Last Carousel, a collection of short fiction and nonfiction, appeared in 1973. He died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Wright Afterword by Daniel Simon Contribution by H.E.F. Donahue

Foreword by Colin Asher Introduction by Tom Carson Afterword by Studs Terkel

Nelson Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that don't fade away.

Among the stories included here are "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and "The Face on the Barroom Floor," in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death—the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning.

Edited by Brooke Horvath and Dan Simon

Foreword by Herbert Mitgang

Afterword by Dan Simon

Notes by Dan Simon and C. S. O’Brien

Nelson Algren’s two books of travel writing describe his journeys through the seamier side of the international social and political landscape of the mid-1960s.

Algren at Sea brings both books together in one volume on the centenary of Algren’s birth.

Foreword by David Mamet

Nick Estes, “Native Liberation: The Way Forward”
(August 13, 2016)

Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Wright
Afterword by Daniel Simon
Contribution by H.E.F. Donahue

Foreword by Colin Asher
Introduction by Tom Carson
Afterword by Studs Terkel