frandroid | Entries tagged with pirate book club

It's been a while since I've highlighted an episode from the Pirate History podcast, but here we go: Episode 269 - Scurvy Schoolmasters

Do you remember when I was posting about Pirate Utopias, and being rather upset that some of the core trade that the pirates at Salé engaged in was slave-trading and kidnapping? One of the early incarnations of Libertalia, another "Pirate Republic" in Mauritius, decided to ally itself with a local tribe, marry their women, and all benefited thanks to the trade that they were doing, mostly in cattle meat for other pirates to stock provisions. Eventually they started selling weapons to only that tribe, and the pirates and the tribe started raiding one of their rival tribes. First they were capturing cattle, but eventually they decided to capture their women, and enslaved them in a bordello for the use of the local pirates and other visiting pirates. So we're once again very far from progressive anarchist fantasies of piracy. The slaves eventually manage to make something good out of the situation but I won't spoil the episode further...

I was kind of tired when I was listening to the episode and can't recall why it's called that, sorry.

Finished reading:
Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling, reading while tabling at the Anarchist bookfair in Hamilton. I had finished the novella a while ago but hadn't read all the extras at the end. The interviews with Sterling, with the illustrator, and with the editor I think. This stuff was actually more interesting than the book itself!

Currently reading:
Hundred Years War on Palestine. Looks like I'm going to take a hundred years to finish this off.

What have you finished reading: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling. Well, I've finished the novella, I still have to finish reading to post interview. But anyway. It did not get any better. So much potential, such wooden writing.

When I was in secondaire 1 (grade 7), we had a French creative writing assignment that was fairly open, so I decided to write a sort of American detective short story, like some sort of Noir thing even though I didn't know this genre name at the time. I made such a pastiche of it that my teacher accused me of plagiarism, and gave me a D instead of a better grade. I was too flummoxed and timid to challenge her so I got stuck with the grade. That year in general was pretty bad in French for me because it turns out that my elementary school had decided that some parts of the French curriculum were optional, and my peers from that feeder school had to play catch up in secondaire. ("Mais ou et car ni or"? What's that? Conjonctions de coordination? I'm still not sure.)

Anyway, I feel like Sterling wrote that novel in the same type of pastiche I did back then. It's so wooden. The only good thing about it is that when I saw a reference to Fiume in Pirate Utopias, I knew what that was and I still plan to hunt that French book down.

Actually the public library has a number of books about Gabriele d'Annunzio...

https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/search.jsp?N=&No=10&Ntk=Subject_Search_Interface&Ntt=D%27Annunzio%2C+Gabriele%2C+1863-1938.

https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM3957715&R=3957715

"...what is worth a mention ashore is surely worth a word afloat."

So I've resumed reading Wilson's Pirate Utopias, where I learned that the events in the book Pirate Utopia published by Bruce Sterling were based on a REAL "pirate" republic!!

The Republic of Bou Regreg was not a pure pirate utopia, but it was a state founded on piratical principles; in fact, it was the only state ever founded on these principles.*
...
*: Unless it be Gabriele d'Annunzio's infamous Republic of Fiume (1919), which financed its brief experience by piracy, and had a constitution based on the idea of music as the only force of social organization. See Philippe Julien, trans. D'Annunzio

Not that that makes that novella that much better, but anyway! All an exciting prospect, and another book (Julien's) to look forward to reading. Hopefully I can find the original French edition.

Here's a money quote from the penultimate chapter of Utopias: « Islam, to a certain extent, was the Internationale of the seventeenth century——and Salé perhaps its only true "Soviet" » 🙃 (The first half of this idea is pursued in Robert Kaplan's book about the Indian Ocean——yes, the neo-con author)

One thing I find frustrating with this book is that it feels like a work that was stopped short. The subtitle is "Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes"—the people found in the pirate republic of Salé, one of the three pirate-controlled towns at the mouth of the Bou Regreg river at Rabat in present-day Morocco. They are treated as a whole so in fact, Wilson only looks at a single pirate utopia. In the last two chapters, he compares this one to Fiume, to Nassau, to the sunken Port Royal, and to the various places in Madagascar that emerged, including the fabled Libertalia, which gets a longer look/rebunking (!). But it feels tacked on. It feels like the subject was supposed to be wider, but after finishing the research on Salé, Wilson decided he was done and wrapped up the book.

Nonetheless, it's a very interesting look at Mediterranean piracy which often gets overlooked for the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean.

Two things mar the book/the utopia. The first one is Wilson brief but obviously shocking defense of pedophilia as practiced in Salé, as a form of criticism in contemporary "conservative" sexual standards. A known item from Wilson, but remains disgusting.

The other one is about slavery. Caribbean pirates were not above keeping pirates enslaved; what to do with captured slaves depended on the crew, the captain and circumstances. Slaving was not the main target though. But in the Mediterranean, pirates were capturing a LOT of people for ransom and slavery. That was a common tactic between Europe and the Ottomans, and pirates were only too happy to do the same. Wilson describes a raid that a Salé fleet conducted in Reykjavik (!!) and finding that there were not that much valuable goods save some salted fish, they kidnapped people instead and brought them back home to be sold.

Now it's not like I thought pirates were angels—they are killers. But in general they tried to use overwhelming force, guile and intimidation to get the other party to surrender. That other party could also choose financial loss over murder and capitalism.

Save for some known psychopaths (Charles Vane, Blackbeard, maybe Ed Low?) pirates were often not going out of their way to kill people. But enslaving people was a choice, and that's one that the Sally Rovers often made.

Eventually I will read Gabriel Kahn's Life Under the Jolly Roger to further disabuse myself of life under piracy =) but more books about Kurds await me in the meantime.

Just finished:

The Sleep of Reason, vol I: Cascade! It was phenomenal. The storytelling was amazing, and I was very amused and entertained. I could have used a bit more exposition at the beginning and after the main hinge point. I was amused/impressed at some of the very obscure vocabulary, and really dug the complexity of the internal dialogue the various characters had, especially some that ostensibly would be outside the natural ideological zone of the author. :) Looking forward to the next volume.

Grabuge Urbain. Je crois que j'ai ramassé ce zine plein-page couleur au Salon Anarchiste. C'est un zine pas mal punk et d'habitude, j'ai rarement de patience pour ça, mais la mise en page/les collages sont quand même poussés, et l'histoire d'une des autrices qui a raconté ses deux (!) poursuites gagnantes (!) contre la police pour cause de brutalité policière est assez impressionnante.

Retomber by Xiaoxiao Li: Despite the French title, this one is a thick English-language comic zine. This isn't a narrative as much as a diary-style thing, with lots of iPhone messaging conversations with an unidentified confidante. All drawing is line drawing with no fill, and all ink is coloured, no black. The effect is quite impressive. There are tons of self-portraits, including two with Munsch's The Scream's figure with are hilarious. It's fairly liberal young girl internal dialogue stuff that I don't usually have much time for, but it's quite compelling. There was a whole subset of young-asian-woman-internal-dialogue type of zines back in the 90s, but I hadn't seen one in a while, and this is probably one of the better ones. (I mean, other than the author's name, you could barely explicitly tell that it's Asian, but her voice is quite similar to that set, though I would be hard-pressed to describe it.)

I think I picked that last zine in the zine boxes at The Beguiling. I don't know exactly what Birkemoe is doing as a buyer, but there are one million unique zine issues in his boxes, some of them over 10 years old. Maybe he just orders a bunch of singles for his own reading pleasure and then dumps them in the sale boxes? Anyway, it's quite the selection. I mean, most of it is not really good, but it's one of the few times in my life where I really get to go crate-digging for zines, as opposed to comic book buyers and record buyers who have plenty of stores to cater to them (including that very store). I enjoy that.

Currently Reading:

Briefly read another chapter of Pirate Utopias. More and more I think The Pirate History Podcast did a better job at the actual history of Moorish corsairs (of course it's being produced 25+ years later...), but he doesn't really do the radical politics from a radical viewpoint, so Wilson's book is still relevant. At least I think so, I'm more into a history chapter than a politics chapter right now. I looked at the back cover of the book again and noticed blurbs by Christopher Hill, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh. Wheww! When I read this book for the first time in 1999, I didn't know who they were, but now I'm impressed.

Reading Next:

This is How You Win the Time War is overdue at the library with holds on it. Oops.

Finished: Some zines. Nothing great, just following up with one author to see her other zines.

Currently Reading:
- Slowly continuing Rachel A. Rosen's Cascade. I'm laughing a lot. There was one paragraph I read where I was like, "oh, that's what Peter Watts is talking about in his blurb..." (re: author's "tricks")

- Re-reading the previous chapter of Pirate Utopias, because I didn't know was what when I picked it up again; the main reason I'm re-reading the book is to commit the pirate history of Salé (the semi-piratical/free city that would eventually grow to become Rabat) to memory this time, which is the topic of this chapter. There are lots of books/podcasts/TV about Caribbean piracy but fewer about piracy elsewhere. (The Pirate History podcast does a phenomenal job of documenting Mediterranean piracy before and during the Golden Age. There's also a book on Jewish Pirates that talks about that too, I forget its title, but there aren't many, so.) (I just remembered that Julius Caesar was once kidnapped by pirates, and I wonder if someone has written good ancient pirate history or fiction...)

One book thing I forgot to mention about my trip to Montréal: I got to meet Erica Lagalisse!!!! They go by Evan in person. They gave a workshop that I couldn't attend, which kind of sucks. At the very end of the fair, I saw them a few meters away but I suddenly got fairly shy, so I was hesitating to introduce myself. Thankfully a child who was part of their entourage came to my table, saw that I was selling their book, and brought Lagalisse to my table, where they promptly recalled a conversation we had on Twitter over a year ago. They sold me a copy of the French translation of their book, which I will gift to a friend I should never give gifts to ever again (he basically stole $1500 from me) but I know it's going to be right in his wheelhouse. Anyway we had a good chat so I was chuffed.

The CBC and the LA Times have teamed up to publish this short-run podcast titled The Outlaw Ocean, looking into what happens at sea when you're outside legal oversight. In Episode 2: The Dark Fleet, host Ian Urbina starts following the Dark Fleet, fishing boats that turn off their transponders and go on overfishing in international and sometimes national waters of other nations. He does so aboard the Bob Barker, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's flagship. The crew of the Barker have decided to target The Thunder, the world's most nefarious illegal fishing ship. (It's on an Interpol list.) When they first meet and it's clear that there's going to be an encounter, the ship ditches its nets and decided to run for it. When a secondary Shepherd crew tries to pull the net out of the water (to keep it for evidence), it takes hours and hours to pull everything in because it's so long. So begins this long pursuit...

You can read the transcript here. But reading "intense music" doesn't live up to hearing the great sound production in this series. :)

Anyway, I'm at episode 4 now and it's a pretty intense podcast... There's been murders and slavery so far, so listener beware.

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A Conversation with Retired Forest Ranger Peter Romkey.

Shared Ground is a podcast I've started listening to recently, looking at the relationship between humans and the environment in Mikmaq'i, i.e. Nova Scotia. I find the podcast generally a little light, but this interview with a retired forester was really fascinating, in particular the importance of decomposing boles (trunks) in a healthy forest, and impacts of clear cutting and other forms of "enlightened" forestry. That sounds a bit nerdy but I thought it was pretty fascinating.

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I really need to write down my impressions right after listening to an episode... I have a backlog of 15+ episodes but I don't recall enough about them to write them up. Sigh.

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy.

What are you currently reading:

Pirate Utopias by Peter Lamborn Wilson.

I looked at the introduction again and it turns out that PLW is a trust fund dude. Hah.

Anyway, I've made some headway. He's giving a general background of piracy in north Africa, first in Algiers, and now focusing more on Salé, his principal focus. I've been listening to the Pirate History Podcast for the last year or so, and I've just finished his Mediterranean piracy arch (up to episode 100 or so), so it's nice to pick up this book now because it covers similar ground, though Matt Albers barely talks about "Salee" (he's really awful at pronouncing any non-English names). While Wilson's book is not particularly well annotated, he does refer to Marcus Rediker and Christopher Hill amongst other historians, so you know he's read the basic lit here. I noticed that the book was from 1995 – somehow I thought it was from much earlier. The old school type and engravings can give that impression. They make the book rather beautiful. Someone could make a deluxe edition of this book and it would sell like hotcakes. Anyway. More on this later on.

Please note the creation of a pirate book club tag.