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Happy birthday, Catholic Worker

Nathan — Thu, 01 May 2014 14:42:28 +0000

To celebrate the Catholic Worker movement’s 81st birthday today, I snuck Dorothy Day into two articles in the space of a week. Today, at Al Jazeera America, “What’s Left of May Day?”:

On May 1, 1933, the Catholic journalist and activist Dorothy Day went to New York’s Union Square to distribute copies of the first issue of her newspaper The Catholic Worker. As she made her way through the crowd, she had a ready audience of thousands: men in coats, ties, and hats — as low-wage workers and radicals apparently used to dress — gathered around a maze of signs for labor unions, fraternal societies, and parties representing the various varieties of socialism then on offer. These groups disagreed in every way they could think to, but they shared the square regardless. For decades, in the U.S. and around the world, May Day was International Workers’ Day, commemorating protesters killed in Haymarket Square, Chicago, during the 1886 strike for an eight-hour workday. It also had earlier roots as a spring holiday of maypoles and flower baskets.

Dorothy Day was only one among many at Union Square trying to suggest a way out of the economic crisis of the time. This was well into the Great Depression, when the breadlines and the legions of unemployed people posed an existential threat to American capitalism; skirmishes between fed-up workers and abusive employers were common and often bloody. Day proposed a synthesis of Christian love and communist solidarity, militant pacifism in pursuit of “a society where it is easier to be good.” The Catholic Worker quickly became the script for a new religious and political movement. Within months, circulation grew from a first run of 2,500 copies to 10 times that, and it reached 150,000 before Day’s pacifist convictions caused subscriptions to drop during the lead-up to World War II. Each May Day, New York’s Catholic Workers still celebrate the birth of their movement with a communal supper and singing.

And something shorter a few days ago for Reuters on the double canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII:

The Co-Cathedral of St.?Joseph in Brooklyn, nearing the end of a long restoration, has a new mural over its main doors. Surrounding the Holy Spirit, in the form of an incandescent dove, is a gathering of women and men flanked by angels. Most have soft yellow halos, but three figures, including the pair closest to the dove, do not.

The three are local icons. Activist and writer Dorothy Day wears a hat with the inscription “NO WAR” and holds a stack of Catholic Worker newspapers, the publication she founded. Beside her is Bernard Quinn, a priest who served Brooklyn’s African American community at a church just blocks away, and whose Long Island orphanage was twice burned down by racists. Pierre Toussaint, who looks intently toward the dove, was a slave-turned-philanthropist who, on gaining his freedom in 1807, adopted his surname from the leader of the Haitian revolution.

Astrology as Metaphor

Nathan — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 05:14:30 +0000

Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme Instrument, a four-story, right-triangular sundial surrounded by semi-circular wings. The complex reflects the style of politics practiced by its autocratic creator — one based on charting the positions of the sun and planets across the zodiac with maximum pomp and precision.

The road named after the Jantar Mantar, however, better reflects the aspirations of India’s past few decades as the world’s most populous democracy. In the space of several hundred yards between two sets of hand-painted red-and-yellow police barricades, an assortment of political and religious outfits have set up tents, encampments and shrines each dedicated to some particular cause — for the prosecution of a high-placed rapist, for the rights of migrant workers, for various flavors of spiritual-social awakening. Several tents contain men on hunger strikes, each reclining on a couch and nursed by supporters, on behalf of a petition like airline employee pensions or voting rights for Indians living abroad. Despite the amplified speeches and droning chants, Jantar Mantar Road is a respite from Delhi’s non-stop hustle; people slowly mill through to listen, strike up conversations and eat deep-fried snacks.

Read the rest at Waging Nonviolence or openDemocracy.

30% Off Thank You, Anarchy—Plus Events!

Nathan — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 03:09:00 +0000

“Schneider does a remarkable job of conveying the euphoric sense of possibility that transformed so many people in the square, as well as the frustrations”—Nick Pinto, Al Jazeera America

“I consider this book one of the lasting benefits of Occupy”—David Swanson, WarIsACrime.org

“[A] fast-moving cinematic chronicle”—Jonah Raskin, Occupy.com

“Part history, part on-the-scene reporting, and part hope for a better future, the work is valuable and delightfully controversial.”—John Scott G, Publishers Newswire

Agree? Disagree? You can share your own reaction with a review at Goodreads and Amazon. And don’t miss the interviews with Democracy Now, HuffPost Live, and The New Inquiry.

Get a Discount

Between now and the end of October, thanks to a special arrangement with The Nation, the folks at University of California Press are offering a 30% discount on Thank You, Anarchy if you order directly from their website using the discount code 14W3726.

You can also find it at all sorts of fine retailers—ask for it at your local bookstore. If not now, when?

Attend an Event

The interest in Thank You, Anarchy and God in Proof have spawned an improvised book tour:

10/8, New York, NY: KGB Bar
10/9, Hempstead, NY: Lecture on proofs at Hofstra University
10/24, Brooklyn, NY: An Evening of Song and Abstraction at the Oratory Church of St.?Boniface
10/26, New London, CT: Monte Cristo Bookshop
10/30, Brooklyn, NY: “Was Jesus a Zealot?” at St.?Joseph’s College
11/1, Philadelphia, PA: Wooden Shoe Books
11/3, Brooklyn, NY: BookCourt
11/8, Providence, RI: Beckett Lecture of the Brown-RISD Catholic Community
11/18, Cambridge, MA: Celebrating On Anarchism with Noam Chomsky and the Boston Review
11/23, Baltimore, MD: Panel at the American Academy of Religion
11/26, Baltimore, MD: Red Emma’s Bookstore
2/22, San Francisco, CA: The Green Arcade
2/24, Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University
2/26-3/1, Seattle, WA: Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference
3/9, Washington, DC: Center for Inquiry lecture

More are in the works. If you’d like to try to bring me to your hometown, please don’t hesitate to let me know how I can help.

I hope to see you somewhere along the line!

The Official Guide to Thank You, Anarchy

Nathan — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 16:15:38 +0000

Maybe you saw a scene from it on HBO’s The Newsroom. Or perhaps you annotated part of it on RapGenius. Some of you may have even glimpsed the foreword by Rebecca Solnit, in which she wrote:

Thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year of Occupy, and what many of the sparks and some of the tinder were thinking, and what it was like to be warmed by that beautiful conflagration that spread across the world.

One way or another, the news about Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse is getting out!

Get your copy

Thank You, Anarchy is available as an affordable paperback, extravagant hardcover, or ephemeral ebook. To support fine non-profit publishing, you can buy it directly from University of California Press using the discount code 13W4710. That should bring the price to just about where Amazon has it (and I guess you also can get it there if you have to).

Also, between now and Occupy’s second anniversary on September 17, you can get a signed copy of the book by becoming a member (at $5/month or more) of Waging Nonviolence, the publication where the Thank You, Anarchy got its start.

Once you’ve read the book, I hope you’ll consider writing a review at Goodreads or Amazon, or anywhere really, to tell the world what you think.

Attend an event

There are lots of opportunities coming up:

9/15, New York, NY: OWS Participatory Walking Tour and Cartography Party
9/22, Brooklyn, NY: Panel with David Graeber, Astra Taylor, and Moustafa Bayoumi at the Brooklyn Book Festival
9/24, Arlington, VA: Reading at Busboys & Poets
10/2, New York, NY: “The Occupy Apocalypse” at the Catholic Worker
10/9, Hempstead, NY: Lecture on proofs at Hofstra University
10/24, Brooklyn, NY: “An Evening of Song and Abstraction” at the Oratory Church of St.?Boniface
10/26, New London, CT: Discussion with Frida Berrigan at Monte Cristo Bookshop
10/30, Brooklyn, NY: “Was Jesus a Zealot?” at St.?Joseph’s College
11/8, Providence, RI: Beckett Lecture for the Brown-RISD Catholic Community
11/18, Cambridge, MA: Celebrating On Anarchism with Noam Chomsky and the Boston Review
11/23, Baltimore, MD: Panel at the American Academy of Religion
3/9, Washington, DC: Center for Inquiry lecture

Keep up with more events to come on my speaking page. If you’re interested in helping organize an event in your hometown, don’t hesitate to contact me.

There’s more

Can’t get enough anarchy? Here’s what else to look out for this fall:

“Where are they now”-style features on Occupy Wall Street in The Nation and the website of the new Al Jazeera America network.
A new collection of Noam Chomsky’s writings published by the New Press, On Anarchism, includes an introduction of mine: “Anarcho-Curious or, Anarchist Amnesia.”
Don’t miss a pair of fantastic new Occu-books by friends hot off the presses, including my Waging Nonviolence co-editor Laura Gottesdiener’s acclaimed A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home and Mark Bray’s Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

What I Learned about Empire in the West Bank

Nathan — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 22:23:20 +0000

At the edge of the West Bank village of Faqqua, an Israeli soldier watches from the other side of the Green Line. Photo by Bryan MacCormack of Left in Focus.

The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

When You Need Your Notebook to Lie Flat

Nathan — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:30:42 +0000

Most of my writer friends are used to me extolling the virtues of Midori MD notebooks, these fabulous little buggers from Japan: tough signature-bound pages, bendability for comfy back-pocket storage (unlike your average Moleskine), and the ability to lie flat, on any page, at a moment’s notice.

The toughness was especially useful when I took my first Midori on a reporting trip in Costa Rica, where the moisture in the air makes short work of flimsy books.?Back-pocket storage was often necessary while reporting on Occupy Wall Street, when at a moment’s notice I’d have to take off my reporters’ hat and help out on something with both hands. Lying flat, then, came especially in handy on my recent trip to Israel/Palestine when, for fear of the notorious security at Ben Gurion Airport and Israel’s anxiety about anyone seeing its occupation up close, I decided to photograph my entire notebook, upload it, and leave the book itself behind.

Thanks to the Midori’s marvelous ability to lie down on a dime, photographing the whole 176 page notebook took only a few minutes, with no need for fingers in the way to hold the pages to the table.

So get your Midori MD today; the more of us in the United States who do, the more likely they’ll continue being available here. I buy them from?the good folks at MyMaido.com, based in California, who’ve given me great service and the best prices I can find on this side of the Pacific.

And if you want to read about about I saw and did in the Holy Land, start with my first dispatch at Waging Nonviolence. More to come.

On Strike Against Myself

Nathan — Wed, 02 May 2012 23:42:37 +0000

Can you spot the author? Photo by The Eyes of New York, via Flickr.

I tried to go on strike for May Day, following the Occupy movement’s calls for a general strike, and it was harder than I thought. My decision was made official—that is, public—by Malcolm Harris’ inclusion of me in his piece, “How Does a Writer Strike?” The trouble is, of course, that I’m self-employed, and my only steady income comes from Waging Nonviolence, which I both co-run and love. My work for the past seven months has almost exclusively been about, and generally regarded as being in support of, the Occupy movement itself. One Occupier even asked me not to strike on Twitter.

The best I could figure was that I’d tell an editor she’d have to wait until the next day for my report, and that I’d keep myself from tweeting. Rather than observing at my usual slight-but-noticeable remove, I would be in;?I would be of.?Correspondence with fellow Occupy writer Natasha Lennard was helpful in thinking this through, and I resonate a lot with what she wrote at Salon:

The May Day general strike is an experiment and one I look forward to taking part in wholeheartedly. I find the distinction between observer and participant a problematic one to uphold. A distinction I prefer, although equally imperfect, is one drawn by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1938 novel “Nausea” — the distinction between “living” and “recounting.” The protagonist notes, “a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.” Just imagine what Sartre would have made of Twitter and Facebook timelines.

But, as with most projects of upbuilding self-denial, I failed, again and again. In Union Square I sat and consulted with Ingrid Burrington, May Day’s one-woman Cartography Department, whom I’d profiled in a little piece on the Harper’s?website the day before, and as we did, we were being filmed as b-roll of me “reporting” for the 99% Film. Before that, I broke ranks with my fellow Occupy Catholics (discussed in a recent polemic for n+1‘s Occupy! Gazette #4?and?Killing the Buddha) in order to run ahead and catch sight of the march taking the street. A reporter’s duty! And, after that, as night fell, an Occupy organizer up and told me a bunch of neat secrets from the tactical end of the planning process, so I got out my notebook to jot some of them down. At that moment two fellow Occupy journos—who had witnessed my agonizing over striking in an email list—noticed me and started shouting, “Scab! Scab!” They had both opted to work that day.

As 10 p.m. approached, the temptation to report got harder and harder to fight. There was just so much. Like a tourist with 10 seconds in front of a world-famous landmark, I couldn’t resist taking a picture.?The scenes were too powerful, and passing too quickly. I later wrote in my subsequent report for YES! Magazine?(and Waging Nonviolence):

As dark came, Occupiers’ plans to hold an after-party in Battery Park were foiled by police blockades. Text-message alerts guided those who wished to stay to a Vietnam veterans’ memorial tucked along the East River waterfront between buildings that house Morgan Stanley and Standard & Poor’s. The memorial includes a space that served as a perfect amphitheater for a thousand-strong “people’s assembly”—so named because OWS’ General Assembly is currently defunct—and it became one of those moments of collective effervescence and speaking-in-one-voice that won so many discursively-inclined hearts to the movement in the fall. People of other inclinations danced to the familiar sound of the drum circle on the far side of the park.

The topic of the assembly was whether to stay, to try and occupy.

So, before the clock tolled midnight, I scribbled. I wrote. May the god of the strike have mercy on my soul.

A Law Higher than the Law

Nathan — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:36:49 +0000

Law, law, law. The other day I published an essay about the renegade lawyer William Stringfellow. Today I’ve got a new one at Harper’s?exploring what Occupy Wall Street has to do, if anything at all, with the First Amendment. Most people think it does, and I think they’re mostly wrong. Here’s a bit of it:

As the movement matured, … it became common practice for occupiers to make reference to the guarantees of the First Amendment as they justified their actions to the public. The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” passed by the General Assembly on September 29, states, “We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right.” It further calls on “the people of the world” to “exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.” The “Statement of Autonomy” passed on November 1 described the occupation as “a forum for peaceful assembly.” Meanwhile, lawyers working on behalf of the movement were trying to establish, on First Amendment grounds, the occupations’ legal right to exist — even as the constant police presence around the occupiers suggested that they had none. The “right” the legal documents spoke of were more an aspiration than a reality.

Ultimately, however, the struggle didn’t play out on legal grounds; Zuccotti Park remained occupied mostly thanks to extra-legal pressures. When the city proposed to clean the park on October 14 — effectively a forcible removal — thousands of people arrived before dawn to stand in the way. A month later, when the eviction finally came, it was as a surprise in the middle of the night. The difference wasn’t so much legal as tactical.

In the end, I think the “peaceable assembly” this movement is doing is less about the letter of the law than about a law inscribed in us elsewhere—in the conscience. Call be a bad lawyer. Or maybe just go ahead and call me an anarchist.

Occupying Memory

Nathan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:37:58 +0000

My coverage of Occupy Wall Street continues, and evolves. The movement that started at Liberty Plaza is growing all the time, and as it does, I’ve been spending less and less time at the occupations themselves and more and more time writing about them, trying to take account of what has so far been the most tremendous, instructive, and hopeful political experience of my life, and perhaps of my whole generation. I’ve noticed many of the early organizers now stepping back some—resting, letting others take leadership roles, trying to dodge the temptations of ego that come with a movement that has hit the big time, a movement that is not to be confused with particular individuals, even while being made up of nothing else.

As a journalist, I’ve been doing the same. Everyone with a notebook or a camera seems to be covering the movement now, so I’m letting them do the work I was doing early on, when few others were there. I’m going through my notes and through my pictures and through my memories, trying to sort out where this came from and how. In the meantime, some more publications and appearances:

My article “From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere” was the lead story of the October 31 issue of The Nation.?I subsequently discussed it on The John Batchelor Show.
A bit of an essay of mine forthcoming in The Catholic Worker?newspaper is now up at OccupyWriters.com, a petition that I helped start with Jeff Sharlet and Kiera Feldman.
An essay?on the meaning of “diversity of tactics” for Occupy Wall Street at Waging Nonviolence has been pretty widely circulated—and I hope its call for nonviolence will be heard. I’m told an edited version will appear in a new book being put out by YES! magazine next week.
In an essay in?The New York Review of Books, Michael Greenberg mentioned the article of mine in the first issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, adapted from my Nation?FAQ.

The Memory Theater, Revisited

Nathan — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:12:07 +0000

Late last year, I published the sketch of an essay here called “Don’t Take Away My Memory Theater.” The feedback that came in the comments from you readers was enough to encourage me to try developing the ideas in it even more. Now, finally, a much-extended version has been published by the good people at Open Letters Monthly: “In Defense of the Memory Theater.” It is, at first glance, my contribution to the Great Speculation among bookish people about what is going to happen to reading when the machines finally take over, if they ever really do. It seems lately that just about every writer is required to submit some opinion on the matter. But I try to make my contribution reach a bit more than usual from matters of fact to those of spirit.

I am in no position to end with prognostication, to predict how all this business will turn out, or to recommend particular policy directives and consumer rules-of-thumb. The companies will have their way, of course; as the filmmaker Chris Marker once put it, I bow to the economic miracle. But I can end with a vision, and it can point to a posture.

Picture a library, in flames, overlooking the city in ruins below—the Library of Alexandria under Caesar’s assault all over again. Books by the thousands audibly crinkle as they incinerate, disappearing for all time, never to be read again and, in a generation or two, never to be remembered. They are all irreplaceable; their loss is exactly incalculable. They are now good only to fuel the fire. As bystanders, we’re consumed by horror. We imagine ourselves as the books, the books as ourselves. Everything is lost with them. Right?

Or, on the other hand, might we instead laugh and cheer? It wouldn’t be the first time at a book-burning. Why not? Isn’t there also comedy—a divine comedy—in what freedom would follow the immolation of civilization’s material memory? We have only ourselves again, ourselves and our God. Perhaps these flames might go by the name of progress.

Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to comment and encourage. Fleshing this piece out, in particular, and putting it before readers means a lot to me.