Synopses & Reviews
Cultural Writing. Anarchist studies. By rebelling against hierarchical society and living under the Jolly Roger, pirates created an upside-down world of anarchist organization and festival, with violence and death ever-present. This creation was not a purely whimsical process. In THE DEVIL'S ANARCHY, Stepehen Snelders examines rare 17th-century Dutch pirate histories to show the continuity of a shared pirate culture, embodied in its modes of organization, its methods of distributing booty and on the careers of Claes Compaen, a cunning, charismatic renegado who claimed to have stolen more than 350 vessels, and Jan Erasmus Reyning, who hit the seas at age 12 and became a buccaneer in the pirate jungles of Santo Domingo, Snelders paints a salty picture of the excesses, contradictions, and liberatory joys of pirate life.
Synopsis
A tumultuous mosaic of artists, ethnics, poets, junkies, barflies, radicals, mystics, street people, con men, flower children, screwballs and eccentrics who inhabit the city's edgiest neighborhood. Not very quaint, pretty, or tidy to the touch. Includes Allen Ginsberg, Lynne Tillman, Ed Sanders, Miguel Piñero, Emily XYZ, Cookie Mueller, Ron Kolm and others. Illustrated.