Month: May 2010

Uncategorized

Waste…not! (2)

May 4, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Not every batch of paper is a victory. If I get two good sheets out of this morning’s batch, I’ll consider myself lucky. But every attempt is a step towards competence in a new set of skills—and a commitment to a different way of thinking about the resources around me. Both are of some importance in the current situation. I left corporate bookselling at the point when the shift in culture transformed the job into something that I—a 25+ year veteran in the field—felt I was not competent to do—and could not see any point in becoming skilled at. There […]
Uncategorized

Might Makes Right (a bad book is good to find…)

May 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
Ragnar Redbeard’s infamous work, “Might is Right,” aka “The Survival of the Fittest, or the Philosophy of Power” (1896), has shown up at Archive.org. Those inclined to hate egoism should cherish this work, which has few—arguably none—of the pesky redeeming features so common in works by Stirner, Badcock, Walker, etc.
Uncategorized

Waste…not!

May 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
I made a trip to the homebrewing store to pick up some calcium carbonate the other day, and over the weekend I made my first batches of paper with fiber entirely derived from junk mail, dryer lint, and whatever I could scrape off the countertop from the last couple of batches. The result was a simple, but rather pretty paper, with quite a bit of “confetti” effect from bits that didn’t blend down as smooth as the rest. The sheets are acid-free and take ink without smudging. As it turns out, I was even able to feed a sheet through […]
come-outerism

Corvine Call #5: Devils, Details, Come-Outers and Non-Resistants

May 3, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
May is “Organize and Update Month” at Corvus Editions, in preparation for the summer book and paper fairs. There are four new pamphlets from the Non-Resistance and Come-Outer movement available now from Corvus Editions. Over the last few months, I have prepared a lot more material than I have uploaded and offered for sale, mostly because there has been a lot of behind-the-scenes organizing that needed to be done before operations could become anything like routine. I’ve resourced all my paper, in order to emphasize tree-free and post-consumer materials. I’ve added a couple of new formats—and have a couple more […]
fiction

From “The Distributive Passions”

May 2, 2010 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Distributive Passions, my fiction project, will return in The Mutualist #2 — “Owning Up,” but, for now, I’m going to leave KAli to fend for herself in the far future, and get back to Gabriel Solly and more contemporary concerns. Gabe’s world is my idea-workshop, the place I go when I need to work out the practical implications of theoretical concerns. It’s a world where lots of little things went differently than they have in our own—and many things worked out in very much the same ways. Fourier ended up with the prominence of Marx—and vice versa. Agassiz was […]