Uncommon Hours

"I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." —Henry David Thoreau

Pages

  • Home
  • FDS Memorial Fund

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

'I'll Occupy' recruitment song: 'The 99 is pissed and we will not be dismissed!'

Posted by Bob Sommer

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Newer Post Older Post Home
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

The Francis D. Sommer Memorial Fund for Homeless Veterans

The Francis D. Sommer Memorial Fund for Homeless Veterans
Francis D. Sommer (5/12/1983 - 2/11/2011)

Uncommon Writings: Selected Posts and Articles

  • "'Elegy for Francis': One Year Later"
  • "Collateral Damage: 'Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan'"
  • "Remembering homeless vets on Veterans Day"
  • " 'A funeral pyre for American thought': The Decline of Reading and Who Benefits from It"
  • "No, We're Not from Texas" (a personal essay about a soldier's homecoming, published in Prick of the Spindle)
  • Sebastian Junger's War (my review in Rain Taxi Review of Books)
  • Bringing the War Home: 'The Hurt Locker'
  • David Bates: The Katrina Paintings
  • "Playing from Memory" (Editor's Choice nominee for the storySouth Million Writers Award)
  • "Plaza Light" (a fictional tribute to John Lennon, first published in Cantaraville)
  • How a bill became a deal: Kansas Gov. Mark Parkinson's 'compromise' with Sunflower Electric
  • "A Curtain Call for the Hyde Park Playhouse," published in Chronogram
  • Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days reviewed
  • The Townhouse Explosion
  • "Court TV"
  • Rick Santelli's Rant
  • "I'm just tired of hate": The mother of a student counterprotesting the Westboro Church
  • "The Education of David Frost"
  • "The Most Important Election of Our Time"

Bob Sommer

My Photo
View my complete profile
Contact
Home

Search This Blog

Loading...

Share it

Uncommonly Popular Posts

  • Conservatives’ ‘climate-gate’ gets less attention than a few emails did
    "Conservatives’ ‘climate-gate’ gets less attention than a few emails did" By Bob Sommer The only good environmentalism is “free-market en...
  • What is the true cost of oil? Photographer Garth Lenz shares shocking photos of Alberta's tar sands mining project
  • (no title)
    Francis David Sommer May 12, 1983 - February 11, 2011 “Attitude toward Death” From The Teaching of Tecumseh Live your life that the fe...
  • Shell Oil Plan to Drill off Arctic Coast Advances
    Shell Oil is one step closer to drilling in the pristine Arctic waters of the Polar Bear Seas. The Obama administration has approved an oi...
  • David Bates: The Katrina Paintings
    David Bates: The Katrina Paintings Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (showing through August 22, 2010) By Bob Sommer Uncommon Hours ...
  • A win for the good guys: Kansas coal-fired plant blocked by the court
    Kansas coal project will face thorough environmental review, new administration decision Washington, D.C. — Judge Emmett Sullivan in the ...
  • U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan hit 5,000
    Military Families Speak Out urges President Obama to bring the troops home: As the nation awaits confirmation from the Pentagon of the 5,...

Uncommon Archives

  • ►  2012 (7)
    • ►  February (5)
      • Conservatives’ ‘climate-gate’ gets less attention ...
      • What is the true cost of oil? Photographer Garth L...
      • Shell Oil Plan to Drill off Arctic Coast Advances
      • 'Elegy for Francis': One Year Later
      • A win for the good guys: Kansas coal-fired plant b...
    • ►  January (2)
      • Sierra Club Applauds President Obama for Rejecting...
      • Paul Rieckhoff: Our Troops Aren’t Political Props
  • ▼  2011 (46)
    • ▼  December (5)
      • Collateral Damage: ‘Windows and Mirrors: Reflectio...
      • 'I'll Occupy' recruitment song: 'The 99 is pissed ...
      • Ron Paul Undiluted
      • Michael Brune: The Keystone XL Pipeline Scam
      • Feds Link Water Contamination to Fracking for the ...
    • ►  November (8)
      • Chris Martenson: “Our job is not to grow as fast a...
      • Fair and balanced, but not so much news
      • Happy Thanksgiving from Team Francis!
      • Remembering homeless vets on Veterans Day
      • State Dept. to reevaluate Keystone XL tarsands pip...
      • Bill Moyers: 'Our politicians are little more than...
      • 'My Water's On Fire Tonight' (The Fracking Song)
      • Michael Brune: 'The Keystone XL Pipeline is about ...
    • ►  October (13)
      • Amy Goodman on Occupy Wall Street: 'Pundits know s...
      • Obama Administration: No Uranium Mining Near Grand...
      • A victory for our wilderness: Federal court reinst...
      • Koch Industries and Cancer: 'Koch Brothers Exposed...
      • Europe’s Top Doctors On Climate Change: ‘Preventio...
      • Rick Perry’s Energy Plan: 'Wheeze, baby, wheeze!'
      • Pollutors Win: House blocks toxic mercury protecti...
      • National Peace Action director to speak in Kansas ...
      • Michael Brune: "...the hypocrisy of the Koch broth...
      • Sierra Club releases clean water voting record
      • U.S. House continues assault on clean air
      • Students Take Action to Move Campuses Beyond Coal
      • Sierra Club Books to release updated edition of Nu...
    • ►  September (3)
      • SAT reading scores hit an all-time low
      • Bush 2.0? Obama Delays Smog Protections until at l...
      • Al Gore: The Dirtiest Fuel on the Planet
    • ►  August (2)
      • State Dept. Endorses Dirty Tar Sands Monstrosity
      • Groups Ask Kansas Supreme Court to Overturn Sunflo...
    • ►  July (2)
      • Bloomberg Philanthropies commits $50 million to Si...
      • The EPA should revoke Sunflower's permit for Holco...
    • ►  June (1)
      • A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes...
    • ►  May (4)
      • 'Your Memorial Day weekend'
      • Court TV
      • 'A funeral pyre for American thought': The Decline...
      • A Mother's Day Poem
    • ►  February (3)
      • Francis David SommerMay 12, 1983 - February 11, 20...
      • Hightower: 'Obama, Inc.'
      • Sierra Club Moves to Intervene in Justice Departme...
    • ►  January (5)
      • Greenpeace delivers a message to the Koch brothers...
      • Sierra Club Launches Effort to Expose the Koch Bro...
  • ►  2010 (62)
    • ►  December (5)
    • ►  November (3)
    • ►  October (2)
    • ►  September (11)
    • ►  August (1)
    • ►  July (4)
    • ►  June (21)
    • ►  May (2)
    • ►  April (4)
    • ►  March (3)
    • ►  February (3)
    • ►  January (3)
  • ►  2009 (130)
    • ►  December (6)
    • ►  November (8)
    • ►  October (2)
    • ►  August (1)
    • ►  July (9)
    • ►  June (7)
    • ►  May (10)
    • ►  April (19)
    • ►  March (20)
    • ►  February (22)
    • ►  January (26)
  • ►  2008 (57)
    • ►  December (33)
    • ►  November (24)

Uncommon Planet

  • Beyond Coal Kansas
  • Earthjustice
  • Environment 360
  • Friends of the Earth
  • GPACE
  • Greenpeace
  • Grist
  • Millenium Assessment
  • On Earth
  • Orion
  • Sea Shepherd
  • Sierra Club
  • Treehugger
  • Wilderness Society

Uncommon Reading

  • Alternet
  • American Book Review
  • Aqueous Books
  • Boston Review
  • Cantaraville
  • Chronogram
  • CounterPunch
  • Dissent Magazine
  • Dissident Voice
  • Drudge Retort
  • Elegant Variation
  • Granta
  • In These Times
  • Liberal Oasis
  • Missouri Review
  • Monthly Review
  • Mother Jones
  • NewPages.com
  • OpEdNews
  • Paris Review
  • Poets & Writers
  • Poets.org
  • Prick of the Spindle
  • Rain Taxi
  • Rolling Stone
  • The Wessex Collective
  • TomDispatch
  • Wild River Review

Uncommon Bookstores

  • Just Books
  • Laertes Books
  • Progressive Book Club
  • Prospero's Books
  • Signs of Life
  • The Raven Bookstore
  • Three Arts Bookstore
  • Town Crier Bookstore

Uncommon Listening

  • All Classical WGBH
  • Cool Blue Jazz
  • Folk Alley
  • Instant Bach
  • Jupiter String Quartet
  • KKFI 90.1 FM Kansas City
  • Lunasa
  • Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill
  • Mason Williams
  • Missouri Valley Folklife Society
  • Old Blind Dogs
  • Radio Clasica
  • Solas
  • WGUC
  • WQXR

Blogging on culture, politics, and the environment since 2008

'Great' news!

My new novel, A Great Fullness, is slated for publication next year by indie publisher Aqueous Books. Set in Kansas during the period from the internet bubble of the mid-1990s through the early years of the Iraq War, A Great Fullness is the story of a girl who lives with a secret that even she doesn’t know she possesses – the truth about her mother’s death.








Where the Wind Blew

Where the Wind Blew
When Borders Books went down, it took with it the distributor for Where the Wind Blew. As a result Signed First Editions are now available at a very low price through Laertes Books. To learn more, please click on the image.

What they're saying about Where the Wind Blew

"... a masterful job of evoking memories of the halcyon days of political activism."
--The Baby Boomer Brief

"This blistering, fast-paced tale of a man whose radical past catches up with him ... cross-examines our culture, then and now." --Chronogram

“I had a hard time putting WHERE THE WIND BLEW down.” —Robert Pardun, author of Prairie Radical: A Journey through the Sixties

Scroll down for more commentary and excerpts from WHERE THE WIND BLEW.

'Old books, rare books, good books!'

Lucifer and Mammon, by Joseph Moser

Lucifer and Mammon, by Joseph Moser
A very rare First Edition. Near Fine. Available from Laertes Books.

Laertes Books is now on Facebook!

Click here to find us on Facebook!
Old books, rare books, good books! Laertes Books!

Uncommon News:

  • MarketWatch
    Currencies: Euro gives up gains against dollar - The euro on Monday sees initial gains fade, failing to get a sustained lift from the Group of 20 major economies supporting an enlarged euro-zone aid packa...
    5 minutes ago
  • Al Jazeera English
    Thailand questions more Iranians in bomb plot - Three being questioned in addition to Iranians already being held over plot to attack Israeli diplomats in Bangkok.
    24 minutes ago
  • TreeHugger
    Climate Change Could Make Everest Unclimbable, Says Sherpa - Due to the warming effects of climate change, ascending the world's highest peak may become more difficult yet.
    38 minutes ago
  • Enviro news | UK Guardian
    Fairtrade shouldn't all be down to the consumer - Shopping on its own cannot undo the wrong when a whole system is at fault A Wedgwood sugar bowl from the early 19th century in the Museum of London Dockl...
    53 minutes ago
  • AlterNet.org
    Big Food Must Go: Why We Need to Radically Change the Way We Eat - This is not a problem we can solve by going vegetarian or vegan, or buying organic and fair trade.
    54 minutes ago
  • War Is a Crime
    Santorum Hearing Voices - By Michael Collins *Satire* (Washington, DC) Senator Rick Santorum *knows* something many of us do not. Satan is waging war on the United States. This i...
    1 hour ago
  • HuffingtonPost
    Charlie Capen: Why Won't My Wife Have Sex With Me? - In the beginning, there was sex. And it was good. And there was more sex. And it too was good... Then, my wife got pregnant as the result of this awesome, gr...
    1 hour ago
  • Firedoglake
    Late, Late Night FDL: World Without Love - Peter & Gordon - World Without Love
    1 hour ago
  • Antiwar.com
    WMDs Redux - No, I’m not talking about déjà vu all over again in Iran (like Iraq) or Syria (like Libya), although no one should be shocked when either or both of those ...
    1 hour ago
  • SocialistWorker.org
    Why was Stephon Watts killed? - Police in a Chicago suburb shot and killed an African American autistic teenager whose only "weapon" was a butter knife.
    1 hour ago
  • Politico
    Change erodes 1985 soil pact - The battered Little Big Man of this year's farm bill wars could be the soil itself. [image: Add to Twitter] [image: Add to Facebook] [image: Email this Art...
    2 hours ago
  • Think Progress
    The Biggest Triumph of the 2012 Academy Awards - To my mind, it’s Asghar Farhadi, who won the Best Foreign Language Film award for A Separation, and marked the occasion with by far the classiest, most mea...
    2 hours ago
  • Talking Points Memo
    Lordy Lordy Lordy - Wikileaks tonight released a massive trove of emails from 'Stratfor' and TPM Reader KB has been looking through them ......
    2 hours ago
  • the Literary Saloon
    Writing in ... the Philippines - In the *Philippine Daily Inquirer* Amadís Ma. Guerrero reports on the recent 2012 Taboan writers fest: Is literature alive and well ? Among t...
    3 hours ago
  • Daily Kos
    Open thread for Night Owls: Political films and the Oscars - [image: Open Thread for Night Owls] At *The New Yorker*, Susannah Griffee writes: While many Academy Award-winning movies have political undertones, only o...
    3 hours ago
  • Truthdig
    The Glitch - By Mr. Fish Related Entries - February 26, 2012 This One’s for You - February 26, 2012 Diplomatic Immunity
    4 hours ago
  • Drudge Retort
    Angry Naked Woman Stomps Car - A heavyset, naked woman who had been removed from a San Francisco railway line Wednesday threw off a blanket covering up her nude body, walked onto the hoo...
    5 hours ago
  • CommonDreams.org Headlines
    WikiLeaks Publishes 5 Million 'Shadow CIA' E-Mails - WikiLeaks announced tonight that it is publishing documents it is calling "*The Global Intelligence Files*" which includes over 5 million e-mails from the...
    5 hours ago
  • openDemocracy
    UK women: the loss of an independent collective voice , Annette Lawson - As the annual UN Commission on the Status of Women opens in New York today, women's organisations from the UK find themselves ignored at home and exclude...
    6 hours ago
  • NewPages Blog
    TFR Tribute to Jeanne Leiby (Repost) - The newest issue of The Florida Review features a thoughtful and heartfelt editor's note: "In Memory of Jeanne M. Leiby, 1964-2011" written by friend and col...
    6 hours ago
  • BBC News
    McIlroy loses to Mahan in final - Rory McIlroy misses the chance to become world number one after losing 2&1 to Hunter Mahan in the WGC Match Play final in Arizona.
    8 hours ago
  • onegoodmove
    President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins goes off on tea-bagger... - A wanker whipping up fear. (tip to Pedantsareus)
    16 hours ago
  • TomDispatch
    Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Antiwar Critics Forgotten on Oscar Night - Well in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of “the war to end all wars,” the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives...
    17 hours ago
  • Grist
    Building blocks: What LEGOs can teach us about rebuilding cities - [image: lego-city] By Alex Gilliam In the Lego room at the National Building Room in Washington, D.C., a seasoned designer gets a lesson in creativity fro...
    17 hours ago
  • Grist Magazine
    Building blocks: What LEGOs can teach us about rebuilding cities - [image: lego-city] By Alex Gilliam In the Lego room at the National Building Room in Washington, D.C., a seasoned designer gets a lesson in creativity fro...
    17 hours ago
  • Arts & Letters Daily
    Arts & Letters Daily (26 Feb 2012) - The Hebrew University Talmud department is full of methodical types parsing footnotes on footnotes. What drives them: truth or vanity?... more Rise of t...
    1 day ago
  • The American Prospect
    Romney's Clunker - “This is not exciting and barn-burning,” Mitt Romney admitted as he stood today amid 65,000 empty seats at Detroit’s Ford Field to deliver what was b...
    2 days ago
  • ProPublica
    Banks Colluding with Insurers to Rip Off Homeowners, Lawsuit Alleges - by Cora Currier A class-action lawsuit in Florida that moved forward this week highlights a little-appreciated aspect of the housing market — the cozy r...
    2 days ago
  • It's Getting Hot In Here
    Tar Sands and It’s Discontents - “Sentiment w/o action is the ruin of the soul.” -Ed Abbey Besides the story of the massive campaign to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, do you know about the...
    2 days ago
  • Miller-McCune Online
    How the Military Can Change Personalities, Slightly - Military training seems to permanently make a grunt less agreeable, which both surprises and reassures traditionally minded psychologists. How the Milita...
    2 days ago
  • Yale Environment 360
    Warming Climate Caused ‘Dwarfing’ of Earliest Horses, Study Says - A new study suggests that the earliest known horse species shrank significantly in size over a 135,000-year span as a consequence of a warming climate. Usi...
    2 days ago
  • Democracy Now!
    Supreme Court to Decide Whether U.S. Corporations Can Be Sued for Abuses Overseas - The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday on whether U.S.-based corporations can be sued in U.S. courts for human rights abuses committed ove...
    2 days ago
  • In These Times
    Forgetting the Past, One Military Movie at a Time - When philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," he meant it as an admonition--not as an endorsem...
    2 days ago

Signed copies available through Laertes Books. Click the image.

What they're saying about 'Where the Wind Blew'...

“This blistering, fast-paced tale of a man whose radical past catches up with him…cross-examines our culture, then and now.”
—Nina Shengold, Chronogram

“WHERE THE WIND BLEW is a story of the past and an allegory of the present.... Bob Sommer hears the music and voices of the past and gives you what America has become today.”
—Mason Williams (of “Classical Gas” fame)

“I found WHERE THE WIND BLEW engrossing and heartfelt…. Emotionally taut and historically intriguing, this novel explores the psyche of a man whose past finally catches him. Although set in the past, its themes transcend time.”
—Ron Jacobs, author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground


“I had a hard time putting WHERE THE WIND BLEW down.”
—Robert Pardun, author of Prairie Radical: A Journey through the Sixties


"...WHERE THE WIND BLEW is not intended to be a story about a hero but a parable of regret, and those stories are truest when the protagonists are people like us, ordinary people who are neither excessively virtuous nor intrinsically evil."
—Stephanie Eve Boone, American Book Review

“WHERE THE WIND BLEW…is sure to ignite strong reactions, regardless of political affiliation….The novel is vividly-realized, bringing both past and present to life.”
—Cynthia Reeser, Prick of the Spindle

“This story is so believable and well-told that I felt I had an insider's knowledge of what it would have been like to live through the protests on college campuses during the Vietnam War era.”
—Kristin Johnson, Whistling Shade


"I was 18 when the Vietnam War started, and the author does a wonderful job of creating a sense of time and place that brought back my memories of those days."
- Norm Jensen, onegoodmove

“I wanted to let you know that I am reading WHERE THE WIND BLEW and LOVE it!…Excellent writing! I am recommending it to everyone.”
—email from a manager at Borders

“What a great accomplishment! The emotional range in this book is just great. I felt close and attached to the characters.”
—email from a reader

Two passages from WHERE THE WIND BLEW:

From Chapter 3:

"The idea seemed not only clearer to him last night, but vital, even urgent, and the conversation comes back to him now—how they sat for a long time on a rug beside the coffee table, passing joints and downing beers, while Simon picked the tobacco of filterless cigarettes from his teeth and described his tours in Vietnam—to Peter, to a couple of others nearby, but mostly to Peter—described the sharp, booming explosions of the five-inch guns on the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in ’64, firing hundreds of rounds into the darkness, hitting what Simon never knew, he said, ammo bunkers, VC, children, water buffalo, maybe Americans. What the fuck were we even shooting at? he asked Peter, leaning close, lowering his voice into a sharp whisper, as if Peter might explain it to him, might finally clear this up, and he waited until Peter shrugged helplessly and then continued, There’s no sense to any of it, man. No sense! He described his second tour, also, this time on a swift boat in the Mekong, where he saw a stack of rotting bodies on a buffalo path alongside the river, and what it was like to unleash the fifty-cal into a free-fire zone without a clue if they were hitting the enemy or just terrified villagers who had the bad luck to live where the VC wanted to hide. But Peter, these people—the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong—they just want their country back. They want everyone out—the French, the Americans, even the Communists. They’re nationalists, Peter. Their country’s been overrun by foreigners for decades, for centuries. He squinted, knowing what Peter would say next before he said it, and asked, Did you know that Ho Chi Minh wanted Truman’s help against the French before he went to the Communists? No, Peter said, as expected, trying to follow him, trying to piece together the fragments of unfamiliar history in his narrative, trying to listen as people came and went, as laughter and talk surrounded them, as someone strummed a guitar along with a Beethoven symphony booming through the stereo speakers; as he tried to fit classical music into the kaleidescope that whirled around him, and to connect the water buffalo and the North Vietnamese and Truman, searching for a pattern, an image, a story woven into the fabric of Simon’s talk.”

***
From Chapter 18:

“And she wondered, too, if he—if all those people like him back then—hadn’t done some of the things they did—maybe not…no, not all of them, but some of them—would anything have changed? It was true, she reasoned, that changing things meant rupturing what existed. That’s what was happening to her—right now. They had all been living on this thin, shiny veneer, living comfortable lives, fretting over trifles, burying themselves in the vicarious lives of celebrities, entertaining themselves with the false realities of reality television, but the veneer had cracked, and when they crashed through, nothing was underneath it, and they were still falling. And now she looked back up as she plunged downward and saw that all around her, that’s how others were living, though they didn’t know it yet, and anything could change their lives, just as hers changed. That was how she lived when she was young, too—while a war exploded, while the country nearly came apart. But she knew so little of what was beyond her small world. She’d been oblivious to everything else. Boyfriends, dances, dresses, music—that’s what that time meant to her, while all of this turmoil bubbled beneath it, and she wondered now, if everyone had just gone along like that, oblivious, indifferent, would the war have ever ended, would blacks still drink from separate water fountains, would the FBI spy on you?”

WHERE THE WIND BLEW (a novel), by Bob Sommer

WHERE THE WIND BLEW

WHERE THE WIND BLEW

Ask your favorite bookseller or order here:

  • WHERE THE WIND BLEW at AbeBooks (signed by the author)
  • WHERE THE WIND BLEW at Amazon (signed by the author)
Powered By Blogger
Simple template. Template images by sndrk. Powered by Blogger.