Friday, September 30, 2011

Happy Birthday VAWC!

Happy Birthday, Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives! We love you!

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Volunteer at Food For Thought Books!


Volunteering is a fun and easy way to support Food For Thought Books. It helps keep our costs down, frees up time for staff to work on specific tasks, and builds community around the store.

Volunteers also get a sweet discount on everything in the store (bibliophiles, take note!).

Click here for more details!

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Justin Vivian Bond's Tango - A Book Review

A good review of Bond's upcoming memoir: Tango

Problematic coverage of the book aside, I loved Tango. Kate Bornstein said it best when she wrote, “…Tango is like listening to your favorite eccentric cousin or auntie tell you hair-​raising tales…Justin Vivian spins a one-​of-​a-​kind story that you won’t be able to put down.” She nailed it on both accounts: the book feels incredibly conversational, as though it were not a book at all, but a collection of Bond’s famously biting asides between songs at a cabaret. Secondly, I truly could not put the book down. I lied to myself, saying I would just read until I was tired, and then tucked myself into bed some hours later, book complete, in the wee hours of the morning.

Tango is largely the story of Bond’s relationship with v’s childhood lover, who was also v’s greatest tormentor in school. This intersects with the various ways in which the adults in v’s life tried, through various means and with varied success, to regulate v’s clearly emerging queer sexuality and gender. The moments range from the utterly traumatic to the touching to laugh out loud. Justin’s mother forbade v from wearing her frosted pink lipstick to school, v’s pop pop bought v Barbie coloring books without question or issue, and v’s Cub Scout troupe found v the odd boy out who picked Sandy Duncan as the figure in history that v would most like to be.

read more...

Also, thank you, J. Rudy for calling out the NYT's transphobic b.s. - so tiresome and so unwarranted.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Baby's Got Book

You know it's true...



Thanks, Rhymes With Orange & Lily Library! That was a good chuckle :)

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Call out to Local Artists!

A call out to local artists: our right-side window is available to display your work! Click here to submit a proposal to our artists in the window series!

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

David Graeber Interview - Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Excellent interview with anarchist anthropologist David Graeber about his new book Debt: The First 5,000 Years

What’s been happening since Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971 has just been another turn of the wheel – though of course it never happens the same way twice. However, in one sense, I think we’ve been going about things backwards. In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

read more....

Bonus Graeber essay: Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Suprise You! :)

Welcome Back Students!



Welcome back students! Best of luck in this upcoming semester - remember: Food For Thought Books is here for you whether it's finding a book, helping you with a project, or just a comfy couch on a rainy day.

Come by & visit us soon - we've missed you!

Recipes template by Emporium Digital. See more at ourblogtemplates.com.