Thursday 5 March 2015

Revolution For The Hell Of It - Abbie Hoffman


It's World Book Day. I looked at the front page of their site and it's aimed at kids. Kids shouldn't read. They should burn libraries and the few remaining bookshops. They shouldn't be taught to read; that way they'll spend less time talking crap on the social network. They might even make interesting art, though why that should happen is only a stupid fantasy of mine. Instead, they'll be encouraged to read children's stories, from which they'll progress to 'teen fiction' and Harry Potter novels, ripening them for adult lives either not reading, or falling for the next shit in printed form after 50 blah blah. 

I bought this book today. They offered me a tote bag, joking that instead of just grey it should be 50 shades of. Perhaps I should have followed Abbie Hoffman's anarcho-yippie-hippie advice in the name of his later work, Steal This Book, but I didn't because my days of book liberation are long over now I can afford to support shops like Skoob

Anyway, here are a few pages. The drippy 'holy' hippy cliché stuff aside, Hoffman, like Jerry Rubin, at least had a healthy sense of self-effacement and subversive humour about the whole thing. This is the 1970 Pocket Book edition...






No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...