Linkity-link: May 1st, 2008

In today’s episode of LL, we have a pamphlet on the Spanish Civil War about how the NKVD framed the POUM , a post on the so-called ‘Open Source Boob Project’, and a Business Week article on the the personal dimension of offshoring a New York factory. Enjoy!

“Every home a fortress, every street a trench, every neighbourhood a wall of iron and combatants…”

Regular readers (hi, Mom!) may recall my post late last year about my overambitious plans for reading during my winter holidays, which amounted to me taking a pile of books about the Spanish Civil War out of the university library and foolishly assuming I would actually make a dent in them. I didn’t do that well, but I have managed to nearly finish one book, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War by Ronald Fraser. I thought I would write about my thoughts so far.

This book, really, is just fantastic. It’s stuff like this that makes me want to do a Masters degree in History. Fraser has managed to speak to a ridiculously-broad sample of Spaniards active in the Civil War, be they anarchists, communists, socialists, left republicans, monarchists, Basque nationalists or falangists – this achievement is doubly impressive considering that while the book was published in 1979, the vast majority of the interviews were conducted between 1973 and 1975, during the twilight years of Franco’s Spain; Franco actually died six months after the last interview was conducted.

Old habits die hard

I went down to the local university library yesterday, intending to pick up Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War, by Fraser. I was interested in doing some more reading on that era of revolutionary politics, and had a literature review passed on to me by a friend. Of course, I just happened to come across not one, not two, but five other books in this review I was interested in, and couldn’t help myself from picking them up too. So now I need to not only find time to finish reading my current book (Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labour and Liberation by McNally, very good but also very dense and outside my knowledge base), but also read Blood of Spain (585 pages), and find time to read The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain by Broué and Témime (544 pages), The Spanish Tragedy by Carr (only 311 pages!), Vision on Fire by (Emma!) Goldman (327 pages), Spain: 1808-1975 also by Carr (a ridiculous 770 pages), and also find time to re-read Homage to Catalonia by Orwell (at only 211 pages, comparatively paltry).

I’d call myself an overachiever, but honestly, I’ll undoubtedly be returning at least half of these books after getting 2 or 3 chapters in. ADHD in action! The rest? I’ll end up paying late fees on them… Also, expect to see some absolutely scintillating discussions of these books in the coming period.