Thought Soup - Tip of the Spear
Hello (and welcome if you're just joining us).
This week we're starting Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton.
If you haven't bought it yet, please consider placing your order here at Open Books: A Poem Emporium. W4G-tagged books on the Open Poetry bookstore send proceeds to The Sameer Project, one of the only organizations still on the ground in Gaza, and struggling to continue to meet the needs of Palestinians.
If you can't buy from the bookstore, please consider making a donation directly to one of the Sameer Project's campaigns, or consider sharing a fundraiser with friends. If you can't do any of that, consider sharing the reading group with some friends; if some of them can buy the book from Open Books, or even make direct donations to The Sameer Project, then that would help enormously.
what to read (and listen to) this week
This week I'm going to read & listen to these:
- Introduction of Tip of the Spear
- Turbulence podcast episode with Orisanmi Burton from November
format & stuff
If you're new here, it might help to recap how often emails will come and what to expect:
The short version is this: I send emails on Mondays and Saturday Mornings. We have jitsi1 video chats on Saturdays at 12pm ET. There's also a signal group chat (more on that below).
more info on the format
On Monday, I'll email with what we're reading this week from the book, and also point to some other thing you can read (or listen to, or watch) to go along with it. I'll try to make sure the readings are either relevant to that week's readings from the book, or maybe just relevant to our current circumstances in the world.
On Saturday, I'll send an email at about 11AM ET. It'll mostly serve as a reminder that we're going to meet if you'd like to join us, but I'll also include an icebreaker question to potentially get the conversation going when you arrive.
schedule
If it helps, here's my projected pace for the next few weeks. Unfortunately I can't include additional readings and other links without causing the table to overflow and be hard to read.
| Reading | Week of... |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Feb 16 |
| Ch 1: "Sharpening the Spear" | Feb 23 |
| Ch 2: "Black Solidarity Under Siege" | Mar 2 |
| Ch 3: "Attica Is" | Mar 9 |
| Ch 4: "Gender War" | Mar 16 |
| Ch 5: "Hidden War" | Mar 23 |
| Ch 6: "The War on Black Revolutionary Minds" | Mar 30 |
| ... | |
| Theory of Water | Apr 6 |
That's all for now; stay safe this week, and we'll talk Saturday.
PS: if you'd like to suggest any writing or anything for us to read and chat about, I'd love to hear about it. Please reach out if you're interested in sharing something of yours, or just something you've come across.
