The Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair runs Saturday and Sunday, March 13-14, at the San Francisco County Fair Building, Golden Gate Park.

My talk will be Sunday, March 14th, at 1pm in the Auditorium.

The comment section, following the essay, is crowded with attacks focusing on my employment-status, gender, reading habits, and my alma mater — which is, you know, pretty much what one expects.

The irony here is that disarming the police is actually my attempt at a moderate compromise position. As I’ve made clear elsewhere (for example, in Our Enemies in Blue), I’d rather just not have cops at all.

Update: The moderator seems to be removing most of the ad hominem attacks. The conversation has shifted, instead, toward naked racism. (I must say, I hardly consider it an improvement.)

One commenter, “Gargleblaster,” is working hard to prove (as he puts it) “More black people equals more murders.” Adding to the absurdity, he seems to believe that this generalization, on its own, justifies Officer Ron Frashour’s shooting of Aaron Campbell. But not only was Campbell unarmed, and trying to surrender — he wasn’t even a suspect. The police were there to check on him because his family worried he might be suicidal.

It’s revealing to see who the Police Bureau’s defenders are and the kind of arguments they make: When logic fails, they appeal to simple prejudice.

Last year, shortly after Ariel Schrag released the fourth volume of her comics memoir, Likewise, I wrote a review covering the entire series. The piece was intended for The Comics Journal, but it got put off repeatedly and eventually the editors decided it had just been too long since the book had come out.

Lucky for me, the folks at Verbicide were less concerned with up-to-the-minute newness. They ran the review, titled “The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag” on January 29.

Ironically, not quite a month later, one of The Comics Journal’s affiliated blogs, The Hooded Utilitarian, is hosting a roundtable discussion on the last volume of the set, Likewise.

To start things off right, Noah Berlatsky wrote a survey essay covering the reviews of Likewise. And in it he pretty much accuses me of being a condescending sexist jerk.

Ng Suat Tong comes to my defense, and Berlatsky calls him a condescending sexist jerk, too — but now at least I have company.

I’m not in the habit of responding to reviews (especially not reviews of reviews). But I do want to state my position clearly in case it has been misunderstood.

Noah wrote: “In short, Williams recognizes that Schrag is working in a modernist idiom, where form follows function. He finds this alienating. He recognizes that the alienation is a deliberate artistic decision. And he responds by…sneering at Schrag for successfully alienating him when she should be writing entertaining, unambitious anecdotes, since that is what high-school girls do best.”

Now, it’s not that I object to highbrow modernism when it succeeds. But I do object to it when it fails. (Pointing out that Schrag intended her book to feel sloppy and dull — or, as Berlatsky puts it, “alienating” — is hardly a defense.) Given how badly I think Likewise failed, I wished aloud that Schrag had stuck with the approach that worked well in her previous books. That’s not because it’s “what high-school girls do best” — but because it’s what Ariel Schrag does best.

I don’t think I suggested that teenaged girls are incapable of producing substantive work. And if someone can convince me that I did, I promise to go back and re-read both Frankenstein and The Outsiders to remind myself that they can.

MEANWHILE:

I wrote a two-part essay, “Border Horror,” in which I parse the economic and political subtext of a zombie comic, Infestacion: The Mythology, and a vampire comic, 30 Days of Night: Juarez. Both happen to be set at the US/Mexican border.

And I’ve offered my gloss of Alan Moore’s anarcho-porno manifesto, 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom.

You can read these, and the rest of my work for the new online Comics Journal at:
http://www.tcj.com/author/kristian-williams

Of course it’s flattering that someone admires the piece enough to run it again. But more importantly, reprints present a good chance for the piece to find a new audience, completely apart from the readers of the first release. And it’s nice that an article that took me dozens of hours of concentrated effort gets to live on beyond the magazine’s brief moment on the news stand.

Lately, I’ve had several pieces resurrected in this way:

The Portland Alliance ran my polemic against police unions, “No Solidarity with Police Union,” which originally appeared in the Portland Observer. It’s in the current Alliance, but you can also see it here: http://portlandobserver.com/?p=491

The current issue of the American Gun Culture Report includes the essay Peter Little and I wrote about gun control and race for In These Times:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3857/talking_about_guns_fighting_about_race/

In its November/December issue, the Earth First Journal reprinted my essay, “The Green Scare, the State’s Priorities, and Day-to-Day Repression.” I originally delivered it as a lecture in May of last year. I then converted the lecture into an essay for the Eat the State website:
http://eatthestate.org/13-22/GreenScareStates.htm

And I recently came across a pirated pamphlet edition of my Monthly Review essay, “The Demand for Order and the Birth of Modern Policing.”
(http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/willmodpol.html)

The pamphlet was free, so I can’t complain too vociferously. I do wish people would ask me first, though. It’s just polite.

They concern Joe the Barbarian #1, BPRD: The Black Goddess, and the Bill Watterson biography, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes.

You can see all three, and the rest of my tcj.com work at http://www.tcj.com/author/kristian-williams

KBOO’s Bill Resnick and I had a two-part talk, December 28 and Janurary 4. The first addressed the causes of police violence and the second considered solutions. You can find those discussions here:
http://kboo.fm/node/18453
and http://kboo.fm/node/18536

On December 27, I discussed similar subjects with Barry Seidman of “Equal Time For Free Thought.” That talk is archived at:
http://archive.wbai.org/allshows.php

And on December 20, I had a longer and more raucous interview with the guys from the Bottom Up Radio Network:
http://radio4all.net/index.php/program/38309
(There were some technical problems with this recording, so the archive likely includes some silent spots.)

I’ve made the argument before: Police are part of the management apparatus of capitalism. Therefore, they are not workers like other workers, and their “unions” serve interests that are diametrically opposed to those of the working class. (I develop on this idea at some length in Our Enemies in Blue: Chapter 6, “Police Autonomy and Blue Power.”)

The occasion for the Observer piece was the Portland Police Association’s defense of one of the most violent cops in the city, right after he appeared on video firing a less-lethal shotgun at a twelve-year-old girl.

You can read the piece here:
http://portlandobserver.com/?p=491

Part One: A War of Memory and Imagination
http://www.tcj.com/?p=1582

Part Two: Art and Propaganda
http://www.tcj.com/?p=1656

Part Three: Defeated Idealists, Undefeated Idealism
http://www.tcj.com/?p=1741

Part Four: “Perhaps we won.”
http://www.tcj.com/?p=1745

In the course of the review I discuss comics about the war, including No Pasaran!, The Black Order Brigade, and select issues of Wolverine. But I also discuss the use of propaganda posters, Robert Capa’s photographs, novels like The Fallen Sparrow and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the movies Casablanca and Pan’s Labyrinth — plus, of course Picasso’s Guernica and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

Of all the things I’ve written about comics, I think that this is my best work.

Meanwhile, I’ve also written a short review of the Comics Book Legal Defense Fund’s Liberty Comics.

You can see that at:
http://www.verbicidemagazine.com/2009/12/18/liberty-comics-ed-by-scott-dunbier/

It’s only been two weeks since the debut of the new online version of the Journal, and already I have three articles there.

Two are short reviews — one of The Simpsons’ Tree House of Horror #15 (the comic, not the tv show); the other of Shaun Tan’s illustrated short story collection, Tales from Outer Suburbia.

More importantly, though, there is also the first installment of a four-part essay on “The Spanish Civil War, Cartooning, and the Cultural Imagination.” (Truth to tell, I’m particularly proud of this piece.)

You can find all my work for the new online Journal archived at:
http://www.tcj.com/?author=15

The first is a long essay about Oscar Wilde and prison, describing his experiences in prison, his attitudes about crime and punishment, and his political efforts after his release.

The essay is titled “A Criminal with a Noble Face”: Oscar Wilde’s Encounters with the Victorian Gaol.

I wrote it with support from the Institute for Anarchist Studies, and you can see it at their website: http://www.anarchiststudies.org/node/335

The other piece is a review of Judith Butler’s latest book, Frames of War.

It’s in the December issue of In These Times, and on the web at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5197/good_grief