-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of B. Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 9:40 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] About that Emma Goldman special on PBS last night...
Did anyone see it?
** Yep. I thought it was pretty well done. What did the Pope say about Gibson's film, "It is as it was." Yeah, what he said (burp). I like Emma Goldman, I find her writings fascinating and I recently read her autobiography, a thick 1000 page tome which fell completely apart by the time I got to page 30. One of the things that struck me, and I don't know if this is her personality or her writing style, is that in this 1000 page work there are maybe 10 pages of self-reflection. Interestingly the Goldman documentary picked up on one of those pages: her concern with violence. After Sasha was imprisoned she came to realise the violence was counter-productive... and that to set oneself to violence, the soul of the artist become martyr, was a terrible event in world history... The other nine pages of insights inluded her relationship with women, her experience of free love, the betrayals of her life... that kind of thing. She must have been dynamite as a speaker... but she was awfully bitter and harsh and anyone that did not conform word and deed to her ideal - she wrote off well-wishers and friends left and right if they didn't have adamant for bones. Still, historiographically, she's invaluable. An example of a leftist critic of the left.
ken