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Sustain our Libraries

Submitted by alycia on Tue, 10/06/2009 - 08:49

I just saw this new poster up at justseeds by Mary Tremonte and wanted to share it. You can buy one for $15.

I especially like what Tremonte writes about this piece:

I made this print in grassroots support of the public library system of Pittsburgh. Most of the posters I printed include the Pittsburgh-specific informational text at the end of this entry. I printed a few without the text to sell on Justseeds to recoup my costs and pay my library fines! (seriously). Dig the rubylith-cut children's book illustration-style, hearkening back to my own childhood, when I would walk to the library every day in the Summer!
Public libraries are so crucial for folks in all walks of life, and their services are becoming even more crucial with increased unemployment, cuts to youth programs, access to computers and continuing education...Libraries fulfill all these roles and more; for many disinvested communities, their public library branch is a community center.

Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh lost 10% of their Allegheny Regional Asset District (RAD) funding this year. RAD accounts for $17 million, or 70% of the library's total budget. CLP are facing state budget cuts of 15-55%. CLP still only receives $40,000/year from the city of Pittsburgh, the same amount that Andrew Carnegie stipulated when he created the libraries over 100 years ago!
These severe reductions in funding could mean reduced services, hours, even closing some branches!
What can we do?
- Write letters to the editor of local papers
- Attend city council meetings
- Call RAD and recommend funding restructuring.
- Donate $ to the library (to the development office, earmarked for 'operating')
- Throw a benefit for the library to raise awareness and $!

2-color silkscreen print
15" x 18"
gold ink!
signed edition of 10

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Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric



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Daily Reading Log

May 12, 2013

  • Lots of reading, amidst the cracks of life as it goes, changes. Halfway through E. Biella Coleman's Coding Freedom, started David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and wanted to start, but probably have to wait until after the thesis, bell hooks' Where We Stand: Class Matters.

April 24, 2013

  • A piece in the New Yorker about Noah Baumbach, a person whose work I have a lot of sympathy for somehow, but in this piece he sounds like he wants to be a vampire sucking the energy off of his girlfriend's ideas. Is that a great way to have a relationship, or a terrible way?
  • I've also been reading Living Anarchy on the train, while very tired lately.

April 23, 2013

  • Zines from the Brooklyn Zine Fest: Alex #4 and #5, Deafula #5, and Indulgence #11.

April 22, 2013

  • Jeppesen, Sandra. "Becoming Anarchist: The Function of Anarchist Literature." Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2011.2
  • Imhorst, Christian. "Anarchy and Source Code - What does the Free Software Movement have to do with Anarchism?"

April 19, 2013

  • Going to try to finish In Praise of Copying today. This book has pleasantly surprised me in many ways and I'm greatly enjoying it. Highly recommended if you would like to think more deeply about copying (and its mimetic, ever-present nature) on a philosophical level.
    Many of the books about intellectual property I've looked at recently discuss the absurdities of various IP situations, or examine IP clashes via specific (often outrageous) legal cases. This book, on the other hand, talks more about the practices and traditions of copying, collaging or appropriating through many different perspectives, going back to the work of philosophers who are long dead but also looking for the mimetic in religious practices, theory, art, and even inside the human body. Totally fascinating.
  • Also this article on drone, also by Boon.

April 11, 2013

  • More Moonwalking with Einstein, enjoying the history of the book (as related to memory) section.

April 10, 2013

  • Inching my way through Moonwalking with Einstein, which I've only read over BC lunches in the office.
  • Insomnia had me reading Fosterhood in NYC

April 9, 2013

  • About half of In Praise of Copying by Boon, which I am enjoying.

April 8, 2013

  • Read the introduction to Common as Air by Hyde.
  • Last week watched the documentary, Kind Hearted Woman. Among many powerful scenes, was struck by those where Robin took family to go walking through the U of M, and how looking at the university and thinking about what it offered was a powerful activity for them.

April 1, 2013

  • While fighting some kind of bug finished Please Kill Me and ripping through Cometbus Omnibus and Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change

March 23, 2013

  • Been reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Not sure if it will help the thesis, but it's a good pick up/put down at random book.
  • Also still moving very slowly through Moonwalking with Einstein, my official over-lunch-at-work book of the moment.

March 13, 2013

  • Still finishing up Getting Things Done
  • Thesis reading: Living Anarchy by Jeff Shantz
  • Democracy Now! and WBAI, who could sincerely use your help.

March 9, 2013

  • Been reading Getting Things Done and trying to get things done.

March 6, 2013

  • Broke open Getting Things Done on the train. Still in the intro parts where there's talk about overwhelming obligations and the ever-increasing nature of the amount of things that are related to work these days. Tell me about it.

March 5, 2013

  • I started See Now Then because I saw that Jamaica Kincaid was going to be doing a reading that I could actually attend. I went tonight and she was fantastic. I didn't have a question afterward, because what I really wanted to say was that reading A Small Place and the surrounding discussion in high school was huge working class awakening and a moment I still think about. And that's not really a question.
    Here's one of many great portions of See Now Then:
    "Mrs. Sweet was a knitter and mender of socks, and she did that because while doing so she could delineate and dissect and then examine the world as she knew it, as she understood it, as she imagined it, as it came to her through her everyday existence."(38)
  • This feels like a p.s., but I'm also trying (and failing) to read Getting Things Done. Ha.