reading tour dates

Upcoming Reading Tour:
August 11: Asheville NC, Malaprops Bookstore
September 23: Baltimore MD, Anarchist book fair; 6:00
September 24: Philadelpia PA, Wooden Shoe Bookstore; 7:00
September 25: NYC, Bluestockings Bookstore
September 26: Brooklyn, Bookthug Nation
September 27: North Hampton, MA, Food For Thought
September 28: may be somewhere in Vermont
September 29-30: Montreal
October 1-2:
October 3: Toronto
October 4: Pittsburgh

New zines to doris distro
Encyclopedia of Doris: stories, essays, interviews
Issues 19-27 of Doris zine plus a bunch of stuff that was printed in other zines and a bunch of new writing! It will be coming out in the beginning of August!

The Papas
this zine by Spoonboy goes with the record of his band The Papas, but I got some zines separately because they are really good and important. It has a really good story/essay about cultural myths - the way masculinity is portraid and taught us; captialism, suicide, queerness and fighting back. also some ways to challenge patriarchy and reprints of really great articles "Masculinity and Homophobia, by Michael Kimmel; I Want a 24 Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape by Andrea Dworkin; and excerpts from The Will to Change by bell hooks

Eleven Months
written by Paul who wrote the Don't be A Dick zine, Eleven Months is a zine about their "experience teaching in the jail in downtown Seattle. It is a mix of experiences, dreams, analysis, rumors, reflections...an attempt to condense a magnificent, traumatic, grueling experience into something to share with others"

Without Words + Without Kneeling: the first six issues

Written by Tom of Rad Dad zine. This zine is a way to explore books about Anarchism from different viewpoints. I really love it. It's fiction - and the story is about an anarchist study group. Each charater is nicely developed and comes from different perspectives - all of which are really relatable. They discuss the books, but mostly the different ideas and viewpoints come out in their lives and realtionships with eachother. Hard to explain but cool. Books discussed include Crimethinc, Anarchism and it's Aspirations by Cindy Milstein, Pacifism as Pathology by Churchill, The Philosophy of Punk and more.

Virgin #1
This zine is about being a virgin, being ok with it, and how the rest of the world does not seem to think it's ok. It's about being queer, NOT asexual, crushes she's had, assumptions people make, and more.

Virgin #2
Contributor issue: stories and articles dealing with disability, asexuality, rape, the marketing of virginity, self-image, etc

When the Crash Meets Something Solid #008: Something Very Ugly

another installment of Gabrielles zine about time she spent in the sex industry in Minneapolis, her herion/drug addiction and recovery.

Preorder The Doris Encyclopedia!

I only have 8 more pages to write for the Doris Encyclopedia, which is Doris 19-27 plus a bunch of new writing, interviews, and articles I wrote for MaximumRockandRpll and other zines! I'm taking pre-orders on a fundraising website called Kickstarter. click here to link
Spread the word!
thanks so much!!!
It's scheduled to be printed by the end of July!!!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/369768719/the-doris-encyclopedia

new edition of doris anthology + do you want to help us on our land?

Oh! My new pressing of my old Anthology is out with a new cover that is so beautiful! If you lost your old copy, or is you've been meaning to get one for a present, maybe you should now! Look! you can order it from me - $13 by mail, cindy crabb pob 29 Athens OH 45701. or the website at dorisdorisdoris.com/zinecat
horray! also, we have a ton of work that we need to do on our land, so if you want to come out and help, let me know. If you are already my friend, call me. If I don't know you yet, we are hoping people who are self motivated and ok at being alone (or who have a friend to bring to keep company), who like camping - because we have this house but we are also very used to spending most of our time alone and so get a little crazy if people are around 24 hours a day. ... so we are looking for people to come for a week, who would want to help with gardening, house fixing, and a million projects. It would probably be like 5 hours of work a day. If you don't feel like you know how to do stuff, we can teach you stuff. send letter of something to me at pob 29 athens oh 45701.
xx
cindy

sister shuffle

Sister Shuffle and doris speaking tour (everything is the band unless it has some weird italic title that sounds like the title to a weird speech thing.

Tuesday 11 - Pittsburgh. zine reading and show with Bad Daughtors , artnoose, some others. 5532 Baywood. 6:00 potluck, 7:00 start

Wed 12 - Baltimore with Abiku and Mian the Monster at 9:00 1729 Maryland Ave

Thurs 13 New Paltz - Breaking Silence: the Radical Necessity of Telling Our Stories I think it's around 7:00 at the Student Union Building in room 100

Friday 14 Brooklyn The Fort. 1414 Lincoln Pl, brooklyn ny

Saturday 15 Boston paper cut zine library. at the democracy center 45 Mt Auburn St in Harvard Square. with superpositive hiphop by Sarah Bean, off kilter rockcombo Frogs! Everywhere!, Up the Creek = lulabyes, + short movies. + maybe I have to talk about zines or something.

Sunday 16 Providence RI with Queening 9:00 115 Empire St at AS200

Monday 17 Boston Self-publishing, feminist zines, and social change or something like that. speech at the Radcliff, Schlesinger library. (That's Harvard!) 1:00 (I think. maybe noon)

Monday 17 Brattleboro VT with Uke of Phillips, corners and another amazing band.

new zine!

I have a new zine out! I know! Already!
ok, not quite yet, but in a couple weeks. It is at the printer right now. If you want to preorder, you can go to the doris website or send a couple dollars and some stamps to pob 29 athens ohio 45701. or tell your local bookstore or record store to order some!

also in the doris news, at the SF zine fair on the 19th at 4:00 I'll be doing a talk and question and answer.
xx
cindy

do you have any questions for me?

the next doris is going to be partially about questions. so if you have any questions for me, leave them here in the comments. so far the questions I have are - what do you want to do most. who do you want to be most.

imagine the impossible

"One must have faith of a kind that our history has made nearly inaccessible."
-Ursula Le Guin

"...a whole bunch of us were talking about how we imagine recreating ourselves and our society, and so many said they just couldn't imagine any other way to live..." - excerpt from letter.

Imagine the impossible.

they want us to believe there is no other way to live, that things have always been this way, that there is no way out and no reason to try, no reason to resist. I rememember learning about Paris, 68, when the students took over the university and the workers had a general strike, and the city was shut down, and people talked about what they would want in a post-revolutionary society. On the walls were slogans. It was a time of great slogans. Imagine the Impossible, Make Your Dreams Reality -- Slogans that are these days used for car commercials. But in those days, my parents days (even though my parents were in office buildings and schools and had no involvement in any of this, aside from that my mom read Anis Nin, and my dad loved a history that said white people weren't the first and smartest people on this earth), in those days the slogans meant that plain Marxism wasn't enough anymore. There was something more that movements for social change were going to have to incorporate.

When I was growing up into politics, there was a whole debate about lifestyle anarchism vs social anarchism. (I can't even remember the titles now. Social?? I don't know.) Whatever we were, we hated lifestyle anarchists. We thought focusing on how you lived was a real waste of time and very self-indulgent. I remember one debate we had about Food Not Bombs when that was just starting, and we decided it was more or less just charity, despite it's pretentions of revolutionaryness. We did not live in collective houses because in the 60's people lived in collectives and it turned into such drama and sucked the life out of real social action and organizing. I lived in a little apartment with my dog. I was very lonely.

But there is a thing that is real. My friend Dave said to me the other day -- I know what I want because I have felt it in moments. -- Moments of communication, moments of protest or parade when we move like one being, times of collective decision making when decisions are made with respect and without fighting, moments of creation when true connection is real and present. Living together outside of nuclear family. Building houses together, feeding eachother, dancing. Times when you can see that another world could exist - this is what I ended up liking about lifestyle - trying to figure out a way to live with integrity, how to live in a way that would feed me and ground me and give me inspiration to keep fighting, keep figuring out how to do more outward struggles for social change.

I have a clear utopian vision. Not clear in the details, but clearly I believe that we could have a world without hierarchy and domination. And for me it becomes embodied in the vision of a world without sexual abuse. For someone else maybe it becomes embodied in a world without the torture of animals, or a world without pesticide use, or a world without schools that turn us into robots. A world without racism. A world where culture can flourish without being turned into commodity. A new world. A world we are told we can't imagine -- but we can. Imagine it. Fight for it.

adventure

Adventure

My friend Courtney was telling me about how her and Lauren took a trip down to South Georgia. Slept in the car, swam: the kind of adventure I like best. And someone said to them, "that's not much of an adventure".

I used to watch the movie Paris Texas when I was 16, over and over and over. It is a very slow movie. Very very slow. And may be partially that is what I liked about it. When my life was so fast and so much information and so much I didn't understand and so much out of control. This movie was like breath. But the part, really, that I waited for, was at the end, and the person telling the story of how their lives had been. He says, "Everything was an adventure. Even just an ordinary trip to the grocery store was such an adventure".

This is what I wanted in life, and what I still want, and what I have. To not grown complacent. To not stop seeing the beauty and wonder in all the small things. To not stop being curious. To never fall out of love. Like when my dog was still alive and I used to take her for 5 mile walks, in the cold winter where the wind bit my skin and she was so happy and we were in love with this, the world, the air, the snow. We would walk to the one pond in the city an lay on the ice and look at the stars. "What do you do for fun", one of my friends asked me. And I told her that story, and she said, "That doesn't sound like much fun".

I want adventure in everything. In the way we let eachother in to our lives, in the daily living in this world. I want adventure that's not self-destructive. That's not always an exciting story. That's not adrenaline filled. I want sleeping in cars and swimming and talking to strangers and looking and feeling and freedom and quiet and someplace new and someplace familiar. Even the ordinary, adventure.

remember your dreams

healing, dreams, becoming human, writing

try and remember your dreams.

If you can't remember your dreams, keep a little notebook under your pillow or by your bed and a little mini flashlight, and write down anything, fragments or feelings, don't try to make sense of anything, just write faster than your brain can go.

Why? there are things inside that are strength giving things, healing things, love yourself things, and sometimes they are working in your sleep. they are creating messages and ways of fixing, and I know for me sometimes all I can remember is the bad dreams, but past that is the good ones. Sometimes even the good is hidden in the bad.

The best part of the dreams for me is when the truelove visits me. Once upon a time I thought the true love was something outside myself. something I could find out in the real world, and maybe there is. but this is a different love, it is part split off from the wholeness of me, and i think a lot of us have that. To survive in this world we have hidden away parts. we are full of self-hate and self-blame and guilt, and there are resources inside ourselves waiting to be recognized, waiting to be let back in.

At night, when I remember, I say, "come visit me dearone." and sometime it does. It takes a little to recognize. It is when I wake up and feel happy and a feeling of wholeness, and I feel back through the images to where that happiness comes from. The truelove comes in different forms. It has come as a highschool boy, troubled. It has come as a part human part cougar. it has come as baby twins. It has come as billiejoe from green day. it has come as a shadow, as a revolutionary fighter. Whatever form it visits in, I try and recognize it. thank it. lay there in the morning re-remembering that feeling of happiness, wholeness, peace.

And rememebering these feelings. letting them in. and in the day when things are rough I try and call them back to me. I give the images names. I call them back to me.

anarchism, feminism, punk, part 2

This is from a blog I was doing for punk planet, and then decided not to do it there any more.

Punk, Anarchism, Feminism, pt.2

One of the things feminism taught me was that the patriarchy was deeply embedded inside my mind and inside my body. from the hollywood fairytales I'd been force fed, the prince in shining armor, the soul mate, the person who would complete me. It taught me about the feeling of incompleteness. It taught me to look at it critically instead of looking to fill it with promises that couldn't come true.
One of the thing Anarchism taught me is that the feeling of incompleteness is part of the neurosis of living in a world that robs us of our humanity by turning us into consumers and vacationers. work time and weekend time. Our feeling of incompleteness was partially due to the attempt to fill our needs with empty products, fill our loneliness with empty fun.
One of the things punk taught me was to scream.
I was a girl who hated girls. I was not one of the mean girls who was mean to girls outloud, but one of the quiet haters who just didn't hang out with girls much. I was one of the girls who got her self worth from men, and more than that, from my desirability.
I had learned from my abuse that if I let someone close to me, they would want that, sex. that my only worth was sexual, mostly. There were the logical parts of me that knew that wasn't true, but when you are sexually abused young, (or ever) the logical parts aren't the one attached to your soul.
I had learned from the media a whole array of woman hating things. Maybe you can look at one media image and laugh at it, but it is the endless repetition, the torture of it seeping in through the edges of your eyes when you're just walking down the sidewalk. The way brainwashing works, repeat, repeat, repeat, until you deny that you've been effected, but you have.
One of the things feminsim taught me was that change does not happen on it's own, and the feminists of the 60's weren't hairy leged, man hating complainers. The Conciousness Raising groups I'd heard about and seen depicted as just a bunch of women sitting around talking shit, were actually mostly groups that really seriously talked about and deconstructed the ways patriarchy (not individual men) had sunk into them, and what they could do to unlearn it and confront it and change the world so it wouldn't happen all over again. They read and talked and related ways patriarchy showed up in their daily lives. They started health groups and newspapers and worked to change the laws that made it legal for a man to rape his wife (like my dad raped his), and they worked to change the laws that made it legal for a man to rape a prostitute. (although both of these things are still a nightmare to fight in court.) The feminsits started rape crisis centers (like the one I went to for free counciling), and sanctuarys for women who were victims of domestic violence. They started publishing houses to publish books by women, and fought to bring women's studies departements to colleges. They worked to uncover forgotten and hidden history of women's acheivement and women's struggles. This is just a surface scratch of things they did.
Another thing I learned was how the ideal of womanhood is embodied.
I started paying attention to how I walked, how I took up space, who I made eyecontact with, who I looked to for approval. I started trying to unlearn. Not that I wanted to walk like a "man," or any of that, but that I wanted to be able to walk into a room and feel like I belonged there. I wanted to be able to walk down a sidewalk and not always be the one stepping out of the way, I wanted to sit on a bus and take up the amount of space I needed, and not always be crossing legs and making small while the guy next to me took up twice his space. It was the feeling of entitlement. I didn't want abusive power, but I did want to be entitled to live in this world fully.
pt. 3 coming soon.

punk, anarchism, feminism part 1

punk, anarchism, feminism.

I have a sort of mythology about how I became a punk. It's not exactly the true story but it goes sort of like this - I didn't become a punk until after punk died -- when Green Day first signed to a major label, and I didn't even know who they were. In Berkeley, where I'd just moved to, there were people sitting on curbsides, taking up public space, making invisible places theirs. They said they weren't punks any more, that punk had betrayed them, that punk was not going to change the world. They were ex-punks I guess, but I don't know. They seemed like punks to me. What I loved about punk was the way we actually lived in the world, walking everywhere and exploring every abandoned building. I liked the hope behind the desperation, and I liked the desperation. I was tired of pretending. Although, honestly, that was something that was hard to unlearn.
What I liked about the music was the songs about real things. Songs about tearing down the capitalist system and building a new world in it's ashes. Songs about the real life of growing up girl in this fucked up society. Songs about killing rapists and songs about loving our friends. What I loved was the drama and the sticking together. The way it encompassed everything and made it possible to forget. I loved the shacks built in forgotten places, and figuring out how to live on almost no money at all, and how life became so much fuller when time was spent living instead of just going along. I still love these things, except not the forgetting.

There were things I was glad that I had before my punkness, like the strong poltical belief that we had to change the world and that there were a million ways that it needed to be done, that ridgid dogma and pure lifestyle weren't the answers. I wanted collectives and alternative schools and alternative health care, small farms and deep thinking, organizing work and cultural work and that if you thought you knew the 100% true answer, that meant it was time to really rethink your assumptions. I was glad I came in to punk with a love of intellectualism and the way theory could push my brain and help me think of things I hadn't had the framework for, and also a hate for the ways intellectualism made some people into pretentious, unliving robots, cut off from the realities of life.

I am glad I came into it with a strong background in feminism, because there was a lot of friends I made who were really reactionary against it, and who refused to see their complicity in perpetuating the values of patriarchy. There was a lot of "we are all just people" and a lot of blindness to the real things that silenced me and so many people I knew. There was a lot of fucked up sexual dynamics, same as with the rest of the world. A lot of unaknowledged sexism and a lot of the attitude that we had to laugh it off or tough it up.
What I loved was the punk girls who looked insane. Who wore blue eyeshadow around their eyes like a raccoon, and prom-dresses and whatever else. Who grew out their mustaches and screamed on stage and also cried in public and organized. Girls doing bike repair for girls classes, and self-defense, and teaching other girls how to play guitar.

This is a little mini introduction into what this stuff has meant to me. This is the kind of things I'll be writing about. Punk and feminism and anarchism, and also about healing and abuse.

If you want, you should check out my dorisdorisdoris.com. there's a speech I gave recently about these things that a lot of people have told me was useful to them and you can read it there. thanks.