Anarchist Nook Book

Talking with James Generic about his history of the Wooden Shoe Collective.

by Sam Tremble

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Published: Jan 30, 2007

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C all it a subversive twist on the impulse item. Perched on the counter at Wooden Shoe Books — next to stacks of event fliers, a mailing list sign-up sheet and political buttons — is James Generic's Across Three Decades of Anarchism: A Brief History of the Wooden Shoe Collective, an All-Volunteer Anarchist Infoshop (AK Press). It's hand-stapled, photocopied and contains the occasional spelling error: Literature doesn't come much more independent than this. The pamphlet tells Wooden Shoe's history through extensive interviews with longtime staffers, supplemented by insights and context from Generic, himself a veteran staffer of seven years.

City Paper: This was written two years ago — why is it only being released now? Why did you write it in the first place?

James Generic: I wrote it originally as my senior thesis as an American studies student with professor Lisa Rhodes at Temple University. Two other collective members thought it'd make a great pamphlet, so they formatted it into one this summer. It had been available to Wooden Shoe Collective members before that.

CP: Did you get a good grade?

JG: B+, if I remember.

CP: Is this an oral history?

JG: I like oral histories, so that's what I was aiming for. I like to let people talk for themselves, and the original paper had 85 pages of interviews.

CP: Will you expand it as you learn more?

JG: There's a Cajun saying that goes something like, "Those who don't know where they came from don't know where they're going." So the goal is to ultimately have a steady guide for not only us, but other groups of radicals or collectives trying to figure out the best way to effect real change in real people's lives. One problem that political groups or any other groups that operate over years with multiple generations of people is that a lot of times, there's no memory passed down other than small stories. So they end up making the same mistakes over and over again. This is an attempt to know where we come from and to guide us on where we're going exactly.

CP: You document several intra-collective conflicts. Have there been any such incidents with the outside world?

JG: We've had trouble with neo-Nazis, but otherwise not much. Last year when we got robbed, the customer who was present asked us to call the police so she could get her cell phone back, and the Daily News' gossip columnist got a hold of that and made fun of us for it.

(s_tremble@citypaper.net)

 

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