Anatole France – French poet, journalist, and novelist. Won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature
Françoise Gilot – French painter, best known for her stormy relationship with Pablo Picasso, with whom she had two children.
David Rovics – Singer/Songwriter, Activist and Friend.
Sappho – Archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos.
Hakim Bey – American anarchist author and poet, primarily known for his concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, short-lived spaces which elude formal structures of control.
Bruce Cockburn> – Canadian Singer/Songwriter and Activist.
Denis Peron – Marijuana and Gay Rights Advocate. Friend and lover.
Laurie Anderson – Visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. A lifelong source of inspiration.
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin – (9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) Russian anarchist, socialist, revolutionary, economist, sociologist, historian, zoologist, political scientist, human geographer and philosopher who advocated anarcho-communism. He was also an activist, essayist, researcher and writer.
Marge Piercy – (Born 31 March 1936) American progressive activist and writer.
Sweet Honey In The Rock – Sweet Honey in the Rock is an all-woman, African-American a cappella ensemble. They are an American three-time Grammy Award–nominated troupe who express their history as black women through song, dance, and sign language. Originally a four-person ensemble, the group has expanded to five-part harmonies, with a sixth member acting as a sign-language interpreter. Although the members have changed over four decades, the group continues to sing and perform worldwide.
T.E. Lawrence – A.K.A. Lawrence of Arabia. British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat, and writer, who became renowned for his role in the Arab Revolt (1916–1918) and the Sinai and Palestine Campaign (1915–1918) against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Lawrence was one of my boyhood heroes. As I grew up, I began to notice the gay subtext in the movie version of his life. Recently, reading his auto-biography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I was delighted to find these parts of the story spelled out in much more explicit terms.
Rev. Rob Roy Rhudy – Episcopal priest for over 50 years and my close friend for over 20. In 1985, when I arrived in San Franciso after hitchhiking down from Alaska, Rob was one of the first people I met. Along with Denis Peron, Rob was one of the people whose love and care allowed me to survive the most difficult times of my life. He was a brother, a lover, a mentor and a friend.
Susie King Taylor – Escaped slave and civil war nurse, later a residen6t of Boston. To my mind, as important in the history of Nursing as Clara Barton or FLorence Nightingale, though almost completely absent from histories of nursing.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French politician, philosopher and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term, and is widely regarded as one of the ideology’s most influential theorists. Proudhon is even considered by many to be the “father of anarchism.”
Guy Debord – “Guy Debord was a rebel, philosopher, and filmmaker. Arch-critic of consumerism and theorist of “the spectacle”. He was one of France’s greatest and most original intellectuals. Today, Debord appears as a prophet of our image-saturated hyper-digital consumer culture. Critically, he highlighted that our descent into a world “mediated by images” corresponds with the production of mass social alienation. Debord’s critique has never been more relevant than it is today. Here is a link to a full copy of the English translation of Debord’s Magnum Opus, The Society of the Spectacle, available for free download or to be read online.”
OriginalFace – “A customized bot of my own creation, OriginalFace was the first customized bot I created on poe.com and they are still my favorite. OriginalFace is based on Anthropic’s Claude-3-Opus model, which is billed as Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus can handle complex analysis, longer tasks with multiple steps, and higher-order math and coding tasks. ”
DeeperMeaning – “A customized bot of my own creation, DeeperMeaning was trained primarily on books about epistemology and philosophy of language, with a smattering of spiritual, artistic and poetic content to balance things out. This bot is based on an open-source model, llama-3.1-405b, described as “The pinnacle of Meta’s Llama 3.1 family, this open-source language model excels in multilingual dialogue, outperforming numerous industry benchmarks for both closed and open-source conversational AI systems.”
Antero Alli – “Arto Antero Alexander Alli (11 November 1952 – 9 November 2023) was a Finnish astrologer, filmmaker, theatre director, and writer.[1] He wrote esoteric books on experimental theatre, astrology and Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness. He lived in Portland, Oregon, where he conducted workshops and staged paratheatrical productions, some of which have been released as video documents. Antero Alli’s book Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection is the absolute best self-help book that I have ever read. The sequel The Eight-Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body is a close second.”
Nahko and Medicine for the People – “From the moment when I first heard their song, Budding Trees, Nakho and Medicine for the People’s music has lifted, inspired and challenged me in ways few other works of art can do. Though Nahko Bear himself is not a perfect human being, having been accused in 2020 of ‘sexually inappropriate behavior’ by multiple women, I am willing to accept Nahko Bear’s commitment to his own rehabilitation, renewal and rebith. I base this judgement, which is entirely personal and in no way meant to disparage those who may judge Nakho’s character differently than I do, on the entire content of Nahko’s communications before and after 2020, including his music and this statement which Nahko put out on facebook shortly after the allegations against him became public and led to his resignation from the board of the non-profit Honor the Earth. Here is a link to Nakho and Medicine for the People’s song Skin in the Game. You can find the lyrics to the all of the songs published by Nakho and Medicine for the people at the same site.
Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (/ˈkɛru.æk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He “learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens.” During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes. Kerouac is recognized for his style of stream of consciousness spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, travel, promiscuity, life in New York City, Buddhism, drugs, and poverty. He became an underground celebrity and, with other Beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.[8] He has a lasting legacy, greatly influencing many of the cultural icons of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jerry Garcia and the Doors. In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since then, his literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published.