Pick Your Battle: Your Guide to Urban Foraging, Hollywood Movies, Late Capitalism, and the Communist Alternative (a memoir) - Paperback

by Douglas Lain (Author)

Tells the story of how foraging from neighborhood fruit trees can lead to a radical encounter. Explains psychogeography, which is a way of wandering through urban landscapes and being attracted and repulsed by the built environments you find along the way. Douglas Lain has written a book about urban foraging as a psychogeographic wander. It is a philosophy book, a memoir, and a radical self-help book for people living during an epoch when the self is under siege. This is a book that aims to derail the reader and the author. "Pick Your Battle" was successfully funded through Kickstarter on July 13th, 2010. Using the foraging of fruit trees and blackberry bushes as the jumping off point, this surreal effort towards an event or an act that might change the coordinates of our collective situation shows that, during a time of economic collapse, limitless war, and peak insanity just stepping outside and getting to know the plant life in your neighborhood can constitute a radical break.

Author Biography

Douglas Lain is the author of dozens of short stories and two novels and the voice behind the Diet Soap podcast. His short stories have regularly appeared in nationally distributed literary magazines and journals such as Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Amazing Stories since 1999, and his first book "Last Week's Apocalypse" was a collection of these stories published by Night Shade Books. His most recent short story collection "Fall Into Time" was released in May of 2011 by Eraserhead Press and includes his short story "Noam Chomsky and the Timebox," which originally appeared in the British Science Fiction magazine Interzone. The Diet Soap podcast is dedicated to applying imagination and intellect to what Lain thinks of as "the problem of Late Capitalism" the podcast is in its 2nd year and reaches well over a thousand listeners every week. The podcast has featured conversations with Penelope Rosemont of the Chicago Surrealist group, radical author Michael Parenti, the performance artist Reverend Billy, the radical homemaker Shannon Hayes, and many others.