Don’t forget to return your library books in Texas. This year an Austin man was arrested for failing to return a GED study guide that was three years overdue. Fines and arrest warrants are the new way to break even in towns with shrinking budgets. Other states, such as Iowa, Vermont, and Maine, are joining in.
Book ’em, Danno!
Thunder Thighs
Recommended Reading: This important essay from Gayle Branedis at The Rumpus on our cultural obsession with women’s thighs.
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Zone One Excerpt
As stated on his website, you can now read the first section of Colson Whitehead's forthcoming Zone One. (Scribd). The book will release this October, and it was tapped in our "Great Second Half of 2011 Book Preview."
Poetry Wounds
“Ocean Vuong is that rare architect of accommodation, giving the most precarious situations or embarrassing of grievances of our culture a sound environment in which they can thrive. As he kisses and tucks the parents in their beds, he sets out from the wreckage of his past towards a hard-won horizon of blunder and wonderment.” Jeff Nguyen reviews Vuong’s newest poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds.
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The Yeti’s Back
Recommended Reading: Megan Garber on the resurrection of Skymall.
Punner Pens Publication
1995 Pun-making champion of the world (and Clinton speechwriter) John Pollack explores the history and meaning of the pun in his new book, The Pun Also Rises, reviewed here.
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Not the First Ebenezer
Our own Kevin Hartnett has an interesting theory as to how Charles Dickens came up with the idea for A Christmas Carol. At The Boston Globe, he looks at the evidence that Dickens got inspiration from the amateur writings of millworkers in Massachusetts.
The Case for “A World Digital Library”
"All over the country research libraries are canceling subscriptions to academic journals," notes Robert Darnton, "because they are caught between decreasing budgets and increasing costs. The logic of the bottom line is inescapable, but there is a higher logic that deserves consideration—namely, that the public should have access to knowledge produced with public funds."
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I find this a very creepy scenario.
Recipe: a.) Increasingly powerful, well-funded lobbies for the corporate prison industry; b.) “criminalization” of the poor (which you already see in some of the tactics used by debt collectors and their use of warrants; c.) underfunded local and state government entities hungry for cash and collections. Result: a Perfect Storm situation for creating a huge new prison population and/or a way to squeeze money out of the families of these people to pay the costs to get them out of the pokey! Already, there are situations where people are billed for the cost of their jailing (after “failing to show” for court hearings, some of which they were never properly informed of). A neo-Debtor’s Prison system, when the rising cost of their bill keeps them imprisoned.
Even now, the criminal justice system is NOT one you want to get swept up in if you are even middle class, or, God forbid, broke. I REALLY
(broke comment)
I REALLY don’t like the idea of criminalizing this type of misbehavior.
And prisons cost taxpayers a fortune. It’s been famously estimated it would be cheaper to incarcerate prisoners in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. And when poor prisoners can’t pay for their imprisonment they will get locked up again, at everyone’s expense.
Imprisonment should not be used for non-violent crimes except in rare and serious cases.
Hello, it is now April 2014, four months after last comment, but I have been researching the pre-Reformation system of “paid” indulgences in the Catholic Church (something Martin Luther) railed against for a book project.
Apparently, the Catholic bishops would “strong arm” family members of the deceased to pay for indulgences for the “departed loved ones” and regale the terrified families of the torments that the old mother was suffering in Purgatory. Their Purgatory “jail term could, then, of course, could be shortened by their purchase of indulgences.
Wow, I am even more scared now about this article!
Moe Murphy
Nuns In Grammar School Sold Us Penny Candy, Said Each Piece Would Remove One Venial Sin