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!
Wendell Pierce Secures A Book Deal for His Look at Hurricane Katrina
Somewhat overshadowed by David Simon’s recent op-ed on the state of modern America (if not capitalism itself) was the news that Wendell Pierce – featured prominently in both The Wire and Treme – secured a book deal for his meditation on Hurricane Katrina and “the effect it had on his family, his life, his memory, and his hometown.”
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Author Internet 101
“I think the key to social media for authors is remembering this: its main purpose is really to show that you are a real human being who lives in this world.” Year in Reading alums (respectively) Celeste Ng, Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, and Adam M. Grant talk to LitHub about how to be a writer on the internet.
Inherited Disorders
In the Fall 2015 issue of n+1, Adam Ehrlich Sachs explores the idea of inherited disorders through nine short pieces. An excerpt: “He wanted the reader to think to himself: ‘I just read about the Holocaust. Why am I picturing this fern? What is the matter with me?’ Such was the literary effect he was aiming for.”
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Remembering Mankell
Recommended Reading: This Atlantic article on the life of Henning Mankell, author of the Kurt Wallander series. The author said, “When I write, I always try to reflect the reality we live in, a reality that is becoming rougher and more violent. This violence and its impact on people around it is what I try to reflect in Wallander. But reality always surpasses the poem.”
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Hollywood Horror
What if H.P. Lovecraft’s work were set in Hollywood instead of New England? At The Toast, Kevin Sharp writes Lovecraftian gossip columns. “Two very famous couples, both well known for their complicated personal lives and grand professional successes (less known, perhaps, for the horrid dark secrets that throb and scream in their antediluvian Hollywood mansions), met for a fateful dinner.”
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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