I do a lot: President of the Speak Easy Gavel Club; head of the prison media center (aka XSTREAM); host of Real Talk, a televised forum about issues affecting imprisoned people; showrunner for several regular TV series; producer of a daily news broadcast; events coordinator for monthly speaking engagements, graduation ceremonies, and concerts; liaison for the ERDCC book club; and more.
10 April, 2024
Thriving
Day to day, I fill several roles that demand a high level of performance brought to life's little stage. There's showmanship in what I do, but I'm really using the word "performance" here to mean "engagement" — attentive dedication to a task.
I started this post to kind of talk through the awe that I sometimes feel at how busy I am. Sometimes I ask myself if I'm a workaholic. As long as I can continue to answer "no" to that question, I figure I'm good. It's just that I get to fulfill so many useful purposes through my job, to be creative, to exercise some agency during my life of confinement, and to make money on top of it all. May I be forgiven if I like these things too much.
21 March, 2024
Four Books I Read This Winter
Without the book club that I joined last year, this and the previous post about my reading habits would probably be shorter. We used to meet biweekly. Since December, to accommodate the professor's teaching schedule, our meetings went monthly. I read at the same pace, but now I eagerly anticipate the second Wednesday of the month.
Our club's selection this go-round was actually one that I suggested. I'd wanted for several years to read Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's novel about the identity and status of a black man in a society that only sees in him what they find personally or ideologically expedient. The other members of the club assented, and Saint Louis University bought enough copies of the book to supply our needs and then some.
This Is Not a Novel starts off with the line, "Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing." There's nothing quite like ennui to fuel a good book, but Markson doesn't give two shits about narrative. He writes it all ("with no intimation of story anywhere") from notes on index cards collected and meticulously assembled by the character he names Writer. This was clearly Markson's method, also. And Vanishing Point does the same thing all over again. The smell of metafiction is strong on these books. There's also a lot about death. Assuming that Markson did good research and isn't trying to dupe anyone, we readers learn from him that Darwin wrote of being "nauseated" by poetry, that Italo Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage, that Mitsubishi manufactured the torpedoes used in the Pearl Harbor attack, that Abraham Lincoln never saw Europe, and a thousand other seemingly random facts, quotes, and observations that comprise these two weird little books. I've got another one still waiting for me, Markson's The Last Novel, the final work in a triptych he completed before his 2003 death.
13 March, 2024
The Great Spork Shortage of 2024
Call them disgusting, call them malnourishing, or call them gross, but prison meals, regardless of the facility serving them, have been consistently eaten at the same times of day for as long as the carceral system has existed. Routine is the foundation on which prisons traditionally operate; however, time changes all things, and even the most fervently held tradition is no exception.
There used to be a time when a prison meal being postponed for anything less than a full-on security breach was unimaginable. The phrase "like clockwork" applied very well. And now? It can be argued that there's no good time to come to prison, but this is an especially bad time for it — at least in Missouri, and particularly at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center, where it seems that everything is in a perpetual state of falling apart. This includes the dining experience.
The odds of not getting a spork with any given tray are now close to fifty-fifty. I should know better than to come unequipped, but stubborn expectations keep winning out. The DOC's new fiscal quarter starts in April; maybe they'll invest in a remedy to this issue then.
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