This Is the End

In every beginning sleeps the promise of an ending. Works of ancient philosophy as much as contemporary breakup songs address the inevitability of things coming to an end. The Pariah's Syntax started eighteen years ago. Although I wasn't thinking at the time about how or when I'd stop blogging, this wrap-up was bound to come.

I'm minutes away from typing the concluding sentence of this final Pariah's Syntax post. Come 2026, this blog will be an archive. You'll need to follow my Substack if you want to keep reading.

I wonder how many hours I've spent blogging. It all started when a friend offered to post on MySpace some stuff I'd written. Three short personal essays went up on that platform before officials declared social media off-limits for prisoners. I briefly vanished from the public eye, then my supporters got clarification: the DOC gave written authorization to post my writing online, provided I leave out my address and don't try to "solicit pen pals."

Perfectly acceptable. The goal was never two-way communication. That MySpace page existed so I could share perspectives and thoughts from my prison cell. Way back in 2008, that concept felt revolutionary, even a little bit transgressive. Today, websites like Prison Journalism Project, the American Prison Writing Archive, and the Marshall Project showcase the writing of incarcerated people everywhere. Sharing this type of work no longer feels edgy—but it's no less important.

Regardless of how routine authoring this blog has come to feel, eighteen years of doing anything is a long time. I've changed along the way. Forever an unrepentant weirdo, I nevertheless believe that touting my pariah status smells too much like victimhood. I'm an outcast accurate in terms of my legal status, but I've said for years that I am not my case. I'm ready to emerge from this restrictive pariah-cocoon, fully fledged, and fly.

Call it a pivot, a rebranding, a transition, whatever you prefer. The Pariah's Syntax, after this, will be no more. Look for a new beginning on a different platform, with content delivered in a more direct way, along with a few cool surprises.

Go to my Substack now and click "Follow" to be sure you don't miss my first post on New Year's Eve. I'm excited to see you there!

Five Books I Read This Fall

Pagan Virtues: Poems is the 2020 collection by Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn, as well as the first book of poetry I've read in a while. It opens with an older poem, "A Postmortem Guide (1)," containing these resonant lines: I learned to live without hope / as well as I could, almost happily, / in the despoiled and radiant now."

Who alive today doesn't understand what Dunn's scratching at here? (Or, to paraphrase another of his poems, published elsewhere, who isn't one, once?) What I like most about Dunn's work is its quality of everydayness. It's the work of a poet who's most interested in getting by. If poetry is an act of bearing witness, then Dunn succeed in what seems to be the most unobtrusive way possible, with quiet observations on moral positions, political alignments, our motivations to work, and other seeming mundanities. This isn't to say that he's dull or wishy-washy. Rather, Dunn at his best gives voice to our frequently inarticulate confusion and frustration with our "despoiled and radiant now."

That phrase expresses a very Buddhist sentiment, recognizing the beauty in what Zen master John Daido Loori called "the whole catastrophe"—i.e., life, the universe, and everything. Daido Roshi isn't featured in the Lion's Roar publication Deep Dive into Zen, but Norman Fischer, Guo Gu, Joan Sutherland, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Josh Bartok, Shinshu Roberts, Stephen Batchelor, and Judy Roitman are. Their writings on Zen Buddhism encompass the history, practices, and quirks of this 1,500-year-old lineage, and make this free e-book an engaging read for the practitioner or the curious reader alike.

The poet and writer Kapka Kassabova wrote three other titles about her travels throughout eastern Europe's Balkan region before Anima: A Wild Pastoral. I didn't read them. For that matter, I'd never heard of her before encountering a New York Review of Books piece about Anima, the last title in her so-called Balkans quartet about the hardscrabble livelihoods of rural people and the animals they live with in southeastern Europe. I'm not ordinarily one to seek out what one might call "adventure writing," but the review intrigued me. Anima seemed like something greater.

The book opens with Kassabova seemingly in search of some je ne sais quoi, hoping to inject more meaning into her existence. She anticipates fulfilling this quest by taking up with nomadic sheepherders in a high village "long, scattered, and empty," called Orelek. (Because, you know, she was in the neighborhood anyway.) Her description of the forbidding, mountain road to town—"hostile, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it to bar entrance—reads like a passage from a Gothic novel. It's a potent start. Kassabova writes a beautiful reverie, and Anima is replete with examples of that talent.

One thing that becomes clear from the start is that she's an incurably restless sort, peripatetic and prone to a poet's romanticization of hard living. This isn't to say that she seems to fetishize the dark-skinned shepherd, Sásho, with his sad history as a feral child, his "surprisingly good smoker's teeth," and his drunken bouts of grownup depression. The two of them share '80s comedies on a smartphone screen in a pasture and fall almost inevitably in love. It does sometimes feel like a fetish, though. More than once, I shook free of her captivating spell to consider how much of the book felt like an account, however beautiful, of the author's slumming?

The reader just has to remember that she's the medium through which this account reaches us, not the story itself. Anima is about humankind's relationship with nature and the poetry of living in balance. The mesmeric love that Kassabova has for the concept of equilibrium shows where her heart truly is, not with the ruggedly handsome Sásho but with the earth itself, with its incomprehensibly complex interconnectedness, with the often amazing simplicity of the lives led in harmony with it.

Early in his life, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh made interdependence a major focus of his teaching. He just called it by a different name. Interbeing: The 14 Mindfulness Trainings of Engaged Buddhism is his book outlining the tenets of the Order of Interbeing, which he founded after the Vietnam War, to strive for social justice in his homeland and beyond.

What he called "mindfulness trainings" were teachings compiled from multiple traditional sources in his effort to renew Buddhism for a new age. These fourteen precepts represent an expansion of the five vows that Buddhist laypeople sometimes take—to refrain from killing, from taking what isn't given, from speaking what isn't true and good, from ingesting intoxicants, and from committing sexual misconduct. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings incorporate not only precepts followed by Buddhist monks and nuns, but also the traditional Bodhisattva precepts undertaken by practitioners all over the world who want to transform suffering and injustice into peace and equity.

A Proxy Loss

I spent months watching Rodney Carr's case, before a judge this week shot down his claim of actual innocence. The decision came as a blow for Rodney and his legal team, of course, but even I, from my slight remove as Rodney's former coworker and close acquaintance, experienced the ruling as a gut punch.

Rodney was convicted of capital murder in connection with the death of a guard during a 1983 prison riot, but the consensus among others who were confined to Moberly Correctional Center at the time was that Rodney wasn't involved. He was in for stealing a car. He ran with a bad crowd, yes, but he was no killer. Guys he associated with did the deed while Rodney himself was reportedly elsewhere. This didn't stop officials from gathering false statements (which they later recanted) to engineer all the convictions they could and ensure that the unspoken message was widely received: This is what happens when one of you fucks with one of us.

Other than sharing similar charges and sentences, my case is almost nothing like Rodney's. I do believe that we're both innocent of the crimes we were convicted of. And for that reason, it's only been natural to talk with Rodney about our respective progress on the rough and winding road to justice. Who else could understand being wrongfully convicted, save someone who's living it?

Rodney has a good team of lawyers. (We even share one in common.) They've worked on his case for years. Monday's ruling came as a heavy blow for them as well. All those sleepless nights and early mornings spent reading, traveling, investigating, writing—all to end in a ruling seemingly cut and pasted from what the attorney general filed. I can't know how that feels.

What I do know is, on the verge of filing my own habeas corpus petition, arguing the minutiae of claims that the state withheld evidence, suborned perjury, and so much more, I am profoundly invested. I fear that, if Rodney couldn't win back his freedom even with newly discovered evidence, witness recantations, and proof of prosecutors' Brady violations, what might my own odds be? Do I have a chance, or is all this pining and striving for freedom a futile endeavor?

It's a dark thought. And it's a thought that, I remind myself, is ultimately meaningless. I am not Rodney Carr. His case is not my case. Rosy ideals of precedent notwithstanding, each decision made by the courts exists in a vacuum defined by particularities and unique circumstance. I have seen all-but-identical cases decided in vastly different ways, depending on (one may assume) whether or not a judge ate lunch before reaching their decision.

Justice truly is blind. She often can't see the facts when they're held right up to her face. But good reasons for hope still exist.

I have a team of lawyers working dedicatedly for my release from this unjust confinement. Nonprofit organizations have paid for experts to review evidence and examine new issues. Evidence that proves my innocence is mounting, and the legal mechanisms we can use to establish the truth are relatively clear. What happened in Rodney's case has no bearing on mine. I need to remember that.

2nd Opportunity at ERDCC

While serving a twelve-year federal prison sentence for financial crimes, Chicago native Augie Ghilarducci devised and taught a reentry program for his fellow inmates. His program became mandatory in the feds and is now taught in prisons and jails across the United States. Today, 2nd Opp (aka the 2nd Opportunity Program) seems to be his life. Augie travels around the country, functioning as an ambassador for the brand, which not only educates the incarcerated but provides support once they're out, in the form of personal mentorship and referral to much-needed reentry resources.

At Augie's in-person introduction to 2nd Opp a couple of summers ago, the topic excited his audience of ERDCC residents. That eagerness showed in the Q-and-A session that followed—as did their skepticism. When would classes start? Who was allowed to enroll? How could he assure them that classes would actually be held?

"They paid for the program," Augie replied, looking almost confused by the question. "I don't know why they wouldn't use it."

His experience in the feds must've been very different from what prisoners in this state contend with. The audience's doubt was justified. Like so many government entities, the Missouri Department of Corrections is infamous for reneging on promises. Foremost on my mind at the time was the DOC director's plan to reward prisoners' acts of exceptionally good behavior. That plan never took effect. Other people who saw Augie's presentation thought of the many features our Android tablets were supposed to have but didn't, including a means of communicating with medical staff and case managers, an interface for ordering commissary, and other useful apps. I don't have enough space here to list all the vows broken by the DOC.

Another matter is ERDCC's scarcity of structured self-improvement activities. To anyone hungry for a better life, 2nd Opp had obvious appeal: a twenty- to twenty-five-hour course that covers mental health, career exploration, financial literacy, professional development, and higher education—all to prepare students for the door. Despite its life-changing potential, the program seemed doomed to be just another carrot left dangling before our eyes.

And so it was. Two years passed without a peep about it from the prison administration. Even in a place like this, where aborted dreams are the stock in trade and the population clings to vain hopes, residents eventually forgot all about 2nd Opp. Well, most of us did.

A few weeks after I started my job in the prison's Reentry Center, I broached the subject with my boss. He expressed vague recognition of the program's name but couldn't say for sure. He furrowed his brow in thought, then grabbed his keys, abandoned his desk, and said, "Come with me."

We unearthed the 2nd Opp materials—five course DVDs, a facilitator's manual, and 500 student workbooks—from the back of a dusty storage closet. He flipped through a workbook. "This looks interesting," he said.

I pointed to Augie's photo on the back of one of the DVD cases. "Here's the guy who created the program. People got excited when he spoke about it."

"All this was locked in here before we remodeled the building! It looks like solid information. Why the hell haven't we been using it?"

That was my question all along. It took two months for the inquiry to travel up the chain of command, but bigwigs in Jefferson City eventually answered. They gave us an immediate green light to begin 2nd Opp classes here at ERDCC. My boss not only offered me the privilege of facilitating them, I even got my choice of partner to teach alongside.

I immediately chose Wade, a friendly, professional guy I brought onboard at XSTREAM last year, when I was still the team lead. I couldn't forget how well Wade and I worked together, nor how sincerely committed he is to helping people.

We had a WebX training the following week with Augie himself, certifying us to teach the class. He seemed as committed to the cause as when I first met him in the visiting room during his introductory presentation. The Path Forward, his video podcast, is available through our tablets, and its biweekly episodes put that commitment on display as he interviews people who've reentered society and found success. All around, Augie strikes me as being a nice guy. He even sent us T-shirts.

Our inaugural class started in October. We've got twelve students, all eager to learn, all highly engaged with our classroom discussions. As we move through the curriculum, Wade and I expect to touch base with Augie via WebX, as often as the Reentry Center staff can conveniently schedule meetings. Wade and I are eager to see where teaching takes us. More importantly, though, we might get to see our students lead better prepared, more hopeful lives.

There's More to Reentry Than Toilet Paper

Some people just don't recognize a good thing when it's presented to them. Case in point: this week's uninvited guest at the ERDCC Reentry Center.

Slouchy and bald, with thick glasses and a long, gray goatee, a little pear-shaped man trundled into the Reentry Center on Tuesday and asked to use the restroom. It was a warm, sunny day in Bonne Terre, and most of his housing unit was outside, enjoying its daily recreation period. The guard at the Reentry Center's front desk said he could enter as long as he signed in.

Why didn't the man just use the toilet at his house? It would've saved him from walking at least twice as far as he did. Unfortunately, the guard didn't think to ask. The man scribbled his name on the sign-in sheet, did what he wanted to do, then returned to his recreational activities on the yard.

That afternoon, without being released by the staff running his house, our visitor inexplicably returned. He once again signed in, once again went into the restroom, and once again left without apparent incident. This time, the guard reported the event to my boss.

Such behavior would probably seem odd no matter where we were, but ERDCC is a place where strangeness thrives, settles in, raises kids, sends them off to college, celebrates their astonishing success, then retires and opens up a snazzy, circus-themed Airbnb. I'm saying the weirdness here manages to operate at a particularly advanced level, while simultaneously being kind of vanilla (which is weird in it's own way, but that's beside the point).

Still, my boss is a former captain with twenty-one years' experience in corrections. He understands the difference between weird and weird. These restroom goings-on had captured his notice. Reentry is his domain, and he will abide no fuckery.

He checked the restroom. Every roll of toilet paper was gone. We had ourselves a TP thief.

The Reentry Center's Wednesday activities include a 2nd Opp class, the Global Leadership Academy meeting, and Anger Management. That morning's bathroom visitor wasn't enrolled in any class, presentation, or program, but he nevertheless finagled a way out of his housing unit and showed up in our building, asking to use the restroom for a third time in two days.

The moment the man signed in, my boss abandoned the spreadsheet he was working on, sprang from his desk, and beelined for the suspect. It wasn't much of a conflict. The man was caught red-handed and quickly surrendered the stack of paper towels and two flattened rolls of toilet paper he'd stuffed in his socks.

"I was gonna let it go," my boss told him. "but you got greedy. I mean, hell, you already got me for three rolls this morning!"

The man smiled and corrected him. "Four."

"Get the hell out of here," my boss laughed. "If you come back in here, I'll write you up for being out of bounds."

The guy was lucky to not get a conduct violation and a bill for the cost of what he stole. A roll of toilet paper costs 95¢ at the canteen. If he's stealing it, he probably couldn't afford the wholesale price the state would charge him for it. It's a little sad—but also ridiculous.

Six Books I Read This Summer

Short stories! Back in late June I ran across a collection of them by Kelly Link and was struck full in the face with a reminder of my love for the genre. Link's collection Stranger Things Happen is reportedly what Wikipedia contributors label slipstream fiction. I prefer the label "speculative fiction," which might be imprecise but at least isn't as outright douchey as "slipstream." Tomato, tomahto.

Link writes surreal little fairy tales—stories of the afterlife, pretty blonde space invaders, little girls with the power to disappear, spectral dogs, and much else. Oh, but now I'm making her writing sound less uniquely fantastical than it is. Some of it reads like a fever dream. Jonathan Lethem blurbed this book with great enthusiasm. Link clearly has a wonderful imagination and a gift for plainspoken perversion, traits that made Stranger Things Happen a pleasant summer read for this indoor-only weirdo.

I followed her contemporary takes on the age-old form with what I trusted would be a genuine classic of Victorian horror, The King in Yellow, by Robert William Chambers. It features ten stories that I was told all concerned madness and woe. The description says that the stories are linked by a fictional play entitled (what else?) The King in Yellow. I was drawn to this book as much for its purported creepiness as for its renown. Horror icon H.P. Lovecraft said it "really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear." Others obviously agree; The King in Yellow has been referenced in books, on TV, and in songs, videogames, and movies for 130 years.

It does start strongly, with stories of horror, dread, and overall unease, but suddenly lurches, around the halfway point, into four tedious, unrelated tales of French romance. I kept waiting for a connective thread to reveal itself. Neither the fictional play within the novel nor even the color yellow receives additional mention after "The Street of Four Winds." All of this makes me want to ask, "What the hell happened, Chambers?"

Such a promising start. Alas! The King in Yellow: two stars do not recommend.

My introduction to the humorist David Sedaris came from NPR's This American Life. Afterward, I was happy to find his occasional contributions to The New Yorker, after I took a subscription to the magazine. His very funny collection Me Talk Pretty One Day had come out a few years before that, but I didn't read it until this summer. It's pure early Sedaris. We might even go so far as to call it his Temple of Aphaia (a stately marvel of Greece's Early Classical period), except, you know, it's a book not a building, and makes repeated references to taxidermy and methamphetamine use. Hilarious!

No pun intended, but I found Sitting Inside: Buddhist Practice in America's Prisons, by Kobai Scott Whitney, to be an enlightening read. Whitney served a six-month sentence for drug charges, where his previously halfhearted Zen practice blossomed. He's now a spiritual leader in the Tien An tradition. In its array of related topics, his book breaks down the ways that Buddhism works (and sometimes doesn't) in prison's quasi-monastic setting. As Whitney writes in Chapter One, "Discipline, in its external form, is imposed by the very structure of prison, but sitting still in silence is so out of keeping with the chaotic, noisy atmosphere of prison that it takes great courage and cleverness to practice at all."

Whitney covers the history of Buddhism behind bars, from the earliest days of Buddhist prison outreach to the Constitutional battles that practitioners had to win before they were allowed to meditate together. I had no idea, before I read Sitting Inside, that it was a Buddhist whose lawsuit (Cruz v. Beto, in 1977) went to the US Supreme Court and opened the gates to prisoners' religious freedom. This book is intended for imprisoned practitioners, for the volunteers who visit them to teach and assist, and for readers curious about the great effort that prison practice requires.

Shunryu Suzuki's book Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness explores Buddhist practice via the Sandokai, a seventh-century work by Chinese poet Shitou Xiqian, that's become a tool of Zen in the modern world. A lot of contemporary practitioners recite its forty-four lines to remind themselves of the ultimate nature of reality. Suzuki was instrumental in bringing Buddhism (specifically, Zen) to the United States. Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness represents a series of talks he gave in 1970, which his students preserved in transcripts. He speaks digressively and incisively, in ways that are silly and profound. As far as I can tell, it's Zen, through and through—but what do I know? That's why it's called "practice."

Acknowledging ignorance in spiritual matters is all well and good, but feeling a cleverness deficit in other areas can be troubling. I experience mine when confronted with the writing of William Shakespeare. Like most people, I first ran afoul of the Bard's poetry in high school. I don't even remember the play, only that I gave up pretty quickly on his opaque Elizabethan elocution. When my book club elected A Midsummer Night's Dream to be our midsummer read, my first thought was, Well, shit.

I read it, though. We all did. Together. Aloud.

Specifically, I recited the parts of Bottom and Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow), and of the fairy queen, Titania—in a Monty Python–like lady voice. Keith read the lover á la Scarlett O'Hara, and Danny did silly voices for the fairies the whole way through. No one else hammed it up as much as the three of us did, but everyone managed to have fun with it. Without our silliness to guide me, I doubt I'd have been able to actually follow the play's dialogue and plot, as four interchangeable lovers run afoul of two feuding fairies and proceed to caper around the stage in demonstration of how "the course of true love never did run smooth."

How have I changed in the last thirty-odd years? Only in all ways. I still feel no particular desire to engage with Shakespearean drama on the page, but at least I have an open mind about it. I didn't even dissent when the club voted to start reading Titus Andronicus, come October.

Most recently, I read the curious Dana Spiotta novel Innocents and Others, a book about three women whose lives focus on seeing and being seen. It tells their story in somewhat experimental ways, through both traditional third-person narrative and first person "articles" written by the characters. I love this almost mixed-media style in fiction, and Innocents and Others used it to deliver a deeply satisfying convergence of three seemingly disparate narratives. On the strength of this book alone, I might have to venture deeper into Spiotta's work.

Another Degree of Infamy

Another podcast addressed the death of Anastasia WitbolsFeugen last week. It went up on YouTube a few days later. Unlike last time, I had nothing to do with this one—Crime Junkie—because my legal team doesn't want any distractions as we prepare for a major court filing. I'm told that the Crime Junkie people did a fair job of discussing the case, considering they only had an hour-long episode. Just the same, I'm glad I didn't have to hear or see it.

As infrequently as I speak about my case, or about the senseless pair of deaths that preceded it, I feel that it's been more than enough. I'm tired of rehashing the same events, answering the same questions, and changing nothing, least of all the minds of people who think fact is subordinate to feeling. Arguing against that kind of stubborn ignorance is utterly exhausting.

I know I'll have to speak again, maybe next time in court. When that happens, I imagine it will be a high-pressure experience—even more so than the first time, and accordingly nervewracking. But at least it should be for a judge who won't be as easily swayed as some people by my onetime girlfriend's incoherent fictions. At least it should require no speculation. At least it should lead to something valuable—more so, anyway, than vacuous publicity.

Four Books I Spent My Spring Reading

When the time came to choose what to read next, our book club facilitator suggested we pick up Alice McDermott's novel After This. He was teaching a course on Catholic literature at Saint Louis University and, with characteristic forthrightness, begged our mercy in selecting a book he was already teaching, rather than adding another book to his literary load. After This is a book he loves, he said, which sounded promising enough. Then he went on to say that it was the one book from the course that his students suggested he remove from next semester's syllabus. "They think it's boring," he said. Being the type of readers for whom such warnings arouse curiosity, we assented almost immediately.

This was my first encounter with McDermott. She writes beautifully at the level of the sentence, with prose rich in meaning without ever being ponderous. Plotwise, I can see why contemporary college students struggled with this book: they probably couldn't relate to the world it depicted. Spanning a period between the end of two wars, World War Two and Vietnam, After This has at its center an Irish-American family in search not of happiness—because wanting happiness, in these characters' deeply Catholic mindset, would constitute a kind of unseemly greed—but of simple contentedness. Just to be okay with how their lives are going seems to be their aim. Their saga unfolds episodically, in a series of vignettes, with years disappearing easily between sections. Its 277 pages flip past with almost a breeze.

Freed in May from an onerous work schedule, I did my best to make up for lost reading time, leaping straight into several books at once. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones is a collection of Zen and pre-Zen writings compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki in 1957. It includes texts previously published as 101 Zen Stories, The Gateless Gate (called Mumonkon in the original Japanese), 10 Bulls (maybe better known as the ox-herding pictures), and an ancient Sanskrit text entitled Centering that emerged in India 4,000 years ago, more than two millennia before Bodhidharma famously brought Zen teachings to China. Unlike McDermott's novel, I took extra time with this book, ingesting it in small, meditative bites that never overwhelmed my ability to sit awhile with a given story, koan, or passage.

When Freedom Reads visited ERDCC a couple of years ago, I had to know its representatives' answers to two questions. First: what one book each of them read during their imprisonment most resonated with them. Then: what book they recommend for others in these circumstances. One response to the second question was The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writers Life in Prison, edited by Caits Meissner. This essay collection was put out by PEN America a few years ago, forwarding the organization's mission to celebrate and elevate the literature of writers "whose voices have too often gone unheard or been ignored." The Sentences That Create Us collects inspiring pieces by justice-impacted writers—novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, screenwriters, playwrights, memoirists, and everything in between—to reveal how prisoners whose minds remain free can create a different kind of life through their writing.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about Zen the way he taught it: simply and with a directness that matched his subject. His book The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation was probably intended to be an introduction to the practice, for readers who were not yet intimate with the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Five Aggregates, the Paramitas, and other essential Buddhist teachings. Even though I've been practicing this stuff for a while, its good to go back to basics every so often and get a refresher. With straightforward pronouncements like "The person who has no compassion in him cannot be happy," and "Twenty-four hours are a treasure chest of jewels," Thich Nhat Hanh once again proves himself a teacher worthy of his beautiful reputation.

I'm not really sure where my reading will take me next. It's been so long since I had enough downtime from work to read much of anything. A visit to the prison's library is in order—my first in almost three years. Who knows what I might pick up.

Resignation/Resuscitation

You wouldn't think that a prison job could keep a person busy enough to induce burnout, but that's exactly what happened in my leadership role at XSTREAM.

Exhaustion, anxiety, distracted thoughts, and occasional testiness over the past six or seven months tipped me off that I was feeling more stress than was healthy. The hours kept me away from my cell for a minimum of seven (as many as fourteen) hours a day, seven days a week, which you'd think would be nice, considering the environment. It wasn't. Stress gnawed at me, even on the good days, sometimes feeling as if I was being eaten from the inside.

The other members of my team relished those long days at their desks. They'd rather stay at work, typing actor names into the database, than be around their cellmates. I never shared the aversion. Either I value my free time too much or my cellmate of the past two years, Bob, is just more tolerable than most people here. Many were the nights that I left work "early" (i.e., before the building closed at 8:30 PM) because I was just plain beat. My colleagues usually stuck around—I guess because the poor bastards don't have lives of their own.

I gathered Team XSTREAM together last Friday to lay it all out. Not wanting to mince words, I concluded my little monologue: "I don't want to work here anymore." Everyone suggested that I simply take a month or two off, clear my head. That wouldn't work, though. The on-the-job issues I'd been struggling with would still be there, whether I left for one month or for six. There was no fixing this. Still, I thanked them for their kind support.

What made me nervous was approaching our boss, the Recreation Director, about my intention to quit. I didn't want to have to justify my decision and decline a bunch of offers to make changes to the workplace, my schedule, or the workload. I'd reviewed possibilities in my head all weekend, and none of them were quite good enough to compel me to stay. I was resolute.

When the boss came in on Monday morning, I asked when might be a good time for us to have a serious conversation. We sat down in his office a bit later and I explained how I'd been feeling, the conversation my coworkers and I had, their idea for a remedy, and all the reasons that I doubted it could work. To my utter amazement, he shook his head and said, "You're preaching to the choir. I wish I had the option you've got here. I've still got two years before I can retire. I'm burning the candle at both ends." He gave me his blessing to do whatever was best for me.

I thanked him, then made my ask: "Can I count on you for a recommendation, whatever I move on to?" I had planned to put in for a clerk position rumored to be available at ERDCC's Reentry Center, a newly opened facility at the prison, where people within one year of release can request help with job-hunting skills, work on their résumés, and even get vocational training. XSTREAM made a lot of signs, labels, and decorations adding to the building's slick, professional appearance, not to mention video-recorded their big open house event a couple of weeks ago. I hoped that our work would afford me a leg up in the application process.

Within an hour of my request, my boss called the Reentry Center and put in a good word on my behalf. They offered me the job without hesitation, no questions asked. I didn't even have to formally apply. (Of course, even after changing employers, I'll still host TV shows for XSTREAM. The team wouldn't let me get away from them entirely.)

I'm supposed to report to the Reentry Center sometime at the end of this week, to talk about the job and my options there. It sounds a little like I'll get to create my own position, with the possibility of even facilitating classes or programs myself. I love the idea of working face-to-face with people who want to use this time to make more of their lives! This feels in some ways like a major shift; in others, it feels like the most natural transition ever.

My last day at XSTREAM is a week and a half away. This probably won't surprise you, but I'm already sleeping better.

An Afternoon Furlough (Almost)

The Missouri Department of Rehabilitative Services probably doesn't get much press coverage. Such is its lack of notoriety that I can't even describe for you the relationship between DORS and the Department of Corrections—and I've been a prisoner in the DOC since 2002. They did hit a significant milestone here at ERDCC yesterday, though, with a ribbon cutting for the Missouri Reentry Center, the state's biggest and probably most modern facility of its type. I not only got to be there for the big event, I even got to hand out purple octopuses.

The display table offered to XSTREAM was in recognition of everything my coworkers and I do for the institution, and for all we did for the Reentry Center in the leadup to yesterday's event. We not only cut adhesive vinyl numbers to mark the building's doors, we also made big decorative wall stickers—inspirational slogans, logos, and a career-centric word cloud. We even made the 6-by-9-foot Reentry Center sign bolted beside the front entrance, which the administrative team posed beside with giant scissors before cutting the ribbon.

We put a 55-inch TV beside us, looping a brief promotional video I compiled for the occasion. A 32-inch model on the tabletop continuously displayed our octopus logo. After recording the ceremony, a coworker and I sat and fielded questions from educators, law enforcement officers, visiting staff from other prisons, members of the Bonne Terre Chamber of Commerce, and a newspaper reporter. One of my ambitions is to make XSTREAM a recognized production outfit outside of the prison, creating media content for entities outside these fences. Yesterday felt like an opportunity to move toward that.

While pitching our production work to the public, I handed out swag to everyone who came close enough to talk—because who doesn't love stickers? Our logo is iconic enough to be cool without context, but with any luck the little octopuses I cut in royal purple and baby blue will prompt the person who took one to remember our unique display whenever they glance at the laptop, clipboard, or binder they stuck it to. Who knows, somebody might even strike up a conversation with them about it.

By prison standards, the Reentry Center is really nice, and I'm happy to have played a small part in making it look that way. Being allowed to attend the open house event and talk with everyday people about the work I'm so proud of felt like an afternoon away from prison.

As "The Real Killer"'s Third Season Comes to an End, I Have Some Thoughts

Attention being drawn to my case by The Real Killer is, arguably, a good thing. Continued interest at least hints at a reason for hope. The way Leah Rothman's been setting out the facts seems a little scattershot, but the Jackson County Sheriff's Department investigation lasted almost four years, the facts do tend to sprawl.

I've always preferred putting everything on the table and letting people decide for themselves whether mine is a cause worth getting involved with. That is basically what The Real Killer has been doing over the past thirteen weeks. Messy? Sure, but at least it's honest.

Comparatively, people who believe (or desperately want to believe) that I'm guilty take the opposite tack when it comes to their argument strategy. The anti-Byrons call up the worst aspects of my polarizing teenage personality, cite out-of-context case document excerpts, invent unsubstantiated and often outlandish "facts," then wave it all around like a bloody handkerchief, shouting to all the world that their case against me is airtight.

I do wonder what conversation about the podcast has taken place in that camp. I hear occasional snippets of what passes for communication on The Real Killer's Instagram feed, and it seems like more of what it's always been: some people consider the facts and come away with the sense of my innocence; some watch video of my interviews and hiss, "He's got no soul!"

Everyone's got opinions, but the podcast itself keeps them to a merciful minimum. Anastasia's sisters said in a recent episode that they believe my accuser, in part, because she's stuck to the same story for twenty-four years. I have only this rebuttal: if time invested in maintaining a stance was the measure of its legitimacy, my innocence should be of no question. I've stuck with the truth since investigators first asked me if I was involved with Stasia's death. That was in October of 1997, three and a half years before Kelly Moffett made up her story. How could time convince you that Kelly's being truthful, but not that I am? This is the double standard I'm pitted against—another example of the injustice I've now fought more than half my life.

Listeners have been promised that the podcast's finale is coming soon, that The Real Killer is now taking a short break. What that last episode might be, I can only guess. I've been waiting for disappointment ever since I listened to the very first episode. Other shows' outcomes, even the half-hearted shrug that was MTV's Unlocking the Truth, have instilled in me a bit of pessimism. My approach with The Real Killer has been one of nonjudgment. Week after week, I refrained from guessing what direction the podcast was heading, the whole time half-expecting a hard left turn, as it veers away from Leah Rothman's relatively straightforward reportage.

At the moment I'm typing this, that turn has yet to come. While there are some small things about the podcast I take issue with, they're trifles, not important enough to speak out against or even mention here. Some of them are simply products of dramatic necessity. Leah's got to keep listener numbers up and her sponsors happy. The podcast is, after all, primarily a form of entertainment.

Like everyone who's faithfully listened every Thursday as new episodes drop, I'm waiting with anticipation to see how The Real Killer concludes. You could say I'm waiting for a miracle; I'm waiting for justice, after all.

Resignation

Joining the Speak Easy Gavel Club (Toastmasters club number 622676) six years ago, I wasn't interested in public speaking or enhancing my leadership skills. I was just looking to get out of the house at a new prison and maybe meet some other people inclined to self-improvement.

What I got was a rich reward. I found a friend, I landed a great job, and yes, I developed the handy ability to engage an audience through speechcraft. As valuable as these benefits may be, though, the well of riches had to run dry eventually.

I served as the club's Vice President Education twice, its President once. After that term ended, I announced my disinterest in running for another office. I wanted to set aside the organizing and delegating awhile and just do some speechifying—something that had taken a backseat to "higher duty" in the last couple of years. Nevertheless, at the next election I was nominated for multiple offices. It seems they didn't want to let me go. The position of Vice President Public Relations didn't seem like it would put an inordinate amount of work on my already heaping plate, so I reluctantly accepted a VPPR nomination and won it. Overwhelm, in retrospect, seems like it was inevitable.

As work ramped up its demands on my time, I started missing as many meetings as I got to attend. (I am living proof that, even in prison, time can get away from you.) None of the other members complained; nevertheless, I felt the distinct guilt of letting people down. I was not upholding my duty as an officer of the club. It was time to face facts: I was standing in the way of someone else who actually wanted to hold the position.

The resignation speech I gave to the assembled members at their last meeting was declared "eloquently straightforward." Then I was thanked for what I've done for the club and continue to do for the prison community. The Vice President Membership floated a motion to make me an honorary member—only the second in the Speak Easy's twenty-one-year history. As I left the lectern, the veteran Gaveliers led the room in a standing ovation. It was nice.

More than anything, though, it felt like a relief. I hadn't had to write and deliver a speech in almost a year, but there were member evaluations, committee efforts, mentoring duties, contest organizations, special event coordinations, fundraiser efforts, board meetings, and other responsibilities to tend to. Taking that away felt good. I had to wonder why I waited so long.

Two Books I Spent My Fall Reading

In the month of November, my book club chose to read The Plague, by Albert Camus, a book I last encountered seventeen or more years ago, in the 1948 translation. This new iteration, translated by Laura Marris in 2021, felt, for lack of a better word, punchier. Its language seems better suited to the philosophy that Camus espoused, downplaying some of the melodrama of that earlier version. The discussions we had in our meetings this season—about freedom, loneliness, religious belief, human nature, germ theory, bureaucratic inaction, the patron saint of wrongful convictions, Flannery O'Connor's opinion of Jesuits, and quite a few other scattershot topics—lent themselves to some very engaging Wednesday mornings.

Unstructured leisure time is at a premium in my life. The reading I get to do is split in several different ways. The New York Review of Books brings me joy, even though I take weeks to read a single issue and skip many of the political articles. The books waiting for my attention seem to increase in number weekly. (I've come to think of my to-read list as aspirational at best; I have e-book versions of several tempting texts and zero idea of when I might start any of them.) When I do get to pick out leisure reading, it's a special treat.

Recommended by a small host of writers whose opinions I trust, Anna Kavan's Ice proved to be an unsettling little novel. I bought Penguin's fiftieth anniversary edition, with a foreword by the writer Jonathan Lethem, and was floored. Kavan's hypnotic storytelling kept me rapt, chapter after chapter, as her horrific tale unfolded like a fever dream.

The book centers around one man's obsessive chase of a young woman—not motivated by love or even lust, but by an odious desire to possess. His quest leads him around a war-ravaged world on the brink of ecological disaster. Is it science fiction? Yes and no. The story takes place on earth, in a time very close to ours, but under the perpetual threat of "the ice," huge freezing shapes that will soon engulf and smother all life.

Despite the high concept at play, Ice is decidedly "soft" sci-fi, verging on Surrealism. Kavan gives us a phantasmal tale that doubles back on itself, revising as it goes, like a nightmare or a bad trip or a spell of amnesia. You think it's headed one way, until it picks up at another point, ignoring everything you just read. The girl dies, then she's alive again. Then something else is undone and done again, in a different way. Events aren't undone so much as un-done. Further confusing matters, the narrator's protean account continually shifts perspective. He describes impossible-to-know events and changes identities at the blink of an eye. The whole time, you hate him, but he gives you a window into this story that you can't help but stare through, mute and aghast. What a book!

In the months to come, I'll probably pick through a textbook, devour some Gothic horror, and ingest some philosophy—if I can make time amid my various commitments. Where there's a will, there's a way.

Overcoming a Service Outage

Ripples from my friend Luke's disappearance, in October of 2023, spread far and wide. Gains and losses were to be had in equal number (even though I'd much prefer if he'd stuck around). Most notable among the changes: I inherited his position at the head of operations at XSTREAM but lost the weekly religious service that I had benefitted so greatly from.

The Department of Corrections requires all accommodated religious groups to maintain a certain attendance level. The minimum is five attendees per week. If the number of people drops below that for more than a month, the service will be suspended for ninety days and undergo a review. After we lost several guys to transfer, losing Luke brought our Buddhist service down to four. I tracked down everyone whose DOC file might list Buddhism as their religious preference. (This was somewhat easier than it sounds.) To those I could find, I extended an invitation to join our service—to no avail. We were suspended and ultimately put on inactive status.

After expending no insignificant effort over the past year, I'm delighted to say that Buddhist services are scheduled to pick back up this week. All it took was a seven-month search for Buddhists, a questioning about their level of commitment to the practice, a plea for them to sign a form claiming interest in attending services, then a long wait for the paperwork to grind its way through the gears of bureaucracy.

It was touch-and-go for a while. "No commitment necessary," I stressed to the guys whose signatures I sought. "Just give me a signature and I'll work out the rest." But the fact is, even if I collected enough signatures, I wasn't sure we'd actually meet the attendance criteria. Anyone can sign their name to a sheet of paper. That doesn't mean they'll show up to sit on a cushion every seven days with a group of strangers. I was nervous. Might my efforts be in vain?

What amazes me is how circumstances (or, if you prefer, karma) conspired to make my aspirations a reality. The Buddhists had previously met on Thursday mornings. When the chapel switched our scheduled time with that of another group, we started meeting in the afternoons, a time that two attendees couldn't make jibe with their schedules. We lost them, as a result. I only got them to sign back up as a favor; I needed signatures, dammit! Then the chaplain announced that our previous meeting space was already booked throughout the week. He'd have to talk with the Institutional Activities Coordinator and get back to me.

"How would you feel about Thursday mornings, through the midday count?" the chaplain asked. My wheels immediately started spinning. Thursday mornings were still prohibitive for those two guys on my list—but if the chaplain could offer us Thursdays through count time, couldn't he just as easily offer us the same time on Fridays? "Let me confer with the IAC," he said, "and maybe we can make that happen."

And just like that, I've stepped into Luke's shoes in another area, becoming the designated service representative for ERDCC's newly revived Buddhist community. The chaplain appointed me to the role last week when he cleared our group for Friday morning services, during count, a time that should work for more than the minimum number of us to attend. That feels like a big win.

As for becoming the Designated Service Representative, I have mixed feelings about taking on yet another responsibility. Nevertheless, I've accepted it with what I believe is an appropriate degree of solemnity. Being a DSR means placing orders for books and supplies every three months, and sacrificing time for quarterly hours-long meetings with the Missouri DOC's Religious Programming Coordinator. It's not exactly an unmanageable burden. If anything, I hope to be able to bring something good to the population, one breath at a time.

A New Hope

A motion to undo my wrongful conviction was filed in the Missouri Court of Appeals in December. Katie Moore, the reporter for The Kansas City Star who interviewed me for her article about the filing, wanted to know how it felt to have my case back in court for the first time in thirteen years. Was I hopeful, she wanted to know.

I'd begun the interview feeling prepared to answer any question she asked about my case. That question, though, caught me by surprise. Was I hopeful?

For a stretch of recent history, having hope has been considered a blessing. Philosophers and theologians in our modern age tend to believe that hope is a great virtue. But older cultures had a different view. The ancient Greeks, for instance, considered hope an especially nasty flavor of self-deception, a corrupting evil. That age-old story about Pandora opening the box containing all the world's woes? (It was actually a jar, not a box, but whatever.) Hope was in there, unloosed upon the earth thanks to Pandora's curiosity, to humanity's great torment. An Italian proverb holds that a person who "lives by hope will die by despair." Referencing this, Addison wrote, "If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is." Although a young Nietzsche wasn't too keen on hope, either, he did come around in his later years. By the end of his essay on the ultimate futility of life, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus accepted hope, but only begrudgingly. The biblical proverb about hope deferred could provide the basis to an argument against hope. A comparable notion can be found in Buddhist teachings, which hold that wishing circumstances be otherwise ignores reality, the opposite of an enlightened mindset. Although there's been a general shift toward the line that hope is a good thing, it's not without detractors. There's always a cynic somewhere. I know because I used to be one. "Byron the Black-Hearted, Dark Cliffs upon Which the Waves of Hope Break," one clever friend dubbed me. I'll just say, you don't get that kind of moniker bestowed on you for being fun at parties. If that was then, what am I now? I want out of prison, of course, but I no longer feel desperate for that outcome. It's been so long since I had a fighting chance at freedom. Since my lawyers' filed our motion to the court, a chance has presented itself. I feel like a dog with a grape in its mouth – Is it food or is it a toy? – and I don't really know what to do. The poet Marianne Moore wrote, "Hope isn't hope until all grounds to hope have vanished." (I've probably quoted that line on this blog before; what can I say except I like it that much?) I don't know what Moore intended by it, exactly, but her line nevertheless makes sense to me. You can't truly know hope until you've stared into the abyss – which, as Nietzsche famously wrote, stares also back into you – then continued moving forward anyway.

Right now, I'm just moving.

Back in Court, Back in the News

Before yesterday, the last media interview I did was with a podcaster, ten years ago, on the subject of my then-newly published book, The Pariah's Syntax (from which this blog takes its name). Then Monday rolled around, and I gave another.

Kansas City Star journalist Katie Moore got me on the phone to talk about the filing of a long-awaited motion by my lawyers, who've been working on the details of this 130-something-page document for months. In the motion they lay out evidence of the fraud that the Jackson County Prosecutors Office committed in order convict me of a murder that probably never happened, the 1997 death of my friend Anastasia WitbolsFeugen. We show how the state withheld evidence, conspired to falsify documents, suborned perjury, and more – all to close a case that authorities felt had remained open for too long.

Ms. Moore had questions to ask about the facts of the case, of course. It might sound weird, but these feel secondary to the reality of my imprisonment. The narrative of my case has been related again and again, in story after story, and seems at this point to have lost a lot of its former import. 22 October, 1997, exists in a past that's now over half of my lifetime away, so forgive me for feeling somewhat detached from it. Nevertheless, I trudged though yet another recitation of the facts. Where things got tough was in talking about my friends Anastasia and Justin, both of whom I lost in such a sudden, ugly way. My voice broke unexpectedly as I remembered them. My throat tightened. It's been so long, yet I still consider the months that I squandered in the company of those two kids as being among the happiest of my otherwise difficult teenage years. "Are you okay, Byron?" one of my lawyers asked. I wasn't sure then; I'm not sure now.

Ms. Moore's story was published today. More importantly, my lawyers also filed their motion. At the time of this writing, I haven't read either one. I can't fathom the most likely outcome of either, but you can find the former online at kcstar.com.

Synthetic Drugs and Books – What's the Connection?

The year was 2009 when the Missouri Department of Corrections finally reversed its longstanding position and allowed prisoners to receive books ordered by people on the outside. I wrote a blog post expressing my joy at the change and, in the years that followed, more than once called it one of the best things that the state ever did to improve the conditions of confinement for those in custody. Can I take back that praise

The DOC announced in its August "Friends and Family" newsletter that, effective 25 September (i.e., this past Monday), prisoners would no longer be allowed to receive books ordered by people on the outside. Books now need to be purchased by the prisoners directly, using a certified check from their institutional accounts. Any books sent to us by caring, considerate people out there must be mailed off, thrown out, or sent away with a visitor.

Since the world's largest retailer, Amazon, hasn't accepted checks since 2004, this limits prisoners' options. Having to order from smaller venders with limited stock and higher prices, although good for local economies, is a notable hardship for those of us who count our every dollar. It also means that people will feel less inclined to send prisoners gifts. The DOC itself tells people not to send prisoners money unless they feel confident about how it will be spent. Removing people's option to order a book likewise removes the personal touch, in the same way that some say gift cards do.

And here's a funny thing: no one saw fit to tell us prisoners about what's being called a "transitional operation procedure" until two days after it went into effect. I only heard about it from my mother, who subscribes to the Department's newsletter. In the days that followed the announcement, news sources, such as Kansas City's NPR station and the Kansas City Star, started reporting on it.

Just today I learned that used books are prohibited as well, reversing twelve years of departmental precedent. Thanks a bunch, fentanyl.

That's right. A supposed uptick in drug overdoses is being blamed on books by the Department. I'm not making this up. A DOC representative claims that parties unknown are lacing the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers with synthetic drugs that they mail to the facilities, leading to increased overdoses in prisons across Missouri. (There's also some question about whether the numbers are actually increasing, or just being more frequently reported. I'll leave that for journalists to determine.) How method of payment for the books might change this is unclear.

The only meaningful outcome of this "transitional operation procedure" is a limitation on the volume and frequency of prisoners' access to reading material of their choosing. We're limited to the number orders we can place each year and limited in the number of books we can have in our possession at one time. Before this ban, people could order a book for someone in prison once a year or once a week and never have it count against that prisoner's order limit, because an order is defined as something purchased with money from the prisoner's account. It was win-win: case managers didn't have to trouble themselves with processing orders, and, assuming the books didn't violate censorship guidelines, prisoners got whatever books they wanted.

This decree by the Departmental powers that be should be troubling on a number of levels. It's not about prisoners getting to read a limitless string of bestsellers. It's about the ability to choose how and what one learns while imprisoned. Books offer an effective means for achieving the fundamental change in thinking that most prisoners so desperately need. This ban severely limits the potential for that change. Exactly what kind of people is the Missouri DOC trying to create here?

The Department representative quoted in that KCUR article mentioned above said that facility libraries make plenty of books available. I call bullshit. There's a reason that, until last month, I hadn't visited the library at ERDCC in three years – and it wasn't COVID. I would argue that most of what are considered essential texts in education are missing from prison library shelves. For example, ERDCC's library has no titles by Noam Chomsky, Marshall McLuhan, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, or Howard Zinn. I don't think there's a single nonfiction feminist text in the whole room. Nothing in queer studies, either. We do have a W.E.B. DuBois collection and a Ta-Nahisi Coates title, but not much else that might fuel a burn-off of someone's racist ideas.

In literature, the situation is even bleaker. There's some Nathaniel Hawthorne and dusty old Homer, but no Wallace Stevens, Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, or Philip Roth. And forget about finding any daring, experimental, or milestone literary fiction more recent than about 1990. For a truly avid reader, the window offered on the world has become very small indeed.

There is a reason that Freedom Libraries are being installed in prisons all over the country and that numerous independent bookstores run programs that send free books to prisoners. They know both the power of books and the need for them. If only we could show the Missouri DOC.

Four Books I Read This Summer

Buddhism boasts a larger body of writings than any other belief system. Practitioners, of course, regard certain texts as more essential than others, and in Zen (called Ch'an in some other parts of the world), the most venerated of these are arguably the Prajna-Paramita Sutra, the Record Of The Transmission Of The Lamp, the Altar Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, and Master Dogen's Shobogenzo. The Diamond Sutra represents a small section of the very long Prajna-Paramita Sutra, from which the renowned Heart Sutra also comes.

The translation of the Diamond Sutra that I read back in July is by Venerable Cheng Kuan, a Taiwanese monk ordained in Japan, who's lectured and taught in both America and Taiwan. His bio says he has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, which makes it all the more puzzling that he would render this already challenging text the way that he has. Venerable Kuan chose to invent his own terms that he believes approximate those for which no direct English equivalents exist. It doesn't make for easy comprehension. Where most translators would use a term such as "sentient beings" to refer to all life forms, Venerable Kuan goes with the unusual, inexplicably capitalized "Mutibeings." Where other translators leave the title "Tathagatha" (one of the Buddha's ten epithets, meaning "one who has thus come" or "thus-comer") as-is, Venerable Kuan dubs the Buddha the "Thus-Adventist," a term I've never seen or heard used before. It's just weird. The frequency with which Venerable Kuan does this kind of thing makes reading his odd translation of the Diamond Sutra somewhat difficult. I'll have to give this one another go later, with a different translator's rendering.

Using more natural language but focusing on a similarly incomprehensible premise is The Shapeless Unease, a delirious, haunting, beautiful memoir by Samantha Harvey. The book covers a yearlong period during which Harvey suffered crippling insomnia. You could call her experience a nightmare if that word didn't land too painfully far from the truth. This book is a wonder. The author's literary product is no mere procedural, that follows her means and methods of seeking relief. In another writer's hands, this might've ended up a blandly straightforward account of not being able to sleep and getting increasingly frustrated with that fact. Instead, Harvey brings a discursive, poetic flair to the matter, making this memoir a must-read.

From Act II, Scene Seven, of As You Like It come the famous lines

All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts

We know them even if we're not well versed in the Bard's work, and many of us recognize that even in Shakespeare's time the idea of humankind as a great acting troupe wasn't particularly original – Ol' Billy just said it prettily. Until the mid-1950s, however, no one seems to have ventured a systematic look at selfhood through this particular lens. Enter Dr. Erving Goffman, stage right, wearing a perfectly nice bowtie, to deliver his monograph The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the third book I read this season.

Goffman's sociology text takes the metaphor made so famous by Shakespeare's play to its logical extreme, positing that, in what he calls "Anglo-American society," selfhood is an imputed image based on a character played within a given field of action – a result of a given situation, not the cause of it. He goes into great and often amusing detail to illustrate the point, citing studies, anecdotal evidence, and historical precedent. I liked how closely Goffman's conceptual framework aligns with the Buddhist idea that inherent selfhood is an illusion. I found a lot to appreciate about Goffman's study, in fact, and read much of the book with a knowing smirk intended for an audience of myself alone.

I wonder for whom I was performing when I agreed to partake in another round with the prison's book club. Our previous book was a short story collection by local writer (and super nice guy) Ron A. Austin. This time we went big, tackling the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Not only did I read this version once before, about ten years ago, I also tried to read the not-especially good Constance Garnett translation a couple of years before that. After that initial reading, this translation became my favorite work of Russian literature – more unruly than Tolstoy's tedious Anna Karenina, more soul-stirring than Solzhenitsyn's harrowing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Considering how busy I am, reading a dense 800-page novel and going to biweekly meetings to discuss it may seem foolhardy. It's too much fun to say no to, though. Our book club is a collaborative project between Saint Louis University and XSTREAM Media. SLU's Prison Education Program supplies the books, and XSTREAM broadcasts every meeting on TV, in an effort to generate more interest in reading. The University sent a professor to lead the club meetings for The Brothers Karamazov, which made for an even richer experience that I was happy to be a part of. Our often lively discussions made decent television, too.