A Spanner in the Works?

PG acknowledges the messages he has received from several visitors about strange behavior on TPV.

He’s going to dig around the dusty foundations to look for various electronic mistakes, nasties, ghosts or evil-doers have been frolicking about.

He suspects he has allowed the active portions of the blog to grow too large, but, of course, he could be wrong.

He’s happy to entertain diagnoses/problems/solutions from one and all.

Art is always political

From The Bookseller:

On Tuesday, Arts Council of England (ACE) released a statement about the organisation’s funding policy. You have all probably read it by now. The statement warned creatives and organisations against “reputational risk” which ACE defined as any “activity that might be considered overtly political and activist and goes beyond your company’s core purpose and partnerships with organisations that might be perceived as being in conflict with the purposes of public funding of culture”. This was not limited to activities directly funded by ACE.

Is any form of art unpolitical? I write from several places of marginality. Author Bell Hooks calls this marginality a place of resistance. I too see this place of otherness not as a place of deprivation but as a place of opportunity and possibility. Anything and everything I write is political. It has to be. My lived experience, much like any other marginalised writer, is a space of refusal to accept what is laid out for us, the boundaries that are set around our existence, the spaces we are not allowed to inhabit. We learn to oppose these norms that limit our existence, and opposition becomes a necessity, not a choice. Writing is a way of writing ourselves into the mainstream, telling stories that are not necessarily heard, challenging the colonisers and oppressors, and imagining a radical new world where these boundaries and hierarchies do not exist anymore. Writing is a way of finding a counter-language, that hooks calls a “space of refusal” where we say no to the language of the colonisers and oppressors and find a language to name the repression. Once we silence these counter-narratives then we silence the language of resistance.

While I am writing this ACE has released an update, a sort of pushed-into-a-corner, we-are-not-really-bad but only-thinking-of-your-own-good statement; a faux-benevolent backtracking. It mentions “freedom of expression” and “artistic freedom” a few times to allay concerns and outrage expressed widely by artists on social media and elsewhere. Nevertheless, it refers once again to reputational risk, to polarisation and puts the onus on the organisations to make sure “that if they, or people associated with them, are planning activity that might be viewed as controversial, they have thought through, and so far as possible mitigated, the risk to themselves and crucially to their staff and to the communities they serve”.

There are larger questions at stake here as to what the public funds are for if not to fund art that resists the artificial oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems

Perhaps the timing is merely a coincidence as we are witnessing a artificial oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems among artists against the genocide happening in Palestine. If this is silencing and censorship, then of course it isn’t anything new, but to couch it within a concern for “reputational risk” seems disingenuous. There are larger questions at stake here as to what the public funds are for if not to fund art that resists the artificial oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems. If not this, then culture can never evolve beyond the limits of our current imaginations. Preventing creatives from challenging dominant norms, questioning, speaking their truth will only result in a monolith ossified culture, stagnant and festering with dissent and paralysed with fear.

Marginalised writers have lived with these fears for so long. Reputational risk is not something to be taken lightly. For anyone who is an “other” it is an anxiety that lies heavy on their shoulders, something that lurks silently at all times intent on pushing them away further into the margins. The warning against “reputational risk” feels like bullying, and intimidation. And the whole purpose of bullying is to create self-doubt, uncertainty and unease. As we face even more cuts to arts funding and public funding becomes even more scarce, creating a culture of fear is counter-productive to encouraging and supporting innovative art. The ACE stance is silencing of those who have been marginalised, and those who speak up against oppressive forces, telling artists to stay within their boxes, quiet, unchallenging, unresistant, fearful of the repercussions. When people are silenced, it creates hopelessness and despair.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

  1. PG doesn’t agree with more than a bit of the OP. Don’t ask him to identify the bit.
  2. “[fill in the blank] is political!’ is a now ancient technique used by all sorts of people, right, left and center, to shut down argument.
  3. Marginalised, silencing, bullying, intimidation, self-doubt, uncertainty, unease, paralysed with fear, speaking their truth, challenging dominant norms, oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems are in the eye of the beholder. If these conditions are so widespread, horrible and heavy, why doesn’t everyone notice them?
  4. PG’s favorite horror was “faux-benevolent.” Heaven forfend!
  5. “What the public funds are for if not to fund art that resists the artificial oppressive structures inherent in our society and systems.”
    • Does anybody think to ask the public how their taxes should be used? Whether they do or don’t want to fund the creation of things they find abhorrent.”
  6. “outrage expressed widely by artists on social media and elsewhere.” Oooh! Outrage! On Social Media! Who would have imagined there was outrage of any sort on social media? How could we possibly miss outraged artists on social media amid so much reasoned, quiet, calm, and polite conversation with never a hint of anger everywhere we look on social media?
  7. And finally, genocide, the all-purpose horror, not to be missed in any tirade.

‘How to murder your husband’ writer sentenced for murdering husband

From The BBC:

An Oregon judge has sentenced Nancy Crampton Brophy, a romance author who apparently foretold of her crime in an essay titled “How to murder your husband”, to life in prison for the shooting death of her late spouse.

Crampton Brophy, 71, was found guilty of second degree murder last month.

A jury found that she shot her husband of 26 years in 2018 for a $1.5m (£1.2m) life insurance pay-out.

Before her crime, Crampton Brophy had been a self-published author whose works of steamy romance and suspense include novels such as “The Wrong Husband” and “The Wrong Lover”.

Her late husband, Daniel Brophy, was a chef and respected teacher at the Oregon Culinary Institute.

He was found shot twice in the kitchen of the Institute in June 2018.

His widow was convicted of the murder last month.

The case attracted much attention for an essay Crampton Brophy had written years before the crime, titled “How to murder your husband”.

“The thing I know about murder is that every one of us have it in him/her when pushed far enough,” she had said in the now-deleted post.

She listed a number of ways to commit mariticide, from guns and knives to poison and hitmen before writing “it is easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them”.

She added: “If the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail”.

A judge ruled against admitting the essay as evidence at her trial because it was penned years earlier as part of a writing seminar.

But prosecutors did not need the text.

They successfully argued that Crampton Brophy had the motive and the means to murder her partner, showing the couple had fallen on hard times financially, and she stood to pocket a hefty insurance pay-out after his death.

Link to the rest at The BBC

PG suggests that, if you’re planning to commit a crime, it’s a very poor practice to write about a similar crime beforehand or afterwards.

That said, stupid people committing crimes makes life for law enforcement investigators a lot easier.

If you spend a few days as an observer in criminal court, you’ll hear a lot about what one of PG’s granddaughters calls, “bad choices.”

A Frolic of His Own

As all discerning visitors to TPV (is there any other sort of visitor to TPV ?) will recognize, PG changed things up with his postings today.

He’s included the odd poem that floated into his odd consciousness on previous odd occasions but thinks (but could be wrong) he has not made so many posts focused on poetry in a single day has he has today.

PG has had a lot of old poems spinning through his ancient head during the last few days, so he gave into his poetry obsession and included three poems, one each from Ireland, Scotland and England, today.

He hopes you enjoy them.

He expects to return to the proven TPV formula tomorrow, but he can’t guarantee not to go on another poetry frolic of his own. After all, outstanding Minnesang, Flameca, and Chastushka poets remain uncelebrated.

The Queen of Romance in AI

PG promises this is the last of today’s AI writing posts.

Prompt: Provide a fictional plot outline in Danielle Steel’s style and themes.

ChatGPT4

Title: “Shadows of Yesterday”

Plot Outline:

  1. Setting and Introduction:
    • The story unfolds in modern-day New York City.
    • Introduce the protagonist, Isabella, a young, ambitious, and successful magazine editor facing personal and professional challenges.
  2. Isabella’s Background:
    • Isabella comes from a wealthy, but emotionally distant family.
    • Flashbacks reveal her struggles with her demanding and critical mother, shaping her relentless drive for perfection.
  3. Career Challenges:
    • Isabella is up for a major promotion, but faces stiff competition and workplace politics.
    • Her professional life is a whirlwind of high-profile events, glamorous parties, and celebrity interviews, masking her inner turmoil.
  4. Romantic Entanglements:
    • Isabella’s love life is complicated, caught between a comfortable but unexciting relationship with a longtime friend and a passionate, unpredictable affair with a charismatic entrepreneur.
  5. Family Crisis:
    • A sudden family tragedy forces Isabella to reevaluate her life choices.
    • She returns home to confront unresolved issues with her family, particularly her mother.
  6. Self-Discovery and Growth:
    • Through these trials, Isabella embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
    • She begins to understand the importance of balance in life and starts to question her relentless pursuit of success.
  7. New Love Interest:
    • Amidst her personal growth, Isabella meets a new love interest – someone who challenges her perspectives and offers a more authentic and supportive relationship.
  8. Climactic Decision:
    • Faced with a pivotal career decision, Isabella must choose between her lifelong ambition and a chance at genuine happiness.
    • This decision is complicated by a surprise revelation related to her family’s past.
  9. Resolution:
    • Isabella makes a bold decision that prioritizes her personal happiness and true self over societal expectations.
    • The story concludes with her embarking on a new path, finding a balance between her career ambitions and personal life.
  10. Themes:
    • The narrative weaves through themes of self-discovery, the complexity of family dynamics, the pursuit of success, and the search for love and personal fulfillment.
    • It highlights the often difficult choices women face in balancing career, family, and romance.

This fictional outline is inspired by Danielle Steel’s style, known for her emotionally rich stories that explore family, relationships, and personal growth set against the backdrop of contemporary life. The plot combines elements of romance, drama, and self-discovery, typical of Steel’s bestselling novels

End of ChatGPT4

Since PG is not an expert on the works of Ms. Steel, he’ll leave comments on the accuracy of the plot outline to those who are.

For PG, this series of “Provide a fictional plot outline in (well-known author’s) style and themes” AI experiments is the first indication that AI might be a potentially-useful tool for authors.

It strikes him that AI might be helpful for beginning authors writing in various genres. PG checked the Romance Writers of America website and this is part of what he found:

The Basics

Romance fiction is smart, fresh and diverse. Whether you enjoy contemporary dialogue, historical settings, mystery, thrillers or any number of other themes, there’s a romance novel waiting for you!

Definition

Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. 

A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as they want as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love. 

Romance novels may have any tone or style, be set in any place or time, and have varying levels of sensuality—ranging from sweet to extremely hot. These settings and distinctions of plot create specific subgenres within romance fiction. 

The same types of expected elements can be found in all the genre fiction that floats into PG’s mind – fantasy, sci-fi, YA, horror, mysteries, etc. His is impression from his personal AI experiments is that one of the things AI can do is generate some interesting ideas for rules-based subjects.

Truth Is What a Comedian Makes of It

From Vulture:

In September, The New Yorker published a story by Clare Malone that detailed five moments from comedian and then-rumored Daily Show host candidate Hasan Minhaj’s specials where he appeared to distort facts in ways that centered himself in stories of racial discrimination or exaggerated his victimhood. In his 2017 Netflix special Homecoming King, for example, Minhaj talks about a white date dumping him the night of the prom because her parents didn’t want them in photos together. When Malone’s reporting called into question the exact timeline and whether the decision was racially motivated, Minhaj defended such decisions to her as being in service of his comedy’s “emotional truth.” The consensus, at least on social media, seemed to be that Minhaj was in the wrong. Then on October 26, Minhaj responded with a very Hasan Minhaj–style video fact-checking The New Yorker’s fact-check, in which he argued that the reporter manipulated quotes and chose not to include critical information. The New Yorker released a statement standing by their reporting, but Minhaj’s defense was enough to split public opinion on which side was more trustworthy.

The story illustrates just how invested fans and assorted onlookers have become in the idea of comedians’ credibility. This is partly attributable to the 21st-century ascent of The Daily Show and political-comedy shows that provided takes on the news, all while the hosts evinced uneasiness with being called “journalists.” A watershed moment occurred in 2004 when Jon Stewart appeared on CNN’s Crossfire and squared off against actual political pundits Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, with many viewers coming away feeling that Stewart was the only one involved who had any journalistic integrity. That same year, a survey revealed that one in five 18-to-29-year-olds got their election news from comedy programs such as The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.

By 2016, with Stewart off the air, Trump running for president, and the content industry booming, there were comedians for seemingly every demographic in America to trust as a source of news or political commentary. We’ve had shows from Stewart acolytes (including Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee), “funny” pundits on Fox News (Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters), and podcasters spanning from the Dirtbag Left (Chapo Trap House) to the Libertarian-ish Joe Rogan Extended Universe (The Tim Dillon Show and Legion of Skanks). Minhaj himself had a Netflix show, Patriot Act, that ran from 2018-2020, underscoring the argument in Malone’s New Yorker piece that comedians such as him have “become the oddball public intellectuals of our time, and, in informing the public, they assume a certain status as moral arbiters.” That perception, however, leaves Minhaj and his peers caught between opposing realities: As a host, he is an authority expected to speak truth to power and adhere to journalistic standards, and as a comic, he is an artist trying to elicit feelings from his audience on a deeper level than if he were to just provide facts and figures.

The relationship that comedians have with the truth has evolved over the last 75 years. While in the past comics were content telling stock jokes or riffing on familiar tropes (wife is bad; mother-in-law is bad; food is bad — and such small portions!), most contemporary comics agree their work should have some kernel of personal truth to it. They just have different perspectives on how to achieve that goal. That tension is something I’ve observed firsthand while interviewing upwards of 200 comedians, including Minhaj, on my podcast Good One over the past seven years. Every performer takes a different approach to stretching, reformatting, and intensifying the truth in their work. Some strive for 100 percent accuracy, going as far as to fact-check with other parties involved in their material. Others try to express their truth based simply on how they remember a given situation. A few invent stories and situations but hope to create something that feels universally true to their audience.

Most often, stand-ups start with the truth and then tinker with the particulars based on audience response. When we spoke in 2020, Bert Kreischer told me about a breakthrough he had while crafting his famous “The Machine” story: the realization that he was too attached to information that would prove the story was true. “I wanted to share things that couldn’t be faked, and that was a mistake,” he said. “I don’t think anyone really cared if it was true or not.”

. . . .

Quick summary of the history of the concept “truth in comedy.” In the 1950s and ’60s, “sick comedians” — your Shelley Bermans, your Lenny Bruces — became models of authenticity, inspired by the great postwar, existentialist-indebted look inward. “Many Americans were attempting to find their ‘real selves,’” wrote Michael J. Arlen in The New Yorker about this movement. “The new entertainers, in addition to playing off on these searches after identity, attempted to gain the goodwill and regard of their audiences by revealing — or, anyway, acknowledging — their ‘real selves.’” A decade passed and Lenny Bruce begot George Carlin and Richard Pryor, both with similar legends of eschewing their mainstream audience and clean-cut presentation in exchange for something more shaggy and “authentic.” Late-’70s Pryor modeled how various forms of truth-telling interweave with each other to earn an audience’s trust, mixing pitch-perfect behavioral impressions with dead-on observational comedy with an exploration of his inner self with openness about his faults and failures with challenging social critique. Then, reacting to the corporatization of stand-up-comedy clubs in the 1980s, ’90s comics showed their authenticity by, say it with me, “not selling out.” This resulted in, for example, Bill Hicks railing against advertising, fashioning himself a sort of maverick, saying things in interviews like, “I’ll continue to be me. As Bob Dylan said, the only way to live outside the law is to be totally honest. So I will remain lawless.” And alternative comedians in the 1990s at shows like L.A.’s UnCabaret, where everyone was required to bring completely new material and discuss things they haven’t talked about before, reacted to the rigid observational jokes and tight, late-night-ready five-minute sets of the ’80s by trying to not perform at all, espousing the mantra of “Fewer jokes; more you.”

Now, the perceived culmination of a lot of these ideals —

Louis C.K. In the story of comedy’s march to be taken more seriously, C.K. was, for nearly a decade, its avatar. And at the center of this celebration was “truth.” The Los Angeles Review of Books called him “television’s most honest man.” The New Yorker wrote in 2015, in an article about a new C.K. special, “Comedians are seen as honest populists: laughter, we think, not only feels good but teases out universal truths.” This perception didn’t come out of nowhere but was cultivated through work and actions that either were genuine or seemed to be.

Link to the rest at Vulture

PG suggests that an audience assumes that entertainers will entertain. Different groups of people and different audiences will vary in their preference for various styles of entertainment.

If truth-telling is entertaining to an audience, the truth-telling entertainer has done her/his job. If exaggerating various truths is entertaining for an audience, the entertainer has succeeded. If fabulizing is entertaining to an audience, the entertainer has succeeded in entertaining the audience.

In the 21st Century, “truth” has, unfortunately, become a malleable commodity. Personal truths are often given the same sort of respect as objective truths. PG is an old-fashioned guy who believes that objective truths are something different than “lived experience” because it’s pretty much impossible to verify that “lived experience” actually happened as opposed to being embellishment or outright lies in the furtherance of some end, another goal, good or bad, than telling the objective truth.

But PG could be wrong. Happens all the time.

How a Collective of Incarcerated Writers Published an Anthology From Prison

From Electric Lit:

It would make sense that any history would begin at Stillwater Prison, where so much of the story and mythology of prison in Minnesota also begins. It is where Cole Younger of the famous James-Younger gang did their time, and where they spent their own money to start the Prison Mirror, the world’s oldest and continuously run prison newspaper.

My first experience with a writing community came when I was still near the beginning of my sentence, decades ago, and was welcomed into the Stillwater Poetry Group (spg), the first place where I felt that art was something to be taken seriously. As part of the spg, we met with so many interesting local writers: Desdamona, Wang Ping, Ed Bok Lee, and J. Otis Powell, among others. It was exhilarating, until decision-makers in the facility realized the threat that artists and poets pose to the ideas of the captivity business. After only a year and a half, the group was disbanded. It was my first lesson in how easily good things in prison get discarded. Watching art and culture go away can create a bleak and hopeless landscape that will jade and obscure a person’s faith in creative community. It was a pattern shown to us repeatedly.

Several years later, after a long education shutdown and budget cuts, and years into Minnesota’s own mass incarceration expansion era, a new wave of incarcerated writers/thinkers/persons were emerging at Stillwater. Dr. Deborah Appleman and Dr. John Schmidt volunteered to teach courses on linguistics, literary theory, and creative writing. Out of these classes, a semblance of a new writer’s community was created and a book was published. Letters to a Young Man and Other Writings offered us both the gratification of seeing our words in print and a renewed sense of purpose. Then, collectively, we waited, just as before, for the facility to let the professors back in to cultivate our new community. Again, we were reminded of how good things in these places are rarely allowed to come back once they’ve left.

During those early classes I formed a friendship with Chris Cabrera, a genius young artist with whom I shared similar lofty aspirations for both our work and our lives. We spent hours conversing and arguing over the creative and intellectual visions we had. Cabrera would shout these big, abstract rhetorical questions at me, one after another, as we tried to figure out what so many more years as artists in prison would look like without fundamental change. We argued whether art was enough to free us, and to what extent we might go to make our dreams reality—or if it would even make a difference in a system that had pretty much always disregarded our work and our humanity. In the end, I think we agreed that neither of us wanted to disappear without the chance for our work to be realized, or at least the chance for it to be recognized and embraced by the people about whom we cared most.

Chris envisioned an ongoing writing program facilitated mostly by a collective of incarcerated writers. Ideally, it would harness resources so that it could offer writing classes and opportunities throughout a writer’s incarceration. I thought it was a great idea, but our experiences with administration and abandonment in the past made me suspicious of programming in these places. I wanted to publish and to have a career, even if it had to be behind these walls. I was working on a book project and was constantly worried something administrative would mess it up. We both argued that a collective couldn’t work unless we were ultimately reconnected to the greater, free-world literary community to which we had very little introduction. It was lofty thinking for guys who had sparse writing credits between them, and who really had no formal writing instruction outside an early creative writing course. Our experiences with Dr. Appleman, though, had empowered much of our thinking. Why not think big? Another writer from our community and I had just won the Pen Prison Writing Awards. Why shouldn’t we believe our work and our community had a right to be cultivated?

It was from these conversations that the Stillwater Writers’ Collective (swc) was born, out of an agreement that our power was as a community, and a realization that if we didn’t support each other, who would? We also realized that it was hard to get our peers, even when they are threatened, to write when there aren’t instructors to read and validate their work. Historically, there just hadn’t been enough support or success in our prison system to warrant that kind of confidence.

The swc was also created because our small cohort agreed that, at some point, someone or something was going to come along with opportunities that we had been waiting for throughout the long stretches of our collective incarcerations. There was agreement that as a community we would need to be ready so that the blessing we felt was supposed to be ours wouldn’t get passed along to somebody else. We believed it would be a crime for the story of writing in the Minnesota state prison system to be told, or written, without us. Just as the foundations of these old structures had been laid by the hands of the imprisoned, we were trying to lay a new literary and intellectual foundation. We were fortunate to have the support we needed from our then-education director, who introduced Jen Bowen and Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (mpww) to us, and whose own vision made for an ideal partnership for the community at Stillwater, and throughout the state, to grow into what it has.

American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion is the culmination of a special partnership between Coffee House Press and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop with an editorial board starting with twelve writers from the prisoner-created collectives of the Minnesota Correctional Facilities at Stillwater, Faribault, and Moose Lake.

For the past decade, mpww has provided a first-of-its-kind ongoing writing program within Minnesota state prisons. What started from a single creative writing course taught by the organization’s founder, Jen Bowen, has expanded from one facility to every prison in the state. The program offers a wide range of writing classes at all levels of the learning spectrum, as well as an extensive mentorship program. The workshop has become a model admired by potential prison writing programs across the country.

Before mpww, there was already a burgeoning community of talented, but mostly unrecognized, artists and writers incarcerated in the state of Minnesota. Mpww’s presence offered opportunities and resources to meet and take instruction from the larger literary community in the state, helping us to grow into a stronger community and to develop as individual writers. The relationship between mpww and the incarcerated writing community has produced numerous awards and countless publishing credits for many of the workshop’s students, as well as for many of the incredible writers that make up the mpww instructor staff and mentor program.

The twelve members of this book’s editorial staff are a small group of the much larger collectives that have grown up in our state, and throughout the country, in the sense that writers and artists always find each other in these kinds of spaces. There are creation stories that connect to make this community possible.

Most of us on the editorial board of this project recognize how exceptional it is to have the opportunities mpww provides. It affords us agency in our work that most incarcerated writing communities in the country do not share. Writing communities have and do exist in other prison systems that don’t have the same kind of programming infrastructure that we have in Minnesota. Ever since human beings began using confinement as a means to control other human beings, there have been writers imprisoned. Writers have risked their safety and their futures to find ways to sneak their words out into the world. The written word matters. Just as likely—and for just as long—writing and intellectual communities have existed in those spaces. Just like we did, artists will always find each other. It’s like a law of nature—if you put a thousand people in a single space, the artists, even with their own divergent energies, will gravitate toward each other.

Time in the life of a writer, or a prisoner, is an emergency. Incarcerated writing communities provide for us what we can only assume they offer to non-incarcerated writing communities: peer support, friend- ship, competition, rivalry, and shared stakes in the success of their members. These communities offer reminders of time and the emergencies time represents. Classes get canceled and cut. In 2005, our whole education department shut down for months and every computer in the joint was wiped and scoured. Stories, essays, poetry, and even an anthology of our work disappeared from the universe. There are lockdowns, seizures of materials, intentionally, and sometimes collaterally. There are surprise transfers that leave us without computer access, and we must figure out how to keep the things we need most. We, who are working hard to mend some of the wounds in the social and familial fabric of our lives, live with a stopwatch to create evidence that will show something redemptive within us.

I published my first memoir, This Is Where I Am, after 17 years in prison with the support of my small but unified family unit. Less than a year later, my mom passed away. She was my last living blood relative. Deadlines, story and book completions fulfill the need to have whole pieces of writing that can speak for the incomplete parts of our lives and families. They are our main emergency.

We build community because we can’t expect, demand, or control the machinations of the captivity business. Likewise, we can’t be sure that the politics of confinement will provide the spiritual and artistic resources we need to transcend our encagements. These collectives are our expression of both community and art. They provide our agency. The carceral state will not feed the kind of hunger an artist in these kinds of places experiences. So, we find ways to feed each other. There is a ceiling to the kinds of programming corrections provides, and this includes education. A member of the collective (and the editorial board) connected me with the right people to be able to finish my bachelor’s in English when the prison system was unable to help me. Most of the computer labs in the system were originally proposed, and in many cases set up, by members of our community who knew their value. There is a constant nourishing in the books and magazines we pass around. There are the friendships—the several successions where one member will encourage the work of a newer writer to keep revising, because they see the genuine value, and then, later, they see these stories win awards or find publication in reputable journals. There are also the rivalries, so strong and ingrained into the history of collectives. They have driven some to become the writers they were never sure they were supposed to become. We join forces because individually we are writers and poets and artists, but collectively we are power and possibility and refutation of the hypocrisy of the carceral complex.

Does your life matter? Does your art matter? I hope so. I know that I could never rely on an ever-constricting prison system at a pivot point of mass incarceration to answer these questions for me.

There is great significance to a panel of incarcerated writers editing an anthology on the precarious class in 2023. We, the editors, are the same population who have been tweaking and revising our work so that our voices might gain acceptance into the journals and anthologies we’ve hoped would validate our efforts. We are trying to make greater sense of our place in the larger, broader world. It matters that this is a volume edited by the imprisoned, because the history of class hasn’t always been written by the powerful, but they have always been its editors. We are a group of human beings who sought out community to consolidate the power of our own work; we, the incarcerated, are editing this most recent chapter on class. As a group, we have come to understand, or have tried to understand, power and class distinctions through the ways we have, as an incarcerated community, categorized and divided ourselves. Incarceration is the extension of the same mechanisms of power and marginalization that Black, brown, queer, and impoverished human beings have been manipulated and oppressed by through the institutions of our society. We are the depository of that pipeline.

Just as the largest of corporations believed that they could drop sewage into nearby rivers, or bury our human footprint in a land-fill or in a plastic swirl in the oceans, without the earth spitting its truth back at all of us, we dispose of human problems into the chasm of the penal system without confronting the socioeconomic circumstances that created the problems in the first place. The power dimensions that are at once manipulative, deceptive, and plain old mean are also cowardly and speak to the fragility of the human place in the eco-system. We have felt for so long—and our social and economic systems support the belief—that human beings must control each other to control the world.

As a broader, new American society in the wake of a global pandemic, we’ve now felt the soft incarceration of being sequestered, a fear of being trapped, and a fear of catching invisible sickness with uncertain consequences. The trapped analogy is obvious. The pathologies in all forms—viral, bacterial, psycho-sociological—well, we’ve been passing them back and forth unknowingly for generations until we are too sick to know any better. We watched, from inside and out, as a knee pushed on a neck and the stop-clock-emergency-of-time ran out, and then, like so often in our history, we have watched the fire and the rage. We bite down because we know that the violence of taking a person’s time and all their hope can’t be represented in a short video clip on tv, or even elicit the flash or rage such violent taking should.

During the course of this project, our editorial board went through two cohorts—the first, pre-pandemic, totaled twelve individual editors in three separate correctional facilities while the second consisted of a much smaller concentration of editors. Covid-19 did just what time in these places does—change and complicate things further. There were expected and unexpected transfers, incongruent security priorities and lockdowns that made it impossible for our cohorts to meet, so we had to depend on individual institutions to relay memos and manuscripts. Institutions have never been known for an ability to make adjustments to benefit the humanity of their inhabitants. In the pandemic, prisons reverted to the answer they knew best—tightened security. Our project went from finding its purpose and personality to frozen indefinitely—and that continued well beyond when the rest of the world started to open and venture out again. Significant effort was made to keep up momentum, but it was extremely difficult to keep twelve humans, all separated in different carceral compartments, connected to each other and to a changing outside world. When we did come back to this work, we were without members from both cohorts and access to the entire group from Stillwater was cut off. We were left with the cohort from Faribault, with participation from a couple of transferred editors in an entirely different facility in Moose Lake. And by that time, the entire world had transformed. Editing a book about class looked, felt, and tasted exponentially different.

. . . .

In so many ways, prisons are secrets hidden from the rest of the world. Society has always hidden its most disturbing transgressions. Yet, culture still matters in these hidden spaces. We, the incarcerated, are the caretakers of it. If a prison is old enough, it remembers the prisoners that quarried the granite for its walls, or laid the bricks for its cell blocks that we have spent a century inhabiting. The incarcerated have always been more expendable than the buildings that house us, but our ideas echo long after we have left our initials scratched into old slabs of inmate-laid concrete, or scribbled on the walls of holding tanks. The state may maintain the institutions, but we nurture the culture, always—we, the artists, students, musicians, and writers. Prison writing communities are proof of a force stronger than single unread poems or stories. They are proof that there are more of us coming!

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG hasn’t had a client charged with or convicted of a crime for a very long time nor has he had any reason to visit a client in jail or prison. He is thankful because these were very difficult cases for him to deal with.

All of PG’s criminal clients had committed a crime of one sort or another. While there have been a number of cases in which a miscarriage of justice has occurred and an innocent person has been punished as a criminal for a crime he/she did not commit, such cases represent a vanishingly small percentage of the total number of people charged with a criminal offense.

Most people charged with a crime have done something wrong. There might be compelling extenuating circumstances that provide an excuse for the individual’s criminal acts. Or the person may have been charged with a crime more serious than would be justified by her/his actual behavior.

Part of the reason criminal cases were almost always difficult for PG to deal with is that every person charged with a crime has parents, children, spouses and/or friends who are devastated by the criminal charges that have been brought against someone they care about deeply. Bad people may hang around other bad people most of the time, but PG never handled a criminal case where there were not some good and innocent family members who were deeply saddened by the criminal charges.

If the loved one is incarcerated for an extended period of time, the heartache often lasts for an extended period of time.

Reading the OP brought to mind another book with a similar theme.

Flare-ups

While he was attending college, PG was involved in a motorcycle meets automobile accident. He was the motorcycle rider and the rider always ends up on the losing side in that sort of encounter.

On another occasion, PG was on his way to a college football game as a passenger in a car that was rear-ended by another.

Most of the time these days, neither of these injuries is painful. However, every once in a while, one or both bring back memories of some of his less enjoyable college days.

Today is one of those flare-up days.

PG is not in agony, but he is anxious to spend a lot of time lying down, so he won’t be posting on anything else today.

The Emotional (And Financial) Toll of Book Bans: Book Censorship News

From Book Riot:

USA Today posted a data visualization of the state of banned books in the country for Banned Books Week. If you’ve been following censorship news, none of it will come as a surprise, but seeing just how much challenges increased from 2019 to 2021 is staggering.

. . . .

Booksellers in Texas are in an uncomfortable limbo with House Bill 900, which would — among other things — require vendors to rate every single title ever sold to a public school for sexual content and submit those ratings to the government. Texas booksellers, alongside other groups, have challenged the bill. It is hard to see how it would be physically possible for any bookstore to uphold, given the number of titles they stock, even setting aside that ratings are up to interpretation and would vary wildly from vendor to vendor.

A judge’s order blocked the law, but an administrative stay has overruled that, meaning HB 900 is still in effect — despite a judge ruling it unconstitutional. Federal judge Alan D. Albright called it a “web of unconstitutionally vague requirements.” He went on,

“The government has the power to restrict the ability of its school district as to which books it may purchase. The exercise of these powers must, of course, comply with the requirements of the constitution, but these are powers that should be exercised by the state directly, not by compelling third parties to perform it or risk losing any opportunity to engage in commerce with the school districts.”

This administrative stay, which is usually used as a temporary measure to uphold the status quo, applies indefinitely, meaning booksellers have no idea when it will be overturned.

. . . .

Librarians Are Leaving the Profession Over Stress, Threats, and Accusations

In December 2022, Rockwell Falls, NY, youth services director Amanda Hoffman let the library board know that they were planning to do a Drag Story Hour in April. Bringing it up to the board wasn’t a requirement, but she decided to give them a heads up, knowing there would be some backlash. They were excited about the event.

By the time April came around, though, the board claimed they had been “in the dark” about the Drag Story Hour — despite meeting minutes showing Hoffman informed them. The public response was so vitriolic that the event was canceled, but that wasn’t enough. It started a cascade of criticism and investigations into the library. Hoffman was accused of being a pedophile and a child molester. “I had someone pray for me over the phone for Satan to leave my body,” she shared with The Post Star. She got a call from an FBI agent saying there had been a bomb threat against the library.

As Hoffman faced more and more harassment at work — on Facebook, over the phone, and in person — she begged the library board, the community, and even the police for help, but none came. Eventually, the stress manifested into extreme vertigo that landed Hoffman in the hospital.

Today, the library is temporarily shuttered, and Hoffman has resigned.

This is just one example of what librarians are being expected to put up with right now. The job was already demanding and underpaid, especially considering that it requires a Master’s degree. Now, they’re expected to also endure bomb threats and accusations of pedophilia. It’s untenable.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

PG is increasingly more dismayed and disgusted by the state of civil speech in the United States (he can’t speak for other nations on this subject.)

In the United States, public schools are financed through local and state taxes plus some federal funding (usually around 8-10% of a typical public school’s budget).

Public funding brings with it public oversight, typically in the form of a local school board picked in local elections (although it’s not unusual for school boards in smaller communities to run unopposed). This is one of the most basic public offices in most parts of the US and one that has a significant impact on local citizens with school-age children.

Typically, the school board selects a Superintendent of Public Schools, who hires Principals as the on-location chief executive of a given public school. Principals typically hire school teachers for their schools.

In some suburban communities, school board service is sometimes used as a springboard to other elected offices, mayor, city council, etc.

Traditionally, in most communities, there was very little intense political disagreement about the operation of public schools. This was certainly the case in the small public schools PG attended in ancient times.

Obviously, as the OP indicates, in some places, the operation of public schools has been affected by larger political and social schisms in the populace.

PG suspects that sex has always been a preoccupation for a significant number of teenage school students. Preoccupation accompanies the wide range of physical changes that characterize this age group. Social controls are the main ways teen-age hormones are kept under societal norms, backed by laws setting the bounds of sexual relations between teenagers.

Same-sex attraction has also been a constant in the lives of some teenagers. Traditionally, social norms prohibited any expression of this attraction for a teen-age student, backed by juvenile court sanctions.

Class discussion, books, and school lessons regarding same-sex attraction was traditionally so out-of-bounds that it was almost never mentioned. This is characteristic of the world in which most of today’s parents grew up in.

PG isn’t certain how the expectation of teachers, trained in many of today’s colleges and universities that consenting adulthood (or near adulthood) is the only reasonable constraint on sexual behavior between individuals will comfortably fit with the concerns of many of today’s parents.

Master Pointer is Improving

PG tried to move his boxcutter gash along its healing path a little too quickly this morning and ended up dripping blood in several places before he realized what was going on. He didn’t feel a thing.

(No permanent blood spots, however, for those who worry about that sort of thing. Mrs. PG is one of your compatriots in this category of spousal/friend/main-squeeze concerns.)

So, PG reapplied a large contingent of bandaids and cinched them very tightly. No more blood escaped for several hours.

PG just removed his gang of bandaids and replaced them with a single bandaid that allows PG to actually feel the keys on his keyboard to some extent with his right index finger. He’s not going to win any speed-typing contests, but he’s back-spacing a lot less.

During this blood-finger interlude, PG has distilled a deep truth – Don’t take your fingers for granted.

You may wish to consider your own digits during a moment of silence to honor and thank them for all their wonderful work and extend a wish that they will continue to be ten healthy and busy little beavers when you call on them to do their best.

Or not.

Missing in Action

PG was careless with a boxcutter a few minutes ago and discovered he has excellent circulation at the tip of his right index finger.

It has required two layers of Bandaids to prevent PG from dripping here and there. Touch-typing with a clump of bandages on the tip of “Pointer” is more than a bit frustrating.

(PG has used at least a week’s worth of back-spaces for this message.)

Therefore, PG has declared Pointer and his squad to be missing in action for today.

Why Bookstores Can’t Avoid Politics

From Publishers Weekly:

The most glaring challenge to access to books today stems from attacks on school and public libraries by right-wing politicians and activists. In Texas, lawmakers are trying to regulate how books are sold to schools. Libraries frequently receive bomb threats, including in a recent spate in the Chicago area. These are brazen and dangerous attacks on our democracy as well as fundamental challenges to bookstores—but they’re not the only challenge that books and booksellers face.

Almost every bookseller has heard some version of “$18 for a paperback! Books are so expensive!” Given the thousands of hours of skilled labor a book requires, $18 really should be considered cheap. But $18 is still too much for many people. Once they’ve paid their rent, health insurance premiums, student loans, car loans, phone bills, and other utility bills, and fed and clothed their families, there isn’t enough left to buy the books they want. Readers who should be booksellers’ customers aren’t.

Today, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. The minimum wage in 1968, when adjusted for inflation, would have been worth $12 per hour today. According to data from the Federal Reserve and Realtime Inequality, if the federal minimum wage were to have grown with increases in productivity since 1968, it would’ve been $21.50 in 2020. Since 1980, the top 1% has seen its income grow 235.3%, while the bottom 50% has only seen an increase of 29.8%. We talk about the erosion of the American middle class in many other contexts, but I rarely see it discussed in terms of the ways in which it impacts small businesses in a consumer-spending-driven economy.

Those same expenses that eat into customers’ discretionary spending strain bookstore owners, too. We pay for health insurance for our employees, dramatically reducing our potential wages. We get squeezed on rent; too often we are forced to move from successful locations because landlords want more money. These economic conditions aren’t natural phenomena. Low wages and exorbitant healthcare, housing, and education costs are the result of policy decisions made to support some populations at the expense of others. And though none of those policies target bookstores, they still hit us.

My book, The Art of Libromancy, focuses on the changes booksellers can make to stores that will impact the publishing industry and the wider world. But booksellers also need to look at the challenges facing all small businesses and all Americans, and consider techniques for change that may have made us uncomfortable in the past. The American Booksellers Association has used litigation in the past, notably when it sued publishers and Barnes & Noble over unfair discounts; the shop local movement seeks to change both the culture of individual communities and influence municipal, state, and federal policy; and the ABA and many booksellers engage in antitrust and anti-censorship advocacy. These political actions have a direct focus on bookstores. But, taking a larger view, can we really argue that the collapse of the American middle class only indirectly affects our industry?

. . . .

That confronting these specific challenges overlaps with other political conflicts over social and economic justice shouldn’t make us fear accusations of partisanship. Rather we should look at is as an opportunity for solidarity and community with those who have been fighting these battles for decades.

Too many people in this country can’t afford the goods and services—and books—they want because of policies that transfer wealth from the working class to the rich and powerful. As much as booksellers may want to remain nonpartisan, we have to recognize that many of the challenges our stores face are political and, at least today, partisan. I believe if bookstore owners focus on community building and cultivating long-term booksellers, we can run profitable bookstores that pay livable wages—even if we are hamstrung by these challenges. But imagine if we weren’t.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

“My book, The Art of Libromancy, focuses on the changes booksellers can make to stores that will impact the publishing industry and the wider world.”

When PG goes into a physical bookstore, the last thing he wants to be confronted with is politics. If a bookstore couldn’t avoid politics, PG would head out the door and order a book from Amazon.

PG notes that the author of the OP is the co-owner of a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the author is correct that the federal minimum hourly wage is $7.25 per hour, Massachusetts has set a state minimum wage of $15.00 per hour and PG hopes that the employees of his bookstore are paid that amount.

The Art of Libromancy is published by Biblioasis, “a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario, committed to publishing the best poetry, fiction and non-fiction in beautifully crafted editions.”

From the Biblioasis website:

If books are important to you because you’re a reader or a writer, then how books are sold should be important to you as well. If it matters to you that your vegetables are organic, your clothes made without child labor, your beer brewed without a culture of misogyny, then it should matter how books are made and sold to you.

For the record, although Biblioasis and The Art of Libromancy don’t appear to be PG’s cup of tea, he thinks child labor and misogyny are bad things.

He’s happy to have fresh vegetables, regardless of how they’re raised or fertilized.

However, if you’re worried about the welfare of those who aren’t as wealthy as many others in society, you should understand that organic produce costs substantially more to raise and purchase than produce raised with fertilizer and harvested mechanically.

Using the most efficient means of cultivating food grains, America and Canada are able to raise far more food than their populations can eat. Every year, each nation exports a huge amount of food to the rest of the world at very low prices.

If you would like a bit more Mom and apple pie, per research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “family farms remain a key part of U.S. agriculture, making up 98% of all farms and providing 88% of production.”

PG grew up on family farms and ranches and drank milk from various dairy cows milked mostly by his father but also by PG on occasion. PG helped his family raise beef and dairy cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens in varying quantities until he left home to attend college.

PG has been chased by upset cattle and mother pigs under a wide range of circumstances and shoveled (and occasionally slipped and fallen onto) a lot of nasty-smelling manure on more occasions than he can remember.

After such adventures, his mother almost always made younger PG leave his boots outside then strip to his underwear in the basement or mud room, where he rinsed his dirty clothing in a large basement sink used for dealing with those sorts of adventures. Thereafter, he put his clothes into a washing machine with a little extra soap to clean them up for their next outdoor adventure.

No, This is Not The Amazon Voice

PG almost never posts multiple items about the same company on a single day.

However, today, Zon was generating huge press coverage on a variety of fronts.

This isn’t anything more than a one-day-wonder, so TPV will not become All Amazon, All the Time.

The Blog Today

PG was heavily occupied by a variety of different technical issues that were more difficult for PG to solve than they should have been.

Then, he was reminded of Gay Talese, a favorite author of a much younger PG. So, he downloaded one of Talese’s best from Zon and will do some reading.

PG hopes you enjoy the quotes. El Blogo will look more familiar tomorrow.

OpenAI disputes authors’ claims that every ChatGPT response is a derivative work

From Ars Technica:

This week, OpenAI finally responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors—including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey—who earlier this summer alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on pirated copies of their books.

In OpenAI’s motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits), the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at “a later stage of the case.”

The authors’ other claims—alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment—need to be “trimmed” from the lawsuits “so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability,” OpenAI argued.

OpenAI claimed that the authors “misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”

According to OpenAI, even if the authors’ books were a “tiny part” of ChatGPT’s massive data set, “the use of copyrighted materials by innovators in transformative ways does not violate copyright.” Unlike plagiarists who seek to directly profit off distributing copyrighted materials, OpenAI argued that its goal was “to teach its models to derive the rules underlying human language” to do things like help people “save time at work,” “make daily life easier,” or simply entertain themselves by typing prompts into ChatGPT.

The purpose of copyright law, OpenAI argued, is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” by protecting the way authors express ideas, but “not the underlying idea itself, facts embodied within the author’s articulated message, or other building blocks of creative,” which are arguably the elements of authors’ works that would be useful to ChatGPT’s training model. Citing a notable copyright case involving Google Books, OpenAI reminded the court that “while an author may register a copyright in her book, the ‘statistical information’ pertaining to ‘word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers’ in that book are beyond the scope of copyright protection.”

“Under the resulting judicial precedent, it is not an infringement to create ‘wholesale cop[ies] of [a work] as a preliminary step’ to develop a new, non-infringing product, even if the new product competes with the original,” OpenAI wrote.

In particular, OpenAI hopes to convince the court that the authors’ vicarious copyright infringement claim—which alleges that every ChatGPT output represents a derivative work, “regardless of whether there are any similarities between the output and the training works”— is an “erroneous legal conclusion.”

The company’s motion to dismiss cited “a simple response to a question (e.g., ‘Yes’),” or responding with “the name of the President of the United States” or with “a paragraph describing the plot, themes, and significance of Homer’s The Iliad” as examples of why every single ChatGPT output cannot seriously be considered a derivative work under authors’ “legally infirm” theory.

“That is not how copyright law works,” OpenAI argued, while claiming that any ChatGPT outputs that do connect to authors’ works are similar to “book reports or reviews.”

Link to the rest at Ars Technica

As PG has mentioned previously, he believes that using a relatively small amount of material protected by copyright along with far larger amounts of material not subject to copyright protection for the purpose of training an AI and not for the purpose of making copies of the copyrighted material qualifies as fair use.

Even absent fair use, such use is not a violation of copyright protection because the AI is not making copies of copyrighted materials.

PG has mentioned other analogies, but one that popped into his mind on this occasion is an author who reads hundreds of romance novels for the purpose of learning how to write a romance novel and then writes a romance novel using tropes and techniques that many other romance authors have used before.

From Wikipedia:

Precursors of the modern popular love-romance can also be found in the sentimental novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson, published in 1740. Pamela was the first popular novel to be based on a courtship as told from the perspective of the heroine. Unlike many of the novels of the time, Pamela had a happy ending.

. . . .

Women will pick up a romance novel knowing what to expect, and this foreknowledge of the reader is very important. When the hero and heroine meet and fall in love, maybe they don’t know they’re in love but the reader does. Then a conflict will draw them apart, but you know in the end they’ll be back together, and preferably married or planning to be by page 192.

Joan Schulhafer of Pocket Books, 1982

A great many of the most financially successful authors PG knows are romance authors.

Increasing Busyness Ahead

PG has previously mentioned that he and Mrs. PG have been preparing to down-size from the current location of Casa PG into a svelte and smaller Casita PG.

This has been a much more involving task than PG ever imagined. For example, the PG’s have filled three large commercial dumpsters (the type that completely block the driveway when a large truck delivers them (empty) to be hauled back back up on another large truck with a winch, cable and hook a few days later after PG has filled said dumpster by lugging and tossing all sorts of bulky and forgotten items discovered in the dark and hidden reaches of Casa PG).

If PG never hears the sound of another large winch make a heavy dumpster scrape and squeek during loading, he will die a happy man.

PG is also the renter of a large storage locker (Rental Locker PG) which he has partially filled with lots of cardboard boxes containing items that won’t fit into Casita PG. PG fervently hopes to never unlock the large padlock securing Rental Locker PG once he places the final items in it tomorrow. His heirs have padlock keys and can do with them what they will whenever they will.

PG is posting this on Sunday evening, nearly surrounded by large brown U-Haul cardboard boxes. The last rush to pack, locker or dump will occur tomorrow, Monday. The movers arrive bright and early on Tuesday, to deliver a herd of U-Haul boxes to Casita PG, which, fortunately, is not far away.

PG cannot rule out the necessity of taking some more cardboard boxes to Rental Locker PG on Tuesday, but expects to be back in the blogging biz on Wednesday. He doesn’t anticipate being any wiser next Wednesday, but does expect to enjoy a feeling of great relief.

A US Court Temporarily Blocks a Library and Bookstore Law

From Publishing Perspectives:

This weekend, Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers prepared a message for the association’s membership, writing, “I am very pleased to report that District Court Judge Timothy Brooks has granted preliminary injunctions today in Arkansas on both of AAP’s challenges to Act 372, pending final resolution on the merits.”

Arkansas’ Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, had signed the act into law in March, making it in the opinion of many one of the United States’ most severe measures among waves of US book-banning efforts. This law, which was set to go into effect Tuesday (August 1) would, as Pallante describes it, “subject librarians and bookstore owners to criminal prosecution for making content deemed inappropriate (by the state) available to minors, including older minors.”

So repugnant was the thought of criminalizing librarians’ and booksellers’ work that on June 2, the association announced that it was part of a coalition taking Arkansas to court. The association characterizes banning access to various books as a violation of the First Amendment rights of Arkansas’ reading citizens.

You’ll hear this court action referred to as injunctions, plural, and what that refers to is the bench’s temporary blockage of two parts of Act 371. As the AAP describes these two sections, “One component made it a crime for libraries, booksellers, and any brick-and-mortar establishment to display or make available works that might be harmful to minors. This would have required libraries and booksellers to limit all readers to books appropriate for minors or exclude all minor readers from their premises.

“The second provision made it possible for any person in Arkansas to demand the removal of a book the person deemed inappropriate, limiting readers to one person’s opinion about what books should be in the library, and it would have permitted or encouraged review boards to engage in viewpoint- and content-based discrimination.”

. . . .

What has resulted from the court’s Saturday grant is not only a stay against the law going into effect on schedule but also an extensive and what seems to be a deeply felt 49-page document from Judge Brooks.

At a couple of headers, he includes literary quotes, such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 lines, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running
about with lit matches.”

In one of his most compelling passages, Judge Brooks writes:

“For more than a century, librarians have curated the collections of public libraries to serve diverse viewpoints, helped high school students with their term papers, made recommendations to book clubs, tracked down obscure books for those devoted to obscure pastimes, and mesmerized roomfuls of children with animated storytelling. So, the passage of Act 372 prompts a few simple, yet unanswered questions.

“For example: What has happened in Arkansas to cause its communities to lose faith and confidence in their local librarians? What is it that prompted the general assembly’s newfound suspicion? And why has the state found it necessary to target librarians for criminal prosecution?

“To better understand the present moment and why these questions have surfaced, we must first understand the history, purpose, and function of public libraries in America.”

The Arkansas Library Association was part of the coalition of plaintiffs involved in the effort to stop Arkansas’ Act 372, as was the Central Arkansas Library system; the Freedom to Read Foundation; Pearl’s Books; WordsWorth Books; and the now-familiar core four national organizations which include AAP, the American Booksellers Association; the Authors Guild; and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG says the Arkansas law was stupid in that it would almost certainly result in litigation that the state would lose. Although PG tends to be on the conservative side of some issues, he regards the law as a form of virtue signaling by the legislators who voted for it.

Local grassroots actions to engage librarians in discussions about how they handle books likely to offend some large portion of the local community is a much better approach in PG’s extraordinarily insightful opinion. Parents going to the library with their children would be the best approach to making certain the children didn’t cross any parental lines in their reading material.

That said, once children reach a certain age if they want to read a book, they’ll do so regardless of parental wishes or diligent supervision. This has been a pattern of behavior that has existed since the creation of libraries and probably before that in some other form.

Somehow, the world has continued and virtuous adults have continued to appear on a regular basis.

Gaps in blogging

As PG has mentioned too often, he and Mrs. PG are in the process of downsizing their possessions in preparation for a move from Casa PG to Casita PG.

This process has involved PG moving a great many things around and Mrs. PG boxing some of them up and sending PG to a charitable institution with extra stuff in boxes that others might be able to use.

It has also involved the rental of storage space for things PG (mostly) can’t decide if he’s ready to dispose of or not. PG has been making 1-2 trips per day lugging boxes full of stuff of various weights to the storage unit to be considered for chucking, gifting or donating in the future.

PG is certain this process could be streamlined for more efficiency but hasn’t figured out how to do this. The digital world is much easier for PG to deal with than meatspace.

PG can perform his various digital activities from his keyboard with great speed. However, he hasn’t figured out how to digitize a chair or a bed or a box of tools he thinks he might need in the future for some annoyingly non-digital task.

Not Dead Yet

PG apologizes for his failure to post yesterday without advance warning.

As he has mentioned, the PG’s are in the process of downsizing in preparation for a move to more cozy surroundings in less than a month. (Downsizing = They are currently filling dumpster #4.)

Yesterday PG was engaged in the not-inconsiderable task of dismantling his usual computer setup. It’s amazing how many little items have been hiding in dusty places PG didn’t realize existed behind various and sundry pieces of hardware. The mother of all computers has been broken down into its constituent parts, ready to be boxed.

PG is now working from a laptop. He’s also dealing with the lack of lots of little apps, scripts and programs he has used since time immemorial that were on his desktop setup and aren’t available on the baby computer.

Despite the fact that he moved the keyboard and mouse from his usual setup, PG feels like he’s blogging in rubber waders half-filled with swamp water.

The biggest change is the lack of three good-sized monitors that allow him to drop things from the middle monitor to one on one side or the other and bring them back later without conscious thought.

PG understands these are first-world problems and he is entitled to no sympathy from anyone, so commiserations are not necessary in the comments (but he won’t mind if they show up).

Inside the Secretive Russian Security Force That Targets Americans

From The Wall Street Journal:

For years, a small group of American officials watched with mounting concern as a clandestine unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service covertly tracked high-profile Americans in the country, broke into their rooms to plant recording devices, recruited informants from the U.S. Embassy’s clerical staff and sent young women to coax Marines posted to Moscow to spill secrets. 

On March 29, that unit, the Department for Counterintelligence Operations, or DKRO, led the arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, according to U.S. and other Western diplomats, intelligence officers and former Russian operatives. DKRO, which is virtually unknown outside a small circle of Russia specialists and intelligence officers, also helped detain two other Americans in Russia, former Marines Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, these people said.

The secretive group is believed by these officials to be responsible for a string of strange incidents that blurred the lines between spycraft and harassment, including the mysterious death of a U.S. diplomat’s dog, the trailing of an ambassador’s young children and flat tires on embassy vehicles. 

The DKRO’s role in the detention of at least three Americans, which hasn’t been previously reported, shows its importance to Russia under Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who led the Federal Security Service, or FSB, before rising to the presidency. The unit intensified its operations in recent years as the conflict between Moscow and Washington worsened. 

As with most clandestine activity carried out by covert operatives, it is impossible to know for certain whether DKRO is behind every such incident. The unit makes no public statements. But officials from the U.S. and its closest allies said that DKRO frequently wants its targets to know their homes are being monitored and their movements followed, and that its operatives regularly leave a calling card: a burnt cigarette on a toilet seat. They also have left feces in unflushed toilets at diplomats’ homes and in the suitcase of a senior official visiting from Washington, these people said.

The DKRO is the counterintelligence arm of the FSB responsible for monitoring foreigners in Russia, with its first section, or DKRO-1, the subdivision responsible for Americans and Canadians.

“The DKRO never misses an opportunity if it presents itself against the U.S., the main enemy,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security analyst who has spent years studying the unit. “They are the crème-de-la-crème of the FSB.”

. . . .

This article is based on dozens of interviews with senior diplomats and security officials in Europe and the U.S., Americans previously jailed in Russia and their families, and independent Russian journalists and security analysts who have fled the country. Information also was drawn from public court proceedings and leaked DKRO memos, which were authenticated by former Russian intelligence officers and their Western counterparts. Gershkovich’s lawyers in Russia declined to comment.

“They’re very, very smart on the America target. They’ve been doing this a long time. They know us extremely well,” said Dan Hoffman, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Moscow, about DKRO. “They do their job extremely well, they’re ruthless about doing their job, and they’re not constrained by any resources.”

. . . .

On March 29, DKRO officers led an operation, hailed by the FSB as a success, that made Gershkovich, 31 years old, the first American reporter held on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War, according to current and former officials and intelligence officers in the U.S. and its closest allies, as well as a former Russian intelligence officer familiar with the situation.

The Journal has vehemently denied the charge. The Biden administration has said that Gershkovich, who was detained during a reporting trip and was accredited to work as a journalist by Russia’s foreign ministry, has been “wrongfully detained.” Friday is his 100th day in captivity.

Putin received video briefings before and after the arrest from Vladislav Menshchikov, head of the FSB’s counterintelligence service, which oversees DKRO, according to Western officials and a former Russian security officer. During the meeting, Putin asked for details about the operation to detain Gershkovich.

DKRO also led the operation to arrest Whelan, in what U.S. officials, the former Marine’s lawyers and his family have said was an entrapment ploy involving a thumb-drive. The U.S. also considers him wrongfully detained.

When Moscow police held Reed, another former Marine, after a drunken night with friends, then claimed he had assaulted a policeman, officers from DKRO took over the case, according to the U.S. officials and Reed. Reed denied the assault and has said Russian law enforcement provided no credible evidence it had taken place. He was given a nine-year sentence, and eventually swapped for a Russian pilot in U.S. custody.

.S. officials blame DKRO for cutting the power to the residence of current U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy the night after her first meeting with Russian officials in January, and for trailing an embassy official’s car with a low-flying helicopter. U.S. diplomats routinely come home to find bookcases shifted around and jewelry missing, for which they have blamed DKRO officers.

More recently, a Russian drone followed a diplomat’s wife as she drove back to the embassy, unaware that the roof of her car had been defaced with tape in the shape of the letter Z, a Russian pro-war symbol. U.S. officials say they believe the group was behind that. U.S. officials strongly believe that the Russian police posted around Washington’s embassy in Moscow are DKRO officers in disguise.

American diplomats posted to Russia receive special training to avoid DKRO and other officers from the FSB and are given a set of guidelines informally known as “Moscow Rules.” It was updated recently to reflect the security services’ increasingly aggressive posture. One important rule, say the officials who helped craft it: “There are no coincidences.”

In May, the spy agency arrested a former U.S. consulate employee, Robert Shonov, and charged him with collaboration on a confidential basis with a foreign state or international or foreign organization. At the time of his arrest, the Russian national was working as a contractor to summarize nwspaper articles for the State Department, which called the arrangement legal and the allegations against him “wholly without merit.” Like Gershkovich, Shonov is now in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison.

. . . .

“Today, the FSB is incredibly powerful and unaccountable,” said Boris Bondarev, a Russian diplomat who resigned and went into hiding shortly after the invasion of Ukraine. “Anyone can designate someone else as a foreign spy in order to get promoted. If you are an FSB officer and you want a quick promotion, you find some spies.”

DKRO officers occupy a privileged position within the security services and Russian society. Its predecessor was the so-called American Department of the KGB, formed in 1983 by a hero of Putin, Yuri Andropov, the longtime security chief who became Soviet leader.

. . . .

The unit’s officers are well-paid by Russian standards, receiving bonuses for successful operations, access to low-cost mortgages, stipends for unemployed spouses, preferential access to beachside resort towns and medical care at FSB clinics that are among Russia’s best.

The FSB emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union subject to little legislative or judicial scrutiny. Since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, its official duty to expunge spies and dissidents has given it such expansive control over many aspects of Russian life that some security analysts now call Russia a counterintelligence state. In one of his final articles before his arrest, Gershkovich and colleagues reported that the invasion was mainly planned by the spy agency, citing a former Russian intelligence officer and a person close to the defense ministry, and was filtering updates from the front lines—roles usually reserved for the military.

In April, Russia passed new treason legislation that further empowered the FSB to squelch criticism of the war. In May, the spy agency, using wartime powers, said it would start to search homes without a court’s approval.

Putin has publicly berated his spy agencies several times since late 2022, after his so-called special military operation fell short of his expectations. Around that time, U.S. officials noticed an uptick in aggressive actions toward the few Americans still in Russia.

. . . .

“You need to significantly improve your work,” Putin told FSB leaders in a December speech to mark Security Agents Worker’s Day, a Russian holiday. “It is necessary to put a firm stop to the activities of foreign special services, and to promptly identify traitors, spies and diversionists.” 

He repeated the admonishment during a visit to Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters, a month before Gershkovich’s arrest. 

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in April denied that Putin had a role in authorizing the arrest. “It is not the president’s prerogative. The security services do that,” he said. “They are doing their job.”

Putin likes to be personally briefed on the FSB’s surveillance of Western reporters, said U.S. and former Russian officials. Leaked FSB documents from previous surveillance cases against foreign reporters show agency leaders along the chain of command adding penciled notes in the margins of formal memos, so that higher-ups can erase any comments that might upset the president. 

DKRO memos often begin with greetings punctuated by exclamation marks to indicate urgency and militaristic formality—a common style in the Kremlin bureaucracy—followed by meticulous notes about the movements of Westerners in Russia and the locals they meet.

“We ask you to identify an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at his place of employment, interrogate him about the goals and nature of his relations with the British, and as a result, draw a conclusion,” read one 2006 memo reviewed by the Journal. 

The FSB has oversight for espionage trials conducted in secret using specialist investigators and judges. During Putin’s 23 years in power, no espionage trial is known to have ended in acquittal.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG notes that the lives of 20th and 21st Century dictators have often ended in premature death.

For those who manage to hang on and direct the affairs of their nations for more than a brief period of time, the fact of their dictatorship tends to impoverish many of their people and results in a nation in which the economy substantially lags those nations which have non-dictatorial political structures.

Populations that live under dictatorships seldom produce world-class technology innovations or other types of creativity. Persistent anxiety and uncertainty regarding one’s standing with those who are part of the extensive government agencies principally assigned to controlling the populace and rooting out enemies of the government shrivel the creative impulses of all but a miniscule percentage of the larger population.

Leaders who gain and hold their positions using thuggery snuff out creativity and economic dynamism among their people and inevitably fall behind nations with a stable tradition of democratically- elected leaders.

Independence Day

For visitors from outside the United States, today, July 4, is celebrated as America’s Independence Day, a major national holiday with picnics during the day and large fireworks displays, ideally with firefighters nearby, at night. The sun is shining on Casa PG and this will be the only post (he thinks) today.

Below, you’ll find the text of The Declaration of Independence, ratified on July 4, 1776, which represented the first formalinized break in North America from being thirteen colonies of the British Empire.

This declaration was an important step in the American Revolutionary War, AKA Revolutionary War or American War of Independence.

Fighting began on April 19, 1775 at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The state of war was intensified following passage of the Lee Resolution, which asserted that the Thirteen Colonies were “free and independent states”, by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 2, 1776 and the unanimous ratification of the Declaration of Independence two days later, on July 4, 1776. (See Wikipedia for more information. {PG understands that there may always be some dispute on Wikipedia’s details, but there’s little dispute about the big picture.})

PG will also note that the French, Dutch and a few other European countries provided significant assistance to the American military and commercial strength during the revolutionary period. This was not necessarily due to the support for the ideals of the leaders of the American Revolution, but rather as a means of drawing British military and naval power to a war far distant from Europe.

PG also notes that the Revolutionary uprising was detrimental to the personal and financial conditions of many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Five signers were captured by the British and brutally tortured as traitors. Nine fought in the Revolutionary War and died from wounds or hardships. Two lost their sons in the war, and two others  had sons captured. At least a dozen of the 56 had their homes pillaged and burned.

Boston, the home of John Adams, the first Vice-President of the United States, was bombarded by the British navy. British troops fought in other major battles up and down the Atlantic coast which also caused destruction of a great deal of the wealth of those living or doing business there. One far-flung series of battles took place along the waterways from Lake Champlain and into Canada ending at Quebec in 1775.

For PG, the heart of the Declaration is the first portion, where the authors describe a series of “self-evident” truths followed by a description of what a government should and should not be, including a lengthy a list of examples of poor government under British rule and a contention that the people have the right to change a government if the people believe they are not being properly governed.

In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.


Georgia
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
North Carolina
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Massachusetts
John Hancock
Maryland
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Pennsylvania
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
New York
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
New Hampshire
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire
Matthew Thornton

Scientific Consensus: The development of full artificial intelligence

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.

Stephen Hawking told the BBC

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year time frame. 10 years at most.

Elon Musk

I don’t want to really scare you, but it was alarming how many people I talked to who are highly placed people in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug out’ houses, to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.

James Barrat

Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.

Ginni Rometty

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence—in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement – wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

Alan Kay

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.

Ray Kurzweil

Forget artificial intelligence – in the brave new world of big data, it’s artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.

Tom Chatfield

How Books Are Used to Perpetuate the Prison Industrial Complex

From Book Riot:

The prison industrial complex is a term you may have heard if you’ve looked into abolitionist thinking or learned about the contexts around social movements like Black Lives Matter. It’s a term that, as defined by abolition group Critical Resistance, describes “overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” While the concept of the prison industrial complex covers a huge number of social structures, you’ll most frequently hear it used in discussions about mass incarceration, for-profit prisons, and how criminalising and imprisoning people benefits the rich and powerful (particularly politicians and CEOs) while doing nothing to tackle or prevent harm that takes place within society at large.

The term “prison industrial complex” was coined by activists as well as incarcerated people and their families. And a number of academics and writers have provided powerful critiques of the prison industrial complex — Angela Y. Davis with Are Prisons Obsolete?, Michelle Alexander with The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Elizabeth Hinton with From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, and many less formalised writings from abolitionist groups and activists.

. . . .

There has been a great deal of writing and literature about the prison industrial complex — but are books one of the structures supporting the system itself?

. . . .

In my earlier article on copaganda in crime books, I explored how literature, particularly the detective genre, has often bolstered a pro-police social agenda. The same is true for the prison industrial complex, and pro-carceral justice structures. In detective fiction, prison for the villain is often a major part of a happy ending — although in many crime books, the conclusion involves the murderer dying in a showdown with the hero, rather than being incarcerated. Literature often portrays prison as largely unproblematic, the only issue being when innocent people are imprisoned. While miscarriages of justice are enormously harmful, the prison system also enacts enormous and disproportionate violence on people who have committed the crimes they are accused of; however, social attitudes to this are very different, with the refrain “if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime” commonly thrown back at people who argue against carceral abuses.

. . . .

Throughout the majority of literature, prisons are represented as frightening but necessary institutions that largely keep the public safe, only harmful when people are incarcerated for a crime they didn’t commit. There is little focus on, or care for, the harm that prisons cause to people who have committed crimes, or their harm to society as a whole. The area of literature that has paid the greatest amount of attention to the harms of the prison industrial complex is the prison memoir, but, once again, the most successful examples of these are books by political prisoners, or people incarcerated because of racism or other forms of bigotry, such as Nelson Mandela or the Exonerated Five. These stories are incredibly important, but they also show how incarcerated people are generally only portrayed as sympathetic if the person is “not a real criminal,” but someone who has been done wrong by the system, instead of considering the possibility that the system of imprisonment is itself wrong. “Real criminals” don’t get the same kind of sympathy or humanisation in literature, and it is rarely suggested that the prison industrial complex itself may be the true villain.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

While PG does not characterize U.S. prisons as ideal surroundings for anyone, including prison employees or convicts, that doesn’t mean that prisons are a terrible idea or that anyone has found a better way of protecting people who don’t commit crimes from people who do commit crimes.

When you’re living in a relatively safe world, where chances of being injured or killed other than by old age or terminal illness, prison can seem to be cruel and overly-strict. However, no one is more relieved to hear that someone who has committed a serious crime that has harmed them has been locked up in prison so she/he can’t commit another crime for a good long while or retaliate against them for reporting the crime.

PG has visited people in prison in two roles – hired attorney and as a representative of the religion of the prisoner, e.g. pastoral visits.

He has yet to meet anyone who is incarcerated who PG didn’t think was a danger to his/her community and was the perpetrators of one or more acts that harmed other people.

The primary purpose of a prison is as a deterrent to all to not violate the law and to punish those who have done so. A secondary purpose is as to protect society in general from a repetition of the bad acts of an individual who, absent punishment, is likely to repeat those bad acts to the detriment of others, either individually or collectively.

The Prison Industrial Complex is manipulative Marxist-style term designed to manipulate perceptions to the detriment of the underlying purpose of prisons – to protect those who don’t commit crimes from the actions of those who do and is a typical Marxist creation designed to manipulate emotions. (See also, Military Industrial Complex)

Absent prior convictions, non-violent criminals tend to receive punishments lighter than prison – release on probation either after they’ve served a period of incarceration or, often with some prior time in jail prior to the hearing, probation, supervised or unsupervised, which usually involves meeting with a state or federal probation officer on a regular basis and a condition that the probationer not commit another crime during probation.

Depending on the jurisdiction, supervised probation may require weekly or monthly or, sometimes bi-monthly visits with a probation officer to discuss what the probationer has been doing, whether he/she is attending school, going to work or some other condition the sentencing judge may impose – attending Alcohol Anonymous meetings weekly, spending some time helping a local charitable organization, etc.

Some prisoners finish getting their high school or college diploma while incarcerated. Prison wardens are generally quite pleased with someone who does this sort of thing and it is a plus if the prisoner seeks early release for good behavior while incarcerated.

PG has yet to visit anyone in prison who does not acknowledge that he/she deserves to be there.

FTC Sues Amazon Over ‘Manipulative’ Tactics Used to Enroll Millions in Prime

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon.com Wednesday, alleging the retail giant worked for years to enroll consumers without consent into Amazon Prime and made it difficult to cancel their subscriptions to the program.

The FTC’s complaint, filed in federal court in Seattle, alleged that Amazon has duped millions of consumers into enrolling in Amazon Prime, a $139 annual subscription service with more than 200 million members worldwide that has helped Amazon become an integral part of many American households’ shopping habits.

“Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said.

The complaint, which is partially redacted, is the culmination of an investigation that began in March 2021. The FTC, a federal agency tasked with enforcing antitrust laws and consumer protection laws, seeks monetary civil penalties without providing a dollar amount.

An Amazon spokesman dismissed the FTC’s allegations as “false on the facts and the law.”

The complaint alleged that Amazon used “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user interface designs known as dark patterns” to dupe users into automatically renewing Prime subscriptions.

“Amazon leadership slowed or rejected changes that would’ve made it easier for users to cancel Prime because those changes adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line,” the FTC added.

The FTC has been examining the use of dark patterns—a term for design tactics that prompt users into actions that benefit the company but not necessarily the user—in online commerce for several years.

The agency has been looking for cases in which companies entice consumers into subscriptions with misleading offers and then create obstacles for them to cancel payments. Vonage last year paid $100 million to settle FTC allegations that it imposed hurdles for customers to cancel the internet-based telephone service and charged unexpected termination fees.

For years, Amazon made it easy to enroll in Prime with one or two clicks, but created a “four-page, six-click, fifteen-option cancellation process” known internally as “the Iliad Flow,” the FTC said, in an apparent reference to Homer’s epic about the Trojan War. The agency said the “labyrinthine” procedure was designed to make it cumbersome and confusing for customers to cancel Prime.

Amazon revamped its Prime cancellation process for some subscribers in April, shortly before the FTC filed the case, according to the complaint. Amazon knew its policies were “legally indefensible,” the agency alleged.

“By design we make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up for or cancel their Prime membership,” he said. “We look forward to proving our case in court.”

Amazon said the FTC filed the lawsuit without allowing the company to explain to the agency’s three commissioners why it shouldn’t be sued, bypassing a step that is typically part of the process for companies facing an enforcement action.

. . . .

 Amazon has said that it had it more than 200 million paid Prime members worldwide at the end of 2020.

. . . .

About 72% of all U.S. households, or 96 million, have a paid Prime membership, according to recent estimates from market research firm Insider Intelligence.

. . . .

The FTC is separately preparing a potential antitrust lawsuit against Amazon to be filed in the coming months that could challenge an array of the tech giant’s business practices as anticompetitive, The Wall Street Journal reported in February.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG acknowledges that there is likely a political element influencing the Federal Trade Commission”s decision. President Biden, a Democrat, nominated the Chairman of the FTC.

But Amazon management lives and works in a Democratic party stronghold.

The last time a non-Democrat held the office of Seattle mayor was in 1990 when it elected an Independent candidate. The last time Seattle elected a Republican mayor was 1969.

PG understands similar party affiliation patterns extend into most of the Seattle suburbs as well.

Thus, PG suspects that most Amazon employees in middle and upper management are Democrats.

Per PG’s search for Amazon-originated campaign information, Jeff Bezos has donated only to candidates who were Democrats.

Opensecrets.org shows the Democrat candidates received about 5X the Amazon-originated political donations that Republican candidates during the 2020 elections.

The last time PG checked, a Democrat was occupying the White House and President Biden chose the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which agency has filed this antitrust suit.

Evidently, political contributions originating from Amazon were not enough to keep the Feds from suing the Zon for antitrust violations.

“Power and Progress” Technology and the New Leviathan

From The Wall Street Journal:

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have written a long, eloquent book arguing that technological progress is a decidedly mixed bag. They believe that the power of the state can and should be used to select the best of the goodies from the bag. The state, they argue, can do a better job than the market of selecting technologies and making investments to implement them.

Mr. Acemoglu is a prolific economist and a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize; his MIT colleague Mr. Johnson is an economist and professor of management. In “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity” they claim that the billions of daily decisions by you and me—to venture on a new purchase or a new job or a new idea—do not “automatically” turn out optimally for ourselves or society. In particular, poor workers are not always helped by new technology. The invisible hand of human creativity and innovation, in the authors’ analysis, requires the wise guidance of the state.

This is a perspective many voters increasingly agree with—and politicians from Elizabeth Warren to Marco Rubio. We are children, bad children (viewed from the right) or sad children (viewed from the left). Bad or sad, as children we need to be taken in hand. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson warmly admire the U.S. Progressive Movement of the late 19th century as a model for their statism: experts taking child-citizens in hand.

The authors begin with the questionable assertion that the most prevalent attitude toward technology today is a heedless optimism. “Every day,” they write, “we hear . . . that we are heading relentlessly toward a better world, thanks to unprecedented advances in technology.” Their chapters then skip briskly through history—from the agricultural revolution of the neolithic era, to the industrial revolution of the 19th century, to the Western postwar economic expansion of the 20th century—seeking to show how at each turn new innovations tended to empower certain sections of society at the expense of others. The “power” that concerns them, in other words, is private power.

Since the 1920s, economists from John Maynard Keynes to Paul Samuelson to Joseph Stiglitz have been claiming, with increasing self-assurance though with surprisingly little evidence beyond the blackboard, that (1) private arrangements work poorly, (2) the state knows better, and (3) we therefore need more state. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson have long believed in this anti-liberal syllogism. Statism recommends a growing Leviathan, as Mr. Acemoglu argued equally eloquently in “Why Nations Fail,” a 2012 book with James Robinson.

We need, in other words, the legislation currently being pushed by left and right to try again the policies of antitrust, trade protection, minimum wage and, above all, subsidy for certain technologies. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson are especially eager to regulate digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. “Technology should be steered in a direction that best uses a workforce’s skills,” they write, “and education should . . . adapt to new skill requirements.” How the administrators of the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce would know the new direction to steer, or the new skills required, remains a sacred mystery.

Choosing a path for a society and its economy is not the only role of Leviathan; distributing economic justice is equally important. “Government subsidies for developing more socially beneficial technologies,” the authors declare, “are one of the most powerful means of redirecting technology in a market economy.” Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson regard the private economy as an inequality machine.

In former times, they write, “shared benefits appeared only when landowning and religious elites were not dominant enough to impose their vision and extract all the surplus from new technologies.” Today we need the state to use its powers “to induce the private sector to move away from excessive automation and surveillance, and toward more worker-friendly technologies.” Fear of surveillance is a major theme of the book; therefore “antitrust should be considered as a complementary tool to the more fundamental aim of redirecting technology away from automation, surveillance, data collection, and digital advertising.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG says absent draconian government controls, which would snuff out modern economies, there have always been and will always be inequalities in wealth and power.

Government is never populated by saints, angels, or true prophets, just by the same type of people occupied in the management tiers of capitalism, small and large.

One difference is that a company, even a very large one, cannot force individuals to do what it wants. Capitalism, in its relatively unfettered form, must always work hard to attract customers lest another group of more intelligent people finds a better way to attract individuals to be their customers.

Governments can and are regularly persuaded, through various methods, legal and illegal, to favor one group of people or another, to create ingroups and outgroups. Ingroups support those at the heights (or depths) of current governments. Outgroups are the ones who want to change what governments are
doing by kicking out the incumbents and replacing them with people who will make decisions differently.

If a significant portion of humankind was comprised solely of saints and angels, such people would be suited to run a society from the top down, treating each individual equally and fairly and ensuring that individuals would be treated with unconditional kindness and equity.

Unfortunately, only a relatively small percentage of the general population even comes close to being saints and angels, and a large share of such people don’t aspire to be rulers or politicians, or the leaders of large business
organizations.

In the OP, “government subsidies for developing more socially beneficial technologies” sounds like something straight out of the faculty lounge of a typical large university. Who decides what a “socially beneficial technology” is, especially when it is in its nascent stage? What happens if there are two candidates to provide a “socially beneficial
technology,” and each wants to do this differently?

Do we really want to have a group of government officials deciding the Windows vs. Mac type of question? Which of the two is more socially beneficial?

The solution is to let individuals decide which one they prefer for whatever reason is most important to them right now. The faculty lounge solution will constantly be screwed up in some way for a whole bunch of people.

Moving

One of the reason that PG’s blogs have a somewhat sporadic air is that he and Mrs. PG are selling Casa PG and downsizing.

We’ve lived in this iteration of Casa PG for almost 25 years. It is possible, even probable, to accumulate a great deal of “stuff” during 25 years and the PG’s are no exception to that likelihood.

We are selling the excess “stuff,” but even that is not an easy experience. A four-drawer filing cabinet is headed out the door in the next 15 minutes or so.

As anyone with a filing cabinet knows, a lot of things go into a filing cabinet that do not necessarily come out of the filing cabinet during the normal course of human affairs, so PG has been going through memories past while emptying out files of ancient origin.

For most attorneys, the easiest way to handle many years of accumulated case files is to sell their practice to a younger attorney and walk out the door.

A second alternative is to die and let the heirs handle it.

Neither of those is going to work for PG because he closed his practice some years ago after deciding there was no attorney within 50 miles, maybe more, who had the sort of practice PG developed over the years, advising author clients all over the world about their publishing contracts, prospective or already signed plus helping a handful of “new model” publishers who were reasonable enough to treat and pay authors fair royalties.

(Why, yes, PG did produce quite a run-on sentence just now. Mrs. Edna Lascelles, a much-loved elementary school teacher, would not approve. Practicing as an attorney for decades brings out the grammatical dark side lurking in nearly everybody.)

CLAVICLE

The Adventure Continues

Today, PG had an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in sports medicine.

The surgeon was kind enough not to comment about what a contrast PG’s shoulder was to those attached many of his other patients, genuine athletes.

The doctor said he could perform a surgery to insert a funny little bent plate and screw the plate onto PG’s clavicle to hold things together. Then, in three or four months, another surgery would be necessary to remove the bent plate because while it was in place, PG would be unable to raise his arm higher than his shoulder.

The second approach would be to do nothing at all, which would result in the broken chip healing into the rest of PG’s clavicle. This would result in a bony clavicle knob that would be visible in x rays, but unlikely non-observable for those who glanced at PG’s shoulder.

The doctor was willing to go either way at PG’s discretion.

Suffice to say, a choice of having two surgeries or an invisible knob was not difficult for PG to make.

Knob it is.

Bonus Quote:

We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob.

Kevin Kelly

PG expects to be blogging again tomorrow.

A Broken Clavicle

PG finally went to the doctor and had an x-ray performed.

Turns out, he chipped a piece off the end of his left clavicle.

He was sent home with a sling and is seeing a sports medicine doctor tomorrow for some sort of treatment.

PG is quite mindful of which arm he uses for carrying something heavy now.

More blogging tomorrow.

Update

Thanks to all who expressed their concern about Tumble 2.

The skin covering PG’S left shoulder – front, back and top – is a lurid combination of deep blue and purple. This the largest bruise PG has ever had, including high school football and t-boning the side of a car while riding a motorcicle in college at a speed of about 45 mph. (PG’S right shoulder made a very large dent in the car’s door.)

Mrs. PG is examining PG’s shoulder on a regular basis and may take him to the doctor is she sees or senses any turn for the worse or an outbreak of a different color on his shoulder.

PG was planning to blog today, but decided to give his shoulder another day to return to its normal happy-chipper-monkey, ship-is-never-sunky self.

Sore Back

PG did what for him was a lot of physical labor today and his back started whispering that it needed to become prone.

Of course, PG ignored those whispers and continued to labor as if he were still many decades younger. Age is all about how old you feel inside after all.

PG’S back decided it was time to play be no more Mr. Nice Guy when it came to its wants and needs. Shortly thereafter, PG laid himself down.

After the passage of a reasonable period of prone time by any measure, PG got vertical to face his computer screen. His back demurred about what was a reasonable length of prone time consisted of and immediately started complaining at a much higher volume.

PG says, “Listen to your back! It may not be smart and stylish compared to your muse, but it knows how to express its wants and needs and will not be ignored!”

Impromptu Acrobatics

PG was trying to carry too many items down some steps at Casa PG earlier today.

He missed a step, took a tumble and banged up various parts of his ancient anatomy.

Nothing is broken. Ice is helping and PG’s body will soon regain its typical vim and vigor. However, PG won’t be making any blog posts today.

PEN America, Penguin Random House Sue Florida School District Over ‘Unconstitutional’ Book Bans

From Publisher’s Weekly:

In response to a troubling wave of book bans, PEN America, Penguin Random House, a group of authors, and a group of parents have filed a federal lawsuit against a Florida school district over the “unconstitutional” removal of books from school libraries.

The suit, filed on May 16 in the Northern district of Florida in Pensacola, alleges that administrators and school board members in Florida’s Escambia County School District are violating the First Amendment as well as the 14th Amendment (the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution) because the books being singled out are “disproportionately books by non-white and/or LGBTQ+ authors” and often address “themes or topics” related to race or LGBTQ+ community.

The suit seeks to have the district’s actions declared unconstitutional and to have the banned books returned to library shelves.

“In every decision to remove a book, the School District has sided with a challenger expressing openly discriminatory bases for challenge, overruling the recommendations of review committees at the school and district levels,” the complaint alleges. “These restrictions and removals have disproportionately targeted books by or about people of color and/or LGBTQ people, and have prescribed an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments…. Today, Escambia County seeks to bar books critics view as too ‘woke.’ In the 1970s, schools sought to bar Slaughterhouse-Five and books edited by Langston Hughes. Tomorrow, it could be books about Christianity, the country’s founders, or war heroes. All of these removals run afoul of the First Amendment, which is rightly disinterested in the cause du jour.”

In a release, PEN officials called the suit a “first-of-its-kind challenge to unlawful censorship,” as it brings together concerned parents, authors, and a major publisher.

“In Escambia County, state censors are spiriting books off shelves in a deliberate attempt to silence pluralism and diversity,” said PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel in a statement. “In a nation built on free speech, this cannot stand. The law demands that the Escambia County School District put removed or restricted books back on library shelves where they belong.” She added that “children in a democracy must not be taught that books are dangerous.”

Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, agreed. “Books have the capacity to change lives for the better, and students in particular deserve equitable access to a wide range of perspectives,” Malaviya said in a release announcing the suit. “Censorship, in the form of book bans like those enacted by Escambia County, are a direct threat to democracy and our Constitutional rights. We stand by our authors, their books, and the teachers, librarians, and parents who champion free expression. We are proud to join forces with our longtime partner PEN America.”

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

PG instinctively sides with the parents in these sorts of cases. PEN and Penguin Random House don’t know anything about Escambia County, the schools, the teachers, the students or the parents. More than a third of the county’s population is not white. The largest minority, African-Americans, is over 20% of the population.

The county tends to vote Republican.

The median household income in Escambia County is $56,605.

The CEO of Penguin Random House earns about $700,000 per year. Suzanne F. Nossel, the CEO of PENN America, earns $423,478 per year and is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

These two highly-privileged Manhattanites are the ones telling the parents of Escambia County’s school children what books those children must see in their school libraries without ever having met, let alone spoken with a single parent or child in Escambia County nor spent a minute of time in Escambia County prior to hiring attorneys to go there to straighten the poor folks out and show them who’s boss.

What Hemingway Means in the 21st Century

From The Literary Hub:

In the playwright Simon Gray’s literary diary The Last Cigarette, there’s a moment where he struggles to recall the name of a particular figure. Gray keeps returning to the image of a strutting, bare-chested, big-bellied man on a boat, holding up a huge dead fish. He has “a grey beard, a square bullish face, something stupid about it, and aggressive.” Who is it, Gray asks himself, who is this obnoxious, swaggering figure? “Hemingway!,” he finally remembers.

For many writers, talking about Ernest Hemingway is like talking about an embarrassing ancestor. Hemingway comes burdened with baggage, lots of it; pugilistic metaphors and hard-drinking aphorisms, an obsession with a pure and “clean” prose, a brittle misogyny and a vainglorious narcissism. And then there are all the dead animals. There they are, heaping up behind the great man’s hulking physique: Key West marlin, and bulls, and elephants, and antelope, and lions.

When I visited the Hemingway collections at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston some years ago, I was shown to a room at the top of the building where I could work on my first day of research. It was a replica of Hemingway’s room in the Finca Vigia in Cuba, complete with lion-skin rug, the lion’s head staring upward in an aspect of roaring animosity. On the side was a drinks cabinet with a row of bottles.

Out of the window, I could look out on the waterfront and the Massachusetts Bay beyond, the sun glancing on the sea, nuggets of gold in the expanse of blue. But on the second day, I had to move downstairs, to a more nondescript space, lit with bright, clinical overhead lights. Here I could begin my research properly, no longer distracted by the gorgeous view and the lion skin.

It struck me at the time as an apt metaphor for the writer’s life and legacy; the collection of images marked in our minds as “Hemingway” were, for want of a better phrase, a kind of showroom. Up there, lion-skins and antelope heads jostled with guns and martinis. The real work was in sifting through the complex and confusing remnants the great writer had left downstairs, in the archives.

. . . .

This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of Hemingway’s first published work, Three Stories and Ten Poems, printed privately in Paris in 1923. Already, the stories in the collection showed a writer with a recognizable style; two of the three stories, “Out of Season” and “My Old Man” would reappear in In Our Time (1925), the collection that made Hemingway’s literary name.

In the stories, the elements of the Hemingway style were finding their place: an unflinching eye for detail, the ability to stage quiet tragedy in spare, crystalline prose. In “Up in Michigan,” for example, Hemingway’s description of a sexual assault is framed by the simple, direct, descriptive language of place and atmosphere. The story ends with an effective depiction of the “cold mist coming up through the woods from the bay”: Hemingway’s Midwestern spaces take on the violence, despair and hopelessness of the human relationships that exist around and inside them.

Yet the volume, as its title suggests, also contains ten poems with varied subjects—from a verse about Theodore Roosevelt (“all the legends that he started in his life/ Live on and prosper”) to the imagistic “Along with Youth,” which sees Hemingway recollecting childhood through a montage of objects and memories.

As with some of the other poems, “Along with Youth” recalls the early work of T.S. Eliot, where disparate and seemingly unrelated images are juxtaposed: compare the porcupine skins, stuffed owls, and canoes of “Along with Youth” to the street lamps, crabs, and geraniums of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” say. But in “Champs d’Honneur,” one of three explicit war poems (Hemingway served on the Italian front in 1918), the young writer sounds like Wilfred Owen at his most viscerally effective, describing the soldiers who “pitch and cough and twitch” in a gas attack.

. . . .

In the early days of reading him, I marveled at the beauty of those sculpted sentences; it seemed at the time as if I was handling fine bone china. Sometimes the prose was so spare it seemed to disappear, and I was left trudging through endless midwestern woods, or dry Spanish plains.

But there were things that were troubling, even in these early days of getting to know Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises seemed to play on anti-Semitic tropes in its portrayal of the character of Robert Cohn (the character is described as having a “hard, Jewish, stubborn streak”). There was often excessive consumption, particularly of booze. It feels as if there is always a chilled bottle of wine open, one Martini rolls into the next one, and the next. Then there are those dead animals. In a 1934 letter to his son Patrick from Kenya, Hemingway wrote that the hunting party had killed four lions and:

35 hyenas. 3 Buffalo bulls. About 8 Thompson gazelles, about Six Grant Gazelles, 3 Topi, 4 Eland, 6 Impalla, 2 Leopards, 5 Cheetah, a lot of Zebra for their hides. 3 Water buck, one cerval cat, 1 bush buck, 1 Roan Antelope, 3 wart hogs, 2 Klipspringers …

That’s not even touching on the problematic gender politics of Hemingway’s writing. As a male reader, I often felt Hemingway was judging me to be inadequate. Why wasn’t I boxing or shooting or watching bullfights or wrestling swordfish?

. . . .

Yet this reading of Hemingway is, of course, partial and incomplete. The obsessive masculinism of Hemingway’s fiction is undercut, not just by Hemingway’s readers, but by the writer himself. His heroes are broken, wounded. Jake Barnes, for example, the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, has sustained an unspecified genital injury in the First World War.

On the one hand, Jake is a typical Hemingway man, obsessed with bullfighting and hard-drinking. On the other, his gender and sexuality are consistently portrayed as ambiguous; as the critic Ira Elliott has argued, his groin injury leads him to identify with the marginal homosexual characters in the novel. Like them, he cannot perform the heteronormative roles society foists on him.

If Hemingway’s earlier work is, at the least, ambiguous on the issues of gender and sex, his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden (1986) raised more questions. As Hemingway expert Debra Moddelmog puts it, the book was a “startling and sudden intensification” of these themes: gender fluidity, homosexuality, taboo sex. David and Catherine, the protagonists of that novel, cut their hair so that they look alike, and play at performing the opposite gender, Catherine as boy, David as girl.

. . . .

There is also a growing number of critics looking at Hemingway through an environmentalist lens. At first, it’s difficult to discern anything ecologically sensitive about Hemingway: isn’t the guy all about killing animals? Yet Hemingway’s interest in hunting and fishing went along with a sensitivity to the environment. Writing to his father in 1925 from Spain, he wrote that the “wonderful stream” he had previously visited was now devastated by logging: it made him “feel sick.”

And there is the ruined, “burned out” midwestern landscape of “Big Two-Hearted River” in In Our Time, with its grasshoppers “all black” from the impact of some ecological trauma. Even those dead, hunted animals are not as straightforward as they might seem; the critic Nina Baym’s influential essay “Actually, I felt sorry for the lion” argues for the importance of the lion’s point of view in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” When Brett Ashley sees the bull in The Sun Also Rises she exclaims: “My God, isn’t he beautiful?”; Hemingway’s bulls and lions are less antagonists than tragic protagonists in a ritual dance from which they cannot escape.

If Hemingway’s influence has been difficult for the literary world to live with, our changing readings of him have drawn attention to the protean, fluid quality of his work. Hemingway is a writer of paradox; a macho, masculine writer who questioned masculinity, a hunter who could run with the hunted, a naturalist who mourned the destruction of the very habitats he plundered for big game. He is a teacher who will teach you how to write until you can’t stand him anymore, and then, all the things you thought you knew about him will fall apart.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

PG says it’s dumb to judge the styles of writing that no longer exist from authors who lived in an entirely different age by today’s standards. A hundred years from now, a class of educated and sophisticated citizens of the world will regard today’s world and its authors with scorn and disdain.

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. To spare you the math, that was 124 years ago. The world was a massively different place. America was still recovering from the Civil war. The South, particularly, was included an economic dead zone in many places. Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona were not yet states, only American territories. The Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam were also American territories.

The Spanish-American War took place in 1898. Spain’s colonial empire was 300 years old and stretched from Mexico through Central America and encompassed large portions of South America, with the exception of the Portuguese colony of Brazil. Far more soldiers fighting on both sides of the Spanish-American War war were killed by yellow fever and typhoid instead of dying in battle.

What are today considered stereotypes were regarded as established facts during Hemingway’s lifetime. Men were expected to have a slate of characteristics and women were expected to have a different slate of characteristics. There was some overlap of accepted traits of the two genders (yes, there were only two), but, among the most and least sophisticated of Americans, there was no question that men and women had inherent differences.

The part of the OP that PG excerpted ends, speaking of Hemingway, with, “All the things you thought you knew about him will fall apart.”

If anyone expects Hemingway and his writing of being anything other than the work of an individual who came to his maturity in the early twentieth century, they’re an idiot. As to “habitats being destroyed”, there have been habitats irrevocably changed by humans throughout human history.

Most of London has been destroyed and rebuilt much differently several times during its long recorded history. After each change, undoubtedly some mourned the old “habitats” that had been destroyed.

If PG were king of California for a day, he would destroy much of greater Los Angeles that was built in the 1940’s and 50’s in the name of improving it greatly.

Bank Problems

One of PG’s banks recently became very confused about his accounts. He learned of their confusion yesterday.

PG has been gathering documentary information to demonstrate to the people who run the bank that they and not PG are the confused party and that they need to correct their records.

He thinks it’s a good idea to take a shower and change out of his typical blogging/proofreading attire.

Not that he expects anything beyond a polite exchange of views and examination of documents will be required to resolve the bank’s errors, but PG recently commented to a group of attorney friends with whom he regularly gather for lunch and shoptalk that he really misses going to court and engaging in the cut and thrust with a skilled attorney on the other side of the litigation.

You can take the lawdog out of the courtroom, but you can’t take the courtroom out of the lawdog.

UPDATE: Everything is straightened up with the bank.

Texas County to Consider Shutting Down Library After Book Ban Ruling

From Publisher’s Weekly:

After a federal judge ordered the return of more than a dozen books improperly pulled from the Llano County Public Library shelves for their content, the county’s commissioners have called a special meeting for April 13 to discuss shutting the library down altogether.

According to a notice and agenda posted to the Llano County website, the Llano County Commissioners Court has set a meeting to discuss whether to “continue or cease operations of the current physical Llano County Library System,” the continued employment of library staff, and the “feasibility of the use of the library premises by the public.”

A tweet from the American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans account shared news of the meeting, and urged local library supporters to contact their local officials to support the library and to show up to the special meeting to advocate for their library. ALA officials say Unite Against Book Bans and ALA will continue to work closely with the Texas Library Association to support “at-risk library workers” in Llano County, as well as with Texans for the Right to Read and other Texas activists “who are on the front lines of the fight to protect every person’s right to read in Llano County and across the state of Texas.”

Closing the library would be an extreme reaction, notes ALA’s Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

“Rather than return twelve books to the library’s collection that reflect the lives and experiences of LGTQIA+ and BIPOC persons, the members of the Llano County Commission and its Library Board are prepared to fire the dedicated staff of the Llano County Library System and deny Llano County residents access to all the information and community services that the library staff provides,” Caldwell-Stone said, “simply to prevent anyone from reading certain books that these officials don’t ever have to read.”

The new developments come after a federal judge found that the library board in Llano County likely infringed the constitutional rights of readers in the community by unilaterally removing books it deemed inappropriate. In a 26-page decision, judge Robert Pitman affirmed that “the First Amendment prohibits the removal of books from libraries based on either viewpoint or content discrimination,” and found that the evidence presented in the case showed that county officials illegally “targeted and removed books, including well-regarded, prize-winning books, based on complaints that the books were inappropriate.”

Link to the rest at Publisher’s Weekly

PG did a little research and determined that Llano, Texas, is a small rural town – about 3500 people – that is located about 65-70 miles from the state capital, Austin.

When PG says small town, Llano has what appears to be a struggling newspaper that includes stories and photos of the local high school athletic teams and contestants for the annual Rodeo Queen contest. The town is surrounded by ranches raising livestock and and doing crop farming.

The population of Llano is about 80% white, including descendants of early German settlers, 15-17% Latino – mostly Mexican – with a sprinkling of a few other races.

PG expects that the library lawsuit was probably the biggest thing Llano (and Llano County) had experienced in a very long time. He doesn’t know if the county paid for its legal representation in the lawsuit or if some or all of its litigation expenses were covered by some type of insurance.

The honor of serving on the King’s Island Library Board sounds like a post that doesn’t attract very many candidates. While a federal lawsuit was certainly a source of a lot of publicity, PG suspects that the members of the County Library Board found that dealing with out of town reporters who regarded them as hicks from the sticks and spending time talking with the Library Board’s attorney during the runup to the trial was not what they had in mind when they decided it was their civic duty to support the local library.

PG found an article from TheDailyTrib.com (covering the news from Marble Falls, Burnet, Kingsland, Llano, Spicewood, Horseshoe Bay, and ALL of the Highland Lakes) that described what appears to be the current situation:

Closing the three libraries in the Llano County Library System will not affect the Little v. Llano County lawsuit, which will move forward, according to an attorney for the plaintiffs. Also, Llano County Precinct 4 Commissioner Jerry Don Moss and Library Advisory Board Vice-chairman Bonnie Wallace still will have to appear before the court as ordered by a U.S. District judge on April 27 or face possible sanctions.

“We will continue to see a permanent injunction against censoring books in case they ever reopen the library,” said Katherine Chiarello of Wittliff Cutter law firm in Austin, when asked about what would happen if the libraries were closed. 

Llano County commissioners are meeting at 3 p.m. Thursday, April 13, to discuss that possibility. According to the agenda, they will meet in executive session to also discuss “action regarding the continued employment and/or status of the Llano County Library System employees and the feasibility of the use of the library premises by the public.”

The county’s four commissioners and County Judge Ron Cunningham are holding the special meeting in response to an order enjoining the county to return 17 books to library shelves and the digital catalog system. The books were back in circulation on March 31. 

In a different ruling, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division, ordered Moss and Wallace to appear in person at 10 a.m. April 27. The two did not appear for depositions on March 22 and 27, respectively. They could face sanctions that would include contempt of court charges, rendering a default judgment against the disobedient parties, or paying expenses accrued, including attorney fees, for missing the scheduled appointments. 

The U.S. District Court does not have a say in whether the libraries should remain open, but people supporting the libraries can have an impact, according to Chiarello.

“The citizens of Llano can make themselves heard,” she said. “It is un-American, it is against the rule of law, and it is not good for the people of Llano County to be deprived of the many services the library offers to the community.” 

People on both sides of the issue plan to show up in force at the meeting, which is being held in the Justice of the Peace Precinct 4 courtroom, 2001 Texas 16 North in Llano. The small room holds about 40 people and is often crowded, even when a meeting is not controversial. 

“I am aware that several people are very upset by this,” said Leila Green Little, one of seven plaintiffs in the case. “I think there will be a big turnout.” 

Buchanan Dam resident Wayne Shipley is also upset over the issue, but for different reasons. He plans to be there and hopes to speak during public comment. He, too expects a big crowd to overflow the small courtroom. 

“I was taken by surprise that the county is having to look at this step,” he told DailyTrib.com. “Seems to me this issue is being forced by the plaintiffs. It’s not about banning books. The books in question are explicitly pornographic in nature. They should not be available for children to pick up off the shelves.” 

Shipley did agree that not all 17 books listed fit in that category, including one about the Ku Klux Klan, another about the caste system, and a children’s series about farting animals and imaginary figures.

“Those aren’t the ones driving the issue,” he said. “I think those are put in there to blur the issue.” 

PG is sympathetic with residents of Llano who get upset by being ordered by a Federal District Judge to show up in court in Austin to be potentially held in contempt of court and/or ordered to pay attorneys fees to a relatively large law firm (17 attorneys) in Austin. PG’s quick and dirty research into the fees charged by Austin attorneys leads him to believe that they’ll be about $300 per hour.

The quote from one of the attorneys on the winning side was, in PG’s personal legal judgement, really stupid:

“We will continue to see a permanent injunction against censoring books in case they ever reopen the library,” said Katherine Chiarello of Wittliff Cutter law firm in Austin, when asked about what would happen if the libraries were closed. 

PG has gone way farther along this trail than he should have, however, here is his last point.

PG just checked and the average per capita income in Llano County is a little over $44,000 per year. That translates to about $12 per hour. PG suspects that very few people living in Llano County, including the lawyers who practice there, earn $300 per hour, which is likely in the general range that the the Austin law firm will seek in the form of attorneys fees should the federal judge decides to hold anyone in contempt of court.

Neighbors

PG’s back has reached a certain age. His back feels a great deal older than the rest of him feels most of the time.

His back hasn’t always felt that way. In college, all of PG’s body parts felt young and immortal.

One fine spring day during that time, a friend lent PG his motorcycle. PG will not paint himself as an expert motorcyclist, but he had ridden enough different motorized two-wheel vehicles to be a decent and safe rider.

On this perfectly lovely day, PG was enjoying his ride on the borrowed motorcycle, tootling along on the main street that went through campus with his then-abundant hair blowing fashionably in the wind.

PG noted that an automobile on a cross-street had stopped at a stop sign as it should have so PG and the motorcycle could whiz through.

After stopping, the automobile drove forward, right in front of PG and his borrowed motorcycle.

PG has neglected to mention that he was attired in his era’s standard spring motorcycle protective gear — t-shirt, cut-off shorts, sandals and a full head of hair.

Time slowed for PG as he hit the brakes of the motorcycle, but it was clear a collision would occur in the very near future.

PG noted that the front wheel of the motorcycle had hit the rear door and was stopping quite suddenly. However, PG kept moving. Somehow, instead of hitting the back door of the car with his lovely head of hair, he twisted and put a big dent in the door with his right shoulder.

Immediately thereafter, things became quite confusing as PG bounced off the back door and rolled across the street, ending up near the curb.

PG will spare you the small details of the rest of his afternoon, but he was taken to the hospital, told by a doctor that he was stupid for not wearing a helmet but very lucky, unlike someone who had experienced a similar motorcycle accident without a helmet, had arrived at the ER a few minutes before PG did and was presently in a coma.

For a few months after the accident, PG thought he had gotten off scot-free, but a persistent back ache took him back to the orthopedist a couple of times. His back would occasionally be sore, but it wasn’t something that cramped PG’s style.

A few months after that, PG met the first attorney he had ever known, one his parents had selected, and signed a bunch of papers. A couple of years later, PG received a nice sum of money from an insurance company, noting that the attorney had kept one-third of the total amount the insurance company had paid.

PG flunked his draft physical shortly after graduating from college and avoided death or dismemberment in Vietnam.

Moving through middle age, PG experienced twinges in his back from time to time. The older he became, the more frequently those twinges happened.

Today, many, many years after that beautiful spring day when he got up-close and personal with an automobile door, if PG moves jusssst so, his back won’t usually bother him. Considered movements almost always work quite well. Ill-considered movements create at least a warning tinge and on occasion will put PG into a reclining chair with a heating pad for an hour or two followed by another period of gingerly movements calculated not to awaken his sleeping spinal nerves.

This winter has brought a great deal of snow to Casa PG and the surrounding areas. Those who ski and snowshoe are in heaven. Those who sell goods and services to skiers, snowshoers and companions of such people are having their best year in quite a long time so PG doesn’t feel right about complaining about clearing his driveway of snow on a regular basis.

A new family moved into the neighborhood about six months ago. It’s a friendly community and the family was welcomed by the PG’s and several other neighbors.

The father of the new family evidently intuited that PG should not do much, if any snow-shoveling. So, after each one of the several overnight snowstorms we have experienced this winter, PG wakes up to either a clean driveway or the sound of this kind neighbor shoveling the snow off the driveway and sidewalk of Casa PG.

PG thanks this neighbor effusively whenever he can catch the man doing good works and has in mind an additional way of showing gratitude for the many kind services his neighbor has bequeathed on the PG’s over the last several months.

Looking back on what has flowed from his auto-typing fingers, PG realizes that he has rambled more than a bit. The lack of a sore back evidently manifests itself in unusual ways. However, he is very grateful for wonderful neighbors, including the one who has done so much snow-shoveling this year.

Politics and the English Language

PG usually places his comments after whatever he excerpts, but he’s making an exception in this case.

Politics and the English Language, an essay written by George Orwell, was first published in 1946, largely in response to what he saw happening both before World War II and during a post-war period in which Russian-backed Communism appeared to be gaining power and influence and a rapid pace. After all, the end of the war left Central and Eastern Europe under Russian control, so from the viewpoint of someone wishing to build an empire, the peace deal was a big gain for the Soviet Union.

One of the common practices of Communist governments and their supporters during this period was to manipulate language in a manner which was, unfortunately, quite effective in influencing large numbers of people.

Here’s a quote that encapsulates much of Orwell’s assessment:

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Animal Farm was published shortly after the war ended. 1984 was published in 1949.

To be clear, Orwell doesn’t limit his cautions to Russians or Communists. He points out all sorts of different groups and individuals who distort language for political purposes in order to gain and keep power over others.

In the TPV post immediately before this one chronologically, the CEO of The American Booksellers Association described the shipment of a book to a large numbers of bookstores as a “serious, violent incident.”

Quite an accomplishment for a small stack of dried pulp from a dead tree.

Since PG has dozens of such dangerously violent objects just outside his office door, he will have to tread very carefully the next time he goes to refill his glass with Diet Coke.

From The Orwell Foundation:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression).

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia).

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet.

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes ontake up the cudgels fortoe the lineride roughshod overstand shoulder to shoulder withplay into the hands ofno axe to grindgrist to the millfishing in troubled waterson the order of the dayAchilles’ heelswan songhotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperativemilitate againstprove unacceptablemake contact withbe subject togive rise togive grounds forhave the effect ofplay a leading part (roleinmake itself felttake effectexhibit a tendency toserve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as breakstopspoilmendkill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as proveserveformplayrender. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard tothe fact thatby dint ofin view ofin the interests ofon the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desiredcannot be left out of accounta development to be expected in the near futuredeserving of serious considerationbrought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Link to the rest at The Orwell Foundation