Catching Up On Life; Joyce Carol Story, Ghosts in an iPhone,White Whales, Jails As White Elephants

It is Wednesday. I have been approved for a new apartment. I found that out tonight. 

Yesterday, I thought I was going to have frostbite. I stopped at the property management company after seeing my counselor. No word was received by him from my PO, but that was no surprise. I have not seen him in about 2 months. I guess he is in no hurry to see me reintegrated into society. Anyway, I had to wait for the bus downtown for about 15 minutes) then I caught the #6 north to the management company. A quick stop there, mostly because I found my ID missing. I went back out to wait for the #6 to come back downtown. I gave up when my feet went numb, and walked across Walnut Street to The Family Dollar. There I purchased a pair of Coke Zero 2-liters and toothpaste. I waited for about another 10 minutes and was about to walk out when I saw the bus going south. I had to wait for the next run north. More being outside for that. I did not get home until almost 6. 

I looked for the ID. No luck. I did emails and downloaded some more music. For anything else, I was too tired. No writing was done.

On Monday, I got a little written, but mostly I spent my time organizing the novel. I did a spreadsheet for that.

Washington Square Review rejected "Rational Actor":

Thank you for your interest in Washington Square Review. We received a record number of submissions for this issue. Though we appreciated the chance to read your story, it isn’t a good fit for us at this time. Thank you again for considering us. We wish you the best of luck in placing your work elsewhere. 

Sincerely,

Washington Square Review

Other writing news: Announcing Our 2024 Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow: Keith Hood. I applied for this.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oats may have been the first of her short stories I read. It is chilling; it is brilliant.

Gogol’s Nose and the Ghost in My Machine by Lad Tobin is a bit of fun; having read Gogol's The Nose, I could not resist.

In some of that literature — Dostoyevsky’s The Double, or Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example — the alter-ego commits or recommends destructive acts certain to destroy the protagonist’s reputation. But just as often, like in Conrad’s The Secret Sharer or Poe’s “William Wilson,” the double acts as a kind of super-ego, warning against destructive or self-destructive behavior. That’s the uncanny feeling I had when my phone did something useful or prescient like notifying my friend I was out of town or shutting down an Instacart order at the very second I had changed my mind and decided to shop myself. Like the man in the Gogol short story who wakes up to find out that during the night that his nose has left his face and is now out in the world and, remarkably, is having more success moving up the St. Petersburg social ladder than he’s ever had himself, I had to face the unsettling fact that my phone seemed capable of handling certain aspects of my life better than I could myself.

My friend DM sent me Einstein’s 7 rules for a better life. He was impressed and surprised by Einstein's wisdom. Does smart exclude a good heart? Perhaps wisdom is more than just being knowledgeable? 

And then there is the dismal side: Go Straight to Jail The new geography of mass incarceration. Yes, I have experience with this subject. You may think I am biased due to that experience. Let's say, it is not that I am biased but that pieces like this confirm my experiences. From what I have seen, incarceration serves no good purpose other than to siphon money to builders and those who provide services (such as telephones) to the incarcerated. More specifically, Indiana wants to change its Bill of Rights to allow the jailing of more people.

Jails today house people pretrial and for sentences under a year in most states, and under three to five years in others. Some states have taken advantage of bipartisan prison reform efforts of the last decade to lower prison populations. While this has reduced the overall number of people incarcerated in some places, such as California, in others, including Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana, it has simply shifted carceral power and capacity to the jail. Counties across the country face the pressures of more people convicted of felonies being sent to jail, and they build bigger jails in the face of this pressure, almost always at the urging of the county sheriff’s office and with the encouragement of jail architects and consultants, and sometimes even federal judges. At the same time, there are incentives for counties to expand local jail capacity to try and capture revenue from state and federal agencies. Whatever the combination of pressures and incentives, local jails have become a key site of carceral power and expansion, and continue to be central to racial capitalist development and planning efforts across the rural to urban spectrum.

Think about it. Better to spend money on schools.

There has also been a significant geographical shift in local incarceration. In mid-year 2019, there were an estimated 758,420 people in local jails, 31,000 more than in mid-year 2013. During that time, jail incarceration in the largest cities in the United States dropped 18 percent, while jail incarceration in rural counties increased 27 percent. These numbers represent real people—hundreds of thousands of people who are directly impacted by the violence of jail incarceration and detention, millions of people who are affected by the extraction that jail facilitates, and by the violence that is perpetrated on families and communities through policing and incarceration across the varied geography of the United States.

Drawing on progressive arguments about improving conditions of confinement and enhancing people’s rehabilitation, county and city officials position jails as sites of care. In doing so, they reinscribe notions of certain racialized, classed, and gendered people as in need of “fixing” while obfuscating the fundamental dehumanization and violence of the cage. At the same time, activists confront county and city officials who have taken up the same tired arguments of prison boosters—false promises that jails will solve their political economic problems. And in the face of austerity and a relentless political commitment to incarceration and detention, organizers are finding that their jail fights are not so local: the forces they are up against are produced by the devolution of state and federal imprisonment.

In closing, Indianapolis gets noted:

As the carceral state’s capacities have shifted and reorganized around jails, organizers have had to shift their focus as well. There have been campaigns against new or expanded jails in large cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta; in midsize cities like New Orleans, Indianapolis, and Oklahoma City; and in dozens of small towns and rural counties around the country. And while there is some coordination and communication between and among these fights, these struggles can also remain isolated from each other and from broader movements. As such, there is also a dearth of information and analysis identifying key points of distinction and leverage when it comes to fighting jail expansion, including issues of funding, revenue, and multi-jurisdictional incarceration. It is essential that we map not only this new terrain of the carceral state but also the emergent abolitionist opposition by foregrounding the hard-forged analyses of anti-jail organizers themselves as they take us through their seemingly local fights, which are actually at the center of the carceral state. 

White whales can also play music:  He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable.

hey gathered in the listening room one last time. Ken Fritz was turning 80. His sons weren’t there. Kurt remained estranged. Scott couldn’t make it down from Chicago. But Fritz’s three daughters and their husbands came and sang “Happy Birthday.” He sat for a portrait and even had a small spoon of ice cream, as much as his constricted throat muscles could tolerate.

It was February of 2022. Six years after he had finished his life’s project. Four years after he was told he only had so much longer to enjoy it.\

Betsy, while helping him inventory his collection, had observed how her hard-charging dad had softened. He was able to share his regrets about his style of fathering. But he had no regrets about the hours, weeks and years that he had devoted to the world’s greatest stereo.

It is almost 9 pm. I have been here 5 hours. I have talked to the management company, searched for my birth certificate, started organizing my move, texted my sister, and worked on this post. It feels insufficient, except for doing my laundry.

What I should have been looking for:

sch