Laundry, Proust, Prisons, Irish Writers - Closing Out 10/13

 I did my laundry this afternoon. The email was caught up to a point where my tired brain would go no further.

I give you a reading list (and two videos) to close out today.

Proust Curious: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” (podcast). I did not have patience enough for listen to it; this novel was far as I got with Proust.

The Porous Prison (an interview)

What makes the picture striking is its revelation of a time when the prison’s walls were more porous, both for imprisoned people and those in the free world. The present-day norm is hyper-security, surveillance, and restriction, which forcefully separates prisoners from the free world, severely limits their connection to their families, and disappears the violence of their incarceration. Yet such a contemporary nightmare, as this picture shows, is not an historical constant. Rather, as Reiko Hillyer argues in her generative new book A Wall Is Just a Wall, “the impermeability of the prison is neither natural nor inevitable but rather a recent, uneven, and contested phenomenon.”

Spanning across a diversity of states and criminal legal systems, Hillyer examines three sites of struggle over the prison’s permeability: clemency, conjugal visits, and furloughs, or temporary releases that allowed prisoners to leave prisons for hours or days at a time. In doing so, she disrupts the standard historiography of late 20th-century law and order by unearthing a more “contradictory juncture” when crises of prisoner unrest and prison overcrowding prompted experiments, to varying degrees, of prisoner release. Attending to the shifting boundaries of the prison need not suggest there was ever a “golden age” of incarceration, and Hillyer goes to great lengths to contextualize even the more “porous” eras of imprisonment, where prisoner release or visits with the outside world were more common, within reactionary regimes of racial social control.

Brendan Behan doc - a writer I know of without having read him: 

Loving the Limitations of the Novel: A Conversation between Sally Rooney and Merve Emre

Finishing the night with Genius.

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