« DISTINCTION WITHOUT A DIFFERENCE | Main | LA EVENT: CHANG-RAE LEE »

April 16, 2004

PRISON WRITING UPDATE

In a development sure to brighten the day of book burners everywhere, it appears that Connecticut officials have gone out on a search and destroy mission.

Prison officials destroyed computer files containing inmates' personal writing days after a prisoner won a national writing award, best-selling author Wally Lamb said.
Lamb, who teaches a creative-writing workshop at the York Correctional Facility in East Lyme, said yesterday that 15 female inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the prison's school ordered all hard drives used for the class erased and its computer disks turned over.

Perhaps they're taking pointers from the German courts ...

Posted at 12:23 AM |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

MM

Man, that's fucking sad.

Posted by: MM | April 16, 2004 at 02:32 PM

Polly

That is disgraceful. I'm from australia with a best friend in gaol and shit that happens here is bad, but not that awful!

Posted by: Polly | October 26, 2004 at 03:30 AM

Karen Tonkin B.A.

Unfortunately such incidents can and do occur within the prison system. During my two decades behind bars some of my punishment included being stripped of anything that looked remotely like a writing implement. No wonder Solzhenitsyn wrote on onion skins. It's a pretty poor system that re-enforces such cruel deprivation in addition to the liberty already denied the State's inmates. Recidivism is created by so-called Caregivers who breach and betray the right of prisoners to exercise freedom of expression.

Posted by: Karen Tonkin B.A. | November 22, 2004 at 03:51 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed