Eva Hoffman's "Time": Book Review

"What time is it?" Awakening, we ask this question. Hoffman regards this as "our first act of orientation," as we locate "where we are in the day and how we should pitch ourselves towards it." (63) Her four short chapters read more like self-contained essays than a solid whole, but she does convince me that Augustine's query: "What then is time?" continues to elude facile explanation. "If no man ask me the question, I know; but if I pretend to explicate it to anybody, I know it not." (qtd. 64)

Hoffman starts off promisingly as she evokes from her Polish Cold War upbringing "the lyrical side of the famous Slavic melancholy" and its less puritanical, more generous, acceptance of slowness and conversation. (13) I read the other day that Czech women take twice as long in lovemaking as Americans, and I wondered about the applicability of this factoid to Hoffman's discussion, as she as an emigré notices the acceleration of the industrialized, networked, "stacked" realms of information and production that permeate the way you read what I type.

It's a truism to talk of the fast pace of our lives, and perhaps this study inevitably suffers from such observations. Hoffman incorporates much information, many endnotes, and scraps (akin to the one I added above) into her chapters, but they remain unevenly covered and intermittently engaging. Much of this scans like an intellectual's notes, and given the audience for this entry in "small books, big ideas," this may be appropriate. Yet, it may cause many to skim a lot.

Death as the way evolution programs us to perpetuate the species and then depart rather hastily by cellular breakdown as organisms, the slow-food movement, the trouble with trying to "drop out" of society when its temporal patterns program us all inside our biological clocks as well as our collective demands, and the role of BPD, ADD, and ADHD all prove intermittently engaging, but Hoffman for my tastes runs past cultural aspects while getting bogged down in phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

Her first chapter on the body works best when tying us to nature and the time ticking within every moving thing. The second, on the mental constructs, struggles to stay more cogent. While her two poems from Emily Dickenson and one from Philip Larkin enliven poignantly her duller scientific summaries, such moments were too rare for me in what often reads like a well-written if overlong term paper rather than an engaging essay.

Chapter three on culture, while it revives the Clifford Geertz examples of Balinese perceptions familiar to any Anthropology 101 student, stops after only a few pages. The cultural impacts remain here very underexplored. The final section about contemporary attitudes, seems oddly blind to the role that 24/7 demands extend the workplace for many of us into what used to be leisure time, declining in America for the employed since the 1980s. Hoffman stresses the entertainment and information-gathering aspects of Internet and data access, but barely mentions the stress exacted as employers expect many employees to be always available for customers, bosses, and production. Surely this erosion of time hastens the personal impact she finds when citing Walter Kirn on how multitasking may enhance visual processing and physical coordination while decreasing memory and learning.

While I learned that wild blueberry bushes live 13,000 years compared to minutes for a mayfly, and how "temporal omnipotence" tempts us all in Promethean fashion, the time spent with this little book I would not call wasted, but not as rewarding as I'd hoped. Still, despite the rather stolid material after the more lively preface, parts of this I predict may excite other readers, even if they may not be the examples I've summarized above.

(I reviewed another book in this series on my blog, Slavoj Zizek's "Violence," last year; earlier I reviewed Hoffman's account of post-'89 Central and Eastern Europe, "Exit into History," both reviews on Amazon US.)

Ted Conover's "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing": Book Review

Certified as if a lion tamer shoved in a cage before he's ever faced down a beast, Conover compares his training as a "corrections officer"; a colleague calls it zookeeping; often it's babysitting, or substituting for a substitute teacher. With 150 hostile charges. New York's prison, built by inmates starting in 1825, imposes itself over the guards, who pass "a life sentence in eight-hour shifts."

The narrative takes you through his training, his duties mostly on the gallery patrolling two tiers and dealing with an endless litany of demands from staff and inmates, the areas of the facility, the history of Sing Sing, his relationships with colleagues and prisoners, and his departure. I liked Conover's tale of another immersion, with illegals crossing into El Norte, "Coyotes." "Newjack" similarly blends his story with that of his "tribe" and its customs. The arrangement, in the historical sections two-thirds through, does lose some momentum by this necessary but duller detour into prison history and Sing Sing's story, but most of the book keeps a brisk pace as the author determines to break into prison the only way he can to cover his story.

Conover decides, as a "participant-observer" schooled in anthropology (this remains blurred in his telling), to join the force. His efforts as a journalist to gain access to tell the guards' side of incarceration blocked by bureaucrats have been blocked earlier by the "wall" of silence put up whenever a civilian approaches. So, Conover enters the only way logically open to a law-abiding citizen. He goes "up the river" thirty miles from his New York City home to work at the original "big house."

The inmates naturally resent whomever's keeping them in, and generally the guards despise or at least distrust the inmates they're paid to lock down. Their weakness or affection can, after all, be used against COs in deadly ways. As one retired CO told the chaplain: "I spent thirty-three years of my life depriving men of their freedom." The recruit's starting salary: as of 1997 when this book takes place: about $23,000. They lead the list of "peace officers" in divorce, alcoholism, and family abuse. Their training does not cover moral issues or ethical problem-solving. It's crowd control of Sing Sing's "2,300 sad stories." While the past two hundred years brought a shift from bodily torture to mental punishment by prison reformers, the reality that the environment with nearly no attempt at true "correction" but abundant control exacts instills failure for all concerned.

Observing the visiting room, Conover reflects on his mixed sympathies with the prisoners, as opposed to his colleagues.

"It was all about absence, wasn't it-- the absence of imprisoned men from the lives of the people who loved them; the absence of love in prison. And also-- what you could never forget-- the absence in the hearts of decent people, the holes that criminals punched in their lives, the absence of the things they took: money, peace of mind, health, and entire lives, because they were selfish or sick or scared or just couldn't wait." (157)

I read this immediately after (also recently reviewed by me on this blog and Amazon US) an account by a man spending twenty-five years in federal penitentiaries for cocaine trafficking, Michael G. Santos' "Inside: Life Behind Bars in America." Santos emphasizes rape, stabbings, smuggling, corruption, blackmail, prostitution, extortion, betrayal, and coercion as daily routines. Conover, by contrast, downplays the "punk-protector system of popular lore" scenario. At one of America's toughest facilities, while Conover shares Santos' depiction from the other side of the bars of the gang domination and the constant threat of sudden violence by staff and inmates, Conover tends a bit towards a comparatively calmer (if such terms realistically can be employed where so many are not only angry and rebellious but also mentally ill) atmosphere. His COs appear often more akin to harried public servants faced with an unending list of shouting customers, staffing a hellish DMV.

The shift from a caged gladiator school may be credited to the fear of lawsuits by inmates, the decline in the no-snitching code among cons, the presence of cameras, the burdens of bureaucratic paperwork, and the surveillance by supervisors of guards. He reckons consensual sex is more common between female COs and inmates than forcible sex between inmates. He tends to dampen the volatile mood assumed by film and rumor to be running rampant without cessation. Waffle Day in the mess hall tempts more mayhem than gangland beefs to settle by stabbings between tattooed rivals, he hints.

Yes, there are corridors without cameras in the old prison labyrinth where recalcitrant prisoners on their way to the box, or solitary, can be disciplined by creative COs. Conover as his hectic and frayed year progresses never can settle into a routine, for in that lies danger, but he learns to say no. He records on two pages how many times on his shift he turns down requests. Some are to annoy, some are necessary, some are legitimate, but the overburdened conditions that Santos lives in also wear down the jailers, understaffed and -- as in public schools-- served by those often least qualified, fresh out of training, and beaten down by uncaring senior colleagues and tyrannical bosses who try to clock in and clock out on cruise control, to isolate their psyches from the dehumanization even as they sustain and depend on their distance from their charges to do their job at least minimally.

"Correction" remains the mantra, but Conover suspects also lurking in his colleagues an idealism that "is never openly discussed by guards, the hope that prisons might do some good for the people in them, that human lives can be fixed instead of thrown away, that there's more to be done than locking doors and knocking heads, that the 'care' in care, custody, and control might amount to something beyond calling the ER when an inmate is bleeding from a shank wound." (209) He ends his year on New Year's Eve, as fires lit by paper thrown from cells fly out and ignite the vast galleries. He knows: "Prison was for punishment; it wasn't ours to forgive." Kindness "was taken for weakness and exploited. Goodwill didn't enter the picture. The job was about maintaining power, and goodwill could erode that power."

But, surreptitiously, he takes some confiscated (they lack the NY State "revenue stamp") cigarette packs out of the discard box from packages sent to inmates. He tries to leave them unnoticed on the rails of the cells of a dozen or so on "his" tiers, where he decided to try to keep working semi-regularly (one problem: newbies are constantly rotated in daily re-assignments to usually the worst postings or "bids," so nobody can get to do one job well if low on the totem pole of COs) on the gallery he once feared. By this gesture, he tries to restore a bit of humanity in the common currency that even the most resistant or the least cooperative prisoner might appreciate as a New Year's gift in a place where few gain any cheer in their cells. (Posted to Amazon US 8-11-09.)

Dlíthe an nádúir go deo

Dónn an spéir inniu in aice leis mo bhaile. Tít crannaí suas ar lasracha tine. Caith sliabhraonta anois.

Tá smúiteach ag timpeall muid anseo. Tá céad céimeannaí teochta nach beag ann. Tá caschoill is cosúil bosca spoinc os cionn i gCathair na hÁingeal.

Is cuimhne liom an forais eile. Bhínn ag suí sa ghrágan ag imeall an sruthán chomh glan le criostal ar feadh mo leathanta saoire an deireadh seachtaine seo caite go Cnoc Hermoin. Tú ábalta feiceáil Sruth Pónaire ina Sléibhte na Crois Naofa leis mo ghriangraf atá go déanta an Domhnach beag seo.

Fágaim síochán ó thuaisceart, faighim cogadh ó dheas. Tugann achan samraidh falscaoth i gCalifoirnea. D'inis ár chomharsaí orm go bhfuil trí déagóirí ag lasadh lasair i gnoc thirim atá is cóngar ár bhaile nuair ag imithe muid.

Dhúisigh mé ag olamh toit inné, chomh agus ar moch ar maidín. Timpeall scrobarnach máguaird ár bótharín. Tá contúirt gach taobh ár chathair mór ar an gcuma chéanna. Tá muid i gcónaí i nádúrtha mar sin féin, agus fanann dlíthe an nádúir ar aon bharr amháin solas go fíochmar i gcónaí.

Nature's eternal laws.

The sky burns today near my house. Trees fall down into the flames of fire. A mountain range smokes now.

It's smudgy around us now. It's almost a hundred degrees in temperature. The scrub (~chaparral?) is like a tinder box above the City of the Angels.

Another forest comes to my mind. I was sitting on a stump along a little stream of water as clear as crystal during my holidays during the past weekend at Mount Hermon. You can see Bean Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains with my photograph which I made this last Sunday.

I leave peace in the north, I find battle in the south. Every summer wildfire comes into California. Our neighbors told me that three teenagers lit a blaze on the parched hill which is closest to our houses when we had gone away.

I woke up smelling smoke yesterday, as early this morning. Brush surrounds us all around our little street. Dangers on every side encircle our great city in the same way. We live in nature all the same, and the laws of nature remain ablaze with fierce light always.

Paul Scott's "The Day of the Scorpion": Book Review

Part two of the Raj Quartet explores WWII-era India from two perspectives. Hari Kumar, back from an English upbringing, languishes in prison after his arrest for the rape of his lover, Daphne Manners, who died at the end of "The Jewel in the Crown." Their baby's fate remains rather open, while Sarah Layton meets it as the sequel opens. She provides the central consciousness, filtered again by an omniscient narrator, into the British response to the rape trial and its prisoners.

Captain Merrick, who played a leading role in the interrogations, now looms as a possible swain for Sarah, but his own injury on the front fighting the Japanese and their Indian allies-- in a dramatically paced episode-- makes their courtship more oblique than direct. She does lose her virginity to an enlisted cad in a late scene that reveals Scott's powers of description: "She closed her eyes, exploring the illusion of possession which such an adoration might create between two people and was then aware that her hands were no longer held except by the desire to explore. Her own head was taken. For a while they stayed so, enacting the tenderness of silent lovers, and then slowly bending her head she allowed him to deal with the old maid's hook and eye." (946; Everyman edition)

Combining compassion and distance, Scott's voice registers throughout this lengthy novel memorably. This will place demands on the reader, and while some of the passages defy it seems the normal pauses and silences and bathroom breaks that in real life might make for less sustained and elegant recollection, the literary artifice of the narrative brings instead of brute realism its own shimmering and dreadful beauties. The very long interrogation of Hari, the reveries of Sarah, and the machinations of Count Bronowsky, the Pandit, and other military officials add verisimilitude and interest to this story.

Still, as before with "Jewel," this remains the story of the British reaction to India. Sarah muses: "They did not transplant well. Temperate plants, in the hot-house they were brought out too quickly and faded fast, and the life they lived, when the heat had dried them out and left only the aggressive husk, was artificial. Among them, occasionally, you would find a freak in whom the sap still ran." (629)

Later at her sister Susan's wedding:

"She had a fleeting image of them all as dolls dressed and positioned for a play that moved mechanically but uncertainly again and again to a point of climax, but then shifted in ground, avoiding a direct confrontation. Each shift was marked by just such a pause, and the wonder perhaps was that the play continued. But the wind blew, nudging her through the creamy thinness of peach-coloured slipper satin and she and they were reanimated, prodded into speech and new positions." (667)

Such artificiality permeates their Indian presence. Loneliness dominates. "Why we are like fireflies too, she told herself, travelling with our own built-in illumination, a myriad portable candles lighting windows against some lost wanderer's return." (716) Miss Manners, aunt of Daphne, when witnessing Hari's interrogation, reflects on them as

"lovers who could never be described as star-crossed because they had no stars. For them heaven had drawn an implacable band of dark across its constellations and the dark was lit by nothing except the trust they had had in each other not to tell the truth because the truth had seemed too dangerous to tell." (793)

Near the end, Sarah sees her sister's reaction to her new husband's death, after Merrick had tried to save them both on the front. Susan, as did Daphne, brings another long narrative to a close with a mix of horror and poignancy, and another child is born by a disturbed British woman into this troubled land. "We sense from the darkness in you the darkness in ourselves, a darkness and a death wish. Neither is admissible. We chase the illusion of perpetual light. But there's no such thing. What light there is, when it comes, comes harshly and unexpectedly and in it we look extraordinarily ugly and incapable." (988) No plucky heroism or stiff upper lips here.

This disturbs the reader. Less than its predecessor, which spread the narrative among different voices and registers, Sarah's tone darkens this installment. Even when she retreats, the ominous detachment dominates. Sometimes an eerie Orientalism arises between the British and the Indians, a doomed inevitability. Hari, the embodiment of British and Indian in one troubled soul, tells his captors about Merrick's stress on "enactment" of actions which are negative themselves, but fall between earlier actions as a consequence and before others as a prelude. History adds up to situations in which no significance can be seen until the actions are finished, or abandoned for fear of responsibility by their actors, "and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events." (797) This combined fatalism and control drifts over the events that Hari has acted in, but determines to stand apart from as he asserts his right to silence about the night he and Daphne became lovers, and that same night he was arrested for her gang-rape.

Few will survive this pressure. Miss Manners watches Hari's testimony and feels that she's "driving to my grave."

"Why and so you are, a voice told her. She recognized it from other occasions. Old people talked to themselves. From a certain age. No. Always. Throughout life. But in old age the voice took on a detached ironical tone. Passion had this determination to outlive its prison of flesh and brittle bone. As it made arrangements to survive it grew away, like a child from its favourite parent, impatient for the moment of total severance and the long dark voyage of intimate self-discovery. And so you are, her voice said. Driving to your grave. The parting of our ways. A release for both of us. One to oblivion, one to eternal life so unintelligible it ranks as oblivion too. And already our commitment to each other is worked out and nearly over. Momentum will carry you through what motions are left to you to show your grasp of situations and responsibilities." (807)

Among these, little Parvati Manners, child of imprisoned Hari and the dead Daphne, must be cared for by the elderly Lady M. Meanwhile, Sarah lingers in her own aftermath of her brief passion, and within such fragile lives, Anglo-India prepares to meet its own demise. Surrounded as the title indicates by their enemies, the colonials will attack back, symbolized by the scorpion stinging itself to death when circled by a ring of fire by those who seek its destruction. (Posted to Amazon US 7-13-09. I read the two-volume Everyman edition pairing "Jewel" with "Day" but this British cover illustration's better.)

Valerie Martin's "Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis": Book Review

Liberation from wealth, embrace of death, love of poverty: Gospel truths for few true Christian preachers. No plaster birdbath figurine on display. Dramatized vignettes from this most Christ-like "perfect failure" spark shocks that Francesco Bernadone jolted to a nascent capitalism, as brutal and as alluring as our own system.

By such parallels, we may too quail at Francesco's story, even as we're drawn to his almost Buddha-like idealism, its insistence that we too can be heroes. This is a narrative shorn of hagiography suited for skeptics as well as believers. Martin locates our common human desire to find freedom from what we accumulate, and our fascination with those few of us who take on the Christian challenge literally.

Destitution brings virtue; God does not want us to get rich; abandoning one's inheritance, we find salvation in folly. These evangelical messages, of course, may appeal more to those born not as lepers, beggars, or peasants, but those who, tempted by riches, chose to vow their surrender so as to more painfully seek salvation along with Assisi's playboy, still crazy as a wandering fool but convinced he'd found treasure beyond his father's peddled soft cloths.

Valerie Martin takes us backwards, from his death to his shattering decision to embrace the leper on the road two decades before he became a living saint, even his dying body protected by the city who mocked him-- lest he die in rival Perugia. The price of fame and the hypocrisy of an Order already bitterly bickering over possessions long before its founder's passing sharpens Martin's eye, but she does not point to easy villains, rather humans who, inspired and perplexed by Francesco, must confront their own path after his intersects with their own in eerily apostolic repetition. Once you meet Francesco, it seems, as with Christ, you cannot forget him.

"Farewell, farewell, Brother Body. Farewell, farewell, beautiful world." Stripped of romanticism by the brutality of a cave where he and his loyal friars skulk to avoid scavengers and opportunists eager to cash in on a saint's relics, already tallying the pilgrim trade to be boosted for the local economy, the last hours of this saint appear more harrowing than hallowed. Those two simple sentences, combining wonder with truth, seem such words as Francesco would have tried to speak on his deathbed. Loving what he viewed, he tormented himself into cutting himself off from the natural beauty that sustained his mystical raptures. No less contradictory than in his famous prayer, full of reversals and opposites, he did believe totally and terribly, as Martin shows on every page, that "in dying, we find eternal life."

He ravaged himself, so at 45 he practically killed off his energy, He thwarted his acceptance of nature's guidance towards the Creator. He fought to win the battle against his own flesh; his fanatical asceticism set a fearful example for his followers-- perhaps not to imitate at their own peril. He took the lessons of Jesus so literally he wound up bleeding through his wounds, hands, feet, and side pierced with the first stigmata. Consider this early scene, one of his last on this earth:

"He is naked now, for his brothers have removed his breeches to keep them from irritating his skin, which is so thin he can be bruised at a touch. Free of the robe, he sits gravely for a moment, clutching the edge of the bed, his blind eyes staring at nothing. Rufino points out the room is cold. He and Leone stand watching Francesco almost warily, as if he might be dangerous. Angelo studies the exposed wound in his side, red but closed, the raw flesh puckered into a circlet, like a tiny mouth. Francesco pats the stone floor with his bandaged feet, as if feeling about for something lost; then, abruptly, he lurches forward and throws himself facedown." (27-28)

Midway through his career, as the Lesser Brothers squabble about who owns what, "these children who will not love another unless they have a law to protect them from one another," Francesco resists vainly the incorporation and expansion of his message, as it must become codified and approved by already thousands of friars. "Like children, though they call him Father, they want to be free of him; they want their inheritance. Many of them are educated; he is unlettered; they think him a fool." (173) Can such compromises ever please radicals who contend with appeasers? Given the legacy of Christ and Buddha, I read this account wondering at the parallels between bold reformers and weary admirers lacking the founder's stamina but still, however weakened, clinging to some remnant of a divinely charged preacher's dream of a better life that's found by giving up life and facing death.

Her unexpected manner of telling these tales may confuse those unfamiliar with the facts; see my 10-24-04 review on Amazon US of Adrian House's "Francis: A Revolutionary Life" that's pitched at contemporary readers. Martin's story unfolds in reverse, except for one powerful chapter when, as the Poor Clares cannot leave the Church of San Damiano that Francesco had repaired so early on, he must come to them, in a fashion I will leave the reader to discover. Martin arranges her stories deftly, prefaced by quotes and supported by endnotes from early chroniclers, as well as intellectuals such as William James, Norbert Elias, Phillipe Aries, and E.M. Cioran. She has a knack for the perfect citation to match later sensibilities with medieval ones. Also, you find yourself imagining the breaking of the siege of Damietta in the Middle East during the Crusades, the unimaginable scene today of a pope's plundered and stripped body decaying on a plinth inside a desolate sanctuary, or the dirt and dust and filth of Assisi, in details that translucently allow you to, alongside Martin, step aside from modern perceptions and re-enter the Middle Ages sensibilities.

For example, take the encounter with the leper, after Francesco has left his father's luxury, courted abandonment, but still must face the enormity of his irrevocable decision. Francesco sees him "like a weatherbeaten statue, and Francesco has the sense that he has been standing there, in his path, forever." (239) He finally summons up the courage to overcome his disgust. "Then the two men clutch each other, their faces pressed close together, their arms entwined. The sun beats down, the air is hot and still, yet they appear to be caught in a whirlwind. Their clothes whip about; their hair stands on end; they hold on to each other for dear life." (241) That's how Martin finishes, suddenly and memorably, her poignant tale. (Posted 7-1-09 to Amazon U.S. and my blog.)

Robert Ferrigno's "Heart of the Assassin": Book Review

In "Prayers," Ferrigno created a marvelous dystopia, the Islamic Republic. West Coast jihadis met Cascades thugs as Rikki tried to escape Seattle, the capital. The author in this had a marvelous set-piece as Rikki was pursued down backwoods roads. A challenge in any alternative history set in the future is to keep the plot moving while informing the reader of the immense changes that have torn apart mid-21st c. America, split into the Bible Belt vs. Islamic Rep. not to mention Mormons, Cubans in Florida, nuclear contaminated zones, and zombies in what was D.C. The scope of a ruined North America and another Aztlan reconquering the Southwest only added to the intensity, but the focus here remained more on the Islamic regime and the various types of fanaticism or moderation that Americans in most of the former U.S. had adjusted to as the dar-al-Islam shifted from a radioactive Mecca to an unexpected new continent to rule. (I reviewed it and "Sins" last year on Amazon US and my blog.)

"Sins" kept the trilogy efficiently gathering intensity, as Rikki and his sidekick Leo entered the Bible Belt undercover, and the set-piece of the eerie Church in the Mists still haunts me for its unsettling mysticism amidst redneck mayhem. Ferrigno seemed to ease up the pace of the immense effort of constructing his realms, and the middle volume had more breathing room for political intrigue mixed with even more bloodcurdling action, spiced with sassy dialogue, theological musings, and social satire. Battle scenes rather than hand-to-hand combat entered the scenarios, and both arenas show the author's skill at mingling characters you care about--even the villains-- with true glimpses of cruelty, cynicism, idealism, decay, betrayal, lust, and more betrayal.

"Heart" wraps it up with more of the same elements; short chapters in very cinematic form illustrate a wide range of characters contending for power. It takes time to appreciate these books, and while streamlined in style and very accessibly told, the alternate history that Ferrigno tells demands attention; his speculations are often inserted almost off-handedly into more conventional thriller episodes. This balance of excitement and meditation can prove poignant and poetic as well as bitterly humorous or ethically instructive.

In the final installment, now the Southern borders get more attention, as the Empire of Aztlan now contends against foes last seen in "Sins" from the Bible Belt, as perhaps they can be manipulated into an alliance of "one-god" peoples against the oil-rich polytheists from south of a border creeping ever north. Rikki is back, and so is his rival super-engineered rival Gravenholtz. Baby and the Old One, Sarah, Leo, Spider, and Ibn-Azziz also return to heighten the tension. It's more international chaos as you never know whom to trust or blame for the latest atrocity broadcast in this militarized, policed, censored, surveilled, and patrolled cyber-hell, half-decaying, half-luxurious, depending upon who's doing the funding as armies battle, mosques tower, and churches fill with a curious interpretation of an ecumenical gospel.

D.C. must be entered, as there's what may or may not be a splinter of the True Cross with miraculous powers within. It may be a McGuffin or a Maltese Falcon, or it may be real, but who else but Rikki Epps, with help from certain friends, to find out? That's about all I can entice you with; the rest of the story awaits your enjoyment.

I will miss this sprawling panorama of despair and dreams, for Ferrigno loves his Pandemonium, and even gains kudos for the insertion on p. 121 of the election of our first "multiracial" President, named "after a grandson of the Prophet," and our current Crusade, as part of the convincing backstory that shows how not violent jihad alone, but gradual conversion by celebrities, a disgust with decayed Christianity and secular capitalism, globalization and our current economic downturn all could be logically seen, in deadly hindsight, as leading to a possible future not so improbable after all.

That Ferrigno uses so much intelligence, research, imagination, and enthusiasm to tell his story proves not only a page-turner (and care is needed as so much is embedded within the dialogue and narration that refers back to "Sins" and "Prayers") but a meditation on our own folly and one radical way that emerges for some to offer us, lost and losing hope, a way for a salvation unseen by the Founding Fathers to whose dirty-bombed capital Rikki returns for a gripping and thoughtfully presented encounter with the end of one American dream and perhaps the attempt to rebuild a more perfect nation after all its divisibility.

Brian Clegg's "Before the Big Bang": Book Review

Clegg combines a history of myth ("a story with a purpose") and science as they struggle to come to terms with creation. His lively narrative strives by frequent metaphor and short chapters to convey an incredibly difficult topic. I never thought I'd be able to understand such astrophysical speculation based on quantum theory and thought-experiments, but thanks to Clegg's clarity, I could, more or less.

Parts of this study will inevitably cause the most nimble mind to quail, given models based on our universe being a 2-d holographic projection into 3-d for us to observe, or a "bit-it" parallel that imagines information itself becoming the building blocks of a universe constructed as we learn to conceive it, or one that is a "multiple universe" one based on the "choices" that a light wave may "make" as we watch it and try to measure it. Not to be confused with multiverses!

That Clegg shows us how this all came to be in the minds of astronomers over the centuries, especially most recently as satellites and telescopes begin to combine with CERN to hint at the previously unimaginable, is an achievement. He tells in a dozen relatively snappy chapters the pre-history of the theories that led to the Big Bang, and then the fudge-factor of lambda added by Einstein as he resisted the quantum mechanics that led to the breakthroughs that eventually eroded the Steady State Fred Hoyle theory in favor of the Big Bang.

Yet, the holes punched in to this model by math and logic, for some astronomers, have then whittled away even this paradigm. "Groundhog Universes" along the Big Crumple, the dodahecadron-shaped possibility of a universe that eludes our whole perception due to our inability to "see" some of its directions, may indicate Clegg's favorite model's replacement of the Big Bang with the Steinhardt-Turok "bouncing branes" set-up. See more about this elsewhere, but this may show another universe a millimeter away from ours with enough ripples in the space-time fabric to allow for gravitational anamolies and a sort of mirror-pattern that shows perhaps a universe previous to the creation of our own.

Such ideas are hard to sum up, but Clegg does his best. This book may often retell the familiar and he has written often on the history of astronomy; he may repeat much, taking about two-thirds of the book to get to where I figured, with the Big Crumple, he'd have arrived far earlier, but much ground for him is smoothed out and worked over before he gets to the latest suppositions. This does slow the book down markedly, but aimed at non-scientists such as myself, such elaboration may be necessary given the immense difficulty of laying out in comprehensible terms (no formulae here) the research of experts.

I do think he gave short shrift to Buddhist cosmological conceptions early on when dismissing these as possible patterns of early thinkers, and he could have also slowed down to dig deeper into the plasma explanations that account for a significant foundation for the multi-dimensional membranes. And, I aver that Clegg needed to flesh out the "universe in a black hole" theory more fully; some of his major points get not lost in the cosmic shuffle of "what-ifs," but they do flash by for the less-skilled layman's eye rather quickly and can be missed too easily.

All in all, a lively primer that as a non-scientist I found answered many of my questions about a question that always fascinated me, and that I did not know had so many analogues. Others more versed in astrophysics may well contend with the devils in the details; to me on the outside, I think Clegg keeps his own biases clear and allows for the chance that as with all scientific theories, nobody can cling to one explanation for such a vast and nearly unprovable subject. The sheer headiness of the glimmer that we can see past our own universe's beginnings is itself cause for the most rarified delight. Clegg keeps his sense of humor, his balance between rigor and skepticism, and his own sense of wonder shows. I recommend this book and thank him for his considerable efforts. (Amazon US 8/09)

Ag ullmhú a campa a shuí

Go luath, rachaidh mé ag Big Sur leis mo theaghlach. Is cosúil Ricky agus Lucy Ricardo. Tiomáinfaidh muid leis leantóir pubaill mar sin féin. Níor thiomáin muid chomh seo cheana.

Mar sin, foghlaim muid an modh ceart triu ár chairde atá ag ligean a leantóir orainn. Ní bheidh seo furasta, ag dul ar an slí lúbach ar thuaidh na gCalifoirnea suas an claddagh casta. Ach, feicfidh mé an áit go halainn an chéad uair ormsa féin.

Champáil mise féin trí huaire. Nuair bhí mé dhá bhliain déag d'aois, chuaigh mé leis Gasóga. Chaith mé do deireadh na seachtaine faoi dhó leo amháin amuigh faoin spéir.

Chuir mé cuairt ina sneachta lá amháin le linn m'óige. Bhí mé is fuair ann! Ansin, d'fhan ina diseart in aice leis Scardan na Pailme ag timpeall Caisc.

Dó bliain ina dhiadh sin, d'imigh mé ar do laethanta saoire i tsamraidh go Na Sierras sínte le Chontae Plumas. Phacáil muid ar ár dromannaí ansuid go an Loch Féir. D'ithe mé breac tar éis a mharaithe go tapaidh. Bhí aon uair amháin ormsa faoi sin fós, aríst.

Anois, tá mé ag dul in meán an tsaoil. Tá mé ag lorg ar síocháin in an tír shíothach ar thuaidh. Tá mé ar intinn agam dul chun go dtí Gleann Pfeiffer ag siúlaigh de chois-- faoin scáth os cionn an t-aigéan, ar ndóigh.

Ba mhaith liom a léamh leabhair-- aon le Jack Kerouac agus an eile le John Muir-- nuair ar an shuaimhneas. Measaim go mbeadh is fearr a bheith ar dhá bharúil leosan féin de réir an radharc iomrothlach nádúrtha faoi na sliabhraontaí creagach agus coillte ciúin de ár Stát Órga. Tiocfaidh mé ar bhaile a insint agaibh níos mo anseo as Gaeilge-- agus Béarla-- tar éis eachtra go leor sin é!

Preparing to pitch a camp.

Soon, I will go to Big Sur with my family. It's like Ricky and Lucy Ricardo. We will drive with a tent-trailer, nevertheless. We have not ever driven like this.

Therefore, we are learning the correct procedure through our friends who are lending their trailer to us. This will not be easy, going on the sinuous way to the north of California up the twisty shoreline. But, I will see a lovely place for the first time for myself.

I've camped myself three times. When I was twelve years old, I went with the Boy Scouts. All the same, I spent my weekend twice only with them only under the open sky.

I visited the snow one time only in my life. I was very cold there! Then, I stayed in the desert near Palm Springs around Easter.

Two years after that, I went off on my free time in the summer to the Sierras around Plumas County bordering Nevada. We "packed on our backs" over there to Grass Lake. I ate a trout after it had quickly been killed. It was the only time for me about that too, again.

Now, I'm getting on the middle of life. I'm searching for peace in the tranquil countryside to the north. I have it in my mind to go off to Pfeiffer Canyon "walking on foot"-- under the shade above the ocean, of course.

I would like to read two books-- one by Jack Kerouac and the other by John Muir-- when resting. I reckon that it'd be best to share their opinions concerning the wide vista (=panorama) of nature about the craggy mountain-ranges and quiet groves of our Golden State. I'll come back home to tell you all more here in Irish-- and English-- after this grand adventure!

Why read when you can surf (the Net)?

Reading me here, you may share my decreased attention for reading seriously. I write this on a blog that feeds to Facebook; I post book reviews on Amazon; I must teach half on-line and half "on-site" now and that means I must check in daily with students. So, I read a lot, so much my neck lately hurts from its fixed position with me in a chair, looking ahead as you are at this screen, these characters.

This demand does challenge me when, soon, I will be away from the Net in a rural retreat. My work tells me at least three separate days weekly-- and I teach 48 weeks a year-- I must at a minimum be electronically documented as teaching on their on-line platform. Realistically, if I logged in that much, I'd enjoy much more time to blog, review, and read, for I'd be out of a job.

David L. Ulin, in "Finding your focus" (retitled at this URL tellingly as "The Lost Art of Reading"), in last Sunday's L.A. Times (a sign of the "Times" that the "Arts & Books" section replaced what he edited as the stand-alone LAT Book Review) laments his decreasing attention span. My wife chastises me for my cellphone aversion. I may be the last person not with iPhone or Twitter, but having joined FB six months ago, I do find many writer friends relentlessly promoting their work there. I welcome their posts, but I wonder if in five years -- as with what we may dimly recall as the wonder of getting e-mail our first few weeks on the Internet circa '95-- we'll be as deluged hourly by dozens of come-ons and look-at-me's as we were by spam and are by pop-ups and Flash and embedded video and floating ads. I blame my students: it's their job to come up with such Javas and applets and gizmos.

This makes me cranky, regaling my charges with the good ol' days of me on a manual typewriter banging out term papers. Only the intervention of my fast-fingered wife saved me from converting 500 ms. pages written with a Montblanc 144 into a 500-page dissertation. That last prolonged gasp of fountain pen on paper, transcribed by her onto tiny floppies, word-processing of what I'd compiled by index cards, sighed that last summer as I scribbled up a decade of research. The next year or so, the GUI via the Internet arrived en masse. Nobody'd bother with books, it seemed, ever again.

Ulin tells a familiar set of symptoms. Distracted, can't concentrate, no longer do the stack of bedside books keep us up all hours. "What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age." Work for most of us now involves a screen, more words, lots of pecking and shuffling and skimming, and who wants more for the eye to face with lines of tiny font when one stumbles home? (Inspired by the font change at the L.A. Times website, terrible as it is, I've followed their move to "Georgia" for its serifs without "sans" for readability.) The big or small screens many prefer may dazzle with games and images and spectacle.

"Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time." He muses that books make us immerse our contemplative selves into a removed realm. They slow time down. They make us think quietly. Yes, it reminds me of monasticism, of withdrawal.

He continues after he cites an essayist who quotes Simone Weil:

"One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise one is just dreaming." That's the point precisely, for without time we lose a sense of narrative, that most essential connection to who we are. We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?

This is where real reading comes in -- because it demands that space, because by drawing us back from the present, it restores time to us in a fundamental way.

Ulin's quest reminds him of the similarities between self-knowledge and self-understanding; these are rarely gained, despite evolution, with our heads plugged into an iPod or our thumbs massaging a message on a BlackBerry or iPhone. I love my iPod, of course, but there's a disciplined intimacy gained from the shelter of the imagination less mediated by somebody else's visual or interpretative adaptation of reality. As with a spiritual seeker, we must plumb deeper if we wish to find nourishment more sustaining than fast food or snack packs.

As Ulin concludes, this gift is "what reading has to offer: a way to eclipse the boundaries, which is a form of giving up control. Here we have the paradox, since in giving up control we somehow gain it, by being brought in contact with ourselves." His memory of being scolded as twelve-year-old for carrying a book to his grandmother's family functions reminds me of my backseat companion throughout my childhood, and for any vacation or long stretch that, even now when waiting to pick up my own child in a parking lot or after school, I carry: another bookmarked book in reach. And, I too was punished for reading too much; I had to go out and shovel dog-crap, clean kennel runs, and if that was done, weed. (I got a Weedwhacker for my sixteenth birthday, just in time for late June. My dad thought this funny.) This in a hundred-degree Southern California, semi-arid, usually smoggy summer. No wonder I never grew a green thumb, why I have hay fever, why I sunburn.

Ulin and I would agree with our earlier bookwormish stages:

"Back then, if I'd had the language for it, I might have argued that the world within the pages was more compelling than the world without; I was reading both to escape and to be engaged. All these years later, I find myself in a not-dissimilar position, in which reading has become an act of meditation, with all of meditation's attendant difficulty and grace. I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It's harder than it used to be, but still, I read."

And, I'd add, like meditation, it carries the determination to engage the quotidian by breaking out of the routine, the checking of e-mail, the logging-in to work, the update of our blog or our website or our FB or Twitter status. These all connect, as cyber-2.0 gurus delight in chiding us, but I will look forward to my time away at a campsite with John Muir's "The Mountains of California" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" as companions with whom I can appreciate the never-seen (except from a car) splendors of Big Sur soon. I'll be away a bit. The campground store, I'm told, will have the necessary wireless hook-up so I can submit my timeclocked teaching by remote, but the real learning for me will be a return to a downtime I have not experienced, in a tent, since I was fourteen, twenty years before that dissertation. Not to mention the Net.

(Adam Simpson's illustration above accompanied Ulin's article. As it captures the meditative analogy well, I couldn't improve on it, hard as the purple detail's able to make out, on the Net. It was easier to appreciate in its original [?] newsprint.)

Mo chuid den Gaeilge

"Tá dul an Bhéarla ar a cuid Gaeilge." Chuir Dónal agam seo leis a mhúinteoir. Tá mé ag socrú ag bhainnean leis seo, chomh d'inis mé orm ar Leabhar Aghaidh inné.

Ag foghlaim Gaeilge nuair foghlameoir fásta go bhfuil deacair a dhéanamh. Ar ndóigh, tá nios deacra nuair cónaithe thar leor. Ní fhaigheann mé Gaeilge ar an bóthar go rialta; ní chloiseann mé sé ar an raidio go coitanta.

Ar scor ar bith, bím ag foghlaim Gaelige inniu! Ar beagán ar bheagán, tá duine eile ag foghlaim de na tíortha thar lear. Téann muid go Éirinn agus ag cónai ar an gcoigríoch gach lá.

Measaim go mbeadh is deacra ag spreagúil Gaeilge ar ball. Tá duine éagsúla ag teacht go Éirinn anois ar an domhain. Maítheadh an scrúdú ar scoil díobh go minic go nádúrtha. Mar sin, beidh mic léinn níos lu ag foghlaim Gaeilge ansin.

Níl aon amhras faoi. Tá dúshlán crua. Nílim ábalta déanamh freagra furasta ann.

Is mór a d'athraigh an tír. Tá athrach saoil ann. Níl tú ábalta fáil fíor-Gaeltacht ach in an rang dhían nó an brionglóid Fhiannach Phiarais. Tá fhíos acu ag rá as Béarla sa deireadh in Éirinn go luath.

Sa chéad chás de, ní fhillfear go brúidiúilacht múinteoira chomh san am a chuaigh thart triu Éirinn. Tógtar rogha a bhaint a foghlaim agus úsaid Gaeilge go saor. Os a choinne sin, b'fhéidir bheadh a bheith pobal le taobhú an teanga dhúchais seo gach lá agus amárach leis bród ina h-áit dhúchais.

Mar sin féin, chuala mé faoi deireanach (nasc: "Palma Nova") de réir abairt le cailín in An Droichead Nua. D'inis sí chuig mo chairde, a tuismitheoirí: "Iarraim gach duine in Éirinn ag labhairt as Gaeilge nuair go mbeidh mé ceannaire na h-Éirinn!" Gheofá sí breith a bhéil féin.

My share of Irish.

"The English's going from your share of Irish," (literal); "Your Irish has the shape of English" (figurative). Dan sent me this from his teacher. I'm in agreement concerning this, as I told him on FaceBook yesterday.

Learning Irish when an adult learner's hard to do. Of course, it's harder when living abroad. I don't see Irish on the road regularly; I don't hear it on the radio daily.

However, I'm studying Irish today! Little by little, there's other people learning from the lands overseas. We're going to Ireland to study but living elsewhere every day.

I judge it may be most difficult encouraging Irish in the future. There's different people coming into Ireland now from all over the world. They're granted exemption in school often, naturally. Therefore, there'll be fewer students learning Irish there.

There's no doubt about it. This is a tough challenge. There's no easy answer I can make.

The country's changed a lot. Times have transformed there. You're not able to find a pure-Irish-speaking area but in a strictly-disciplined classroom or Pearse's Fenian dream.

On the one hand, one will not return to brutality of a teacher as in times past through Ireland. Let somebody take a choice to learn and use Irish freely. On the other hand, perhaps the community should support this mother tongue every day and tomorrow with proper-pride in its native habitat.

All the same, I heard recently (link: "Palma Nova") about a sentence from a little girl in Drogheda. She told my friends, her parents: "I want everyone in Ireland speaking in Irish when I will be president of Ireland!" May she get her wish!

Image/ íomhá: "Acht Gaeilge, Aon Duine?"/Irish-language Act, Everyone?/ Ógra Shinn Féin. Le 'MacSaonordú'. 23 Feabhra/Feb. 2009. "Foghlaim Gaeilge, Aon Duine?"

Is Hell other people?

Sartre's "No Exit" judgment leaves me wondering. "Why the Dalai Lama Matters," today's treadmill reading for me, unexpectedly offers an alternative definition. "A hell-being is a fully alienated, self-isolated being, almost totally barricaded against all other life forms. In the effort to ward off contact with other beings due to fear and hatred of them, the being has imprisoned itself in a defensive iron shell that has become a prison, under the extreme pressure of trying to avoid the entire universe of others." (20)

Robert Thurman discusses Buddhist physics, psychology, and biology; these subjects seem so arcane to our rational Western ways that he uses well the analogy of Neo in "The Matrix" to help us understand how a liberated being can assist others in breaking free. I also wonder if Keanu Reeves, like Richard Gere often perhaps unfairly lambasted for his combination of winning looks and laid-back demeanor a follower of the philosophy of the Dalai Lama, may in fact prove ideal actors to portray such agents of change.

Anyhow, back to the hellish aspect, I realize we need to get off the mental treadmill. I've been feeling felled by the penalties imposed upon me by others lately, and I rail against injustice. As we all do, selfishly or righteously. However, ultimately we can't blame others as prisoners often do. Living within our own high-security protective custody, we begin daily to fortify our own hell. I've been reading-- and dreaming-- about prison lately, and this topic dovetails nicely, as a couple of my cyber-correspondents have noted, with long-term interests of mine.

These in turn help elucidate this revision of Sartre. Rather than as Wire sang, "Two People in a Room," he gave us three; that existentialist drama showed us a triangle without ends or limits, turning away from one corner, one person, to jab the other, and then down and back and over again geometrically and eternally. U2 mused about being "stuck in a moment you can't get out of." This fits Sartre, but also Thurman.

Despite my decade spent coming out of my own private hell in grad school, where my UCLA professor consigned us all as "neurotic egotists," with a doctoral dissertation 500 pages and 500 sources on the "idea of purgatory in Middle English Literature," I never defined hell as neatly as does Uma's father, one of the Dalai Lama's first American followers. We sentence ourselves to our own penalty; no god dumps us there and tosses the key. Read Alexander Theroux's frustrating "An Adultery" for a contemporary description of how we make our own impermeable psychic fortress, within which we shut ourselves away; his novels show how even the brainiest of us easily collude in our own smug isolation. Solitary, the "Special Housing Unit," the Box: it's California's supermax Pelican Bay Penitentiary as our mausoleum in perpetuity.

Around 1990, my wife and I saw "The Rapture," that like Keanu and Gere got savaged by film critics-- and the miniscule audience with whom we saw it-- but which to me despite cheesy special effects on a limited budget dared to show Armageddon and the Second Coming as totally harshing up a typically spaced-out slutty Angeleno's mellow. It had a very effective ending. The heroine (unfortunately Mimi Rogers hearkened to the gospel peddled by a certain former sci-fi hack whose money-making cult esteemed by her and ex-husband Tom C. will go unmentioned for fear of lawsuits and my hard drive being absconded) decided to be left alone in hell, all alone, for refusing to bow down to the demands of a cruel, jealous, vengeful God.

Her Promethean defiance fits better the secular humanist resistance to Nobodaddy. It also reminded me of what agnostic maverick Stephen Batchelor in his books "Buddhism Without Beliefs" and "The Awakening of the West" muses upon. This rejection of the solidity of religious imposition of sin, penalty, and damnation turns into a life-affirming "No Guru, No Method, No Teacher" as Van Morrison sang, in Batchelor. He seeks to dismantle the conception for many earlier Europeans, for whom a Buddhist dismissal of the reality of gods and demons, endless hell or heaven frightened even unbelievers. Mistranslating yearning for "nirvana" and going beyond duality of being/not-being to "non-existence" beyond concept as a terrible plunge into nihilism, earlier Westerners often freaked out when exposed to Tibet. Lhasa seemed to repeat Rome's papal panoply while denying its temporal and eternal jurisdiction.

A Borges story parallels and reflects eerily these scholarly encounters, tenured rationalists lured to but then baffled by the Eastern exotically indescribable. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940). I cite near the start.

He had recalled: Copulation and mirrors are abominable. The text of the encyclopedia said: For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.

It's so wonderful I must cite from the website's parallel text the intriguingly bilingual Spanish too:

Él había recordado: Copulation and mirrors are abominable. El texto de la Enciclopedia decía: Para uno de esos gnósticos, el visible universo era una ilusión o (más precisamente) un sofisma. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables (mirrors and fatherhood are hateful) porque lo multiplican y lo divulgan.

In "Tlon," the narrator praises "Schopenhauer (el apasionado y lúcido Schopenhauer)" -- but he as Pankaj Mishra in "The End of Suffering" explores, warped Buddha's teaching for Nietzsche and legions of Sartre-worshipping black clad beats and hipsters and profs. I might revamp Mishra into a world-denying, No Fun proto-punk rant by café bohos a century before the Stooges or Johnny Rotten against Starbucks conformity or Crocs comfort.

Donald S. Lopez' "Prisoners of Shangri-La" tends to dismiss Thurman's panegyrics for Buddhist science and the "inner revolution" represented by the spread of dharma by Tibetan "science of the mind." Yet, both agree with Batchelor: we can embrace the Void, knowing we must jump in one day if we wish to free ourselves. This terrifying prospect, as the Buddha might tell us, presents paradoxically our only hope. Mystics in medieval monasteries, Tibetan or Carthusian, as English anchorites walled up in cells or Lhasa adepts scaling the heights of psychic transformation, may concur.

If we want to get straight outta Compton or the Hamptons, we gotta get outta this place if it's the last thing we ever do. Song scraps go through the mind of me the (post-)modern. As prayers and scripture might have for my bogtrotting ancestors. I did find, moving out of my inculcated Catholicism into its Eastern practices during grad school, an affinity with the Orthodox Christian teaching of extrapolating divine emanations as perceived in our realm without ever getting to the essence of the Deity. Likewise, Jewish kabbalastic lore tells of the escaped shards seeking from darkness a return to their created original light. It's telling perhaps that Tibetan Buddhist cosmology centers around five elements, none of which are shown in black, one of which, the triangular representation for "magnetizing heat" in red, shows the power of fire.

This favored depiction for Christian hell, fire rather than Milton's truly chilling "darkness visible" for the demonic pandemonium's utter foundation, shows our attraction and fear of this cutting element able to cauterize us for healing after sharp pain, or to torture us in an afterlife with endless gnaw. I suppose Tibetans hearken towards the therapeutic application of fire to cleanse us from our purgatory, our bardo, to shake us out of our posthumous stupor into leaping, enlightened, from the power of our own pornographic projections of demons and angels.

Christians never got this far. Dante better than the English texts I scoured conceived a more literary, better polished, aesthetic vision, but for the didactic uses to which hell, was and continues to be put by earnest Christians who never read "The Divine Comedy"-- it's a death sentence without parole. Even purgatory got transformed early on into the temporary hell, for why ease up on its inventive jailers with manifold racks, pinions, and pains if you wish to terrify your congregants towards a "scared straight" reform?

I think of the Haunted House tradition among born-again evangelicals that's popular today as a counter-reformation to Catholic-tainted frivolity and godless consumerism on October 31st (and increasingly a month before, for grown-ups as well as small fry.) This pastoral outreach, which Chaucer's pilgrims might well have loved, inverts the Samhain Celtic Otherworld interpenetration of the trans-terrestrial with our mundane sublunary (thanks to my blog-pal linked by me on my blog, "Bo" on "The Expvlsion of the Blatant Beast" and "The Cantos of Mvtabilitie" for reviving that adjective) level.

That's turned into both secular trick-or-treat and, in a clever backlash against the "pagan" marketing of Halloween in the US, into a Grand Guignol re-creation of abortionists, atheists, and probably Buddhists and Catholics among those consigned, with rich make-up and cool strobes and gothic get-ups from Hot Topic, into a Mystery Play medievally evocative enactment of the Hellfire Sermon of Joyce's Jesuits. Even Chaucer failed to include in his Canterbury Tales a preacher's tale so vivid; his Church had five centuries more to sharpen its scary stories for the young and old.

Chaucer may have been the first Englishman to read Italian and tentatively have been exposed to Dante, but as far as I could tell, this did not inform his few, rather pro-forma, mentions of purgatory. Purgatory, with its distant, reluctant admission of a doctrinal necessity for a happy ending lacking from "No Exit," "An Adultery," or "The Rapture" (I never bothered with the final installment of the Matrix trilogy: should I?), always lacked the frisson gained by the bogeyman of the slasher film equivalent of the eternally recurring demonic Lucifer, Freddy or Jason.

We all squirm to consign whomever we most despise to greedy, unquenchable Gehenna. Capital punishment's a cop-out for those ending their film's perfect script of a Clint Eastwood avenging angel turned devil. We stock hell with the satisfaction we lack in this life, where parolees, judges, and Democrats letting so-and-so get away with murder. Literarily or psychologically, we long to lash out and restore the balance that Manichean good-evil contention withholds from our weakened mortal grasp. We stock that prison deep down below our stamping feet with Manson, Hitler and Caesar, Stalin and Nixon, Saddam and your boss, Satan and his Lord of the Flies. I'll end my infernal excursus today with a snatch from the prologue to "The Summoner's Tale." The summoner gets his back at the friar. "Hold up thy tail, thou Satanas,' quoth he, 'Shew forth thine erse, and let the friar see/ Where is the nest of friars in this place.'"

Photo: Saen Sok Temple, Thailand: hell as a diorama at a monastic theme park. In "The Hells: 'Niraya' ('unhappy')" American Buddhist Journal: Wisdom Quarterly. 10/4/2008. A helpful compendium of entries on many topics at this blog, even if you somehow cannot comment on any of them! Sort of like talking to the Big Guy Upstairs? One-way communication, as far as we can articulate. The answers may come back as unspoken. Maybe this blog's authored by an unseen incarnation of a buddha after all.

P.S. Inevitable cross-references. I've reviewed Theroux's novels, Gere's audiotape reading of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," Batchelor's "Buddhism Without Beliefs," Mishra & Lopez on Amazon US and this blog the past year. I will soon add "Awakening" and Thurman's book reviewed to both places; "Awakening"'s already up on Amazon.

Behind Blue Eyes

"Nobody wants to hear about your girlfriend, your cat, your life." Bolt awake from a dream half-erotic, half-ridiculous, resisting sleep an hour, I mused about my next blog entry. I'd noted "professional" bloggers' advice: keep it objective if you want to sell success.

But, on this blog, nobody's buying what's free, I figure. You can read Stephane Grenier's "Blog Blazers"-- reviewed last month by me here and on Amazon US-- if you want to make money off your site. I'm content to regale you with me, as you do me with you, through these media. Who knows who finds these very late-night, pre-dawn thoughts? I've lost the Google Analytics widget even though my wife daily checks hers for her quite personal, yet philosophical, blog, full of musings about her girlfriends, her life, if less about the cats that pestered me from sleep now as I type this exorcism of my incubi at 4:45 a.m., failing to return to sleep and lacking a charged iPod with which to shut out her tossing, turning, and talking in her own very deep slumber. The ceiling fan whirs, the summer dawn nears, yet the heat of yesterday's never quite dimmed. August brings restlessness not only for dog's days.

I'd finished late last night Ted Conover's "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing," as a complement to Michael Santos' "Inside: Life Behind Bars in America." I figured they'd give me, from a man serving a year as a New York "correctional officer" and one sentenced for what will be twenty-five years in federal penitentiaries after his release in 2013, a balanced view. It worked for my consciously analytical mind.

The aftermath, a dream of a female prison supervisor and me-- not a prisoner but not quite a guard I guess-- was far from satisfying, but closer to provocative. I spare you the illogical details; I'm not the type to rattle on, at least about my reveries. Suffice to say it was one of those tingling but terrifying ones that combines enticing charm with Gothic frustration; it reminded waking me of a Henry Fuseli engraving, all erotically bound and demonically coiled in some dungeon, or Goya's contemporary drawing "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos." Instead of "a parliament of owls" (correct collective avian noun!) flying out of my drowsing heavy head, I'd replace it with I suppose Catholic guilt, Dorian Grey's reflected failure at chronological restoration, and the family's new photo portraits I saw also the previous evening that we'd bartered, such is the economy and my spouse's necessary business ingenuity, for her stock footage.

I've felt edgy lately, so I suppose I look it in those photos shot a week ago. My reddish-brown hair's nearly all silver, my once ginger beard's white. Barely any auburn remains, and my tousled wavy cut, shorn down for summer to the length of a fresh fish for prison bait as inmate or jailer, allows little distraction from my ever-elongated head with its jutting ears and perpetually thick if finally-- thanks to the magic of "lightweight" marginally thinner lenses at least-- rimless glasses.

The last photo, the one I will probably continue to use on my blog and the Net, had me with still sandy shade above but without specs below. We all on the wife's directive wore autumnal dark, however, so I look like a monk, buried in a black coat and sweater combo against a stormy oilcloth background that only accentuated my pale skin and my owlish, blinded, gaze into strobed emptiness. So, this time we figured I'd wear a bright blue shirt.

This enhanced my eyes, but with my glasses tilting down my beakish nose, as long as John Lennon's to whom I used to be compared (was that a compliment, the sarcastic one and not the cute one?), I looked like a granny. And, who could see pale blue eyes behind the massive width of my glasses? They did serve to stretch out in optical illusion my oval, to put it kindly, countenance. But, I could not believe that this very fair, bleached white, and sharply shorn character represented how you all, in the mugshot on the Web and worse in person for a few of you, see yours truly.

"No one knows what it's like to be the sad man. To be the bad man, behind blue eyes." Or vice versa. The lyrics to The Who's song popped into my sleepless mind as I composed mentally what I'd write, or have not written yet, here. They bring to mind a high school lesson in sophomore comparative religion, where a friend of mine, now deceased, who told of how his brother used these lines, circa '71 when they first appeared, to accompany a presentation of the then-current hi-tech medium for the masses, the slide show as sermon.

I first heard in that class about concepts I study today, about Buddhism and Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. The advice to repair what we've heedlessly damaged in our early stumbles through life transcends sectarianism. Perhaps that instruction stuck with me, despite my mistakes that harmed others as I tried to grow up. We all grapple with our own ignorance, our own lack of control, and we still keep falling down. But, I've tried to pick myself up and lend a hand to others as they for me.

After I found some old classmates on Facebook, for a couple of them, I tried to make amends for past wrongs. These harms dated, them being old classmates, back decades, one to the late-Seventies, the other the mid-Eighties. For both, I suppose until hindsight via FB's perspective enabling me to contact them sharpened my focus abruptly, I had not realized so long ago, until now, how deeply I had hurt them.

One promptly accepted my apology. One eventually deflected it. It shot back at me, and it hurt. I guess forgiveness is not mine to always bestow as largesse-- and then to waltz away so smugly from the one struck down. Perhaps this pain sometimes for some of us we must endure, to remind us of our lack of power, our humility. This too keeps us tethered by our weakness. It drags us closer to our common frail anguish.

Still, with this chance to keep present with people from my past, I welcome unexpected opportunities provided by technology to bolster communication. I may not always gain the responses I'd anticipated, but I've tried to unburden my conscience, better late than never. Without social networking, I'd never have been able to contact friends anyway; this reveals to me the blessings that surround me. I hope you too, perusing my thoughts perhaps on that same social network fed by this blog.

In restless hours in the middle of that waking night, our past haunts us and transforms us into revenants. Returned ghosts who keep revisiting where we once lived. Economic loss, vanished careers, family sundering, and the death of loved ones, I found with many of those I have learned about-- perhaps especially with the two old friends I tried to ask forgiveness from-- also hammer many of us today in particularly cruel onslaughts. It's poignant, humbling, and chastening to find that my own troubles don't amount to the proverbial hill of Bogie's beans compared to many of my peers.

It's been a challenge to reach out not only in this blog but in correspondence to people you'd never thought you'd see again, let alone in this new medium to verbally and cybernetically re-"friend." The promise of that capacious term as a verb for our social networking's elastic and elusive. As my spouse observed in a related context: "cheaper than yoga or shrinks." Apropos, I also add her three favorite words in the English language to be said to her by me: "I was wrong."

I near I find a hundred "Friends" now on FB, but if asked as a recent quiz did there how many I'd know in "real life," it's barely half at best. Fewer of whom might recognize me as their old classmate, unless prompted by an uploaded JPEG. And, seeing for many I once accompanied in dorms and cafeterias, classrooms and libraries so well in their present incarnations or-- for many-- an animal, a celebrity, a joke stand-in, a landscape, a tiny half of a barely discernable happy couple, or an old photo of them as I last saw them in the late-Seventies (or far less often, tellingly for me and them, those Eighties), I gaze at their own displayed or hidden or transmuted representation as but a thumbnail snap.

And, if you're reading this as one of those FB near-hundred, or as a un-Google Analyzed faithful or accidental follower from the original blog, I appreciate you as another friend. They say an Irishman will talk to you for hours but tell you nothing. But, I hope this entry's something, despite or because of discretion mixed with candor. I write as if shouting or whispering into ethereal voids. Existentially and practically, it's impossible for me to know who's listening to me as I type this. Analytics aside, we all face a mystery when seeking out another pair of eyes.

Coming downstairs to peck this out in the dark, I removed a cat from my chest, stepped over a sleeping poodle who barely wagged her tail as I tiptoed, and greeted the corgi before he returned to his dogbed. (Is that a cat in the Goya corner? It looks as unreal as Blake's romanticized "Tyger, Tyger burning bright in the forests of the night.") But, as I finish, the birds chirp and the owls apparently return to their irrational dreams. So, I prepare to post this at my Pacific Standard Time. Albeit far earlier than usual!

Michael Santos' "Inside: Life Behind Bars": Book Review

Michael G. Santos: Seattle suburbanite, sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for cocaine trafficking at 23. It's as graphic, brutal, and dispiriting as I'd expected.

It's also well-written, educational, and sobering. Santos completed a B.A. and M.A. in prison but a new warden's blocked inmates from post-graduate education for "security reasons," so his Ph.D. from U Conn (no pun intended) remains on hold. Vowing to make himself better by merit rather than cruelty, Santos after sentencing has tried to inform himself and others in prison and outside of it about the inequities inside. To those who dismiss his revelations as special pleading, he notes cases filed in court that testify to such brutality. To those who sense he's angling for his own time off, he counters that his discipline has largely gained him distrust from his keepers. To those bent on punitive measures, he responds that healing will be found by guiding broken people-- often poor, uneducated, deceitful, conniving, and/or mentally ill-- towards a life better able to be lived straight. For 95%, a life spent one day or twenty years from now alongside the rest of us.

He tries to present despite his limitations to material a full picture of the environment faced by inmates and jailers within a federal penitentiary. He makes no excuses for his crime. He also spares no detail for his guards or his peers. All are treated unflinchingly, as he attempts to reveal the reality that so many romanticize, ignore, perpetrate, and exarcerbate. The problem: we as taxpayers have no way to hold accountable those who profit from the misery of 13.5 million inmates. Their time served does not rehabilitate; policy's now content to humiliate.

Santos provides-- from his own experience-- a bold depiction of the tiered process by which often benign city and usually awful county jails in urban areas lead those once convicted into warehousing at federal prisons; he's been transferred about as many prisoners are, often at the whim of authorities or due to overcrowding. Without gangs or respected inmates to protect you in the hole, it's a hell the weak may not survive. This barbarity may reward law-and-order enforcers, but it warps millions who must capitulate to blackmail, smuggling, prostitution, or thuggery as a ransom.

Santos refused to plea-bargain, and faces his guilt without having ever "sought my own release through the punishment of another." (x) Convicted in 1987, he promised himself to not waste his twenty-five-year stretch. He's often been sort of a jailhouse lawyer for his less-informed peers. Mostly, he studies and writes in the library. He's now at the twentieth prison, at least, nearing the end of his time.

It takes awhile to get used to the structure of his narrative, but it follows his own rise up into the higher-security from the lower, and then back down again, interspersed with the stories he shares and reconstructs in tough dialogue. He has an accurate ear for dialect and slang that enhances the realities he depicts. Consensual sex, failed relationships, white-collar crime, drug smuggling, weapons, prisoner retaliation in protective custody, reform by one "O.G.", and supermax facilities are also covered in topical chapters. These can be a bit uneven, as the personal and the investigative intersperse, but given his narrowed perspective within and his lack of full access to sources, it's worthwhile.

My wife wondered, however, what happens to the royalties he earns from St. Martin's Press for his book; so far I have no clue. A diligent "success strategist" who's determined to help others like himself, his eponymous website sells articles and gives links to his daily blog feed via a resource his wife runs, but I could not find an answer to my wife's question there. His book mentions his imposed restitution-- now required for all felons-- to the tune of two million dollars. I'm not sure how he's going to pay it; his efforts to be a legal advocate, a stock investor via phone calls to his sister, and a Ph.D. in prison studies have all been blocked by his jailers.

Santos tells how since he entered prison, American prison populations have increased four-fold: one in fifteen in this country today doing or having done hard time. This does not count many more in jails or on probation. 800,000 people work inside prisons. It costs us $60 billion to house and feed U.S. prisoners each year. Santos doesn't mention this, but I've heard 80% are incarcerated due to the enforcement of anti-drug laws.

He bases his narrative on what he has heard, seen, corroborated, and cross-referenced to reconstruct as honestly and accurately as his limited access (no wardens or officers agreed ever to help him; nobody can visit him at certain prisons he's been at unless he had a "prior relationship" with the applicant before he was sentenced, which undoubtably narrows his circle of possibilities) can verify. He uses psuedonyms, blurs identifying details, and protects privacy even as he exposes constantly the system that never "corrects" and improves and rewards conforming inmates. Instead, the guards and wardens benefit from keeping inmates as long as possible, as liable to recidivism as will thicken the wallets of those guarding them at often lucrative salaries, and as helpless when they get out as when they entered. "Instead of erecting barriers that separate prisoners from society, they should allow bridges that will allow individuals to work their way to freedom." (283)

Santos remarks how the squeaky wheels, the baddest brutes, the made men get favored in prison. They are coddled more, left in single cells, with better food or nicer jobs, to keep them tamed. The ones who follow the rules, he finds, have no incentive to do so, for by their cooperation their parole will come no nearer, nor will their conditions be improved. Santos' own obedience proves this; by his steady gaze-- he likens his style to a periscope view kept above the surface as he glides like a submarine through choppy waters-- he unsettles many of his keepers. Those who keep a steady course are left, when obeying this regimen, to indifference. His own straight-arrow allegiance has not brought him a diminishment of his time; to the contrary, his unflappable scrutiny of his surroundings earns him suspicion from his jailers, even as his attention to discretion and fidelity keeps him in the confidence of his peers with whom he must navigate a constantly jolted routine that finds beatings, murders, entrapment, and betrayal everyday occurrences.

For those punished, Santos chronicles unflinchingly rape, extortion, corruption, intimidation, and chaos. He moves as his time has, from city to county to high-security to medium-level federal penitentiaries and now lower-security camps. He shows how there's no use for what the British term an "Ordinary Decent Criminal" to reform. Yet, the "correctional officers" boast strong unions and political clout. Santos cites Thomas Jefferson's dictum that the government should exist to serve the people's needs; for prisons, "the mantra has become to preserve the security of the institution." (281)

Although there's incredible waste of resources, the boomtowns created by prison construction, and the contractors who alongside the guards need never to justify their expenditures or results to we who foot the bill mean that as Santos concludes: "This cycle of failure continues as if in a closed loop, justifying the need for more prisons and all the billions of dollars in expenditures that keep the system alive." He adds: "Its growth depends strictly upon a culture of failure and high recidivism." (290)

Santos for the federal institutions shows how with time, many guards and prisoners usually relax their defenses. The danger, all can't forget, is that confidence that may be given may backfire, fatally or violently or legally. This heightens the resentment ticked off in his wardens and jailers by Santos' earnest efforts to better himself by his writing and his website promoting coping skills (some for sale) to inmates, parolees, and their families. By his enterprise and enterpreneurship, he seeks to improve others by his own advice, gleaned on the inside for when he gets outside "the fences." He seeks, and why not, to make a long-term career out of his career that's consumed nearly his entire adult life. He's feared for his hard-won knowledge, and foiled by administration when he tries to earn his doctorate. Contrasted with less-educated, less-motivated neighbors behind bars, Santos shows the threat that an informed inmate presents to a system bent on breaking the prisoner and keeping him cowed. Yet, the alternative's more deadly. The skill with which inmates, perhaps not when they entered but as they endure, learn to bend the rules like they bend a papier-maché bolus into a shank, can and will kill.

Santos' estimates that 6.6% of our nation's residents will be in a state or federal prison at some point. (xiii) That's twenty million Americans. Bloated budgets and "throw away the key" revenge continue to confront those doing hard time in a hard state under a hard regime determined to punish rather than reform, and to exact vengeance rather than to right past wrongs. (Posted to Amazon US 8-12-09.)

Strong convictions: Correction or coercion behind bars?

My wife alleges I'm a dilettante. She noticed I'd started a book I checked out for her, Michael G. Santos' "Inside: Life Behind Bars." Seattle suburbanite, sentenced 45 years in federal prison for cocaine trafficking at 23. It's as graphic, brutal, dispiriting, and raw as I expected.

It's also well-written, educational, and sobering. Santos completed a B.A. and M.A. in prison but a new warden's blocked inmates from post-graduate education for "security reasons," so his Ph.D. from U Conn (no pun intended) remains on hold. Vowing to make himself better by merit rather than cruelty, Santos after sentencing has tried to inform himself and others in prison and outside of it about the inequities inside. To those who dismiss his revelations as special pleading, he notes cases filed in court that testify to such brutality. To those who sense he's angling for his own time off, he counters that his discipline has largely gained him distrust from his keepers. To those bent on punitive measures, he responds that healing will be found by guiding broken people-- often poor, uneducated, deceitful, conniving, and/or mentally ill-- towards a life better able to be lived straight. For 95%, a life spent one day or twenty years from now alongside the rest of us.

He tries to present despite his limitations to material a full picture of the environment faced by inmates and jailers within a federal penitentiary. He makes no excuses for his crime. He also spares no detail for his guards or his peers. All are treated unflinchingly, as he attempts to reveal the reality that so many romanticize, ignore, perpetrate, and exarcerbate. The problem: we as taxpayers have no way to hold accountable those who profit from the misery of 13.5 million inmates. Their time served does not rehabilitate; policy's now content to humiliate.

Santos provides-- from his own experience-- a bold depiction of the tiered process by which often benign city and usually awful county jails in urban areas lead those once convicted into warehousing at federal prisons; he's been transferred about as many prisoners are, often at the whim of authorities or due to overcrowding. Without gangs or respected inmates to protect you in the hole, it's a hell the weak may not survive. This barbarity may reward law-and-order enforcers, but it warps millions who must capitulate to blackmail, smuggling, prostitution, or thuggery as a ransom.

He now is incarcerated in the same county as the prisoner we visited recently. Santos refused to plea-bargain, and faces his guilt without having ever "sought my own release through the punishment of another." (x) Convicted in 1987, he promised himself to not waste his twenty-five-year stretch. He spent a lot of time as a sort of jailhouse lawyer for his less-informed peers. Mostly, he studies and writes in the library.

My wife wondered, however, what happens to the royalties he earns from St. Martin's Press for his book; so far I have no clue. A diligent "success strategist" who's determined to help others like himself, his eponymous website (first-name, last-name, dot-net) sells articles and gives links to his daily blog feed via a resource his wife runs, but I could not find an answer to my wife's question there. His book mentions his imposed restitution-- now required for all felons-- to the tune of two million dollars. I'm not sure how he's going to pay it; his efforts to be a legal advocate, a stock investor via phone calls to his sister, and a Ph.D. in prison studies have all been blocked by his jailers.

My wife's reading an Alice Munro story in the current issue of "Harper's." Her favorite writer, so that comes first. So, needing a break from my heavier fare, I plunged into a report from the underground that we rarely if ever see firsthand. A life as I thankfully've never known it. Santos tells how since he entered prison, American prison populations have increased four-fold: one in fifteen in this country today doing or having done hard time. This does not count many more in jails or on probation. 800,000 people work inside prisons. It costs us $60 billion to house and feed U.S. prisoners each year. Santos doesn't mention this, but I've heard 80% are incarcerated due to the enforcement of anti-drug laws.

My wife figured, given a year ago I'd taught myself chess and read about this pursuit, and then I've been learning about Buddhism in earnest both for personal elucidation and academic preparation for an article and a couple of conference presentations this autumn, I'd found merely my next phase of what to read next in my endless nose in a book progression down the Dewey Decimal System to previously unplumbed shelves. I plead guilty, but what's the alternative? Sit on the couch watching the Dodgers? Amass porn cachés like apparently many of my male counterparts younger or not have? Take up golf?

She in her blog entry about "The Tehachapi Loop" wrote last Friday much of what I'd have mentioned today about the correspondent whom I in my bilingual Irish practice entry three days ago "Ag cur cuairt im bpriósún" in stilted fashion summarized as "B.C." Fifty or so miles east, Santos sits today, with four more years to go. It's at least his twentieth prison; he's in the last stretch before freedom.

He bases his narrative on what he has heard, seen, corroborated, and cross-referenced to reconstruct as honestly and accurately as his limited access (no wardens or officers agreed ever to help him; nobody can visit him at certain prisons he's been at unless he had a "prior relationship" with the applicant before he was sentenced, which undoubtably narrows his circle of possibilities) can verify. He uses psuedonyms, blurs identifying details, and protects privacy even as he exposes constantly the system that never "corrects" and improves and rewards conforming inmates. Instead, the guards and wardens benefit-- as my wife agrees from her own correspondence, research, and observance-- from keeping inmates as long as possible, as liable to recidivism as will thicken the wallets of those guarding them at very lucrative salaries, and as helpless when they get out as when they entered. "Instead of erecting barriers that separate prisoners from society, they should allow bridges that will allow individuals to work their way to freedom." (283; copying some of this entry I will review his book next on this blog, and for Amazon US.)

Santos remarks how the squeaky wheels, the baddest brutes, the made men get favored in prison. They are coddled more, left in single cells, with better food or nicer jobs, to keep them tamed. The ones who follow the rules, he finds, have no incentive to do so, for by their cooperation their parole will come no nearer, nor will their conditions be improved. Santos' own obedience proves this; by his steady gaze-- he likens his style to a periscope view kept above the surface as he glides like a submarine through choppy waters-- he unsettles many of his keepers. Those who keep a steady course are left, when obeying this regimen, to indifference. His own straight-arrow allegiance has not brought him a diminishment of his time; to the contrary, his unflappable scrutiny of his surroundings earns him suspicion from his jailers, even as his attention to discretion and fidelity keeps him in the confidence of his peers with whom he must navigate a constantly jolted routine that finds beatings, murders, entrapment, and betrayal everyday occurrences.

Naturally, as with psychologists, social workers, nurses, soldiers, or teachers in difficult situations, one's emotions must often be detached from one's efforts to do one's job. A necessary professional depersonalization accompanies those who resist burnout; while burnout to the outsider appears precisely what's happened to those who keep doing their job as if automatons. Having taught "at-risk" inner-city youth, runaways in a teen shelter, kids on probation mandated to begin a non-traditional path towards their GED or diplomas, I can attest to the need to distance one's self.

Yet, having entered Tehachapi "Correctional Institution" last weekend, if only for five hours, I agree with my wife when she concluded her entry. She felt as if she'd been punished. The pressure of the guards to be robocops, the lack of niceties or respect that confronts every visitor-- often coming from Sacramento or Modesto at distances two or three times what separated us from "B.C."-- adds to the determined assault on one's own sensibilities incorporated within so many government-run facilities whether schools, hospitals, or prisons, wears down even the casual visitor. You don't need the frisson of Foucault's employment of Bentham's all-seeing Panopticon; today, cameras and detectors and frisks replace human eyes. Still, as always it must be, a steely facade's kept up to drive away weakness, contraband, or distraction. It must be this way, we say; what defines a prison better than a wall?

This intentional oppression pales, for those punished, beside rape, extortion, corruption, intimidation, and chaos which Santos chronicles unflinchingly. He shows how there's no use for what the British term an "Ordinary Decent Criminal" to reform. Today's programs for education and rehabilitation for "B.C." for example: minimal to none. The air-conditioning repair classes he excels in and delights in may be cut due to the woeful state budget cuts in California.

Yet, the "correctional officers" boast our Golden State's strongest union by far in terms of lobbying and clout. Santos cites Thomas Jefferson's dictum that the government should exist to serve the people's needs; for prisons, "the mantra has become to preserve the security of the institution." (281) Even now, my wife found many jobs going begging on line this recession, for federal prison staff.

"B.C." told us about California's lack of jobs for prisoners that train them for skills or allow them to produce practical goods; unlike many states, there's a convoluted profiteering that denies now the "unfair" competition that prison labor would present to business. Although the incredible waste of resources, the boomtowns created by prison construction, and the contractors who alongside the guards need never to justify their expenditures or results to we who foot the bill mean that as Santos concludes:

"This cycle of failure continues as if in a closed loop, justifying the need for more prisons and all the billions of dollars in expenditures that keep the system alive."

I read today that $100 million's spent in our state alone for death penalty appeals, procedures, and housing that could be saved if we switched to life without parole for those on Death Row. But, would the unions and suppliers to our governor, our mayor, Uncle Sam, the "security state" that represents one of the few lasting economic success stories of the current decade agree? "Its growth depends strictly upon a culture of failure and high recidivism." (290) Without them, a governor will not gain power or as the recall of Gray Davis proved, keep it.

I taught a student about a year and a half ago. He was a bit edgy and belligerent, but one of the best in "Advanced Composition." He challenged my dicta and questioned my assignments every class. He mused aloud to all after taking a few quizzes I made up that "your previous job must've been making up tests for the D.M.V." I liked his wit. He had been injured in a riot at Corcoran, long one of Cali's toughest prisons.

A chair had been thrown at him and his back was injured severely. Now on permanent disability, one of a family of those who'd served at the facilities that loom over the vast Central Valley's desolate stretches, he was the only one in his extended family of veterans of the prison force who'd ever been hurt on duty. He'd enrolled in college and sought on his benefits package to start over again. I reckoned he makes now, with a high school education, on pension more than I do with my Ph.D. after fourteen years teaching at my present position.

Was his affliction, the pain he bore, the drugs he took, the rehab he endured, worth it? My other book, and only two such for now I promise, that I found on the surprisingly underpopulated 365 section of the library may answer this. About five years ago, same time as Santos' report, investigative journalist (I liked his "Coyotes" way back about his undercover trek with illegals into El Norte) Ted Conover published his account of his year as a prison guard "up the river" at New York's notorious Sing Sing. "Newjack" will show me the other side of the bars.

As I spoke with "B.C." I wondered how he'd reply to my student the former jailer. I used to doubt that many guards talk freely to their charges, or vice versa, unless to manipulate, coerce, or lie. I'd read nothing really about American prisons but a lot about those in the North of Ireland during the H-Block and hunger strike campaigns. I figured the hostility engendered there tended the norm. [By the way, Louise Dean's fine novel (also reviewed by me on Amazon; written in 2005 same as Santos' & Conover's books) "The Human Season" parallels the tale of a Long Kesh "screw" with a mother of an IRA Blanketman on the protest circa 1980.] But, Santos for the federal institutions shows how with time, many guards and prisoners usually relax their defenses. The danger, as he and "B.C." and my student all can't forget, is that confidence that may be given may backfire, fatally or violently or legally.

This heightens the resentment ticked off in his wardens and jailers by Santos' earnest efforts to better himself by his writing and his website promoting coping skills (some for sale) to inmates, parolees, and their families. By his enterprise and enterpreneurship, he seeks to improve others by his own advice, gleaned on the inside for when he gets outside "the fences." He seeks, and why not, to make a long-term career out of his career that's consumed nearly his entire adult life. He's feared for his hard-won knowledge, and foiled by administration when he tries to earn his doctorate. Contrasted with less-educated, less-motivated neighbors behind bars, Santos shows the threat that an informed inmate presents to a system bent on breaking the prisoner and keeping him cowed. Yet, the alternative's more deadly. The skill with which inmates, perhaps not when they entered but as they endure, learn to bend the rules like they bend a papier-maché bolus into a shank, can and will kill.

Unlike the likes of me sitting beside a Marine vet trying to learn-- as one did last week when I subbed for remedial college English-- what a vowel was and when to use "a" vs. "an," the predicament of guards and inmates, advocates and reformers, complicates simple do-goodism in prison. I can walk in to help that student and then turn away without fear of a backstabbing. He can sit in the room and he knows that, unlike his term in Iraq or his native Lebanon, no violent act will shatter his focus.

Having now a clearer mental and literary picture of what the inside of Tehachapi State or any maximum-security prison looks like, I can better comprehend, under my welcome lack of first-hand observation ironically, what for long has been relegated to rumor, exaggeration, hearsay, tattoos, or cryptic asides from a few of past students. I've taught veterans and "veteranos" both; I don't pry. If they tell us something, as one did in casual class conversation last month about his time in jail, students around him or her let it flow; many come from inner-city or working class, gang-ridden or impoverished, little educated or legally dubious upbringings that remind me of Santos' estimate that 6.6% of residents "will find themselves in a state or federal prison at some point during their lifetime." (xiii) That is, nearly half the population of dense California-- which with its prisons all at double-capacity, builds another one each year: or, twenty million Americans.

Seeing "B.C." face-to-face for the first time after getting to know him as my wife had, through their letters over the past year, means now I have a personal attachment to what were anonymous figures with obscured profiles or uniformed ranks on "Lockup" or "Lockdown." Without being accused of dilettantism-- and certainly any who know me realize I am no bleeding heart-- I hope my encounter with "B.C." at Tehachapi will lead to a lasting and restorative friendship for us both along with my wife's own committment to him and the other two inmates with whom she corresponds and to whom we send books as one way to regain what budgets and revenge have taken away from those doing hard time in a hard state under a hard regime determined to punish rather than reform, and to exact vengeance rather than to right past wrongs.

Photo: "Tehachapi Sunset" by Jenna Russell. Naturally this real estate page fails to mention the correctional facility.