Gone Daddy Gone
I'm on a Violent Femmes kick. Swell music to dance in the kitchen to while the tea is boiling, yeah? Yeah. Which is what I'm finally able to do, have happy dance fun walkey times. I've been sick for a week and a half. Some kinda throat thing with a head thing that made me feel like there was an Isengard of snot pressing against my brain. Awesome.
But now I AM AN ATOMIC FIREBALL! of energy with a slightly stuffy nose who is ready to get back to frikkin writing.
Can I hear an amen?
(Amen.)
Yes, I did call and response myself.
Somebody's got to.
Other:
Second day udon noodles are AWESOME.
:: nibbles whilst typying ::
This is what happens when I don't blog for over a week. I write even more randomly than normal.
Example:
I finished reading the book Texas Tough by Robert Perkinson.
OI! what a GD terrifying doorstopper. A fourth of it's weight is from the notes section and it took ten years of research to write. Perkinson outlines the two beginnings of the American prison system: reformation and retribution - and retribution has out-paced its rival from the beginning. It's always been cheaper to a cage a person than to teach them.
Perkinson focuses on the Texas prison system because it's the nation's largest and it set the tone of penitentiaries from the Emancipation Proclamation onward. Why teach a prisoner when you could work 'em fifteen or more hours of the day and make some money? Why let those criminals sit on their haunches staring at a wall when they could be out in a field picking cotton? There was a shortage of field workers after the Civil War.
"If a profit of several thousand dollars can be made on the labor of twenty slaves," posited the Telegraph and Texas Register, "why may not a similar profit be made on the labor of twenty convicts?" (pg 74)
"Their aim...was to adopt a coercive system of labor to replace slavery. Their instrument would be a new body of civil and criminal laws known as the 'Black Codes.'" (pg 88)
Yep, there were laws that only African Americans could break. Some were as simple as vagrancy. If a person was found to be "idle" in public they could be arrested, then fined. If you couldn't pay the fine, you were "leased" for labor until the nebulous fine was paid.
Prisoners were routinely worked so hard in Texas fields that, finally, in the 1930s they started to rebel. Rather than have to work a harvest field for twenty hours a day, some would cut their Achilles tendons so they couldn't work.
"Self mutilation is prevalent throughout the state prison system," admitted one board member." "It's no surprise to find convicts injecting kerosene or gasoline into their legs and arms..." (pg 214)
Others cut off toes, arms or legs in attempts to get out of the fields...and that was knowing that the prison hospital was near useless. There were some that even sliced their skin open and packed the wounds with lye so that they would create festering sores. Prisoners committed "...violence against the self to spotlight the violence of the state." (pg217) Some wardens made them try to work the fields with their newly acquired stumps.
* * * * *
Totally different subject:
Check out Marc da Cunha Lopes:
I read Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington. It was about Pentecostal snake handling in the early
'90s. A journalist goes down South to cover the trial of preacher who was accused of attempted murder on his wife with the church snakes. He, of course, says that the only reason that his wife got bit by the snakes was because she was trying to kill him with them. Dude got 99 years and Dennis Covington, said journalist, became so intrigued with snake handling, that he started attending services and eventually takes up snakes himself. All of this being rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible... "And these signs shall follow them that believe in my name, they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them, they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover." - Mark 16:17-18
Hella interesting book, though the end turned somewhat small town gossipy.
But now I AM AN ATOMIC FIREBALL! of energy with a slightly stuffy nose who is ready to get back to frikkin writing.
Can I hear an amen?
(Amen.)
Yes, I did call and response myself.
Somebody's got to.
Other:
Second day udon noodles are AWESOME.
:: nibbles whilst typying ::
This is what happens when I don't blog for over a week. I write even more randomly than normal.
Example:
I finished reading the book Texas Tough by Robert Perkinson.
OI! what a GD terrifying doorstopper. A fourth of it's weight is from the notes section and it took ten years of research to write. Perkinson outlines the two beginnings of the American prison system: reformation and retribution - and retribution has out-paced its rival from the beginning. It's always been cheaper to a cage a person than to teach them.
Perkinson focuses on the Texas prison system because it's the nation's largest and it set the tone of penitentiaries from the Emancipation Proclamation onward. Why teach a prisoner when you could work 'em fifteen or more hours of the day and make some money? Why let those criminals sit on their haunches staring at a wall when they could be out in a field picking cotton? There was a shortage of field workers after the Civil War.
"If a profit of several thousand dollars can be made on the labor of twenty slaves," posited the Telegraph and Texas Register, "why may not a similar profit be made on the labor of twenty convicts?" (pg 74)
"Their aim...was to adopt a coercive system of labor to replace slavery. Their instrument would be a new body of civil and criminal laws known as the 'Black Codes.'" (pg 88)
Yep, there were laws that only African Americans could break. Some were as simple as vagrancy. If a person was found to be "idle" in public they could be arrested, then fined. If you couldn't pay the fine, you were "leased" for labor until the nebulous fine was paid.
Prisoners were routinely worked so hard in Texas fields that, finally, in the 1930s they started to rebel. Rather than have to work a harvest field for twenty hours a day, some would cut their Achilles tendons so they couldn't work.
"Self mutilation is prevalent throughout the state prison system," admitted one board member." "It's no surprise to find convicts injecting kerosene or gasoline into their legs and arms..." (pg 214)
Others cut off toes, arms or legs in attempts to get out of the fields...and that was knowing that the prison hospital was near useless. There were some that even sliced their skin open and packed the wounds with lye so that they would create festering sores. Prisoners committed "...violence against the self to spotlight the violence of the state." (pg217) Some wardens made them try to work the fields with their newly acquired stumps.
* * * * *
Totally different subject:
Check out Marc da Cunha Lopes:
I read Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington. It was about Pentecostal snake handling in the early
'90s. A journalist goes down South to cover the trial of preacher who was accused of attempted murder on his wife with the church snakes. He, of course, says that the only reason that his wife got bit by the snakes was because she was trying to kill him with them. Dude got 99 years and Dennis Covington, said journalist, became so intrigued with snake handling, that he started attending services and eventually takes up snakes himself. All of this being rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible... "And these signs shall follow them that believe in my name, they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them, they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover." - Mark 16:17-18
Hella interesting book, though the end turned somewhat small town gossipy.