NateLaffan.com

Too Much Information

admin — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:02:18 +0000

After polishing off Pulphead, one can be forgiven for seeking a little more Sullivan, and you can only imagine the gleeful eep! sound my brain made when, after a quick googling, it was discovered that he a) reviewed DFW’s Pale King and b) was as big a howling fantod as you can hope for among the ultragood. (Matched only (and perhaps bested) by Zadie Smith’s long piece at the end of Changing My Mind.) Sullivan on Wallace. Who could ask for anything more?

Here’s a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That’s what Wallace’s suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn’t just a sad thing, it was a blow.

And then, after moving on in to Pale King territory:

He was a writer who in fighting to rise above the noise of his time remained hopelessly of it, susceptible to its voices even while trying to master them. His reality, as he once wrote, had been “MTV’d.” This is why, like no one else, he seems to speak from inside the tornado.

Pulphead

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:23:41 +0000

The best book of essays I have read. Period. From the NYT Review:

Sullivan seems most interested in that rare cultural nexus where artistry — where something genuinely new, challenging — intersects with commercial popularity. What he writes of one blues scholar could easily be said about Sullivan himself: “He was interested, in other words, in culturally precious things that had been accidentally snagged and preserved by stray cogs of the anarchic capitalist threshing machine.”

The Caging of America

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:23:33 +0000

A brief, compelling look at just how bad the American prison system has become.

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:23:28 +0000

Raise the Crime Rate

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:23:16 +0000

Where Gopnick (above) gives a survey of what prison reform advocates have been up to recently, Glazek appears to be one himself, and over the course of ten or so pages lays out his scheme in broad strokes, arguing that we should give up on one cause in the interest of bettering our chances of advancing another.

If, in the popular imagination, the primary purpose of prisons is to keep us safe from (the vanishingly small number of) people like Charles Manson, then we should simply kill Charles Manson. Prison abolitionists should be ready to advocate a massive expansion of the death penalty if that’s what it takes to move the discussion forward. A prisonless society where murderers were systematically executed and rapists were automatically castrated wouldn’t be the most humane society imaginable, but it would be light-years ahead of the status quo.