in defense of flogging
I. Audio Trip
Accents are less interesting than they used to be. I don't have the links to support that for this blip, but it's something I've read time and again. There are still enclaves of West Virginians and Wisconsinites and Bostonians, but even among these North American tribes the distinctiveness has lessened. Supposedly. My favorite anecdote on this subject is that when Flannery O'Connor first arrived at Iowa University her classmates couldn't understand her. The dynamics of language and class and power - especially as class is distinguished by education - are complicated, and yet also simply. Talk dumb, people think you're some sort of lower caste. And by talk dumb we usually mean you don't talk like those there news anchors. It's all nonsense, of course, which we know and which still isn't the least convincing if you take some New Yorker into Mississippi and have them chat on a few front porches. I think the easiest answer is to kill news-anchor speak, and hire only locals with accents rooted in whatever mutant regional affect is around. If you're national news, you should be replaced by a robot. Or just film the teleprompter, perhaps, and improve national literacy.
Well, all of that is an overblown intro to a great clip of Flannery O'Connor reading one of her best stories, "A Good Man is Hard To Find." What a beautiful way of verbalizing.
II. The Big Read Cast, but Smaller
Short outing this week. I've actually been writing so much that I've been reading less, and collecting interesting articles even less than that. I did, however, find time to read a very short book called In Defense of Flogging and discuss it with my buddy Bill on a podcast we're doing. The book serves as a pretty efficient intro to why we're one-hundred-percent failing those accused, and even those guilty, of committing a crime. Our system of mass incarceration is awful, everyone who reads about it for even a hot second seems to know it's awful, and yet this book brings the point into startling clarity: Standing before a judge, you can either serve five years in prison or receive ten lashes. Which do you choose? Listen to the podcast here or on iTunes.
As a note, I'm terrible at podcasts. I have one of these stuttering and high-pitched voices NPR is always forcing down everyone's throats. I also worry about the extemporaneous nature of the thing. Writers hate getting caught with their intellectual pants down, and I'm no exception. What I mostly do with my thoughts is write and re-write and refine them until you have the very best of what I'm thinking (haha, not in this newsletter). And yet, podcasts have given such a great outlet to people wanting to discuss or bolster the discussion of both deserving and wonderfully frivolous niche subjects. They've done for radio what the internet has done for everything else, only without so much of the heinous repercussions of Twitter or Reddit. At least, that's how I feel.
In addition, though, writing is lonely. It's nice to read a book and have the motivation to then discuss it intelligently with a good friend. That's basically a book club, you might say, and I'd say yes: A book club carried on across the nation with the only person I know who might read the books we choose, which is a pretty neat reality.
As a final note, the world is still burning, but just think, you read a whole thing on the internet that didn't include that one story about that one adult film actress and our cartoon-fascist president until just this sentence. We should all have such reprieve, now and then, from such dishonorable deeds. Love to you and yours. And I mean that.