HERE'S MY LATEST BOOK.....
This is a book of
short stories taken from the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the
factory town of Ansonia in southwestern Connecticut.
Most of these
stories, or as true as I recall them because I witnessed these events many
years ago through the eyes of child and are retold to you now with the pen and
hindsight of an older man. The only exception is the story Beat Time which is based on the disappearance of Beat poet Lew
Welch. Decades before I knew who Welch was, I was told that he had made his
from California to New Haven, Connecticut, where was an alcoholic living in a
mission. The notion fascinated me and I filed it away but never forgot
it.
The collected stories
are loosely modeled around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners
(I also borrowed from the novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my
character in “Local Orphan is Hero” is also the name of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like Joyce I wanted
to write about my people, the people I knew as a child, the working class in
small town America and I wanted to give a complete view of them as well. As a
result the stories are about the divorced, Gays, black people, the working
poor, the middle class, the lost and the found, the contented and the
discontented.
Conversely many of
the stories in this book are about starting life over again as a result of
suicide (The Hanging Party, Small Town
Tragedy, Beat Time) or from a near death experience (Anna Bell Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade, A Brief Summer)
and natural occurring death. (The Best
Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)
With the exception of
Jesus Loves Shaqunda, in each story
there is a rebirth from the death. (Shaqunda is reported as having died of
pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal, the desperate
and depressed divorcee in Things Change,
changes his life in Lunch Hour when
asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time,
the last story in the book) In The
Arranged Time, Thisby is given the option of change and whether she takes it
or, we don’t know. The death of Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the diner and into the waiting arms
of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.
Although the book is
based on three sets of time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the diner is opened
in the early morning and closed at night, time stands still inside the Diner.
The hour on the big clock on the wall never changes time and much like my
memories of that place, everything remains the same.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Small-William-Tuohy/dp/
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
John
William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in
writing from Lindenwood University. He is the author of numerous non-fiction on
the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of
bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and
"Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."
His
non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist,
American Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic
Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction
work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of
2008.
His
play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel
in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New
York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First
Amendment Award for best new play.
Contact
John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM
Diyan Connolly, author Anthony Connolly and me at the Lindenwood Univeristy Alumni Awards.
GOOD WORDS TO HAVE………………..
Xeric: Characterized by, relating to, or requiring only a
small amount of moisture. By the late 1800s, botanists were using the terms
xerophyte and xerophytic for plants that were well adapted for survival in dry
environments. But some felt the need for a more generic word that included both
animals and plants. In 1926 a group proposed using xeric (derived from xēros,
the Greek word for "dry") as a more generalized term for either flora
or fauna. They further suggested that "xerophytic … be entirely abandoned
as useless and misleading." Not everyone liked the idea. In fact, the
Ecological Society of America stated that xeric was "not desirable,"
preferring terms such as arid. Others declared that xeric should refer only to
habitats, not to organisms. Scientists used it anyway, and by the 1940s xeric
was well documented in scientific literature.
Shakespeare
in Modern English?
By JAMES SHAPIRO
THE Oregon Shakespeare Festival
has decided that Shakespeare’s language is too difficult for today’s audiences
to understand. It recently announced that over the next three years, it will
commission 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern
English.
Many in the theater community
have known that this day was coming, though it doesn’t lessen the shock. The
Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been one of the stars in the Shakespeare
firmament since it was founded in 1935. While the festival’s organizers insist
that they also remain committed to staging Shakespeare’s works in his own
words, they have set a disturbing precedent. Other venues, including the
Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the University of Utah and Orlando Shakespeare
Theater, have already signed on to produce some of these translations.
However well intended, this
experiment is likely to be a waste of money and talent, for it misdiagnoses the
reason that Shakespeare’s plays can be hard for playgoers to follow. The
problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and
actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s
plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean.
Claims that Shakespeare’s
language is unintelligible go back to his own day. His great rival, Ben Jonson,
reportedly complained about “some bombast speeches of ‘Macbeth,’ which are not
to be understood.” Jonson failed to see that Macbeth’s dense soliloquies were
intentionally difficult; Shakespeare was capturing a feverish mind at work,
tracing the turbulent arc of a character’s moral crisis. Even if audiences
strain to understand exactly what Macbeth says, they grasp what Macbeth feels —
but only if an actor knows what that character’s words mean.
Two years ago I witnessed a
different kind of theatrical experiment, in which Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About
Nothing,” in the original language, trimmed to 90 minutes, was performed before
an audience largely unfamiliar with Shakespeare: inmates at Rikers Island. The
performance was part of the Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit
initiative.
No inmates walked out on the
performance, though they were free to do so. They were deeply engrossed, many
at the edge of their seats, some crying out at various moments (much as
Elizabethan audiences once did) and visibly moved by what they saw.
Did they understand every word? I
doubt it. I’m not sure anybody other than Shakespeare, who invented quite a few
words, ever has. But the inmates, like any other audience witnessing a good
production, didn’t have to follow the play line for line, because the actors,
and their director, knew what the words meant; they found in Shakespeare’s
language the clues to the personalities of the characters.
I’ve had a chance to look over a
prototype translation of “Timon of Athens” that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
has been sharing at workshops and readings for the past five years. While the
work of an accomplished playwright, it is a hodgepodge, neither Elizabethan nor
contemporary, and makes for dismal reading.
To understand Shakespeare’s
characters, actors have long depended on the hints of meaning and shadings of
emphasis that he embedded in his verse. They will search for them in vain in
the translation: The music and rhythm of iambic pentameter are gone. Gone, too,
are the shifts — which allow actors to register subtle changes in intimacy —
between “you” and “thee.” Even classical allusions are scrapped.
Shakespeare’s use of resonance
and ambiguity, defining features of his language, is also lost in translation.
For example, in Shakespeare’s original, when the misanthropic Timon addresses a
pair of prostitutes and rails about how money corrupts every aspect of social
relations, he urges them to “plague all, / That your activity may defeat and
quell / The source of all erection.” A primary meaning of “erection” for
Elizabethans was social advancement or promotion; Timon hates social climbers.
The wry sexual meaning of “erection,” also present here, was secondary. But the
new translation ignores the social resonance, turning the line into a sordid
joke: Timon now speaks of “the source of all erections.”
Shakespeare borrowed almost all
his plots and wrote for a theater that required only a handful of props, no
scenery and no artificial lighting. The only thing Shakespearean about his plays
is the language. I’ll never understand why, when you attend a Shakespeare
production these days, you find listed in the program a fight director, a
dramaturge, a choreographer and lighting, set and scenery designers — but
rarely an expert steeped in Shakespeare’s language and culture.
A technology entrepreneur’s
foundation is bankrolling the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s new venture. I’d
prefer to see it spend its money hiring such experts and enabling those 36
promising American playwrights to devote themselves to writing the next
Broadway hit like “Hamilton,” rather than waste their time stripping away
what’s Shakespearean about “King Lear” or “Hamlet.”
James Shapiro, a professor of
English at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of “The Year of Lear:
Shakespeare in 1606.”
Sculpture this and Sculpture
that
Mask II' by Mueck (2001-2)
A&P
By John
Updike
In walks these three girls in
nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the
door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught
my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid,
with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of
white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs
of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to
remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts
giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty
with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip
me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a
mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers
smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle snort in passing,
if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem
-- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and
were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the
aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes
on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and
the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I
guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby
berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall
one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns
right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind
of girl other girls think is very "striking" and
"attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which
is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so
tall. She was the queen.
She kind of led them, the other
two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around,
not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima
donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in
her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight
move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting
a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls'
minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like
a bee in a glassjar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into
coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow
and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink -
- beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it
and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped
loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had
slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this
shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have
been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there
was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just
her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones
like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than
pretty.
She had sort of oaky hair that
the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a
kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose
it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck,
coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't
mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.
She must have felt in the corner
of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but
she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and
stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and
buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they
all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-ri
ce-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks- rackers-and- cookies
aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter,
and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with
the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing
their carts down the aisle -- the girls were walking against the usual traffic
(not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were pretty hilarious. You
could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or
hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they
pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would
by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering
"Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah,
yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no
doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around
after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.
You know, it's one thing to have
a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody
can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A
& P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with
her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile
floor.
"Oh Daddy," Stokesie
said beside me. "I feel so faint."
"Darling," I said.
"Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on
his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's
twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.
"Is it done?" he asks,
the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's
going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great
Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.
What he meant was, our town is
five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we're
right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts
or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these
are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and
nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of
town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the
Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and
about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer
broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and
there's people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat
counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they
shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was
left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them
sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they
couldn't help it.
Now here comes the sad part of
the story, at:least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself.
The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing
much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again.
The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel
they'd come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around
the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings
or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy bars, and
plastic toys done up in cellophane that faIl apart when a kid looks at them
anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little
gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see
her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an
old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple
juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often asked
myself) so the girls come to me.
Queenie puts down the jar and I
take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour
Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made
them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim look she
lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink
top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.
Then everybody's luck begins to
run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot
and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all
day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school
and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says,
"Girls, this isn't the beach."
Queenie blushes, though maybe
it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she
was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring
snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the
people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it
ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid
right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were
standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals
picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all
holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When
my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair
Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons
stencilled on.
"That's all right,"
Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me
as funny, as if it hadjust occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these
years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He
didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he concentrates
on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.
Queenie's blush is no sunburn
now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back -- a really
sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for
the one thing."
"That makes no
difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went
that he hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you
decently dressed when you come in here."
"We are decent,"
Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she
remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must
look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.
"Girls, I don't want to
argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our
policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the
kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had
been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had
all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a
peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody
getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up
this purchase?"
I thought and said "No"
but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC,
TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough,
it begins to make a lttle song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing)
there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer
flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having
come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were
there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the
herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who'd blame them,
are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough
for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero.
They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they
flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony
(not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in
his eyebrow.
"Did you say something,
Sammy?"
"I said I quit."
"I thought you did."
"You didn't have to
embarrass them."
"It was they who were
embarrassing us."
I started to say something that
came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grand- mother's, and I
know she would have been pleased.
"I don't think you know what
you're saying," Lengel said.
"I know you don't," I
said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start
shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my
slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel sighs and begins to look
very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents for years.
"Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me.
It's true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal
not to go through with it. I fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red
on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it.
The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the
rest of your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but
remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I
punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and the drawer
splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow
this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and
galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother
ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the
sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but
they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming
with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue
Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat
moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in
my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and
his back stiff, as if he'djust had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of
fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.
DON'T YOU JUST YOU LOVE POP
ART?
Still Life With Liz
HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!
Looking out to Sea - Théo Van Rysselberghe 1862-1926
Madame Reizet by Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson 1823 (X)
I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE
PHOTOS FROM FILM
Woman and man kissing at night club. 1945 weegee
Sunt
Leones
BY
STEVIE SMITH
The lions who ate the Christians
on the sands of the arena
By indulging native appetites
played what has now been seen a
Not entirely negligible part
In consolidating at the very
start
The position of the Early
Christian Church.
Initiatory rites are always
bloody
And the lions, it appears
From contemporary art, made a
study
Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy
Liturgically sacrificial hue
And if the Christians felt a
little blue—
Well people being eaten often do.
Theirs was the death, and theirs
the crown undying,
A state of things which must be
satisfying.
My point which up to this has
been obscured
is that it was the lions who
procured
By chewing up blood gristle flesh
and bone
The martyrdoms on which the
Church has grown.
I only write this poem because I
thought it rather looked
As if the part the lions played
was being overlooked.
By lions’ jaws great benefits and
blessings were begotten
And so our debt to Lionhood must
never be forgotten.
Florence
Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (September 20 1902 – March 7 1971) was an
English poet and novelist. Stevie Smith, born Florence Margaret Smith in
Kingston upon Hull, was the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith.
She was called "Peggy" within her
family, but acquired the name "Stevie" as a young woman when she was
riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey
Steve Donaghue. Smith's first volume of poetry, the self-illustrated A Good
Time Was Had by All, was published in 1937 and established her as a poet.
Soon
her poems were found in periodicals. Her style was often very dark; her
characters were perpetually saying "goodbye" to their friends or
welcoming death. At the same time her work has an eerie levity and can be very
funny though it is neither light nor whimsical. "Stevie Smith often uses
the word 'peculiar' and it is the best word to describe her effects"
(Hermione Lee). She was never sentimental, undercutting any pathetic effects
with the ruthless honesty of her humor.
"A
good time was had by all" became a catch phrase, still occasionally used
to this day. Smith said she got the phrase from parish magazines, where
descriptions of church picnics often included this phrase.
This
saying has become so familiar that it is recognized even by those who are
unaware of its origin. Variations appear in pop culture, including Being for
the Benefit of Mr. Kite by the Beatles.
Though
her poems were remarkably consistent in tone and quality throughout her life,
their subject matter changed over time, with less of the outrageous wit of her
youth and more reflection on suffering, faith and the end of life. Her
best-known poem is "Not Waving but Drowning".
She
was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1966 and won the Queen's Gold
Medal for poetry in 1969. She published nine volumes of poems in her lifetime
(three more were released posthumously).
Not Waving but Drowning
BY STEVIE SMITH
Nobody heard him, the dead
man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than
you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved
larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold
for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold
always
(Still the dead one lay
moaning)
I was much too far out all my
life
And not waving but drowning.
The
greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.
Every
mind has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never
have both.
All
necessary truth is its own evidence.
The
secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity but in being uninteresting.
No
man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.
“The urge is always with me to retouch
yesterday’s canvas with today’s paintbrush and cover the things that fill me
with regret.” Andrew Davidson
You
know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is
finally better than your dreams. Dr.
Seuss
i
am afraid / that i am not learning fast enough; i can feel the universe
expanding / and it feels like no one has ever tried hard enough; when i cried
in your room /
it was the effect of an extremely distinct
sensation that ‘i am the only person / alive,’ ‘i have not learned enough,’ and
‘i can feel the universe expanding / and making things be further apart / and
it feels like a declarative sentence / whose message is that we must try harder
Tao Lin
We’re
born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship
can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone. Orson Welles
Love
is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with
the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there
are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what
is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought
like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of
childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we
shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I
am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the
greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians
13:4-13
"One word frees us of all
the weight and pain of life: That word is love." - Sophocles
The
Weird, Obsessive World of Free DIY Audiobooks
JOHN ADAMIAN
I’VE SPENT THE past year with
strange voices in my head. Soothing, rich-voiced, strangers intermittently
whispering, crying, yelling, and practicing terrible accents in my ear. This is
because I discovered the weird world of LibriVox, a charmingly scrappy DIY
community site dedicated to creating free audiobooks for public domain texts.
LibriVox is like Audible, the
audiobook service owned by Amazon, except that every book is made for free by
volunteers, and every book was published before 1923. A legion of volunteer
readers—from professional stage actors to people practicing reading English as
a second language—patiently, and sometimes not so patiently, inch through
thousands of texts, posting the end results for free. The most popular
audiobooks on LibriVox— for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Moby-Dick, and
Pride and Prejudice—have been downloaded or streamed more than 2 million times.
Since LibriVox started in 2005, over 8,000 texts have been recorded, edited and
posted to the site by over 6,000 readers. Other volunteers work on the editing
of the audio files and checking for accuracy.
LibriVox volunteers give their
work away. The site maintains a do-what-you-will attitude. If a volunteer wants
to re-record a book that others have already done, that’s fine: the more the
merrier. Anyone can burn LibriVox audiobooks onto CDs and try to sell them.
People have done that. More lucratively, perhaps, third-party vendors have also
developed LibriVox apps, which generate advertising revenue, and host the
site’s catalog.
The difference between LibriVox
and Audible is sometimes like the difference between public-access television
and high-end cable shows. Audible grew by 40 percent between 2013 and 2014.
It’s both the largest seller and the largest producer of audiobooks in the
world. But the growth of both ventures demonstrates that people have a lot of
time on their hands to listen.
“Now Audible has millions of
members globally,” says Matthew Thornton, Audible’s vice president of
communications. “In 2014 that translated to about 1.2 billion hours of
listening.” That’s about the equivalent of over 100,000 years of listening.
Thornton says the average Audible subscriber devotes about two hours a day to
listening, which is kind of mind-blowing.
Whereas LibriVox depends on
passionate volunteers, Audible employs a pool of about a 100 mostly New
York-based actors to record nearly non-stop in the six studios at the company’s
Newark headquarters. The company also draws from professional celebrity
performers like John Malkovich, Kate Winslet, Samuel L. Jackson, Anne Hathaway,
and more. Audiobooks have become so popular that, in some cases, the sales of
individual audio titles outstrip their print counterparts. But unlike Audible,
at LibriVox the values of the marketplace are wonderfully disregarded.
Unintentionally Personal Outsider
Art
You won’t find user reviews of
performances on LibriVox because the community has decided—rightly, no
doubt—that negative comments would discourage volunteers from reading for the
site. (But you can find those reviews—negative and not—on those third-party
apps and on Archive.org, which also hosts the LibriVox catalog.)
Some of the audiobooks on
LibriVox are almost like outsider art. Sometimes while listening I feel like
I’m eavesdropping on a strange over-wrought audition, where an aspiring actor
tries on and abandons accents, tweaks their voice in pitch too much, or
hyperextends vowels in an effort to feel their way into the voice of a
fictional New England sea captain, or a crude Yorkshire industrialist, or a
displaced German Jew in London.
Some readings are wooden, but
with a kind of affectlessness that starts to seem like its own interesting
artistic choice once you’ve settled into the performance. That was how I felt
about readings of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
House of the Seven Gables by two different readers. Under the first-do-no-harm
theory, a dead but intelligible reading might be more tolerable than one that
errs on the side of too much emphasis, or accents that slip in and out or just
grate.
After listening to several
audiobooks, I started to appreciate how every single decision made by a
narrator/reader becomes an act of interpretation, a part of the performance,
and an element that will either win over or infuriate listeners. Pacing can
range from dramatically ruminative all the way to speed-reader fast.
Listening to a too-fast reader
burn through Don Quixote is a little like having a firehose of fine wine
blasted at your open mouth: You can hold on to some of the good stuff, but it’s
a mess. It’s beer-bonging something meant for sipping and savoring, which isn’t
to say it’s not enjoyable in its own rapid-fire way. The original text starts
to take on another secondary context, the one mediated by the narrator—the
whole thing gets meta real fast. And, particularly when listening to Don
Quixote, a book about books and what they do to our heads, it brings to mind a
Borgesian hall of mirrors, one where every reading of every book becomes its
own individual work of art, one shaped by the collaboration between author and
reader.
But then there are the recordings
that achieve the level of art themselves.
The Stars of LibriVox
Mil Nicholson is a Charles
Dickens missionary. She’s spent much of the last three years reading the work
of Dickens aloud, to be edited with the help of her husband and eventually
posted on LibriVox. Nicholson is aiming to win over new converts to Little
Dorrit, Bleak House, Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations and
the rest. Her readings on LibriVox have been downloaded/streamed roughly a
quarter of a millions times.
Nicholson, a trained actress
originally from the north of England, began volunteering for LibriVox, first
recording chapters of Anthony Trollope before moving on to an effort at
tackling all of Dickens novels by herself. (She’s working on Great Expectations
now and expects to have it completed and posted on LibriVox by the end of
2015.) She works from her home in the mountains of western North Carolina,
though she’s spent years acting on the stage in London and Los Angeles.
Like most of her fellow
narrators—volunteer and professional—Nicholson spends a lot of time on a
project. Each Dickens novel takes her about six months to complete, with five
hours of reading getting boiled
down to one hour of finished
narration, generally. (She’s done seven so far, and Dickens wrote more than a
dozen major novels, cranking them out at a rate of about one a year.) She reads
a book all the way through
first, on the lookout for clues
about a character’s voice. Nicholson then marks the text, “just like a script,”
highlighting dialogue.
“The audio work with the books
was an incredible outlet, because it is like a performance,” she says. “You’re
performing these characters. I get just as animated in the booth as I do on
stage.”
One of Nicholson’s remarkable
talents is for differentiating accents with subtlety and contrast, without
having a huge book like Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, which has about 20 major
characters, and a couple dozen
more minor ones, turn into a
discordant patchwork of class and regional variations. She distinguishes some
characters by slight alterations in the speed of their speech, or in dynamics.
She has a pianistic approach to narration.
Nicholson’s skill and commitment
have earned her fans from around the world—from Israel, New Zealand, South
Africa and all over. Like a few other talented LibriVox volunteers, Nicholson
has found employment as a
for-hire narrator as a result of
her well-loved public-domain recordings. A publisher from New York contacted
her a few years ago and helped arrange for Nicholson to eventually do 17 books
for Audible.
The Lucrative Audiobook Boom
It’s not like publishing
executives are necessarily scouting for new audiobook talent by listening to
LibriVox, but other volunteer readers have made the transition to professional
narration, too. (Elizabeth Klett,
another popular LibriVox reader,
has read over 60 books for the public-domain site since 2007, but began narrating
audiobooks professionally in 2011.)
“As the profile of this craft has
been growing, we conduct audiobook workshops at top acting schools across the
country and in the UK,” says Thornton of Audible.
If bartending, waiting tables, or
hoping for small parts in TV commercials were the ways that aspiring actors
made a living before that big break, now many pursue work in audiobook
narration, sometimes working from studios in their own homes.
Katherine Kjellgren is an actress
who makes her living doing audiobook narration. If you search for her name on
Audible, over 200 titles, many of them children’s books, come up in the
results. She studied acting in London, where an emphasis on regional dialects
gave her a very good foundation for her future work doing narration. She’s also
led workshops on narration at schools around the country.
“Once I started doing audiobooks
I really found my happy place and I stopped doing other things,” says
Kjellgren.
Like some of the LibriVox
volunteers who stumbled into the field of audiobook narration only after giving
their labors away, Kjellgren had early experience with books on tape.
“Something that really helped me
with my reading when I was a child was listening to audio books,” says
Kjellgren. “The first time I was introduced to a lot of my favorite authors, I
was listening to them on audio.”
Kjellgren cites her exposure to
John Gielgud’s classic recordings of Shakespeare as a crucial part of her
literary and dramatic upbringing. It’s a little like having a professor who’s studied
the text teaching you about the intricacies of what’s there, but instead of
having to be lectured to, you just listen to the text itself.
“He so clearly understands with
such a laser-like intelligence,” says Kjellgren of those recordings. “It makes
it so much less intimidating.”
The Power of the Human Voice
The novelist Colm Toibin has said
that listening to an audiobook instead of reading a novel is “like the
difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV.” I think
that might be a faulty comparison. It’s more like the difference between
watching marathon coverage on TV versus being a spectator in person. Neither is
to be confused with the labor of running the race. Although narrating an
audiobook well might be practically as difficult as writing one.
If reading a printed book is a
kind of clear-light transference from author to reader, an aesthetic data-dump
across time and space—a one-on-one communion, pure information-delivery—then
listening to an
audiobook is more complicated:
There’s a middleman, the text becomes air. Something’s lost, but something’s
gained, as they say.
The human voice and performance
are central to Western literature. Homer’s epics were recited aloud, though we
don’t really know what form those performances took. Shakespeare, as many will
tell you, is meant to be heard, declaimed, not read silently. And Dickens,
considered by many to be the greatest English novelist, regularly read from his
work at popular public events. (His marked-up texts used for performances—with
extraneous details marked-out—can be seen at the Dickens House Museum in
London.)
Humans have tended throughout
history to think that there’s something sacred in the breath, the spoken word,
the charged air, as it relates to literary inspiration. The Muses are said to
breathe into the ear of the poet. God breathes life into matter in the Bible.
While listening to so many books
this year, I was struck with how many characters in them read to each other.
Mr. Boffin hires Silas Wegg to read to him in Our Mutual Friend. Whole chapters
of Trollope’s The Three Clerks are made up of one character reading his fiction
aloud to the other characters. The same thing happens in The House of the Seven
Gables.
Elsewhere in that book Hawthorne
remarks on the peculiar expressive potency of our own speech and how the spoken
word can capture the depth of feeling, “as if the words … had been steeped in
the warmth of [the] heart.”
But if the voice can reveal
truths about a text, it can also uncover plenty about a reader and their
thoughts, and so that’s why Kjellgren, Nicholson, and all the other performers
seem to take it so seriously.
“It’s very important to never
judge a book,” says Kjellgren. “If you judge a book while you’re reading it,
then you’re the one who looks like a fool.”
WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS.....................
THE ART OF PULP
THE ART OF WAR...............................
One of the “The Girl You Left Behind” series produced by the Germans to demoralize the Anglo-American troops in Italy, this one dropped behind British lines to make them worry about American soldiers in
The piercing cry of child poverty in America
Monday September 28, 2015 09:02
PM
Marian Wright Edelman,
writer
Pope Francis speaks out faithfully
and forcefully against poverty and has been called “the pope of the poor.” But
on his first visit to the United States there was demoralizing news about
poverty, especially child poverty, in our nation — the world’s largest economy.
Despite six years of economic
recovery, children remain the poorest group in America.
Children are poor if they live in
a family of four with an annual income below $24,418 –$2,035 a month, $470 a
week, $67 a day. Extreme poverty is income less than half this.
New Census Bureau data reveal
that nearly one-third of the 46.7 million poor people in the United States in
2014 were children. Of the more than 15.5 million poor children, 70 percent
were children of color who already constitute the majority of our nation’s
youngest children and will be the majority of all our children by 2020.
They continue to be
disproportionately poor: 37 percent of Black children and 32 percent of
Hispanic children are poor compared to 12 percent of white, non-Hispanic
children. This is morally scandalous and economically costly. Every year we let
millions of children remain poor costs our nation more than $500 billion as a
result of lost productivity and extra health and crime costs stemming from
child poverty.
The Black child poverty rate
increased 10 percent between 2013 and 2014 while rates for children of other
races and ethnicities declined slightly. The Black extreme child poverty rate
increased 13 percent with nearly one in five Black children living in extreme
poverty. Although the Hispanic child poverty rate fell slightly, Hispanic
children remain our largest number of poor children.
Nearly one in four children under
5 years old is poor and almost half live in extreme poverty. More than 40
percent of Black children under 5 are poor and nearly 25 percent of young Black
children are extremely poor.
New state data show child poverty
rates in 2014 remained at record high levels across 40 states, with only 10
states showing significant declines between 2013 and 2014.
In 22 states, 40 percent or more
Black children were poor. In 32 states, more than 30 percent of Hispanic
children were poor. And in 24 states, more than 30 percent of American
Indian/Alaska Native children were poor.
Only Hawaii had a Black child
poverty rate below 20 percent while only two states, Kentucky and West
Virginia, had White, non-Hispanic child poverty rates over 20 percent.
The rates are staggering,
especially when we know there are steps Congress could take right now to end
child poverty and save taxpayer money now and in the future. In CDF’s recent
Ending Child Poverty Now report based on an analysis by the nonpartisan Urban
Institute, we proposed nine policy changes which would immediately reduce child
poverty 60 percent and Black child poverty 72 percent and lift the floor of
decency for 97 percent of all poor children by ensuring parents the resources
to support and nurture their children: jobs with livable wages, affordable
high-quality child care, supports for working families like the Earned Income
Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and safety nets for basic
needs like nutrition, housing assistance and child support.
Congress must make permanent
improvements in pro-work tax credits (both the EITC and the CTC), increase the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) benefit, and
expand housing subsidies and quality child care investments for children when
parents work.
To complement gains in these
areas and to reduce child poverty long term, we must ensure all children
comprehensive affordable health care, high-quality early childhood development
and learning opportunities to get ready for school and a level education
playing field to help all children achieve and succeed in life. It is a great
national, economic and military security threat that a majority of all children
in America cannot read or compute at grade level and that nearly three-fourths
of our Black and Latino children cannot.
Data show key safety net programs
lifted millions of people, including children above the Supplemental Poverty
Measure (SPM) poverty line, between 2013 and 2014. These supports all reduced
child poverty: SNAP (4.7 million people), rent subsidies (2.8 million people),
and the Earned Income Tax Credit and the low-income portion of the Child Tax
Credit (roughly 10 million people including more than 5 million children).
There also is strong evidence these measures will provide long-term benefits
for children.
We know how to reduce child
poverty but keep refusing to do it. How can our Congressional leaders even
discuss spending as much as $400 billion to extend tax cuts for corporations
and businesses while denying more than 15.5 million poor children — 70 percent
non-White — the opportunity to improve their odds of succeeding in school and
in life?
We can and must do more right now
as children have only one childhood.
Our
welfare system insults the poor. Basic income could do better.
By Matt Zwolinski September 28
Each week, In Theory takes on a
big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week we’re
talking about universal basic income. Need a primer? Catch up here.
Matt Zwolinski is Associate
Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, and co-director of
USD’s Institute for Law and Philosophy. Find him on Twitter: @Mattzwolinski.
Too often in the United States,
welfare comes with strings attached. Yes, Americans are willing to help the
poor; but they aren’t quite willing to trust them. After all, a lot of
Americans still believe that people fall into poverty because there’s something
wrong with them. Poverty is the material reflection of an internal moral
failure.
And so, many of us believe that
whatever aid we give to the poor should not be a “handout.” It must be
conditioned on the poor correcting the personal failings that got them into
poverty in the first place. We’ll help you take care of your children, but only
if you get a job. We’ll help you buy food, but only with food stamps that we
know you can’t spend on alcohol or tobacco.
A basic income program that
replaces in-kind transfers like food stamps or Medicaid with a simple,
universal cash grant would not only provide more effective aid to the poor, it
would provide that aid in a manner more consistent with the values of human
dignity and responsibility.
The efficiency argument on
behalf of cash grants is straightforward: unlike in-kind benefits, people can
use cash on whatever they need the most. If what they need is food, they can
use the cash they’re given on groceries—and they’re no worse off than if they
had received food stamps. But if what they need is something else—to pay their
rent, or an overdue utility bill, or maybe even to save a little for the
future—then cash is much better. As long as we assume that people know more
(and care more) about their own needs than the government does, the case for
cash over in-kind benefits is powerful. Cash is flexible. Cash is freedom.
This isn’t just theory. There
is a growing body of empirical evidence showing that the poor use the freedom
cash provides to make real improvements in their lives. From the Bolsa Familia
program in Brazil, to cash grants inUganda and Mexico, we’ve seen that poor
people who are given cash grants typically use the money responsibly:
purchasing basic necessities and trying to generate sustainable streams of
revenue. Those benefits often add up to real, long-term improvements in health
and educational outcomes.
Paternalism isn’t just
ineffective; it’s insulting. It presumes that the poor are incapable of
managing their own lives. And it requires a great deal of invasive and
degrading snooping on the government’s part to ensure that the poor are living
up to the demands we’ve placed on them. Cash transfers, in contrast, give
recipients the resources and responsibility to take charge of their own lives.
Basic income proposals face
serious theoretical and practical challenges, among the most serious of which
is the prohibitively high cost of a grant sufficient to cover people’s basic
needs. As a result, I’m much less confident in the idea now than I used to be. But
even if a basic income per se is unattainable or undesirable, there’s a lot to
be said for moving in its direction. We can do so by consolidating various
welfare programs —SNAP, TANF, affordable housing and so on— and by converting
as many in-kind programs as we can to simple cash grants. Doing so could give
us a welfare state that’s less costly, less paternalistic, and more effective
at meeting the needs of the poor than our current system. And that’s something
that people from across the political spectrum ought to celebrate.
Instead of Shaming the Poor
Yesterday I joined Fox and
Friends for what they billed, in typical Fox News fashion, as a “fair and
balanced debate.” The topic was a Maine mayor’s call to publish the names and
addresses of all recipients of public assistance online as a sort of
“poverty-offender registry.” Mayor Robert MacDonald of Lewistown announced this
ugly proposal last week in an op-ed in the local Twin-City Times, offering the
justification that Mainers “have a right to know how their money is being
spent.”
My conservative counterpart on
the show—Seton Motley, a one-man political operation he calls Less Government
(hey, at least he gets points for being straightforward)—defended “shaming the
people who are sitting on welfare” as a tactic to get them off of assistance,
and to crack down on what he termed “widespread welfare abuse.”
As I pointed out when my turn
came to speak, the real shame is that our nation’s minimum wage is a poverty
wage. In the late 1960s, the minimum wage was enough to keep a family of three
out of poverty. Had it kept pace with inflation since then, it would be nearly
$11 today, instead of the current $7.25 per hour.
And it’s not just workers earning
the minimum wage who are struggling: Working families have seen decades of flat
and declining wages, while those at the top of the income ladder capture an
ever-rising share of the gains from economic growth.
As a result, millions of
Americans are working harder than ever while falling further and further
behind. And many are juggling two and three jobs in an effort to make enough to
live on: 7 million Americans are working multiple jobs. (Remember Maria
Fernandes, the New Jersey woman who died in her car after trying to get a few
hours of sleep in between her four jobs?)
Many low-wage workers need to
turn to public assistance to make ends meet. In fact,researchers at Berkeley
found that the public cost of low wages is more than $152 billion annually, in
the form of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Earned Income
Tax Credit (EITC), Medicaid, and other work and income supports that workers
must rely on when wages are not enough to live on. The researchers also find
that more than half—56 percent—of combined federal and state spending on public
assistance goes to working families.
Contrary to conservatives’ claims
that a bump-up in the minimum wage would “kill jobs,” a large body of research
shows that past minimum wage increases at the federal, state, and local levels
have boosted earnings and cut poverty among working families, without leading
to job loss.
And it’s not just teenagers
earning extra spending money who stand to benefit from raising the minimum
wage. The average age of workers who would get a raise is 35—and more than 1 in
4 have kids. (Then again, Motley went so far as to say that people earning the
minimum wage shouldn’t have children… Oy.)
If Mayor MacDonald, Motley, and
their cheerleaders in the right-wing media really want to shrink spending on
public assistance, then instead of wasting their time shaming people who are
struggling to make ends meet—which, of course, is the sole purpose of Fox
News’s recurring segment “Entitlement Nation”—they’d be wise to embrace raising
the minimum wage. Indeed, my colleague Rachel West has found that raising the
federal minimum wage to $12 an hour, as Senator Patty Murray and Congressman
Bobby Scott have proposed, would save a whopping $53 billion in SNAP in the
coming decade—more savings than the $40 billion in cuts proposed by House
Republicans during the last round of Farm Bill negotiations. In Maine, the
single-year savings in SNAP from a minimum wage hike would top $31 million.
Whether or not Mayor MacDonald’s
widely criticized—and likely illegal—proposal for a public assistance shaming
database gains traction—even in a state that’s been leading the nation when it
comes to policies that punish its citizens for being poor—we should see his and
Fox News’ poor-shaming for what it is: an attempt to divert attention away from
the real causes of poverty, as well as the solutions that would dramatically
reduce it.
For pushing harmful policies and
bullying people who are struggling to provide for their families in an
off-kilter economy, Mayor MacDonald and his friends in the right-wing media are
the ones who should be ashamed.
Rebecca Vallas is the Director of
Policy for the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American
Progress and the co-host of TalkPoverty Radio.
Last week, when Pope Francis
entered the Capitol building to give a historic addressbefore a joint session
of Congress, the pontiff carried with him a moving plea for the establishment
of a “culture of care.” The Pope’s address included an appeal to dialogue with
“the many thousands of men and women who strive each day to do an honest day’s
work, to bring home their daily bread, to save money and—one step at a time—to
build a better life for their families.” But too many of those working
parents—especially those in low-paying jobs—know just how precarious that
effort to care for their families can be.
Many of us, including the pope,
might very well disagree on just what makes a family, but we can all agree that
the common good of our society is best served when caregivers don’t need to
risk their livelihoods in order to provide care for young people. However,
policies like paid sick leave—which allows workers to take time off to care for
themselves or their families if someone becomes ill or incapacitated—remain out
of reach for too many people.
President Obama recently made
headlines after signing an executive order requiring federal contractors to
grant workers up to seven days of paid sick leave each year. But the fact
remains that out of the 22 wealthiest nations in the world, the United States
is the only one without any form of guaranteed paid sick leave for workers. As
a result, only about 43 percent of workers have reported the ability to take
paid leave to care for a sick family member. Nearly a quarter of American
workers report losing a job or being threatened with job loss for taking time
off to care for a sick child or relative.
While paid family and medical
leave impacts all families, it especially impacts women.Six in every 10 mothers
are the primary, sole, or co-breadwinner for their family. This includes both
single mothers and mothers with an unemployed spouse or partner at home. And
about a third of all children in the United States live in a single-parent
household; nearly half of them are already living below the poverty line. Forty
percent of their parents are working in low-wage jobs—the types of jobs least
likely to offer paid sick leave.
Many working families simply
cannot afford to take the time they need to care for their children when they
get sick. For a family headed by a sole breadwinner who earns the average wage
for workers without paid sick leave, it would take just three days of missed
work to be driven below the federal poverty line. With over one in five
churchgoers estimated to be living in households that earn less than $25,000 a
year, people of faith must come to realize that this kind of instability—and
injustice—is a reality for many of the people in their congregations.
This desire to care for our
children is a human instinct, a family value, and a faith practice. The
scriptures appeal repeatedly to God as a nurturing parent who always comes to
the aid of their children. Most of us are familiar with the imagery of “God the
Father,” and scripture pushes us further. God the Mother speaks through the
prophet Isaiah to promise: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort
you.” In the Christian New Testament, Jesus remarks at how often he has
“desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her
wings.”
Faith advocates have endorsed more
just, family-friendly workplace policies for years. It’s now time for people of
faith—whether in the pulpits, in the pews, or in politics—to stand up, speak
out, and actively promote paid sick leave as a real family value and faith
practice that impacts every working family. In a real “culture of care,” when
parents inevitably get that call from the school nurse, they can leave their
desk, or register, or assembly line and offer the care their children need.
State and federal elected officials and business leaders—especially those
claiming to be pro-family and pro-faith—should take the steps necessary to make
access to paid leave a reality for all working families.
Carolyn
J. Davis is the Policy Analyst for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative
at the Center for American Progress and an ordained minister in The United
Methodist Church. Follow her on Twitter at @carojdavis.
Advocates Push Bail Reform to Stop
‘Penalizing People for Being Poor’
by Jason Salzman
A new free, downloadable book
explains the changes in Colorado law, and it emphasizes that certain practices,
such as using a formula to set bail based on types of crimes, are flat-out
unconstitutional. (Shutterstock)
In the United States, where the
principle of “innocent until proven guilty” is a cultural bedrock, close to
half a million people are behind bars awaiting trial, convicted of nothing.
As part of a growing effort to
reduce pretrial jail time for defendants, a national organization of defense
lawyers teamed up with public defenders and advocates in Colorado to publish a
guide on how to win the release of people as they await trial, especially those
identified as low risk.
Publication of the free,
downloadable manual, The Colorado Bail Book: A Defense Practitioner’s Guide to
Adult Pretrial Release, comes in the wake of a 2013 overhaul of Colorado bail
laws. The statutory updates were based on a detailed assessment of the risk
posed by releasing people arrested and charged with a variety of crimes.
“When people started looking at
the numbers, they started asking, ‘Why are we holding poor people on money
bond, often times on minor offenses?’ It really seemed to be penalizing people
for being poor, because wealthier people were being released,” said Colette
Tvedt, indigent defense training and reform director for the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), which aims to “ensure justice
and due process for persons accused of crime or wrongdoing.”
The Colorado Bail Book explains
the changes in Colorado law, and it emphasizes that certain practices, such as
using a formula to set bail based on types of crimes, are flat-out
unconstitutional, Tvedt told RH Reality Check.
The guide points public and
private defense attorneys to a risk-assessment tool that “identifies which
defendants are likely to be higher risk to public safety (commit new crimes)
and to fail to appear for any court date during the pretrial period.”
Defendants are assessed based on a series of questions and background checks.
The document states that the assessment tool was successfully piloted in
Colorado courts.
“We’re hoping that the judges and
the prosecutors will abide by the new changes in the law and release a lot more
of the low- and moderate-risk defendants who should be out, without
conditions,” said Tvedt.
A call for comment to the
Colorado District Attorneys’ council was not returned.
Of the 735,000 people
incarcerated in local jails in the United States, about 60 percent are being
held pretrial, and are not yet convicted of any crime, according to federal
statistics. There are about 2.3 million people incarcerated in America,
including federal prisoners.
The costs go beyond dollars spent
on keeping defendants in jail. People in pretrial detention often lose their
jobs and housing and face personal traumas, even though they haven’t been
convicted of a crime, Tvedt said.
Excessive pretrial incarceration
“effectively coerces even innocent defendants into pleading guilty in exchange
for a sentence of ‘time served,'” said Tvedt.
The Colorado Bail Book was published
by NACDL as part of a grant from the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance, in
partnership with the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender and the
Colorado Criminal Defense Institute.
“It is our hope that all
defenders, both public and private, use this resource to aggressively and
consistently challenge the pretrial system that punishes the accused before
conviction, forces guilty pleas to obtain release and incarcerates the poor
simply because they cannot afford to post a money bond,” states the Colorado
Bail Book’s introduction, signed by Tvedt, Maureen Cain, policy director of the
Colorado Defense Institute, and Colorado State Public Defender Douglas Wilson.
Colorado’s manual reflects work
done in Kentucky, Tvedt said, adding that NACDL aims to produce similar guides
for New Jersey and Wisconsin, which are both in the midst of reforming bail
statutes based on risk assessments.
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To schedule an interview with
Jason Salzman contact director of communications Rachel Perrone at
rachel@rhrealitycheck.org.
Photographs I’ve taken
Annapolis Maryland
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A house along the River Célé built into the side of a cliff, near Sauliac-sur-Célé, Midi-Pyrénées, France
Acores, Portugal
Agios Triadas, Meteora, Greece
Altea, Spain
