We interrupt these antiquarian reflections for a public service message.
This week, Northeastern University’s newspaper had a profile on Prison Book Program (PBP), a non-profit that sends books to prisoners. “The volunteers open letters from inmates requesting specific titles or genres of books, and match tem as best they can with titles donated by local philanthropists, professors or publishing companies” (Larocque 5). PBP has “served more than 100,000 prisoners in the last three years” (Capalbo 6), an impressive achievement for such a tiny organization relying solely on volunteers working out of the basement of a tiny bookstore in Quincy, MA.
But it also brings up some of the problems with our corrections system. As volunteer Pam Boiros points out, “Seventy-five percent of prisoners today reoffend, and are readmitted [to prisons]…. It’s called recidivism. The only thing proven to reduce the recidivism rates is when people get educated” (qtd. in Larocque 5). But the American prison system, the largest in the world, focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Prison libraries, whey they exist at all, are notoriously small, and most prisons have a rule that prisoners can’t receive books from individuals. Hence, the PBP.
The most commonly requested materials are dictionaries (PBP currently has none in stock), GED exam preparation books, books on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Westerns, and business books. PBP also tries to keep books on LGBT issues, Buddhism, native American topics and legal self-help, as these topics are also frequently sought.
Since I was at a 50%-off sale at a local second-hand bookstore yesterday, I picked up a few such books along with the ones for my work, and I’ll be sending them along with a few new dictionaries in a few days. (See address below.) I encourage you to join me in making the world a safer place. Remember, books change minds; minds change lives.
Prison Book Program
c/o Lucy Parsons Bookstore
1306 Hancock St., Ste. 100
Quincy, MA 02169
Capalbo, Danielle. “Reading into the Facts on Prisoners, Literacy.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 6.
Larocque, Mark. “Local Non-profit Puts Books Behind Bars.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 5-6.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2008
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Declaring an Interest
I recently came across a slim red book, marked $3 and titled The Enjoyment of Wine. I immediately thought, “Well, I love wine, but I love books more,” but I picked it up, and reading the chapter titles led me to buy it, simply so that I might use its author’s ideas to say things I have long wanted to say about books. To use H.W. Yoxall’s sentences shamelessly, “I have been [reading books] now for [thirty-five] years, regularly, appreciatively and with attention. I wonder how much I have [read] in all. Probably not as much as I think” (13).
If I have read more books than some other people have, I put it down to influences familial and academic rather than societal. My parents have two walls of bookcases completely filled floor to ceiling with books, and several parts of other walls similarly crammed. In our family’s case it was not so much that “books do decorate a room” as “books do furnish a life.” Having thankfully grown up before the MTV generation, I have always associated books with Knowledge—facts and ideas to keep in the treasury in the back of my mind for future need—rather than, at best, Information—facts for practical use now and immediate erasure from memory. For two years, my mother brought home with the groceries the monthly volume of Encyclopedia Britannica Junior for me, and I read them, soaking up the pages on aardvarks and Australia, gems and Greek gods, knights, naval uniforms, and Vikings. I never intended to use this material; at ten or eleven years old, it was purpose enough simply to absorb it, to know it for its own sake, and to slide each red and gold volume onto my gradually filling shelves.
In college, as an English major, and later in graduate school, I read yet more books: Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare and Woolf in the 1980s; Maxine Hong Kingston, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and Tim O’Brien in the 1990s. Then with my MFA in hand, I went and—tremble, gentle reader—began to teach English.
For fifteen years, I have taught at several colleges in Boston: freshman composition; creative writing of fiction, poetry and autobiography; as well as American literature in various forms. But otherwise I went on with my life as usual, which largely meant reading what I wanted to: medieval history, mystery novels, architecture, business, flamenco and martial arts. So although I know how to analyze and explicate a text, I do not offer these blog entries as professional opinions, but as personal meditations.
I have long thought that any kind of writing could be a love poem, if it described with enough acute attention the perceived beauty of its subject. Some years ago, I discovered a similar sentiment expressed by the poet May Sarton. As a character says in her 1965 novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, “When I said that all poem are love poems, I meant that the motor power, the electric current is love of one kind or another. The subject may be something quite impersonal—a bird on a windowsill, a cloud in the sky, don’t you know?” (125).
I love books because I find in them new friends, old selves, comforting ideas and epiphanies. These entries, then, are offered as love poems. Read them as such, as you might read a sonnet written one or five hundred years ago for some other soul, and think with affection of your own beloved.
Sarton, May. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: W.W. Norton, 1965.
Yoxall, H.W. The Enjoyment of Wine. New York: Drake, 1972.
If I have read more books than some other people have, I put it down to influences familial and academic rather than societal. My parents have two walls of bookcases completely filled floor to ceiling with books, and several parts of other walls similarly crammed. In our family’s case it was not so much that “books do decorate a room” as “books do furnish a life.” Having thankfully grown up before the MTV generation, I have always associated books with Knowledge—facts and ideas to keep in the treasury in the back of my mind for future need—rather than, at best, Information—facts for practical use now and immediate erasure from memory. For two years, my mother brought home with the groceries the monthly volume of Encyclopedia Britannica Junior for me, and I read them, soaking up the pages on aardvarks and Australia, gems and Greek gods, knights, naval uniforms, and Vikings. I never intended to use this material; at ten or eleven years old, it was purpose enough simply to absorb it, to know it for its own sake, and to slide each red and gold volume onto my gradually filling shelves.
In college, as an English major, and later in graduate school, I read yet more books: Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare and Woolf in the 1980s; Maxine Hong Kingston, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and Tim O’Brien in the 1990s. Then with my MFA in hand, I went and—tremble, gentle reader—began to teach English.
For fifteen years, I have taught at several colleges in Boston: freshman composition; creative writing of fiction, poetry and autobiography; as well as American literature in various forms. But otherwise I went on with my life as usual, which largely meant reading what I wanted to: medieval history, mystery novels, architecture, business, flamenco and martial arts. So although I know how to analyze and explicate a text, I do not offer these blog entries as professional opinions, but as personal meditations.
I have long thought that any kind of writing could be a love poem, if it described with enough acute attention the perceived beauty of its subject. Some years ago, I discovered a similar sentiment expressed by the poet May Sarton. As a character says in her 1965 novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, “When I said that all poem are love poems, I meant that the motor power, the electric current is love of one kind or another. The subject may be something quite impersonal—a bird on a windowsill, a cloud in the sky, don’t you know?” (125).
I love books because I find in them new friends, old selves, comforting ideas and epiphanies. These entries, then, are offered as love poems. Read them as such, as you might read a sonnet written one or five hundred years ago for some other soul, and think with affection of your own beloved.
Sarton, May. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: W.W. Norton, 1965.
Yoxall, H.W. The Enjoyment of Wine. New York: Drake, 1972.
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