"unfolding below him like a map in one slow silent explosion"

(quote: William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust; video: Warren Ellis on writer's block)

I'm writing my personal statement for applying to grad schools. While trying to understand how I should direct a passage of the essay, I listed writers that I feel influenced by (Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, Kenzeburo Oe, Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Lethem, Warren Ellis, Zola, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Paul Auster, several others). And then, looking over the list, I realized that none of these have been suggested or read in my fiction workshop courses. At least twelve short-stories*5 semesters of workshop=60 short stories and nary an author that I would want to emulate. This is not a knock on them specifically, they're all obviously accomplished and highly skilled at the craft. I just don't think the aesthetic of contemporary lit., as canonized by the academic creative writing machine, is particularly exciting. Dusty, wistful, soft . . .victimized, eviscerated, cliched.

Apparently Dick Cheney has been indicted for profiting from a corrupted system of private prisons. He was invested in a company called Vanguard that operates Federal Detention centers, and it appears they ran it little different than an organized criminal enterprise would. The whole thing sounds rather thin and silly, considering Cheney's remarkable tendency towards 'evil'. And, most likely, Cheney will worm out of any culpability whether he deserves blame or not. What's most unsettling about this scandal to me, is that Cheney is even involved in prisons to this degree. He shouldn't have any involvement with any corporation other than blind trusts operated by financial managers. And yet he is. He makes money from the saddest part of our society, the most overt denigration and dehumanization we have in this country. And, not just Cheney's involvmenet, but that there are private prisons at all. As government functionaries we need to have individuals interested in the goings-on of the prison system. But the notion that there are huge companies making profit from building cinder-block incubators for violence and alienation . . .the idea that there is some conference every year in some shithole casino where the salesmen for Vanguard or Wackenhut are showing the heads of Dept of Corrections glossy pamphlets of people being caged like farm animals . . .How the fuck do these people sleep? We need prisons, yes, but how can a person pour their cup of coffee in the morning thinking how to sustain more human beings on less and less. Make the food shittier, make the cells a little smaller, make the rec yard smaller, look for extraneous luxuries to take away, look for opportunities for prison-labor profit. And then, when the new business plan is all arranged, maybe they punch their grandmother in the neck and piss on their neighbor's mail. Well, as long as they can figure out how to make money on it.