The Cave

“The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement...

“At Tamms, man, it was like a lab,”...

The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country,..

This is the dark side of American exceptionalism

--A. Gawande, The New Yorker.

~

The disappeared: Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan...so many, so much, is unaccounted for. Which is strange, for the state which is founded on statistics (Foucault).

~

Down in the grotty basement of the old bookstore (there are many of these small places and yet I've hardly seen anyone actually, you know, buy a book in one of them. Stationery: yes).

It gives you great pleasure to see M. Hamid's book floundering in this dark place, unread and unreadable. Another person on the game, the bandwagon that is the Islam-fundamentalism-west-liberal-conservative baloney that satisfies a certain clientele in the West. Hampstead, say. Maybe parts of Boston.

The electricity has gone and they're running the back up, which means you can hardly read any of the titles on the broken spines. On the floor lie vast heaps of western fashion magazines, beautiful and sexy women now not part of anyone's fantasies.

Lots of Victoria Holt, Cohelo, Danielle Steele. Then the more random stuff like Wine in Australia, Sex with the Queen, Homosexuality. Large picture books about dogs, horses, cats,..beautiful kept gardens..all the kind of stuff that really resonates with the Lahoris!

Then, out of the blue: books by Richard Hoggart, (the) Elizabeth Taylor, and Thomas Merton (Zen).