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Would we all like to talk about how much I suck for not updating in forever?
Basically, I have been lazy and stressed out because Reasons, and therefore I have been holing up and reading a lot but not getting around to blogging about what I've been reading, so I am now six books behind. Oops! So I suck a lot. NEXT SUBJECT.
The next subject is: Life After Death by Damien Echols. Yes, that Damien Echols! I have talked a little bit about how interesting I think this dude is here and here, and now I will talk about it more.
Life After Death doesn't talk much about the case directly, although there is a short section tacked on to the end (written by somebody else) that gives an overview of the main details of it. The organization of the book is quite effective, I think--it is a memoir, but instead of being in strict chronological order, it is separated into two main narrative threads that alternate back and forth--one is Damien's life from early childhood through being sent to prison; the second is from arriving in prison through the WM3's release.
Damien's stories of his life pre-prison are pretty grim, describing a childhood of extreme poverty, familial abuse, social isolation, frequent moves, several years' of harassment by Arkansas cops (apparently, the cops in the Pacific Northwest were perfectly congenial; it was just the Arkansas ones who were uniformly mean with bad seventies pornstaches), a couple of largely bogus institutionalizations, and being surrounded by general conservative fundiness. In the hands of a less gifted writer, this would all probably end up as an unreadably depressing mess of terrible things; however, Echols writes with pathos and a strong sense of magick, and even sometimes humor.
The writings from and about prison are... well, extreme. I don't particularly feel qualified to judge or critique them in any way; they are the sort of thing that must simply be listened to, and accepted, and allowed to educate you and fill you up with new and upsetting perspectives. Echols talks about his religious practices, about the culture of prison inmates and the creative ways they find to get basic things done, about the sadism of the guards and the toll it takes on the inmates, about the lack of mental and physical health services available for those on Death Row and the ways in which the state of Arkansas pretends to follow the prohibition on executing the mentally disabled. He talks about television and the food and the letters he got from supporters. He talks about his wife, Lorri, and about the books he reads. And he tells a lot of anecdotes about fellow prisoners, some of which are sad, some of which are scary, and some of which are funny; and many of which are some combination thereof.
There are some aspects of the book that are more relatable to someone as sheltered as me and which answered a lot of stupid questions I had after watching the documentaries, such as, How fucking embarrassing is it to have your crappy teen poetry immortalized in a movie? Answer: Excruciatingly embarrassing, apparently, although Echols maintains a sense of humor about his "terrible taste." Also, what was with the terrible haircut, and why did he look so much fatter during the trial than in any photos/video taken before or after?
"No, I am NOT fucking ready for my close-up!"
Apparently, in prison they starve you, but in jail they feed you lots of cheap fattening food.
This is definitely a book about a guy who has had a lot of weird shit happen to him, and while the stuff that happened to and around him is very interesting and educational and upsetting, the two parts of the book that really stuck in my mind the most were two anecdotes of the Damien Engages in Evil Plotting variety (as much as I like memoir writers who are astute observers of fuckwittery, I like it better when they manage to successfully push back against some of it)... one was the tale of the carefully crafted propaganda campaign he played on his family so that they would allow him to become Catholic, and the other was when he used his (according to him, largely bogus and certainly overblown) psychiatric diagnoses to apply for Social Security disability so he didn't have to work and could spend all day reading instead. Go Damien!
Literally my only complaints about this book are two instances of the phrase "politically correct," which is a largely meaningless phrase that connotes only a vague sense of superiority and distancing. I don't begrudge Mr. Echols a sense of superiority at all, since he seems to have spent most of his life surrounded by fundies, sadists, and fuckwits, but most of the time he does a very good job at effectively depicting fuckwittery using colorful words that mean things, so the instances of weak language kind of jumped out at me. Police officers, Christians (especially Protestants), people from the South, and people with terrible seventies pornstaches may have more issues with the book than I do.
The book has a more or less happy ending, despite the inadequacies of the Alford Plea deal and Damien's multitude of prison-induced health problems--he gets out of prison, eats himself sick on real food, gets the fuck out of Arkansas, and plays in the snow with his awesome celebrity friends.
D'aww.
Me being a chronic asker of stupid questions, the main thing I want to know after reading this book is "What are you going to write about now that your life doesn't suck anymore?" I will wait and see, I suppose. In the meantime, West of Memphis comes out in December.
Basically, I have been lazy and stressed out because Reasons, and therefore I have been holing up and reading a lot but not getting around to blogging about what I've been reading, so I am now six books behind. Oops! So I suck a lot. NEXT SUBJECT.
The next subject is: Life After Death by Damien Echols. Yes, that Damien Echols! I have talked a little bit about how interesting I think this dude is here and here, and now I will talk about it more.
Life After Death doesn't talk much about the case directly, although there is a short section tacked on to the end (written by somebody else) that gives an overview of the main details of it. The organization of the book is quite effective, I think--it is a memoir, but instead of being in strict chronological order, it is separated into two main narrative threads that alternate back and forth--one is Damien's life from early childhood through being sent to prison; the second is from arriving in prison through the WM3's release.
Damien's stories of his life pre-prison are pretty grim, describing a childhood of extreme poverty, familial abuse, social isolation, frequent moves, several years' of harassment by Arkansas cops (apparently, the cops in the Pacific Northwest were perfectly congenial; it was just the Arkansas ones who were uniformly mean with bad seventies pornstaches), a couple of largely bogus institutionalizations, and being surrounded by general conservative fundiness. In the hands of a less gifted writer, this would all probably end up as an unreadably depressing mess of terrible things; however, Echols writes with pathos and a strong sense of magick, and even sometimes humor.
The writings from and about prison are... well, extreme. I don't particularly feel qualified to judge or critique them in any way; they are the sort of thing that must simply be listened to, and accepted, and allowed to educate you and fill you up with new and upsetting perspectives. Echols talks about his religious practices, about the culture of prison inmates and the creative ways they find to get basic things done, about the sadism of the guards and the toll it takes on the inmates, about the lack of mental and physical health services available for those on Death Row and the ways in which the state of Arkansas pretends to follow the prohibition on executing the mentally disabled. He talks about television and the food and the letters he got from supporters. He talks about his wife, Lorri, and about the books he reads. And he tells a lot of anecdotes about fellow prisoners, some of which are sad, some of which are scary, and some of which are funny; and many of which are some combination thereof.
There are some aspects of the book that are more relatable to someone as sheltered as me and which answered a lot of stupid questions I had after watching the documentaries, such as, How fucking embarrassing is it to have your crappy teen poetry immortalized in a movie? Answer: Excruciatingly embarrassing, apparently, although Echols maintains a sense of humor about his "terrible taste." Also, what was with the terrible haircut, and why did he look so much fatter during the trial than in any photos/video taken before or after?
"No, I am NOT fucking ready for my close-up!"
Apparently, in prison they starve you, but in jail they feed you lots of cheap fattening food.
This is definitely a book about a guy who has had a lot of weird shit happen to him, and while the stuff that happened to and around him is very interesting and educational and upsetting, the two parts of the book that really stuck in my mind the most were two anecdotes of the Damien Engages in Evil Plotting variety (as much as I like memoir writers who are astute observers of fuckwittery, I like it better when they manage to successfully push back against some of it)... one was the tale of the carefully crafted propaganda campaign he played on his family so that they would allow him to become Catholic, and the other was when he used his (according to him, largely bogus and certainly overblown) psychiatric diagnoses to apply for Social Security disability so he didn't have to work and could spend all day reading instead. Go Damien!
Literally my only complaints about this book are two instances of the phrase "politically correct," which is a largely meaningless phrase that connotes only a vague sense of superiority and distancing. I don't begrudge Mr. Echols a sense of superiority at all, since he seems to have spent most of his life surrounded by fundies, sadists, and fuckwits, but most of the time he does a very good job at effectively depicting fuckwittery using colorful words that mean things, so the instances of weak language kind of jumped out at me. Police officers, Christians (especially Protestants), people from the South, and people with terrible seventies pornstaches may have more issues with the book than I do.
The book has a more or less happy ending, despite the inadequacies of the Alford Plea deal and Damien's multitude of prison-induced health problems--he gets out of prison, eats himself sick on real food, gets the fuck out of Arkansas, and plays in the snow with his awesome celebrity friends.
D'aww.
Me being a chronic asker of stupid questions, the main thing I want to know after reading this book is "What are you going to write about now that your life doesn't suck anymore?" I will wait and see, I suppose. In the meantime, West of Memphis comes out in December.
