An 11-year-old boy is now an adult

This is criminal: this boy, who was 11 years old (that's sixth grade, possibly fifth), is going to be tried as an adult.

The judge said in his opinion: "In evaluating the foregoing testimony...the Court concludes it is not likely Defendant can be rehabilitated prior to the expiration of the juvenie court jurisdiction."
He also discussed the issues of the nature of the crime and of premeditation: "The evidence presented by the Commonwealth showed that the victim, Kenzie Marie Houk, 8 1/2 months pregnant, was in bed at the time she was murdered. She was totally defenseless at the time her life and the life of her unborn fetus was taken by a shotgun blast to the back of her head. There is no indication of any provocation by the victim that led to her killing. This offense was an execution-style killing of a defenseless pregnant young mother. A more horrific crime is difficult to imagine." The judge said the evidence indicated that "the commission of the crime demonstrated a degree of criminal sophistication" on the part of the boy, and that the offense was "necessarily premeditated."

So, in seven years, this child can't be rehabilitated. Nice to know that now. What do you think he'll be like at the end of seven years in - where? - an adult facility? If this kid is convicted, he will get a mandatory sentence of life with no possibility of parole.

What this means is: this judge, these prosecutors, think this child is so severely damaged that they are willing, in essence, to discard him. To remove him from society for the rest of his life. To effectually end his life, because, let's be honest: a lifetime (growing up!) in prison isn't really life. Not life as we know it.

The unborn child rhetoric really bothers me. And frankly, I cannot see why the judge feels this kid had no provocation - no immediate, physical threat, perhaps, but it doesn't take a child psychologist OR a genius to see that a kid whose father is about to have a new child, with another woman (who he will also soon marry), is a child in a potentially very provoking situation. In a normal, happy, psychologically stable environment, kids have trouble enough with the arrival of new siblings. Throw in that the sibling is a half-sibling, child of dad's girlfriend/soon-to-be-new-wife (ie, NOT this boy's mother) -- yeah. Imagine ANY level of mental illness on this kid's part. And things don't seem so unprovoked.  Relatives of the victim said that this boy showed jealousy over the attention she and the new baby received. She also came with two daughters from earlier relationship(s??).

Not that anything can ever excuse murder. It cannot. But to declare an eleven-year-old unfit for rehabilitation? To declare that the state - the State - is ready willing and perfectly content to throw away an eleven-year-old kid? This, to me, is shocking. This is punitive law at its sharpest, not rehabilitive justice.

This is a terrible, terrible story, for everyone: for those two littler girls, whose mom is dead; for the father of this boy, who lost his fiancee, his unborn child, and - for now, anyway - his son; for that poor girl, who was only 26 when this kid shot her; and for Jordan Brown, this boy, who was in fifth grade and jealous and had his own rifle and used it to kill his soon-to-be stepmom and as-yet-unborn half-sibling.

But putting a kid in prison for the next 70 years, or however long he lives, won't correct any of that. All it will do is put a kid in prison for his entire life, and strip him of any chance to ever really recover or atone for what he's done.

It is vile, absolutely vile, to say that an 11-year-old child is, or should be, tried for murder as an adult. The penalty is too severe, the child is too young an actor, to warrant that kind of status.

It is a very depressing truism that the law and justice are often not the same thing. In this case, they are very far apart indeed.

I Went Shopping, or Cheap Crap from China

After the long weeks of being snowbound and avoiding any driving not strictly and absolutely necessary, I made a semi-frivolous shopping excursion this past Sunday. I needed to get a few things from Home Depot, and wanted to start my seed buying; I also needed to stop by Target for a few household essentials.

Home Depot is always an absurd experience. I'm mesmerized by the enormous number of items stocked there that I absolutely cannot identify. I have NO idea what most of that stuff is for. I often suspect that, even if its use was revealed to me, I'd still be in the dark about how it fits into the larger picture of any particular system (ie, plumbing, electrical, etc). 

I looked at lighting for my bathroom, which has old, mismatched wall sconces. I like wall sconces, so I looked at the meager selection. And in looking, realized - every Home Depot in America probably has exactly the same stock. All across the country, people are choosing from the same six styles. There are almost certainly literally millions of bathrooms with the same sconces that I liked.

This is depressing.

Wikipedia informs me that Home Depot operates over 2,000 stores across North America, and - terrifyingly - China.

I got my seeds and my molding trim and the few other items I needed, and zipped off to Target.

And got depressed again.

This has been happening more and more often lately; I go to stores (and they're all inevitably big-box-style stores; what other choices do I have?), and all I can see is the excessive stock of cheap crap made in China.
I look at the plastic dishes, the notebooks, the knickknacks, the patterned socks, the printed t-shirts, the tea-towels, the candles, the toys - and I almost literally don't see them; I see factories, industrial wastelands in China staffed by poor women and children and men who feel confused, scornful or envious of the products they're manufacturing. And who, more than likely, couldn't afford to buy the $1 picture frame they're making.

Everything is made in China now. It's a challenge to find things that aren't, and when I do, they seem to be made in India, Indonesia, maybe Thailand or Vietnam or Bangladesh, or sketchily administered colonial outpost islands in the Pacific. I may just be cynical, but I have very, very little faith in the quality of working conditions and wages in these places.

And it's because we're cheap. We are one stingy country. We want everything for the lowest price possible, except when it's Coach handbags or Louboutin shoes. but all that avalanche of cheaply-produced, cheaply-sold, cheapery - we love it.

I realized this winter how hard it is to find anything that's made out of a sturdy, lasting, quality material. I've taken up embroidery as a sort of pastime, and when I go to buy my embroidery floss, it's all synthetic. Polyester, or poly blends. But the embroidery I have that my grandmother did (or purchased) was done with silk floss. I can tell - it's obviously a finer material than the thread I'm buying. But there's no other choice at Michael's or Joann's - there may be a few skeins of silk or silk-blend specialty threads, but in the main, if I want a basic rainbow palette, I'm buying synthetic. Clothes are the same; I'm not at all affluent, scrimping on my student budget, so I can't afford to shop in any nice stores. But even when I do go in, the dress trousers are almost always blends. Wool blend if you're lucky; all-synthetic most of the time.  In the nineteenth-century novels I read, women are always rustling around in silk or taffeta dresses, or wearing satin - I have no idea what these materials felt like. The satins and silks I've come across are all - yep - poly blends. I think I've encountered a few 100% silk ties, but never a full dress.

My house is outfitted with a lot of IKEA furniture, especially in the genre of bookcases. I have nine bookcases currently in use, and six of those are from IKEA. They're all made of composite woods with real-wood "veneers." They're made of fakery.

There didn't use to be a choice like this. Everything was real. Many people couldn't afford the finer real things, but even the poor had real wood and real cotton and real wool and real metals in their hovels. There was variation. One single catalogue - just one! - for a furniture manufacturer in Victorian London listed over 7,000 - that's seven thousand - different bedsteads on offer. All different. IKEA has - what? - a dozen? Maybe 20, at the very most? And those 7,000 bedsteads were being produced in the industrial age - there was mechanization, there was mass production, there was piecework. It wasn't just one skilled carpenter handcrafting an entire bedstead.

Now, if you want to find real, nonsynthetics, you have to hunt and you have to pay a LOT. I'll be using IKEA veneer furniture for many years to come, unless someone leaves me a substantial legacy or I manage to marry money (what a quaint Victorian idea!). Or, I suppose, unless I learn to build things for myself, out of real woods. But who knows how to do that kind of work anymore? There are hobbyist woodworkers in the dozens, but I don't think any of them are really up to the task of replicating Victorian desks or bedsteads.

It all comes down to quantity and quality - we have floods, absolute floods - of cheap and cheaply made stuff out there, ready for our impulsive debit cards to buy. I'm not quite the minimalist I'd like to be; I'm not Thoreau, exhorting us all to "Simplify!" I like things, I love stuff.  But I'm coming to know, more and more, that the things I like and love are the things that are well-made. The things that are sturdy, that are made of natural materials and not synthetic substitutes. The things that are not the same across thousands and thousands of houses. The things that were made by skilled workers who received some kind of living wage for their work.

This spring, I will try my best to dispose of my disposable income in a more responsible way. Instead of squandering my hard-earned minimum wage on cheap crap from China, I will try to save my pennies and buy plants instead, perennials that I covet like foxglove and delphinium and oriental poppies. I'll try to find silk thread and clothing made at least of 100% cotton, if not of satin or silk or wool. I will try - and more than likely fail - to purchase items made in the US, or in countries that I know maintain some kind of decent standard for working conditions, wages, and environmental impact. I will pay a little bit more, but I will do it happily. And I will try to save more of those hard-earned pennies so that I can buy antiques - not because they're Valuable Old Antiquities, but because they're real.

i read the news today oh boy

This has been a harrowing week in the news world, which means - in the world at all. More specifically, in the local world; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has just been cranking out the stories about horrible things happening to people around town and around the world.

The confluence of so many horrifying things is disconcerting but can, probably, be attributed somehow to the fact that we are deep in the winter doldrums. So far, the Pittsburgh region has gotten 40 inches of snow in February alone - and there are still ten days to go before this shortest, most brutal, month comes to a close.

A friend of mine speculated, several weeks ago, that there's a kind of global malaise; she was referring to the fact that nearly all of her own friends and acquaintances were experiencing depression of varying degrees, and that a series of very unfortunate events seemed to be underway for just about everyone. Interestingly, she suggested that an underlying trigger or exacerbating factor was the earthquake in Haiti, and the horror and helplessness most of us in the western world were feeling as a result of the earthquake's consequences.

It's an interesting idea, though I don't know how much credence I give it. But in a weirdly Dickensian way, I like to see patterns and interconnectedness everywhere; of course, in a Pynchonesque way, I also like to point out the absolutely illusory nature of those patterns and interconnections (for a more recent and perhaps obvious literary example of this, see Frank Portman's King Dork).

It does sometimes feel like the external world is mirroring the internal, or - and this is more likely - acting as a catalyst for the internal.

Some of the horror stories from the news this week, just to recap:
Six people near Pittsburgh are arrested for torturing and murdering a young woman with a mental/developmental disability. Torture included painting the woman's face with nail polish, making her consume spices and urine, and beating her with various household items.
A few days later, I read that these six people have their initial hearing delayed because they are all quarantined at the jail with lice.

A man in New Jersey broke into his ex's house and stole their 7-month-old baby from its grandmother. The ex was at that moment at court getting a restraining order. The man then threw the baby off a bridge into the river.

A middle-aged couple in Penn Hills was found dead, evidently of a murder-suicide. They have a 17-year-old kid.

A cop in Pittsburgh fatally shot a robbery suspect
Some more cops in Pittsburgh beat a teenager who was carrying a "suspicious item" (it was a violin, I think).

A man in Pittsburgh died last week because of the gross incompetence of the emergency services during the snow; he and his girlfriend made at least 10 calls to 911, but the ambulances failed to reach him because of snow. At one point, they were a few blocks away but unable to drive closer; though he was unable to walk, the man was told by the EMTs that if he wanted the ambulance ride, he'd have to walk the few blocks to the intersection.

There were several shootings in North Braddock in the last 24 hours.

A nutjob flew his small plane into an IRS building in Texas, causing fire, havoc and injury but - as far as I can tell now - no deaths except his own.

A  driver near Pittsburgh hit and injured a man and killed a dog (a foster/rescue dog), and kept on driving.

There are more, I'm sure, once you look beyond the local and occasional national stories - there are consistently shudderingly awful stories from Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Iraq. And then there are all the places we rarely hear much about: Angola, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Congo.

It's been a brutal week, though, around Pittsburgh. And the fact that, when I try to look out into the rest of the country and the world for more news, I only find more dismal, horrific stories, is enough to make me want to retreat into a cave in the woods for eternity.

I wonder how most people cope with the news? A crowd of people turned away, but I just have to look.  But what happens to the crowd that turns away? Do they register the news stories? Are they desensitized, beyond the routine cluckings of "how awful" or "I don't know what the world is coming to?"

But all the negative emotional energy these stories must generate has to go someplace. Doesn't it?

this old house

I've been painting my bathroom, a task that SHOULD have been a snap but turned into an ordeal. If I knew how to drywall, OR knew someone who would put up drywall for me for cheap, I could have solved a lot of my problems.

However: that is not to be.

My house is 100 years old this year. The property info I have lists it as being built in 1910 - thus, the centennial celebration of my little old house.

My dad recently came across some historical information about drywall and its precursors (don't even ask. we're a family of nerds). And, after doing a bit more research, he informs me that what I have in my house is almost certainly a pre-drywall called Sackettboard, which became gypsum board, then became drywall.

Sackett board is an alternative to the lathe-and-plaster mode of wall construction, which was costly and time-consuming. It's made of layers of plaster and a kind of felty cardboard, and is installed much like drywall. It has unfinished edges and is quite, quite heavy, which made it hard to work with (thus the refinements of gypsum board and drywall).

Sackettboard was only around and in use for maybe 10-15 years, before the other, better kinds of boards were devised. My house falls smack in the tail end of that period, but almost certainly before gypsum board made its appearance. And my walls - the ones I've exposed, anyway - are a weird kind of felty cardboard . With plastery stuff underneath. Sackettboard didn't take paint or wallpaper very well, evidently, but the fellow who built my house (referred to in the property listing simply as Dad, and called Dad by me and my family) slapped up wallpaper, and then - when things needed refreshing - he just painted over the paper.

Which meant that, to repaint the bathroom, I had to peel off the paper (the paint was chipping, the paper was bubbling). Down to the felty cardboard.

So my walls are lumpy and bumpy and funny looking.

Part of me wishes I had the financial wherewithal to have nice, new, smooth drywall installed. The room would be polished and tidy and clean - all white, with a black-and-white floor, with a nice vintage feel. But another part of me thinks it's amazing - amazing! -  that the walls in my bathroom are the originals from 100 years ago. The chips and scores and bumps are the history of the walls, the history of the house. Same with the wood trim around the doors and windows - there are bumps and bruises where Dad clearly missed the head of the nail and just knocked a circle into the wood.

There's a weird, scratched-together feel about my house, which sometimes makes me feel awkward. But I love the quirkiness of it, and the age. I live in a house from 1910 - 1910!!!!!  with original walls and woodwork. chipped and scarred, yes, but one hundred years old and still standing and quite, quite functional.

I LIKE old cracked and chipped peeling paint. I LIKE outmoded countertops and tiling and no granite anything, anywhere. I like the weird faux-wood graining on the wood trim. I like how my house sometimes feels like the cabin of a ship, and sometimes feels like the weirdest little dollhouse cottage in the world. Sometimes, in summer, it feels like a treehouse.

so my bumpy, funny-looking walls don't bother me that much. They need another coat of paint, probably, to be finished, but they'll still show their age.

And for a 100-year-old house, I'd say this one's doing all right.

keeping us safe...

This appalling story today, on good old Valentine's Day: "Twelve Afghans died Sunday when two rockets fired at insurgents missed their target and struck a house."

Great work with the precision rocketry and whatnot.

General McChrystal said: "It's regrettable that in the course of our joint efforts, innocent lives were lost."

Regrettable. Gosh. Maybe General McChrystal could find a thesaurus and choose a slightly more...empathic word. "Regrettable."

Regrettable is when the snow plow buries your car, or knocks off your sideview mirrors. Regrettable is a billing error on your gas bill.

People only get one life - you only get one, just this one - and those twelve people had their lives taken from them by this stupidity in Afghanistan. Does anyone even know why we're there? Other than that we're trying - in some crappy, ineffective way - to clean up the mess we made?

And spare me the REMEMBER 9/11 NEVER AGAIN jingoistic propaganda.
Those attacks were terrible, horrible, criminal, tragic and terrifying - but it didn't then, and doesn't now, justify launching a war at this sad, scrubby barren country and its sad, poor inhabitants.  Most online sources, some more reputable than others (reputable ones including the UN and Human Rights Watch) indicate that several thousand Afghan civilians have been killed as direct result of military action.

How is this okay?
Why do we allow this to happen?
It's running in the background, all the time, like some kind of white noise you don't hear any longer.

the financial cost is obscene - costofwar.com keeps a running counter, searchable by state, city/county, and individual - the numbers are astronomical.

and what are we getting for our billions and billions of dollars? the satisfying feeling of a job well done, when we kill entire families, little kids, old people, in a "regrettable" accident?

Short Stories, or I Have Found My Medium

I'm a terrible writer of fiction. I used to play at it a lot in high school and early college, but then I got a life and didn't need to live inside my fiction. I did a creative writing class in high school, which was quite a good experience, and made me feel very professional - revising, editing, workshopping, drafting, plotting. It was in that class that I discovered ee cummings, so it was definitely worthwhile, even though my writing remained (remains) pretty dreadful.

I have an amazing storehouse of words on hand, and have read a lot from a lot of the best writers in English (or translated in English - my dream is to learn enough Russian to read Dostoevsky in the original), so I can patch together sentences and paragraphs relatively well - and my academic writing is really not bad at all. I'm no Lee Edelman (oh, how I wish I could write theory like Lee Edelman!!), but I'm not too shabby.

But lately, fiction has been beckoning to me from a sneaky, unexpected quarter: short stories.

I have never been a fan of short fiction, especially. I read - and quite liked - Stephen King's collections of novellas and short stories (Nightmares and Dreamscapes in particular is one of my favorite collections), and of course I've read and loved Diana Wynne Jones's shorter fiction. But I've been largely unmoved by short stories for most of my life.

But early on in January, I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes, which is five novellas loosely linked by a common theme of music and/or performance. Ishiguro has become, in a few short weeks, one of my favorite contemporary writers; he's brilliant. Utterly, beautifully brilliant.

When I finished Nocturnes, I felt a little dazed and dazzled, and very much wished I'd written it myself. The daze and dazzle - the real surprise - was in the discovery that one could write those kinds of stories, the kinds of stories I'd always wanted to write. Quiet, dreamy, contained. Reflecting moments rather than plotting stories - but of course every moment is a story, or is part of one. It's rather silly of me - a person with rather extensive experience in literature - to not have realized that such writing was possible. I simply assumed there was no place for it, no outlet, no desire. Or that it somehow couldn't exist.

Ishiguro proved me wrong.
Reading a book I wish I'd written is a vexing experience. It hasn't happened to me in a very, very long time.

Ishiguro prompted me to think again about short stories - about reading them, certainly, but about how they work, what they can do, whether I could write them. I doubt I can - as I say, I'm a pretty awful fictioneer. It all comes out as memoir or autobiography or worse, some kind of diaristic blithering.

So last week, before the snow, I came across (and grabbed) a copy of the collected short stories of Katherine Mansfield, who I have never read, but who crops up from time to time in critical essays - especially, if I am remembering correctly, in some of the narrative theory I used to read. She's wonderful, absolutely wonderful, in a way not terribly unlike Ishiguro - the dreamy moment.  And she writes some shockingly gruesome things about children, which delights me to no end. I do not think Katherine Mansfield loved children.

But as I read, I keep thinking "I could do this!" Not as well as she does, not well at all, but I could actually do it. I could accomplish the writing of a short story.
Of course, I shouldn't be attempting any more projects, especially not any new oddball ones like short story writing. I should, if I write at all, be writing my dissertation.

It is comforting and intriguing and a tiny bit exciting, though, to think that I have figured out something as unexpected as this. To daydream a little bit of writing stories, of sitting in a window while the sun shines in, rattling away on my little computer, spinning little webs of words that actually do something.

I have found my medium.
Somehow, that's almost as good as actually creating something in it.

State-Condoned Murder, or The Death Penalty is Another Reason I Should Have Gone to Law School

NPR's really hammering at legal injustices these days - clearly, someone at NPR wants me to feel guilty about my non-legal career decision(s).

The latest - and not as poignant or potent for me as the series on bail - is a Fresh Air interview with David Dow, who has the thankless, hideous job of defending Death Row inmates in Texas.

Texas puts more people to death than any other state, though Virginia and Florida come close (and Florida's death chambers are at the prison in - where else? - Stark, Florida. No symbolism there).  Amnesty International keeps a very good site with loads of death penalty statistics, both national and international. One of my favorites is that in 2008, 93% of all known executions took place in five countries - China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the USA.

It's odd that one of the main legal arguments against the death penalty is that it is used so (relatively) sparingly.   There are lots of other arguments, including ones organized around race, quality of defense counsel (who are often public defenders - in other words, overworked and underpaid), cost of maintaining Death Row prisoners (largely in legal costs - the appeals process goes on and on and on and on....), the question of deterrence, and so on - all that before you ever reach the moral grounds for opposing the death penalty.

But the infrequency with which the death penalty is applied and carried out makes it - by definition - unusual. And the Eighth Amendment has that nifty prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.

It's also rather appalling that the Supreme Court briefly held the death penalty unconstitutional (Furman v. Georgia, 1972), based, essentially, on the Eighth Amendment argument about unusual punishment.  It was reinstated in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia. Those were the last days of high quality jurisprudence from the Supreme Court, in my not-all-that-expert opinion. Some of those old Supreme were masters of legal thought and argument as well as being highly ethical and/or moral - it comes through loud and clear in their opinions.

If I had ever gone into law, I wouldn't have gone this route - I would not be able to cope with the emotional trauma of having to represent and fight for men (and they're almost always men) who were about to be killed with the state's consent. I get queasy, literally, when the news organizations post their "deathwatch" stories on the days of executions. I cannot read about last meals, last meetings with families, last words, prayers, etc without feeling nauseous. The fact that these executions give anyone a sense of pleasure, of satisfaction (however grim it may be) is even more nauseating.

The death penalty's persistence in the US shows how strongly we have shifted away from the idea of rehabilitation to the idea of vengeance or retribution. If a person is so unbalanced, so broken, that he cannot be rehabilitated, then  - to my mind - this demonstrates that he is seriously mentally ill, and as such, should be committed to a secure mental institution, not killed. But many, many people who commit murders do so without "malice aforethought," - during robberies or other lesser felonies, out of fear, nerves, or while on drugs - and are not murderers at heart. Rehabilitation should be the goal for every single person convicted of a crime, whether it means physical rehab of the getting-off-drugs variety, or whether it means psychological rehab. The Quakers, with their penitent-iaries had the right idea. How we wandered so far away from that is a very unpleasant mystery to me, and says some very ugly things about the collective makeup of the American population.