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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Melville at Home, the English Cottage Garden, and Stonehenge Lard

Also: The mass incarceration myth, and more.
640px-Arrowhead_(Herman_Melville),_Pittsfield,_Massachusetts

I’m back in the office after a day (and an extremely uncomfortable night) of camping at False Cape State Park in record heat. It’s good to be home, and one of the benefits of my job is that I can work from home for long stretches during the summer. I have a small office that overlooks our back yard, and while I would love to be looking over the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I’m thankful for what I’ve got.

So, too, was Herman Melville, apparently, who loved to write from his Arrowhead farm, as Jill Lepore explains in a wonderful piece in The New Yorker: “Herman Melville seems to have got the idea to write a novel about a mad hunt for a fearsome whale during an ocean voyage, but he wrote most of Moby-Dick on land, in a valley, on a farm, in a house a-dither with his wife, his sisters, and his mother, a family man’s Walden. He named the farm Arrowhead, after the relics he dug up with his plow, and he wrote in a second-floor room that looked out on mountains in the distance and, nearer by, on fields of pumpkins and corn, crops he sowed to feed his animals, ‘my friends the horse & cow.’ In the barn, he liked to watch them eat, especially the cow; he loved the way she moved her jaws. ‘She does it so mildly & with such a sanctity,’ he wrote, the year he kept on his desk a copy of Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale. On the door of his writing room, he installed a lock. By the hearth, he kept a harpoon; he used it as a poker . . . Delbanco considered Melville more of a New Yorker than any other American writer, so much so that reading the endlessly digressive Melville is ‘like strolling, or browsing, on a city street.’ But fields, too, teem and seethe and croak and shriek. On a wagon ride from the Pittsfield train station, Melville scribbled the names of all the grasses he knew: redtop, ribbon grass, finger grass, orchard grass, hair grass. He once wrote to Hawthorne about lying in a field on a summer’s day: ‘Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling.’ He never loved any place more, not even the sea.”

The charm—and artifice—of the English cottage garden: “The confusion is understandable. You arrive at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon, keen to experience the quintessential cottage garden — only to be told that Shakespeare’s garden was, in fact, designed in the 1920s. The space in front of an Elizabethan cottage would have been used for keeping pigs or hens, with a patch for cabbages or onions. Any flowers or herbs would have had medicinal or practical uses, not least for strewing on the cottage floor to disguise the stench.”

Were Stonehenge’s huge stone slabs transported over 140 miles with the help of pig fat? Perhaps.

The legal dispute that “derailed” Iowa State University’s Lego art program comes to an end: “In 2016, Iowa State University accused an employee of fraud and theft in a dispute over the unusual but lucrative campus assets she managed: popular outdoor sculptures made of thousands of Lego bricks. Three years later, the school has withdrawn its allegations against Teresa McLaughlin under a settlement reached last month.”

David Ulin goes on a walk: “West Eighth Street. It’s Sunday morning in September and I’m walking Eighth Street when I see it: spray of words in green and pink, framed in the middle of the pavement as if an illustration of some kind. In the middle of the pavement? In the middle of the lanes of traffic, although there is no traffic, not on a Sunday morning in the shadow of Miracle Mile. I am walking, as I have done in this neighborhood since I first moved to Los Angeles, a span of more than twenty-five years.”

George Gene Gustines reviews J. Michael Straczynski’s memoir Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood: “Straczynski, a writer of screenplays and comic books best known for creating the television series Babylon 5, chronicles a life that in his childhood was dominated by dysfunction — his father was a physically abusive Nazi sympathizer, his mother was distant and frequently institutionalized — and as an adult by professional success that came with its own tensions and crises. Superman, whom Straczynski discovers through the 1950s TV series starring George Reeves, shows him that life can be different. Unlike his father, Straczynski writes, Superman ‘was kind and honest and fair, and he never hit anybody who didn’t hit him first.’”

Essay of the Day:

In a review of the pamphlet Ending Mass Incarceration, to which a number of Democratic presidential candidates have contributed, Rafael A. Mangual argues that while some American prisoners have been wrongly incarcerated, most belong behind bars and should stay there longer than they do:

“The essays provide a useful summation of Democratic talking points on criminal justice. That the United States over-incarcerates is evidenced, reformers say, by the numbers: though it has about 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. houses about a quarter of the prisoners worldwide. America’s high incarceration rate, goes another assertion, is driven by the unjust enforcement of ‘low-level’ and ‘nonviolent’ offenses, particularly drug crimes. A further charge: the system is racist, given how much more likely blacks are to be behind bars compared with whites. Finally, they say that sentences have gotten way too long.

“True, for a subset of America’s prison population, incarceration does not serve a legitimate penological end, either because these individuals have been incarcerated for too long or because they should not have been incarcerated to begin with. Justice dictates that we identify these individuals and secure their releases with haste. But none of the above claims advanced by the presidential hopefuls is correct—and acting on any of them would be disastrous.

“Start with drugs. Contrary to the claims in Michelle Alexander’s much-discussed 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow, drug prohibition is not driving incarceration rates. Yes, about half of federal prisoners are in on drug charges; but federal inmates constitute only 12 percent of all American prisoners—the vast majority are in state facilities. Those incarcerated primarily for drug offenses constitute less than 15 percent of state prisoners. Four times as many state inmates are behind bars for one of five very serious crimes: murder (14.2 percent), rape or sexual assault (12.8 percent), robbery (13.1 percent), aggravated or simple assault (10.5 percent), and burglary (9.4 percent). The terms served for state prisoners incarcerated primarily on drug charges typically aren’t that long, either. One in five state drug offenders serves less than six months in prison, and nearly half (45 percent) of drug offenders serve less than one year.

“That a prisoner is categorized as a drug offender, moreover, does not mean that he is nonviolent or otherwise law-abiding. Most criminal cases are disposed of through plea bargains, and, given that charges often get downgraded or dropped as part of plea negotiations, an inmate’s conviction record will usually understate the crimes he committed. The claim that drug offenders are nonviolent and pose zero threat to the public if they’re put back on the street is also undermined by a striking fact: more than three-quarters of released drug offenders are rearrested for a nondrug crime. It’s worth noting that Baltimore police identified 118 homicide suspects in 2017, and 70 percent had been previously arrested on drug charges.

“Not only are most prisoners doing time for serious, often violent, offenses; they’ve usually received (and blown) the second chance that so many reformers say they deserve. Justice Department studies from 2000 through 2009 reveal that only about 40 percent of state felony convictions result in a prison sentence. A Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study of violent felons convicted over a 12-year period in America’s 75 largest counties shows that 56 percent of the offenders had a prior conviction record.

“Even though most state prisoners are serious and serial offenders, nearly 40 percent of inmates serve less than a year in prison, with the median time served about 16 months. Lengthy sentences tend to be reserved for the most serious violent crimes—but even 20 percent of convicted murderers and nearly 60 percent of those convicted for rape or sexual assault serve less than five years of their sentences. Nor have sentences gotten longer, as reformers contend. In his book Locked In, John Pfaff—a leader in the decarceration movement—plotted state prison admissions and releases from 1978 through 2014 on a graph. If sentence lengths had increased, the two lines would diverge as admissions outpaced releases; in fact, the lines are almost identical.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Alesund

Poem: Alfred Nicol, “Emily Dickinson”

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