Most of those who end up incarcerated, whether guilty or innocent, suffer from an educational and cultural deficiency that is a major cause of the incarceration and will lead to a life of incarceration if the deficiency is not corrected.
The future belongs to those with education.
We live in a society in which the major part of the workforce has jobs that are classified under category of information.
It is brains not brawn that will enable you to have a future that does not contain incarceration.
There is only one way to break the continually reinforced habit of remaining ignorant.
Spend an hour each day alone, in silence, with a book.
An hour, each day, alone with a book.
No walkman, no radio, no television.
Multi-tasking is nonsense.
For that hour, build your brain muscle as you build your LATs and ABs.
Don’t miss a day. Be patient. Learning takes time.

A good place to start is with a word wealth book.
Get a notebook and a decent dictionary in addition to a word wealth book.
Use the notebook and the dictionary to write down the new words and use them in sentences.
Expand the practice when the daily habit becomes part of your life by going to the library and taking out a classic.
Read the classic slowly. New things take time.
Patience is the basis of all learning and success in life.
Read each day until you find 5 new words.
Copy those 5 new words out into your notebook and look them up in your dictionary and use them in a sentence.
A small practice that should teach you some patience and inculcate (look it up) in a you a first possible step out of the prison rut of TV, sleeping too much, and mindless block-out activities.
Discipline, patience, daily practice.
A way out of the rut of incarceration as a lifetime activity.

Written for young offenders re: a request

June 16, 2009

Dear Mr. Einhorn:

I was a friend of the late author William Styron. In helping Styron’s widow to gather his letters for publication, I’ve come across a remarkable letter you wrote to him in 1962 about his novel Set This House on Fire. I feel certain that Styron would have responded to your letter (especially considering the hostile treatment his book elicited from mainstream critics), so I’m writing to ask if you have any recollection of his reply or any notion of whether it still exists – and if so, where?
I’m somewhat familiar with your case and am aware of the confiscation of your private diaries (and other papers?) by the authorities, so I realize this is a shot in the ark and that it’s unlikely you either have Styron’s letter or can help me to obtain a copy. But there’s always a chance, and no harm trying. I’d be willing to sort through evidence files if that would be permitted.
Your letter to Styron is among his papers at Duke. I enclose a copy, restoring at least this tiny portion of your writings to you.

February 2, 1962

Dear Mr. Styron,

A short note of thanks for the beauty that you have created in Set This House on Fire! Rarely have I been so overwhelmed by any experience as that provided by your powerful novel. The time that you spent in writing is obvious on every page, for the precision which you obtain is rare in modern writing; but more important, to me, is the message – a message which only a man who has gone through the hell of self-discovery is agile to convey.
The tears which instantaneously flooded my eyes, along with the shock which traversed my entire body, as I read the words of Luigi describing this prison called life came from deep within as I realized that Cass would not be allowed to end his pilgrimage as the hero of Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano (a haunting novel which your book, especially the ramblings of Cass, brought to mind) in suicide (symbolical in the case of Cass); but would be forced to face the task of creating his own existence in full knowledge of the nothingness of anything but what he created as you so perfectly state through him at the end of the novel. He can’t fall back upon repentance (in an external sense) like Raskolnikoff but rather must impose his own restrictions on the freedom which being conveys upon us. No external means can provide us with satisfaction or salvation for the self is all we possess. To throw off the illusion of the necessary casual relation between his crime (so called) and his supposed external-imposed repentance is to throw off the fetters of conventions which prevents us from seeing the difference between morality and moral justice is fickle along with everything else that man has created. To know this is to advance in the game of life.
Your plight, to be misunderstood by all the reviewers who read with their eyes instead of their hearts, shared by William Gaddis who wrote The Recognitions (a man whom I feel, along with yourself, is capable of making a lasting contribution to the American novel) is not to be assuaged by my meagre word of thanks, but I hope your patience lasts, for six years is will worth the waiting for a work of such stature as Set This House on Fire.
The Long March which I also recently read is masterful, for as the French translator of your books has said: not a word can be left out. Incantation is the only word to describe your writing – please continue.

I constantly wrote letters to those whose books I read in a large number of disciplines, particularly to those that I thought were not adequately received by their peers.
It often led to a correspondence or a friendship: Thomas S. Kuhn, John Cage, Norman O. Brown, Stafford Beer, Andrija Puharich are five prominent examples among many.
I am now being contacted about those letters, see the recent letter from a friend of Bill Styron as example and my letter. His name is withheld for reasons of privacy and should serve only as an example.
All of my papers were taken in March of 1979 during an illegal search of my apartment. The DA refused to return them. They have no legal argument for keeping them, but the law in Pennsylvania is now so hypocritical, along with many other aspects of America life (what the bankers are getting away with for example) that people should be in the streets waving red, white and blue scarves rather than watching the Iranians waving green scarves on TV.
It is time to wake up to the growing irreality of American life, in spite of the election of a wonderful president.
A paradoxical statement, perhaps, but it is from paradox that we learn.

Eifelheim
By Michael Flynn
Tor Books, 2006
320 pages

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn was an unusual science fiction book as it created a depth of character that is rare in science fiction which is often long on ideas but deeply lacking in depth of character, depending on stick figures to convey its ideas.
The novel is set in medieval Germany in a small hill village not far from the Black Forest.
For over 300 pages I was transported back and forth between a medieval German world that felt as real as an created by more conventional historical novels and a rather pedestrian present that felt disemplaced in contrast to the richness of Dasein communicated by a parish priest on the run, the lord of the castle, the folk who lived in the village and the aliens who crash-landed onto the wrong planet.
The gradual integration of the aliens into a medieval village, the conveyance of Christianity as a lived presence and the ability to depict alien personalities without destroying their diffence (they were in essence large grasshoppers with advanced technology) was a continual pleasure to read, irrespective of the feeling that the plot machinery, that took us from time to time back to some now wherein what we were reading was being researched and a new physics was being developed, just didn’t work well.
In spite of those interruptions, and a new physics that can be thrown on a pile with all the rest that can’t quite produce a new cosmos, I read every page with great avidity.
Eifelheim is a book that is suffused with humanity and a spirit of rare openness.
It is a delight to read.
I will read more of Michael Flynn and respond when the response is apt.
Days after I closed the book, I could still feel the village and its inhabitants under total siege from the plague.
I also felt strongly that the author is a fine novelist and should perhaps have a go at a conventional novel as his gift for conveyance of character and place is rare.