Texas is perfectly fine to mess with itself

You could read several national newspapers, the columns of most major pundits or just swear at the TV after a weeks worth of buffoonery on CNN to get a sense of the train wreck America can emulate sometimes. (Yes Jon Stewart works, too) but all elements of what makes America both squeamish and authoritarian are contained in this little beauty here.

"When an English translation of The Savage Detectives, by the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, was published last year in the United States, New York Times critic Richard Eder judged the work "complex, numbingly chaotic and sinuously memorable." In the Sunday Times Book Review, James Wood, a famously exacting literary critic, compared Bolaño's novel favorably to the work of Stendhal and Gide. The literary thriller's content, however, falls outside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's publication-review guidelines as spelled out in its Offender Orientation Handbook (see excerpts on Pages 2 and 3)."

Inmate No. 1385412 is my new hero, if for no other reason that on the outside people generally wait for the paperback. And it not like my hero is going anywhere because, well it's Texas.

Posted by Dave