Book burning in the electronic age

Fang-Face writes “
This is how easy it is. And this sort of loss is something that makes me feel ill. Five years of writing by fifteen women wiped out by neo-fascists AND the hard drives seized as if deletion simply wasn’t good enough. Keep your e-books, Dave, I’ll stick to hard copy. Burning real books is no less heartbreaking, but it’s nowhere near as easy as this.”
Update: 04/16 05:33 EST by B:fang points out they didn’t take the hard drives, but rather “destroyed computer files” and took working disks.

April 16, 2004 by Uncategorized 3

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3 Responses

  1. Anonymous Patron says:
    April 16, 2004 at 5:34 pm

    example of naivete?
    From the article: “Lantz said miscommunication between Lamb and herself about the writing award led to the shutdown.” What did Lamb say or not say? If Lamb acted as if the workshop were held for the general public rather than in a tightly controlled prison environment, then that’s more than a little naive.

    Reply
  2. Christina says:
    April 16, 2004 at 9:15 pm

    Wow.
    I think that even if there was an issue, the hard drives should have been seized for evidence, not destroyed. I’m sure this article doesn’t tell the whole story, but it does seem that CT has given up on trying to rehabilitate prisoners and is just storing them.

    Reply
  3. Snave says:
    April 16, 2004 at 11:01 pm

    Re:example of naivete?
    The PEN announcement is at http://www.pen.org/freedom/pressrel/NOA%202004.htm l

    It’s hard to see how Lantz, Lamb or PEN could be confused about whether the workshop was held for the general public or in a prison environment. It seems pretty clear, IMHO, that both the prior attempt to recover money from the prisoner/authors and the seizure of their work after the award was announced is about retaliation.

    From the PEN announcement:
    “Last June, PEN wrote to the Connecticut Attorney General to protest the state’s effort to recover the women’s share of the book proceeds, noting that although the law presumably permits the state to attempt to recover the cost of incarceration from any inmate who earns any income whatsoever, it has been applied extremely selectively: of tens of thousands of men and women who have served terms in Connecticut since the law went into effect, only 15 have been the subject of cost-of-incarceration actions-7 who were targeted following significant financial windfalls, and 8 of the women whose writings appear in Couldn’t Keep It To Myself.”Because these eight women came to the attention of the state through their work,” PEN wrote at the time, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they have been targeted for their work-or at least that, intentional or not, they are being penalized for exercising freedom of expression.”

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