[UA] Joe Campbell Shits His Pants

[Tim Toner]

----- Original Message -----
From: Gregory Paul Stolze <holycrow at mindspring.com>
To: <UA at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 10:00 PM
Subject: [UA] Joe Campbell Shits His Pants


> Here is the expurgated quote.
>
> "The glory came not in going but in coming back.... [E]ach individual who
> could go and come back brought something new...to add to the culture[.]"
>
> Understand that the "going" referenced in the quote is a dangerous,
> unpleasant and extremely confining experience.  It involves the loss of
> almost all freedoms and being cut off from one's usual home and family.
It
> is, very much, a symbolic death.
>
> I think this is very Campbell omnimythic.  What's scary is the source.
> Here's the whole quote.
>
> "Your 'work' brought you in contact with the police and, since jail was
> part of the job description, you simply prepared ahead of time for the
> mind-fuck of being a prisoner. The glory came not in going but in coming
> back. To come back showed a willingness to 'stay down.'  It fostered an
> image of the set as legitimate, and each individual who could go and come
> back brought something new--walk, talk, look, way of writing--to add to
the
> culture of the 'hood."
>
> -From "Monster: The Autombiography of an L.A. Gang Member" by Sanyika
> Shakur, aka Monster Kody Scott.

Strangely enough, there's a riveting YA novel which came out last year by
Walter Dean Myers called "Monster."  My only problem with the book was that
it's told in two different ways.  The first is a journal kept by a 15-year
old, acccused of murder.  The second is a device he uses to make all this
comprehensible--he recounts events in script-form, as if he was making a
movie, with pans and zooms.  The second way seems a little too pat.  The
advantage of it is that the narrator gets to keep an ironic detatchment from
the events in his life, leading up to a conclusion that'll make your brain
do backflips.  However, the first way is a punch to the solar plexus.  I've
read a lot of 'prison narrative,' and somehow this was a thousand times more
effective than anything else, largely because this poor lost soul doesn't
have the usual mechanisms--gang life, for one--to help him cope.  You really
get the feeling of what a horrific place prison must be, and how we have to
do everything in our power to keep people out of it.  Because once you're
in, you're gone.


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