NOT ANYTHING

Sobriety is so awful, and it's so awful in such uncool ways. It's waiting, always waiting, and you're the only magazines to read, you're the unattractive wallpaper pattern, and you're the climate control that displeases and the TV that's loud and the receptionist who won't make eye contact. You're stuck in yourself waiting for nothing, nothing, it really sucks. I mean drinking makes one fat and clownish and more monstrous than usual and ruins one's life but there are far worse things than ruination. Ruination is at least something, and sobriety is nothing, nothing, nothing, every fucking tick-tock moment.

It's a howling absence of pleasure's possibility, an absence that makes the multifarious other absences in one's life sing in sympathy, chiming in until every dog in the neighborhood's barking. Emptinesses, shortfalls, absences, keening like cavities, a cacophony crowding ever into one's attention, the wind whistling through them all. God, one longs for the absence of absences, but of course there are things to be done.

Another moment endured, another minute survived, another hour harrowed, another afternoon undergone, another weekend withstood finding ways to get by, and no reward waiting, nothing waiting but nothing, more of it, a fucking wall of it falling over you every second, burying you again and again, and you're clawing through your life like it's quicksand, but it's not-- it's not anything.


...Fortunately, one can sometimes find solace in a good book. The Iron Rail is open every day from 1 to 7 p.m.

NOTES ON PRISONER SUPPORT

Is there somebody in OPP you'd like to help out?

Books and magazines cannot be mailed or hand-delivered or even ordered from a third-party vendor; they can only be obtained by the inmate herself ordering from the book selection on the commissary list. I'll see what I can do about getting a copy of the commissary list, but in the meantime please join me in making uninformed and overwhelmingly negative assumptions about its contents.

I asked a couple jail employees if the prices on books and magazines are more or less in line with the prices of other commissary items (meaning hyperinflated) and was told yes. This means reading material would be pretty hard for somebody locked up to get ahold of first-hand when balanced against necessities like soap and tobacco.

Inmates can receive letters, however. If you were to lay hands on an electronic text of something, maybe some poems you like, maybe some shakespeare plays, maybe a novel, and broke it into chunks and printed it out, you could certainly send it along, in envelope installments, in 10- or 15-page increments. You cannot send blank envelopes, stamps, stamped envelopes, blank paper, or cards, however... nor can you send a literarily inclined inmate pens or other writing utensils. Stationary supplies may only be obtained via the commissary.

You will need the inmate's actual name, booking #, and location to send mail.

To put money in an inmate's commissary (very important), you can either mail the inmate a signed money order or donate over the web, though the latter does add a fee. Again, you will need the inmate's personal information. The webpay service is here, and for somebody in OPP the Pay Location Code would be 5500 and the Facility Code would be "MSY - Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff (LA)".

To avoid providing the sickening, parasitic war-criminal fucks who run these hideous systems any more $$fees$$ than necessary, I encourage those interested in helping somebody in OPP in these specific ways-- money and reading materials-- to get ahold of me. If you don't know me, or how to reach me, come to a meeting; we can discuss pooling our resources.

Jails are not justice
"Judges" are an illegitimate authority
The legal system is corrupt beyond saving

CHOCOLATE CHIP LABELING

REVENGE OF BRIDE OF RETURN OF LABELING PARTY

Do you know how sometimes something feels so good that you just can't stop doing it? That's where we are with the labeling parties. Oh dear. The labeling, the alphabetizing - where do we start? Where do we stop? Slowly, the dream that was the labeling party has become our day-to-day, and the rest of our lives... the hours empty of labeling... have faded to the texture of dream. Only labeling is real. Did you know that piracy goes in class war/labor studies? I did. Plus, we chucked out a bunch of Maoist stuff, so if you want hardline polemics to inspire your shrill, hectoring newspapers which no-one reads, you'll have to go elswhere. Seriously, 'communism' is now 6 books thick - it's original texts only - direct action/protest has been EXPANDED. Christianity is the next to go - tomorrow. Each book in the section will be marched up the steps to the guillotine, summarily judged, and sentenced to the free pile.

My co-author is being kind. We're burning books at the iron rail. No way, that's not even funny. Yes, it is. We aren't, though. Because YOU, gentle reader, will come be a voice of reason in this purging, by contributing your time and talents to the labeling and cataloguing process. It's spelled cataloging!!! However it's SPELT, there will be a lot of it tomorrow, and it will be exhilirating, like a fox. Like the hot orange blur of a fox, and the henhouse is our overstuffed shelves full of insufficiently revolutionary books. He totally stole 'like a fox' from me, btw. Like the internet for dummies, and "A pseudo marxist critique of freudian lesbianism from the 1950s". No just kidding.

We're thinking it will kick off around 1:30 PM, and we'd love you to intervene and save us from ourselves. We're going to hopefully provide chocolate chip cookies. Sunday, July 6th. COME GIVE US A HAND WE'RE WICKED SWEET. (That is true).

-- SARAH -&- the mighty d-block

CATALOGUING PARTY THIS SATURDAY

The Iron Rail is volunteer-run. We're here because we CARE, and one of the things we care about passionately is finding the best method for cataloguing our library. Finally, we have arrived at that method. We've sorted it all out, every detail of it, and will never have to address the issue in any capacity whatsoever at any time in the future ever again. To celebrate this, we are having a CATALOGUING/LABELING PARTY this Saturday afternoon at 1:30 PM.

WHAT IS A CATALOGUING/LABELING PARTY?
We are gonna go through our whole library and label each book with its category and shelve it alphabetically and catalogue it by hand

WHERE'S THE FUN IN THAT?
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it. This is librarianism at the fringe. Didn't you read that clipping your mom sent you about how it's cool to be a librarian? She was right. Not right about you going to library school, but definitely right about it being cool.

Tintin, Snowy and the cast of sesame street will be there. Fat, fluffy goblins, their dreddy gnarls combed out and their fur gently, organically shampooed, will be there, be-ribboned, dispensing loving hugs. You may cry into their absorbent, fleecy nap, and the internal pressure that's been building up for weeks will dissipate, leaving you cleansed and calm. This will be a deeply healing cataloguing party.

BUT IT WILL ALSO BE FUN.

THE RAIL BECOMES YOU

The scorching ion beams of the summer sun have driven many of our valuable collective members to cooler climes, and it is getting tougher to find the volunteers we need to stay open. When there aren't enough volunteers, some members of our collective go into 'crisis mode,' becoming frantic, overbearing douchebags who start overspeaking on behalf of the collective and abusing the first-person plural on the internet. Please, help us. We don't want to be like this.

What is the Iron Rail, besides its physical space? Is it a closed clique of 'cool' people? No way, dude. Is it a snooty gathering of high-flown academic theoreticians? Non! Is it some aggressive subcultural punk scene where people are judged on their uniform? Fuck no!

We're just locals (and a rotating cast of visitors) who are commited to books, independent thinking, and liberty in the broadest sense. There is no litmus test for belonging except willingness to pitch in. Some of us are more radical than others. Some of us have day jobs we believe in, some of have jobs we hate, some of us have no jobs. A few of us even have love lives. We have a token Christian. The Iron Rail boils down to providing the community with a free library and a cheap, interesting bookstore in a space that stands against oppression. We have free, extremely high-end coffee, and you can meet folks from different walks of life and talk to them or not, as you see fit. We have a damn good literature selection. There's also a range of periodicals, self-published texts, and an awesome, chronically-undervalued archive of zines from the distant past through today.

The Iron Rail was the first library in New Orleans to reopen after the failure of the federal levee system. The Iron Rail has been around for years, and isn't going away, but we also would love anyone from the community who's interested in contributing even a little but of time or energy to come by one of our weekly meetings, Wednesdays at eight PM. The meetings are open to everyone, and we bicker, discuss, and reach painstaking consensus. We're pretty nice. We'd love to see you there!

--the mighty annoying D-Block

OUR LOVE IS OVERDUE

WHY does it have to hurt so bad? Why do you check out books and never return them, or only show up drunk and give us run-around excuses?

The Iron Rail has feelings too, and if you have books of ours past their return dates, or you've misused your thief skillz to "borrow" them without asking... well, I'm a let my girl Tammy speak on it:

THERE USED TO BE AN MP3 WIDGET HERE THAT SERENADED VISITORS WITH TAMMY WYNETTE'S EXQUISITE "LOVE OVERDUE," BUT NOW IT IS GONE, POSSIBLY STOLEN?? EXPECT TO HEAR ABOUT THIS OUTRAGE AT THE NEXT COLLECTIVE MEETING!!!!

New Books, and the N.O. Human Rights FilmFest!

We recently got in:
-The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
-The Cunt Coloring Book
-Gender Trouble
-ANSWER Me!: The First Three
-Dishwasher
-As The World Burns by Derrick Jensen

All at or below cover price! Read, and give good books to people you love. Do it!

And please check out the AMAZING movies being shown in the 5th Annual New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival!