chain(links) & magic(realism): US prisons ban fantasy and scifi

the first link lays it out:

“it’s especially cruel that U.S. prisons ban magical literature.”

— Moira Marquis, “Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction,” LITHUB, December 7, 2023

— Francesco Queirolo, Disinganno, 1753

… to be free of illusion …? [the title of the sculpture can be given as…

disillusion.] The Neapolitian Raimondo’s dedication is truly beautiful: the life of his father is used as an immortal example of…

“human fragility, which cannot know great virtues without vice.”

And looking for the text which brought me to Disinganno, not finding it, but going by way of Emmanuel Carrère, a writer who takes a bead on being free of illusion led me to another who does too:

The text however, tying up these loose ends, I really wanted to link to is “On the Radical Escapism of Magic Realism” by Eden Kupermintz. On the little bit of magic required for immunity from communal reality, and le sens commun,

“This is not to say that magical realism cannot deal with ‘grand’ events like the fall of regimes or life and death. But it is usually that those events transpire from the small, the every day, and the mundane, where that mundane is ‘fed’ a small degree of magic.”

— from the magical realism essay, here at (Seneca: Animum debes mutare, non caelum [you must change your spirit (or self or mind), not the sky {non caelum}]) notthesky.com. Note the title in the link, which would make “On the Radical Escapism of Magic Realism” the subtitle. It is…

On Becoming a God

a use of force that can only ever be disproportionate because of the violence underpinning it, which is that of a colonial power. And colonialists set the terms of existence for the colonised.