Eastern State Penitentiary

This summer I was lucky enough to have one the of best experiences of my life. I took a cross country road trip with PoseySessions. We drove from San Diego to Connecticut and visited NYC, Washington DC and a bunch of other awesome places. One of the best things about the trip was the fact that I could stop at several places along the way and visit friends and family who are spread out all across the country. One side trip took us to Philadelphia where we planned to stay a few days with my cousin Desi. Without anything really planned Desi decided to show us around her home city. We feasted at several great ethnic restaurants, saw the famous Rocky statue and played in a few fountains. Now if you know PoseySessions you know that she is sort of a bibliophile. Desi recommended a neat little used bookstore near a place she used to work. So we went, and found a great parking spot, which was surprising! But what was even more surprising is what was directly across the street from our destination. While I drove along the cramped streets of Philly I did not even notice the hulking stone mass (hey I am a small town boy, I had enough on my plate just understanding if I was going the right way down any of the one way streets). We stepped out of the car and then I saw it, well I saw a huge block wall stretching high into the air. It did not fit, here we were in the middle of a major metropolitan area and there was a castle across the street from a coffee shop, a Greek restaurant, and a used bookstore. I wondered out loud what that could be. It is Eastern State Penitentiary my cousin responded, and then my heart skipped a beat, I immediately thought of this.



Those (few) of you who follow the blog may have noticed that I am slightly interested in the paranormal. That being so I have been a fan of Syfy’s Ghost Hunters since its first episode. I don’t claim to believe everything that happens on the show, but I do get a fun little tingle by tagging along into creepy places in the middle of the night. F you have seen the show then you might know that Eastern State was one of the locations that TAPS investigated early in the series. They came out with some spooky (if controversial) evidence. Later in the series they returned for a live event. The TAPS crew announced Eastern State was officially haunted. So there I was, standing, staring (gawking) at this mass of stone and mortar. It cast a pall over the neighborhood, its mere presence making the cloudy day even gloomier. We have to go, I announced. And so we did.

Eastern State is a fantastic place. While the self guided tour seemed a bit lacking, the experience of being able to roam on your own through the dark crumbling halls was better than I could have ever imagined. The stories told by inmates and guards alike are enough to put even a person without knowledge of the supposed haunting on edge. It was the country's first penitentiary. Penitence being the root word. The prisoners were kept in silence, devoid of human contact. Guards wore special socks over their shoes as to make no noise when walking the halls to alert the inmates to the presence of another human being. A reverent pall settled on me as I entered into the first cell block, men actually lived years of their lives in this place, it was a sobering thought. The halls were crumbling and the rusted, warped doors led into dark voids filled with damp, cracked walls. As we walked through the oppressive atmosphere I could not help but feel a rush, this was a legitimately spooky place, this is how they are supposed to feel. if a ghost lives anywhere in the world, I bet there is one at Eastern State.

As we concluded our tour feeling suitably humbled and slightly creeped out we walked out into the courtyard and the threatening storm broke loose on us. Lightning flashed briefly brightening the day darkened by black clouds. Thundered boomed across the prison and rain spattered down. It was the perfect ending to the amazing experience.

Another interesting aspect to Eastern State were the numerous artistic installations. While I found some of them to be a bit out of palce for my taste (the ode to Abu Ghraib in particular) several of them only served to enhance the experience. One was a set of televisions located in different parts of the prison playing scenes from famous prison movies. In the bathroom was an endless loop of bathroom scenes, in the hallway were scenes that take place in prison halls, and so on for cells and other parts of the penitentiary. Another that served to capture a moment of Eastern State and freeze it in time was the addition of several white plaster cats placed among the crumbling ruins. They were crafted in homage to the pack of stray cats who made a home in the prison walls, and to the man who took care of them. The story of the cats was almost as sad as that of the penitentiary itself. Animal control spayed and neutered all the animals and the clan eventually faded away, like their statues which are crumbling and disappearing from the grounds of Eastern State.

In the end I cannot say if Eastern State is haunted, but I can say it is a wonderful place to visit. PoseySessions was the photographer for this excursion as she is for most of them.. She got some shots that captured the creepiness of the place.

This might not be a ghost in this picture, in fact I doubt it is, but I like to pretend we caught something paranormal during our time at Eastern State. Below: extremely creepy barber chair in one of the cells.

I have an Ereader, Yes I do.

One bright day in Sunny San Diego PoseySessions and I walked into a Barnes & Noble and we walked out with a Nook. It was an amazing gift from the greatest gal ever. So I have an ereader (more like we have one, I think she uses it as much as me) so what, right? No! I have found this device to be a blessing, and sometimes a curse. One amazing thing about owning an ereader is the freedom it offers. I can get any book anytime I want and I can take it and a thousand others anywhere I go. It is also ergonomic. While opening a book and holding it in your hands is not the most physically demanding of activities, it can sometimes be annoying, especially with big bulky hardcovers, that refuse to lay flat or cooperate with our one handed attempts at holding them while multitasking. My nook lays flat anywhere, that is actually the first thing I realized I loved about it. I could set it on my lap and hold my bag of chi…err carrot sticks in one hand and double half calf soy milk mocha frap in the other, and never once have to contend with the pages slowly creeping shut on me. So I guess I fell in love with the lazy factor.

The amount of books I have on my nook is ridiculous, honestly I dont think I will ever read them all, even though I would love to do it someday. Along with books my nook is also home to a number of academic articles that, because the Nook reads .pdf, are easily accessible for studying on the go. Thanks to sites like Project Gutenberg I feel like I am never far away from thousands of (free) and enlightening books. After entertaining lectures, or reading the bibliography of a particularly good book I find myself browsing the Gutenberg library of public domain books in search of more and more information on whatever topic has caught my eye. Another amazing site is NetGalley where book reviewers big and small (me) have access to hundreds of ebook ARCs made available for review purposes. Between these two sites I will never run out of stuff to read.

However neat it may be, gathering thousands of books is not really a good thing. I have no sense of urgency or expenditure, and I am often lacking motivation to read or finish the books I have amassed. When I think of reading something on my Nook I often end up saying “I can read that anytime".” Whereas, having checked it out from a library, or more pressingly, spent money on it I am much more likely to read something. Every ebook I have paid for has been read to completion on the device. But the other few hundred remain unopened, so far.

I feel a little silly complaining about having too many books. So I will stop now. And instead focus on why I think the device, and to a lesser extent the Kindle (I have only spent a few minutes using one) are still lacking necessary features, or maybe feature. I first envisioned the Nook as a great way to further and assist my studies. I have spent many hours with my faced buried in articles from academic journals, sometimes printing over 100 pages of them in one sitting. I dreamt of easily highlighting and annotating my articles and then during discussions easily searching my notes for points. It did not happen this way. Highlighting and annotating on a Nook is an excruciating process that takes the reader out of the article and into a maze of menus and buttons. So much so that I refuse to do it. I manually (with a pen and paper!!!) write notes and page numbers to avoid having to manipulate the device. In next gen readers I would love to see easy touch screen highlighting that automatically popped up a little touch keypad where notes could be entered, and then a notes file generated where then entire ebook could be uploaded to a pc in highlighted and annotated form with a glossary of notes. Cross your fingers.

In the end I think ereaders are a wave of the future, not THE wave of the future. I do not see them easily replacing paper books. Their is a romanticism surrounding the bound book and I doubt it disappears rapidly. Only when every other aspect of society is paperless do I think we will see real physical books go the way of the buffalo. An ebook reader is a great investment just in terms convenience. When you consider the low prices of some of the great readers on the market they even make sense financially. Some of the best stories ever written, some of the most interesting philosophy, and some of mankind’s greatest observations are freely available in public domain. For the price of ten or twelve of those books in paper copies you could own your own ereader packed with hundreds of them for free. I know a lot of people are resistant to making the switch. But I don't think of it as an all or nothing change. My Nook has its place, as do the hundreds of physical books I have lining my bookshelves. The Nook merely compliments my reading and makes getting a book on demand so much easier. I downloaded a book while standing in the middle of times square, because I just couldn't wait! and for me, that's freedom.

There and Back Again.

Hello faithful friends, Mr. X has returned, just in time, for I felt many of you were getting antsy, yes?

It has been an amazing summer. Some of which you may get to read about, much of which you wont, but fret not, those parts are less than interesting. I will return shortly to blogging about things that matter. Coming up we will have some patented Mr. X takes on books movies and more. I believe next will be a review of Inception.

Until we meet again,

Mr. X

The Mind of Mr. X

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