Fourth Sunday from Jingle Jangle

Brady Material (Chapter 6 of Jingle Jangle)

By Jim Rix

[Editor's Note: Opening paragraphs of the review by Daniel L. Kaplan, Assistant Federal Public Defender in the District of Arizona, published in The Federal Lawyer, February 2009:

We all should have a cousin like Jim Rix. Better yet, we should have a justice system that is too reliable to convict an innocent man of murder twice. Failing that, a cousin like Jim Rix can be quite handy.
    Rix didn't think much of it when his mother casually said, to him, “You have a cousin on death row, and he's innocent.” But Rix was curious and wrote to his cousin, Ray Krone. In response Rix received Krone's facially compelling account of having been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. Krone's case quickly turned into a sort of hobby for Jim Rix – although using the word “hobby” here is a bit like using it to describe Lance Armstrong’s cycling.]

The Confession might do what Jingle Jangle hadn't the clout to do

Maureen Corrigan's review of John Grisham's legal thriller, The Confession (in The Washington Post, October 26, 2010), warns us, "don't read this book if you just want to kick back in your recliner and relax."
    I agree. As I wrote to my daughter, who herself was reading a Richard Jury novel by Martha Grimes, "it's not that easy reading, emotionally, because you know that the suffering of the condemned man in the book, and of his family and friends, has been the real suffering of quite a few people (of whom just one was more than enough)."
    I'm reading The Confession by listening to a digital recording, so I don't think I'd noticed the dust jacket image. I saw it yesterday when I looked up a review to include in my listing of books recently read. I'm struck by its use of the "scales of justice" image, which was stylized by Brooklyn artist Matthew Moss for the dust jacket of Jim Rix's 2007 true crime book, Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out:
   

Because of Grisham's base (over 250 million copies of his books sold worldwide), The Confession could achieve what Jim hoped for Jingle Jangle, which never won enough of a readership to do so—namely, rev up the anti-death penalty momentum a notch or two (not that Jim was attacking the death penalty; he wanted to stop wrongful convictions, especially when based on junk science). The Confession attacks most of the police, prosecutor, judge, jury, prison, and political problems that Jingle Jangle attacked, including the use of jailhouse snitches. But Grisham's book doesn't involve junk science.
    I think that Jingle Jangle outdid Grisham's own true crime book, The Innocent Man, in its harder-hitting, broader critique of the criminal justice system. The Confession also outdoes The Innocent Man, in the much greater and more immediate intensity with which it shows just how wrong, wrong, wrong is our criminal justice system—especially as practiced in Texas (or in the Arizona of Jingle Jangle, where Jim's cousin Ray Krone was sentenced to die for a murder that he didn't commit any more than Donté Drumm committed the fictional murder depicted in Grisham's latest thriller).

I'd be very, very surprised (indeed, shocked) if The Confession isn't made into a movie, the kind of movie Jingle Jangle might have become if the right director and screen writer had picked it up. I don't see any mention of a movie project yet, though, on the Internet Movie Database.
    Grisham is an old-hand at piling on the complications and heightening the conflict. The conflict in The Confession just crackles, it's so intense.

Jingle Jangle sells!

Author Jim Rix is signing books again this weekend, this time at Costco's Carson City, Nevada store. He must be signing a lot of them. Look! He's having fun.
     Ray Krone, the subject of the book, lives on a farm outside York Pennsylvania and when last heard from was continuing to lobby for an end to the death penalty, under whose shadow he lived for three years before his cousin began to champion his case and worked with attorney Christopher Plourd to win a new trial. The second jury again bought the bogus bite mark evidence, but this time only sentenced the innocent Ray to life in prison.
    It had become abundantly clear that the only way to get Ray Krone out of prison was to discover who really killed Kim Ancona....

When Jim was through signing today (at 3 p.m.), only eleven of thirty-six copies were left. Hey, Costco needs to restock! Move over, John Grisham. (In fact, the store manager has asked Jim to bring six cases for the next signing session.)
    He left the poster below to pitch those last books for him until he returns tomorrow. The dust jacket art was created by Brooklyn graphic artist Matthew Moss. Drawings inside the book were created by Rob Esmay, whose cartoons occasionally appear in The New Yorker Magazine. I edited Jingle Jangle. It is published by Broken Bench Press.

Nemerov's myth revised

World photographer Paul Calhoun recently said that he was "intrigued by [my] New Ten Commandments; do I detect a Wicca undercurrent there?"
    Ah, no, not intentionally anyway. I'm not that familiar with the nature religions. I had to research what a Wicca undercurrent might be. In the Wikipedia's entry for "Wicca," I learned that

Wicca (pronounced [ˈwɪkə]) is a Neopagan religion and a form of modern witchcraft....
    Wicca is typically a duotheistic religion, worshipping a Goddess and a God, who are traditionally viewed as the Triple Goddess and Horned God. These two deities are often viewed as being facets of a greater pantheistic Godhead....

Well, having read that, I'd now say there's not even any unintentional Wicca undercurrent here! Basically, I'm a scientific naturalist; the supernatural is a figment of the evolved brain's marvelous making. Or, as Howard Nemerov's "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band" puts it: "This world's just mad enough to have been made / By the Being his beings into Being prayed," where I understand "Being" to refer to the natural world, the natural cosmos.

My logic there, I see, is a bit convoluted (in suggesting that the world made itself, even in the beginning). Given the use to which I wish to put Nemerov's clever couplet, I see that it needs adjustment. How about:

This world's just mad enough to have done made¹
The beings who their Maker-Being into being prayed.

That's how it stands at the moment. Thank you, Howard Nemerov.

Paul also asked whether I designed this blog myself ("it has a lush, professional texture to it," he said).
    No, it uses a template supplied by blogger.com. I did change the background color (borrowed from Brooklyn artist Matthew Moss's cover art for Jingle Jangle) and arranged the order of stuff in the right column. I put links in the masthead to the current post (for when people come to a specific post by way of its link address) and my sidebar table of contents. And I routinely use embedded styles in posts for certain modest effects (like the lead-in in bold lower caps).
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1. "Done made" is a quotation of two titles: Alice Randall's 2001 novel, The Wind Done Gone (based on Margaret Mitchell's 1936 classic, Gone with the Wind), and Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 autobiographical work of history, Blood Done Sign My Name.