Being a prison librarian has a lot of unique challenges for an educated man. For me one of the hardest to get used to is being the compound's distributor of hood and smut books. Now prior to my incarceration I was well aware of erotica -- one can't grow up in a house full of single women and not stumble over stacks of Harlequin Romance novels -- but the genre of hood was new to me.
"I want books about pimps and hoes."
"I want books about drug dealers."
"I want books about players."
The first few times I was confronted by these requests I have to admit my white-boy-geek came out and I looked at my patrons like they had three eyes and six arms. I've since learned that there are hundreds of writers who focus on the glamour of the streets. Most have adopted "Hood Names" so I have a lot of fun pondering how to alphabetize C-Murder, Ca$h, J.Anna, and M.O.B.S.T.A.R., not to mention the ones who incorporate numbers into their names like H3NRY or something like that. Since we've been working on an alphabetical catalog this has become an issue of great annoyance to us. I can only wonder what people 200 years from now will think of the T.H.U.G. culture. I have to wonder if their unique dialect and naming conventions will be looked at as we look at Shakespeare today? Will there be T.H.U.G. scholars who spend their lives trying to parse out meaning from Ice Cream For the Freaks or the incredibly popular Always a Hu$tler's Wife? Don't laugh. Anyone who has studied the Bard knows he wrote for the common men and women of his age. There were individuals who lived the life comparable to the urban people of today. For his audience, violence was often the answer and school was only for the nobles. (I could write a thesis on the correlation with ease, there are that many similarities). You must remember that people didn't speak like Shakespeare wrote even then and that he too twisted and altered words in bizarre ways. Makes you think doesn't it?
Now, in truth, the Urban Hood novels I have flipped through are certainly not Shakespeare. They have tons of badly written, often illegible sentences, and plots only to loosely connect the scenes of shooting and sex, but again, is Romeo and Juliet much different? (I could argue that their are James Patterson novels with more complicated plots).
None of us will be around to see what happens to literature or who the next Classical authors will be, but I can assure you, to us, the choices would probably include quite a few surprises!
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