Month: October 2020

“Now a secret must be imparted. Professor Pnin was on the wrong train. He was unaware of it, and so was the conductor, already threading his way through the train to Pnin’s coach. As a matter of fact, Pnin at the moment felt very well satisfied with himself. ”

Vladimir Nabokov “Pnin”

This is a confession of sorts: I’ve helped build two disability studies programs at major American universities and now, after twenty plus years I’m Professor Pnin on the wrong train, though I’m becoming dimly aware of it.

The problem is that disabled faculty who require accommodations to work, teach, and conduct research are not well represented in the field. This is because colleges and universities advance sub-rosa programs in “area studies” as long as they don’t have to engage in any new hiring. I’ve traveled across the US over the years visiting scores of campuses and I rarely meet disabled faculty. Note I say “rarely” for there are some stars of disability research who are cripples but they’re outnumbered. I’m no essentialist: I think non-disabled faculty can and should teach disability themes and conduct research. But I lament the divide that has kept younger disabled scholars and writers from advancing. I can also attest that my own need for accommodations in the workplace has been treated variously and it’s often the case that non-disabled faculty who trade in dis-studies are not meaningful allies.

It would be far different if there were more cripples in the ranks.

Prof. Pnin is Nabokov’s lost emigre scholar who suffers from accidie—that late medieval weariness of the isolated monk who just can’t go on. Pnin doesn’t fit in at the provincial American campus where he finds himself teaching Russian lit and experiences the loneliness that comes with having no true friends among his colleagues. The faculty are “in it” for themselves, an old theme perhaps but for disabled scholars this is a nightmare. Just last week a blind graduate student wrote to say she’s having the run around with her university’s information technology team who are unwilling to help her with assistive tech and rather than admit they’re not up to speed on ADA 101 tell her she’s the problem. When I told her this has happened to me repeatedly even as recently as last year, she was aghast. Surely I was somehow well off? Surely as a well known disability activist and writer with a professorship I must have found the secret to inclusion.

Ableism in the faculty ranks is not over. The cottage industry of hiring non-disabled faculty to teach disability related themes is not over. The unwillingness of technologists to meaningfully address disability is not over. The silence of some though not all faculty in the dis-studies field is not over.

There’s privilege in them thar halls.

Every day there’s an assault on reason in the neighborhood, yours or mine. In Central Asia parents hide disabled children so their non-disabled offspring will be attractive for arranged marriages. Reason seldom prevails over local economics. Thomas Jefferson understood slavery made him rich even as he venerated reason.

Hypocrisy flourishes where economies of suborned dignity are the norm. American conservatives talk of the US constitution using the term “originalism” thereby making no secret of their false virtue where racial equality or human rights are concerned. The American constitution was written by slave owners and their feckless northern apologists. Disdain is never a secret, it’s just tricked out with piety and the kind of candy coated earnestness we saw from Amy Coney Barrett.

There are plural assaults on reason of course: the arranged slaughter of Kashoggi; children caged; refugee camps; environmental looting from the rainforests of Brazil to Lapland, legislation to jail homosexuals in the Dakotas–the list is nearly inexhaustible not only because economies of scale triumph over dignity but because as the globe dies the resource fights are about theft on steroids.

What sells? Delegetimancy. But only for the powerful. Trump’s rhetorical employment of Mexican rapists, the GOP’s histrionics about socialists–(Biden is coming to destroy your suburb) all are incitements to hate the neighbors.

Since Trump is running on no observable platform and since he’s got no catchy slogan (Make America Great Again and Again isn’t cutting it) he should just cry out from his balcony, “Hate Your Neighbors!” There’s plenty of money to still be made.

William Souder’s extraordinary new biography of John Steinbeck has thrown me back into my youth in ways I’d not imagined possible. I’ll explain in a moment. “Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck” is a nuanced and scrupulous volume and it’s also a study in depth psychology without the turgid rhetoric of Jung and Freud–it’s a book about a life of ambitious heartbreaks. It is quite frankly one of the best biographies I’ve read in years ranking alongside Richard Ellmann’s “Oscar Wilde” and Candice Millard’s “The River of Doubt” in its shrewd and empathetic treatment of the doubts and drives inside a creative human being.

Of my youth I’ll just say that between the ages of 22 and 27 I lived the driven torture of “the imagination” often hiding in lonely places just to afford the luxury of writing without income. All writers have these periods I think but Souder brings out the exquisite, clarifying, haunted precision of early seeing that hurts, fascinates, and ultimately makes one who’d deign to write. He brought back for me the loneliness of perception, the cold wind of it. One night at twenty I went out, got down on all fours in a cemetery and chewed the grass because Lorca said something about it in a poem. Yes I was blind. Yes the moon was up. Yes I was wildly alive.

“Mad at the World” is not a staid biography, it’s almost a nonfiction bildungsroman about a man who was richly alive with all the triumphs and tragedies inherent in a writing life. The cliche is “warts and all” but Souder gives us Steinbeck’s blemishes with the light and space to take them in:

“One of the mysteries of writing is how it sometimes happens in spite of everything. Many writers cannot bear distractions. Steinbeck, always brittle and impossible to be around when he was in the middle of a book, had been fiercely protective of his writing time, and nobody who knew him even a little dared interrupt him when he was working. Maybe being alone with his dying mother felt perversely like the kind of isolation he craved. Or perhaps he discovered at last that writing well is impervious to the noise and clamor of everyday life. It happens. Life (or death) taps you on the shoulder, interrupts what you’re doing, and suddenly you find that nobody has been bothering you but yourself. Indulgences disappear, instincts take over, mistrust of your own work fades, and the tendency toward self-doubt is carried away. And so it was with Steinbeck in that terrible time. He actually enjoyed himself while writing Tortilla Flat and the short stories that fell so easily onto his pages. It did not seem possible that this was the beginning of everything. But it was.”

One may say an open hand is nearly always empty but fate has other things to give and it’s sometimes a tenderness, an illuminated private station and Souder shows us how it worked for John Steinbeck. For my money this is one hell of a compelling book about a writer’s life, the lived life of the unaffiliated places inside.

One night, blind and alone in Helsinki, Finland I found a frozen spoon in the snow. I talked to it. Said: “we’re in equilibrium. It all balances.” It was snowing hard.

I started the day with rain in a dish.
There’s always a place like that.
It’s a short lived complex structure.
Mind-house with leaking roof.
Up river someone is singing.
Steinbeck’s ghost.
You can smell the rotting wood.
A patch of garden; damp earth.
A solemn stove rusts in the woods.
Call me what you will,
Friends, enemies.
October winds pass through.
Every day I’m closer to creation.

Bending to Grass in the November Dusk

Acorns, cinnamon ferns, old wish
In mind, regrets from spring,
My family dead
Seem near
A dark toad
Hops in tall weeds.
“You will break,”  say the trees
Apple trees long untended
Knowing something
Do you see? they say.
And the language of broken limbs
Is upon us.

I once held Enrico Caruso’s shoe…

This is a very strange life. I was presented with the great tenor’s shoe. It was heavy. In fact it was the heaviest shoe I’d ever held. To think of the man above it melting spheres by singing aloud the scribblings of Puccini, the shoe anchoring him to earth…

**

Ah, the buttermilk in the far north…

**

Let us be as voluble and engaging as the magpies.

This is a very strange life. Fish swim through our souls. Outside our doors ants are preparing for winter.

**

I kid you not.

**

My neighbor walks about like a man who might shoulder a palanquin.

This is a very strange life.

Keep the television off.

Avoid the warehouses of rage and loss.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Kennth Koch…

Who I never met, whose poems I read
In many far cities, whose voice

Cheered me in dark times.
When you’ve been alone

And peel an orange
So you’re returned

To yourself, that’s
The ticket, you’ll

Be wanting a poet
Who hands you

This…

I had a complicated dream last night. I was in a crowded city. There was unrest as white people like to call it. When I woke I understood the mirror of the subconscious had shown me the waking world but without the usual surrealism.

Meanwhile…

The little dog who’s getting old just tipped over his breakfast dish preferring to eat off the floor. “Good for you!” I thought.
“Age has its privileges!”

Meanwhile…

October and the leaves are coming down. My friend Jarkko called the falling leaves “death’s butterflies” which has always struck me as apt.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. department, “and so on…”

Musing: Donald Trump is a Disney fascist, duck strutting, quacking, really not much to look at.

And so on…

It was a moderate despair like rain in a cup and not the full blown Titanic. I mean that’s how he lived his life, dripping spots of sorrow onto his wrists to see if it was cool enough to feed the infants or share with anyone, really. Small cups of darkness and a stupid song or two in mind, sometimes sung out loud and sometimes not.

Trump brought the supersized American disdain for decency right to his door. The cup didn’t work anymore. He tried opening the windows, then closing them. He tried old prayers.

He’ll vote of course. He’ll continue to pray for better times.
One thing he knows for sure: the days of middling despair sure were a privilege.

Thinking of Kenneth Koch

I am a sad man do you understand?
Seeing I was blind and on vacation
A man climbed a palm tree
And brought me a coconut
But handing it over
He warned me to beware
Of the devil–do you
Understand? People
The world over
Think the blind are possessed.
I’m guessing this
Doesn’t happen to you.
You bend to the pavement
Pick up pennies,
Write your name
On park benches
Or better yet
Someone else’s name.
In general it’s a good day
When they don’t call you a monster
Or a friend of one.