Author: stevekuusisto

Each day I must navigate the dynamics of being stared at by strangers while simultaneously requiring the help of the very people who are doing the staring. 

Many people with disabilities have written about this, most notably Rosemarie Garland Thompson who has deftly explored disability performance art as a means of reimagining the social gaze. A spectrum of disability activists, artists and scholars has sought to engage the issue–to in effect replace subjectivity with playful enactments. My wife Connie who has been a guide dog trainer and who has watched me absorb the staring has often imagined wearing a hidden video camera while working a guide dog–posing as a blind person–then capturing them a la Alan Funt, Candid Camera, having caught their stares. I hope she makes the movie. Maybe now that we’re in Syracuse and part of a broad disability community she can finally take that up. Nevertheless I was put in mind of this staring-as-subject-as-activist-performer issue just today when a new acquaintance, a colleague at Syracuse University told me how she admires my apparent ability to carry on in the face of the faces. She has a disability now, one that requires her to use a cane. Her mobility is quite challenged. She shared with me her sense of the stares–how people seem to be looking at her with pity. I think it surprised her when I wrote back and said that I feel this all the time and that I attempt daily to counteract it by wearing a bemused and ironic expression, one that says (as best as I can model it) “I am not what you suppose.” But let’s be clear: wearing an expression is tiring. Being on stage and disarming the hetero-clite pity stare is exhausting. The whole game is easier if you’re quick of wit and love Groucho Marx. I can use language lickety split and it’s a weapon or an anodyne every hour. Staring back takes work. It takes imagination and darned if I can tell if the art will be unnecessary in my lifetime. So today I’m thinking of all my peeps–the disability artists and activists who are staring back and who do it with intelligence and ardor. 

S.K. 

Yep. You're unconscious is finally starting to act up. It's full. One of its archetypes spoke to me recently:

"After "Guernica" we were feeling stuffed," said Ilpo Aho, a diminutive, elfin Finn who has been speaking for the subconscious since the formation of the continents. "Then came Stalin, Hitler, and Ozzie and Harriet–we were getting hammered I tell you."

Aho says that while everyone is properly worried about global warming they should also be worried about the bloating of the universal unconscious.

"There's no place to stuff the lies anymore," he says. "That means you can lie without guilt. Just look at Michele Bachmann for God's sake! And don't even get me started on Newt Gingrich!"

"Do Democrats also tell guiltless lies?" I asked him.

"They've just discovered they can do it," Aho says, then adds, "Obama will shortly be telling you that smog is perfectly good for you." 

This article by Kristen Wyatt at The Huffington Post confirms what educators have been saying, that our public universities are in dire trouble:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/08/tuition-hikes-fail-to-sto_0_n_954554.html?1315515669

Sent from my iPhone

There's a good press release from Brandeis University highlighting their special collection of materials devoted to the history of disability studies. Here's a quote:

"Special Collections Spotlight's latest offering showcases collections from the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center's Samuel Gridley Howe Library. These collections document the field of disability studies and the history of advocacy from the early 1800s to the recent past.

The collections include several hundred books by scholars and experts in the fields of science, medicine, and disabilities; the papers of Irving Kenneth Zola and of Rosemary and Gunnar Dybwad; and thousands of pamphlets, case studies, and journals on topics ranging from what were then called feeble-mindedness and cretinism to eugenics and crime."

For the full article visit: http://www.brandeis.edu/now/2011/september/disabilities.html

I was singing and there were animals near. No grizzlies. But no Disney either. The otter had soulful eyes…a useful dream withal…

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I have only this: a fortune of crickets. When I was a child I used to sit by an abandoned furnace and listen to the crickets singing inside. The blind kid's radio…

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single vice-president in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of weapons of mass destruction.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish so they waterboarded him.

“When Dick Cheney was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “he made the nipping off of Deomcrats’ noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward him, waltzing around him, hypnotized with longing.”

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, the turd blossom knows.

In a few moments now I shall go and shave my old face. What’s a bear to do?

I shall pack my little lunch (honey comb) for my upcoming day–I’m a greeterat Honey-Mart. “Hello, welcome to Honey-Mart,” I’ll say, as Christopher Robin comes in with his walker and Piglet with his electric scooter. We strive to remain cheerful here in the corporate woods. 

Many years ago when my first memoir Planet of the Blind came out I was roundly attacked by the National Federation of the Blind. As near as I can tell their complaint about the book was fueled by the ableist lingo of certain book reviewers who said all kinds of predictable junk about overcoming blindness and miracles and the like. What the NFB did was to attribute reviewers’ positions as being emblematic of my own thinking, which is silly. 

There are other people in the disability rights community who don’t like me because I’m outspoken. I have a habit of talking about human rights without declensions–that is, I don’t categorize types of injustice as an excuse for not speaking up. As Howard Zinn says: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” I have often labeled social service organizations and charitable foundations as being part of what we call in disability studies “the defective people industry” and when you do that you invariably alienate some folks. In the United States we spend less money annually on curing eye diseases than is budgeted for the Broward Country (Fla) Sheriff’s Office. You can look it up.  There’s no doubt that I’m irascible. 

Some disability advocates think I’m too “mainstream” which means that my books are published by well known houses and ergo, I’m not down in the trenches with the fighting masses. You see how this goes. 

Some years ago I published an article in the New York Times Magazine where I said that Braille needs to be saved from technology. Then I went to a bookstore someplace to give a reading and some blind people accosted me, saying that I was opposed to Braille. People can give you plenty to say. It’s no different in the disability world than in politics or business. 

If you want to be liked, keep your mouth shut and stay home. 

Bernard Berenson said: “Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.”

I suppose that’s only conditionally true but it’s a comfort of sorts. 

In summary: I’m a progressive, anti-war, poetry writing communitarian who helps strangers whenever I can. Though I’ve taught at four colleges and hold a professorship at Syracuse University I’m not inpressed by titles. Every day I think of the blind child in Kenya who made me a decorative dog from a discarded Coca-Cola can. I don’t like people who insist on being called “Doctor” if they’re not carrying a medical bag. 

No wonder so many people don’t like me.  

I took my lamb to market where I tried to sell it

But the lamb was too lovely–strangers came close

Then backed away, hands stretched out

& so I looked around to see what was behind me

Just a lamb at sunset, the sun reflected evenly in her eyes