Author: stevekuusisto

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

I want to start with a disclaimer: I don’t know anything about Tiger Woods. I don’t own a television and am pretty sure I’ve never watched a golf game in my life. I barely understand the rules of miniature golf. Before the events of the past couple weeks, I’m not sure I would have recognized Tiger Woods if he were standing next to me at the grocery store. But when a series of white women start appearing on the news saying they’ve had an affair with a man of Color, I start to get suspicious.

Woods has, of course, admitted to infidelity, and for that fact, I feel very bad for his wife.

But I also wonder why woman after woman has come forward in this public way, at this moment in time. Since some of the alleged liaisons go back years, clearly at least some of the women with whom Woods had affairs could have said something publicly much earlier than the previous three weeks. So why now, all of a sudden, hire an attorney and start making public statements to gossip magazines? Why now, disclose text messages and other sordid details of your affair? There’s something in this public outing for each woman, or they wouldn’t be coming forward in this way. Is it just the prospect of fame or financial gain, a book deal down the road or television appearances?

That may be part of it, but I wonder if it also doesn’t have something to do with Woods’ race. White America likes to see a Black man falter, after all, and the fact that his alleged mistresses to date have all been white weighs heavily on the complex and conflicted history white women and Black men have shared in the United States for hundreds of years. Black men have been lynched, remember, for even being suspected of wanting a relationship with a white woman. White women have felt betrayed as Black men were granted access to the patriarchy. I can’t help but wonder how this long and fraught history is playing out in the public’s fascination of Wood’s downfall, or how it may be weighing somewhere deep in the minds of the women who are coming forward.

Are these women excited by the possibility of being involved in this taking-down of a successful and wealthy man of Color? Americans like to watch a Black man “put in his place.” Especially by a white woman. Especially through sex. Are his former mistresses playing into that? Do they see this moment as their opportunity to wield one of the only powers they have, the power of their sexuality?

Again, I don’t know anything at all about Tiger Woods or his wife or what may or have happened in their relationship. But I hope that we’re interested because of something far less sinister than our historically fraught race relations—love of gossip, maybe, love of seeing our heroes fail, demonstrate their weaknesses. And I would like to believe the women coming forward now are only doing so out of a desire for fame or financial gain. But in the United States, doesn’t race inform everything? Even the moments we choose to remain silent and the moments we choose publicity? Even infidelity?

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief for POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

I have a neighbor who believes in eternal damnation. He thinks about 14th century cosmology while running his snow blower. He’d beat his wife and children but he doesn’t want any trouble. He seldom speaks. He wears a New York Yankees cap though he lives in Iowa. Sometimes when its very cold he wears an Elmer Fud cap with the ear flaps.

One of my students collects serial killer trading cards. He is, of course, Lutheran. He doesn’t need to go to church. He has the cards. They work for him. Inevitably he shuffles the deck when he can’t sleep. I made that up. He probably keeps them in a little homemade box.

The children of the new Middle Ages fret and cry until they are put to work.

The hopeful continue to get up early.

Unlike the original dark ages there’s not enough silence to go around. People wear head phones, ear buds, skull candy, or talk obsessively into portable phones.

Nature continues to loosen everything: door frames, rubber belts, strings of instruments…

Some people remain Gnostics and keep about them a vague sense of Paradise.

When the air rests the snow rests.

Words are disappearing all over the world.

You can see landscapes in the faces of strangers.

This would be a good moment for humor.

The Grim Reaper slips on a frozen turd and almost drops his scythe. (That was a howler in the old Middle Ages.)

Today it is very cold. I think I will go down to the library and warm my hands on the afterglow of histories.

S.K.

The photo above is of a painting of Increase Mather whose Puritan ghost still haunts the American psyche as surely as bubble gum sticks to your sister’s hair–or your brother’s hair–or the noggin of your best friend if, just perhaps, you were an only child. Increase Mather would have frowned at bubble gum and he would have frowned at your sister’s hair. It is entirely possible that the only happy moment of Increase Mather’s life was when he died of bladder failure. (That he died of bladder failure is true but we can’t prove “the smile”.)   

A Puritan ghost haunts every American relationship. It doesn’t matter if you’re straight or gay; single; married; divorced; or still in your latency. (Wasn’t it Woody Allen who said he never had a latency period?)

Poor Tiger Woods. Driven by vanity and lust he was. A fallen man he is. And now, Lo and Behold, here comes the ghost of Increase to tell him that he’ll never get to heaven because his very lust is the proof in the pudding that he’s not among the elect. Tiger is going to hell. And he was always going to go there. There wasn’t anything he could have done about the matter. Don’t you dare smile.

Once when I was vacationing at a resort in Jamaica I told a friendly groundskeeper that there was no such thing as the devil. (The man had just climbed a palm tree for me, and procured a coconut, had opened it so I could drink the milk. He’d seen my blind man’s white cane. He had wanted to help me somehow. He’d said that drinking from a coconut keeps away the devil.)  “There’s no such thing as the devil,” I’d said, taking the coconut. “Oh, oh, don’t say that Mon!” he’d said, backing away and waving his machete at the clouds. “The devil, he everywhere.”

The Puritan ghost believes that the devil is part of the “elect or non-elect” spiritual delivery system. And if you think you can’t argue with that, you’re right. In fact the only way you can win an argument with Puritans is by kicking them out of your country as the British did. And how thankful the Brits continue to feel about their ancestor’s wisdom each and every day.

Young America didn’t of course kick the Puritans out. We tried our best to ignore them but they got the upper hand with the school systems and the water supply and that’s that.

Of course hell doesn’t exist except in the public squares where Puritan ghosts carry on–talkative, hypocritical, afflicting projective evaluations of Mr. Woods’ downfall.

Why didn’t Thomas Jefferson kick the Puritans out?

S.K. 

Today’s New York Times carries a reprinted post from Home Fires, a blog that carries writing by military men and women who have recently returned to the U.S. from foreign deployments. The writer of the Times piece is a fellow named Roman Skaskiw and his description of the mind numbing bureaucracy that precedes a battlefield deployment is so darkly funny that I was in fact reminded of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I was further delighted to discover tht Mr. Skaskiw lives in Iowa City. Perhaps I will meet him one of these days. Happy reading!

S.K.

I spoke early this morning with Mr. Mannion who is currently revisiting the films of the late director Robert Altman. We laughed about one of Altman’s oddest flicks, his film adaptation of the comic strip “Popeye” starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall as Popeye and Olive Oyl. Lance, ever discerning, observed that aside from the movie’s general oddness, it’s chief failing resides in the script’s reliance on a plot that’s essentially extrinsic to the variorum life of the comic strip that inspired the undertaking. Now I confess to occasional abstruse thoughts, for instance I wonder if the world of post-industrial economics would ever have been possible without John Maynard Keynes’ general theory of employment, interest, and money–which is a long way of saying that sometimes I’m looking for someone to blame for our current mess and if it isn’t Keynes its going to be some other poor bastard as I sit in my study and practice my kama sutra of umbrage. But the fact that Popeye the film stinks owing to Jules Feiffer’s infidelity to the Sunday comics is an example of perspicacity gone wild and I’m in awe. And all this time I thought it was just a dumb movie.

“It sure is a complex woild, ain’t it Olive? Ca-ca-ca-ca-ca-ca! Deviated septum cleared up yet Olive?”

S.K. 

I have lately been reading "Helen Keller: A Life" by Dorothy Herrmann. The following passage jumped out at me:

It was largely a lonely triumph. As the twenty-year-old Helen soon discovered, college was not the "romantic lyceum" that she had envisioned. At Radcliffe, which had been forced to accept her as a student, she was more profoundly aware than ever before of her blindness and deafness. Only one of her classmates knew the manual finger language. Another girl had learned to write Braille, copying as a present Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, but Helen never heard from her after graduation. The other students tried to be friendly whenever they saw her at a local lunchroom, and according to Helen, "Miss Sullivan spelled their bright chatter into my hand." But she was painfully aware of the gulf between them, even though her classmates tried to bridge the gap by such lavish, awkward gestures as buying her a Boston terrier, which she promptly named Phiz. Presumably the dog would compensate her for what they were either too timid or too busy to give and what she secretly longed for: "the warm, living touch of a friendly hand."

And here's another revealing passage:

Of Helen's professors, only one, William Allan Neilson, who later became the president of Smith College, took the time to master the manual finger language so he could communicate directly with her. As Arthur Gilman was closely associated with the college, she and Annie were politely ignored by the rest of the faculty and administration, including the autocratic Agnes Irwin, the dean of Radcliffe, and the august Dr. Charles W. Eliot, the head of Harvard.

The snub did not surprise Annie, who was still furious about the plot at the Cambridge School to separate her from Helen. "I would much prefer to have people despise me as they certainly would if they guessed how full of distrust and contempt my heart is towards my fellow beings," she wrote to Hitz. "I know it pains you to hear me speak in this way and doubtless it will hurt you still more to have me write it: but I want you to know just how detestable I am. I find people hateful and I hate them. Mr. Gilman seemed to me a fair specimen of our noble race. . . ."

"Radcliffe did not desire Helen Keller as a student," Dean Irwin later explained to an interviewer. "It was necessary that all instruction should reach her through Miss Sullivan, and this necessity presented difficulties. They were overcome and all went well if not easily."

Helen was wounded whenever her classmates passed her on the stairs and in the lecture halls without a sign of acknowledgment. Most of her teachers were "impersonal as Victrolas," she recollected years later, and "the professor is as remote as if he were talking through a telephone."

**

I have a recurring sense that the realities of campus life for people with disabilities may not have changed much when it comes to what we nowadays call "inclusiveness" in higher education. We have laws of course, and assistive technologies, and surely we do better at providing reading materials in alternative formats. Yet for all that I think that at far too many colleges and universities in these United States one will find that where disability is concerned the faculty and administrators are still "impersonal as Victrolas". One need only visit the web site LD Online for an overview of the struggles that students with learning disabilities have faced and continue to face as they struggle to gain accommodations in the classroom. Or one can visit the U.S. Department of Justice page and see findings against American colleges and universities. See in particular Duke University but also Chatham University or University of Michigan or Swarthmore College or Colorado College or Millikin University or University of Chicago–each of these cases of discrimination against students or staff with disabilities is fairly representative of the landscape in post-secondary education–what we might call the "Autocracy of the Victrola" if you will. And if you believe (as I surely do) that these problems start earlier, you can visit the DOJ's web pages on school district discrimination settlements.

The issue of inclusion for people with disabilities in higher ed is a matter of culture: far too many colleges and universities fail to imagine that people with disabilities represent a cultural movement. (Let's leave aside for the moment the powerful statistical urgencies represented by the finding that nearly 10 per cent of matriculating freshmen are self-identifying as having a disability.)

A cultural understanding of disability means at its very core that students or staff with disabilities are our children, our sisters, daughters, sons, fathers and mothers, our veterans, our colleagues. But it means more than that: an academic or curricular awareness of disability means that our nation's institutions of higher learning will finally sense that what they "do" they do for all and with no oppositional and expensive and demeaning hand wringing. Such a position requires that disability services and academic culture–matters of curricular planning and cultural diversity be wedded as they should be.

In the meantime there are autocratic talking machines aplenty. One senses their steady banishment to the attics of history. Those of us who labor in higher education should do all we can to grease the skids.

S.K.

The photograph above was taken two days ago. It is a simple photo depicting my desk in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Several pages of an essay are spread across the desk and there’s a pair of wire framed reading glasses and a red felt tipped pen atop the scattered pages. There’s a glasses case with a lens cleaning cloth and a manila envelope with a door key. There’s nothing remarkable about this photograph: its just a professor’s desk. And yet to me this photo is utterly remarkable because I took it myself. And yes, I was reading those pages with those reading glasses and I was writing comments in the margins. I am only one small man and I am the bearer of one small life and surely this is a wide world with a billion narratives of joy or by turns of terrible injustice. Yet I like to think that getting some usable vision back means that others will also have their vision restored. I say this not because blindness is a bad thing–far from it, for indeed I’ve been writing for over a decade now about the ways that blindness functions as a form of epistemology–all disabilities offer the normative world riches of mental diversity. I have said so and will continue to say it. Yet for all that I can say that seeing, even if its not quite perfect (residual vision, low vision, call it what you will) is a marvel and working as I do with the University of Iowa’s College of Ophthalmology I know that the cures for many kinds of blindness are very near. Perhaps we are living in dark times. But then again perhaps not. Some days I think it takes greater daring to say “perhaps not”. So this is the landscape from my desk today in winter as a semester draws to a conclusion here in Iowa City.

S.K.

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

I figure skated when I was younger, and spent many hours dreaming of the Olympics, planning routines in my head to music on the radio, imagining elaborate costumes. My favorite thing to do on the ice was spin, and when I spun, I could feel the world move away from me. I pulled my hands to my chest and forgot everyone around me. I felt free for those moments on the ice, like the world outside didn’t matter nearly as much as the world pulled close to my chest.

This past weekend, I taught my niece how to ice skate at Santa Monica’s outside winter rink. Even though I haven’t been on the ice in more than ten years, after a glide or two, I felt my weight shift under me and that old feeling of freedom come back again. I reminded myself how to spin, how to skate backwards, and tried out the little jumps I used to know so well. I felt fluid. I felt like I was dancing.

But what surprised me most wasn’t how easily I slipped back into that love of skating, but the teaching approach I took with my niece. She’s only five, and wanted to hold on to the railings along the side of the rink. A lot of kids were pulling themselves along the railing, but they weren’t really skating; their feet were moving in strange directions and they weren’t learning to balance themselves on the skate blade.

I made my niece hold my hand instead. She didn’t like this approach at first, and wasn’t eager to leave the safety of the wall. I felt myself becoming annoyed. I’m not taking you around if you don’t let go of the wall, I said. She looked worried, and at first preferred to stay put rather than skate with me. I tried to figure why it mattered to me that she actually learned to skate if she was having a perfectly good time on her own along the wall. Eventually, she let me take one hand and let Zac take the other so we could lead her around the rink. Then she let just one person hold her hand as she skated. And finally, she let go of our hands entirely. She skated all by herself, with no help from anyone. As we passed a child who got on the ice when we did and who was still pulling herself along the wall, my niece pointed and said, The wall is bad. And that was almost the best part of the evening.

I realized in that moment that what I most learned from figure skating was my body’s fluidity and ability to adjust, to center myself among the chaos of the world. That falling makes us better, failing makes us work harder. That the risk of participating is more rewarding than the safety of the sidelines. I wanted to teach my niece to skate, but I also wanted to teach her to trust in her own ability to succeed. To push away from the world’s confines and be entirely free for a while. To experience fluidity, movement, the body gliding forward without anything slowing it down. Even if she never skates again, my niece will still have that memory of leaving the wall behind, of pushing herself away from the safety of the wall and finding success one glide at a time.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Because I often think about the dead I see the caissons rolling into view

As if leaving us is prologue

To returning—though I don’t see Christians

& there is no ascendant light

Above the Capitol

The streets of Washington glow with the precious inset stones of everywhere

& nowhere; there is a muted sound of dance music

& voices

A swarm of golden bees hums in the hive of the nation—non serviam is the sound

& then the storied dead come

From nothing through nothing

Their heads bent

& all that was inexpressible and distant grows inexpressible and near

S.K.

This morning while shaving I was thinking.

Who stole our nation’s good, old fashioned phony-ness?

Bzzzzzz! My razor kissed my nose.

Who swiped our beautiful, dopey self-imposed credulity?

Bzzzzz! I extinguished a warlock’s hair growing on my forehead.

Forget the media. Forget Pee Wee Herman. I was forced to conclude that we’ve stolen our ability to bullshit ourselves from ourselves.

Okay, so my next thought was: “Why do we have to learn this the hard way?” Sure I was thinking of Tiger Woods but look around you—hell, there’s your neighbor who tried to sell his children on e-bay until the FBI showed up. (You can’t sell people, even in jest. And this is altogether correct as a law, human trafficking is a scourge, but really, can’t a man have some fun?)

Now all we have left in America is ugly, dopey self-imposed credulity. (The tea party types are a sufficient example.)

But beautiful, dopey self-imposed credulity is in short supply. “Like what,” you ask?

See? No one can remember.

I missed a hair. I have to go.

S.K.