stevekuusisto

Oh Yes, Stay Optimistic

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death back in April, 2000.. I miss him deeply and think of him daily.

Mercifully he died before the election that brought us the shameful presidency of George W. Bush.

I know what he would have said about most of this administration’s greed and crafted ineptitude. He would have said: "Well, don’t drag your ass in the sand." (Yes, a college president for Pete’s sake!)

I think today he would be very optimistic about the candidacy of Barack Obama. I pledge some optimism this morning in his memory.

He would be very optimistic about the Boston Red Sox.

S.K.

Nice T Shirt!

My friend, the physician Edwin Stone is very tall. He is closer to 7 than six feet. Another one of my friends, the poet Kenny Fries is 5 feet and a few centimeters. Last evening I had dinner with these two fine men and several loved ones.

Ed mentioned the invasive conversations he sometimes has with strangers who see him in public and who ask him things like: "Hey, do you play basketball? How did you get to be so tall?"

Both Kenny and I know a good deal about this kind of invasive questioning and of course that’s why Ed brought the matter to the table. It isn’t just the disabled body that attracts befuddled questions "out there".

We wondered about the potential of humankind to overcome its outmoded neo-classical ardor for a select human body type. We want to live free lives; lives of imagination and curiosity; lives without self-contempt or endless hand wringing about our legs or faces.

The most dreadful thing of all of course is the relentless business of metaphorizing the disabled body as a type of aesthetic sensibility. I read an interview recently with a nonfiction writer who says that he writes formless essays that are, in his mind, akin to the idea of "armlessness"—in his imagination a man without arms represents a sort of "gross deviance" which of course in this guy’s view is avant garde when rendered as a symbol for literary activity.

This is a puerile idea and its older than Ahab’s peg leg. There’s a lot of boring ableism in contemporary American literary writing. Or to put this another way: weak writers always turn the broken body into a representation of stylized abjection, a process that is both decadent and uninteresting.

I have started thinking about wearing a T shirt that says: "I’m Always Your Metaphor".

We were pleased to have hosted Kenny Fries at the University of Iowa and you can hear his marvelous radio interview and reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore by visiting their website.

S.K.

LINKS:

A Short History of Disability Poetry

The History of My Shoes: Field Work with Body and Soul

The World as Verb

One of the German philosophers (though I don’t remember which one) wrote that the world"worlds". Taken broadly this means that our planet and all we know will unfold and move in accordance with what things are, as opposed to what we think they are. The Iowa folk singer Greg Brown puts it this way: "The world ain’t what you think it is, it’s just what it is."

This is true of all experience. The Middle East will never be what the neocons want it to be. The EPA can’t turn a wild salmon into a domesticated one just by saying so. A poem is not a self-help book; kudzu isn’t Spanish moss.

Last night I heard a college student ask a question of my friend, the poet and nonfiction writer Kenny Fries. The student wanted to know how disability fit into "identity politics" and Kenny said: "I don’t believe in identity."

Does this mean that Kenny Fries, who happens to have a disability "rejects" his condition? Not at all. But he knows that Spanish moss and kudzu are wildly different "sui generic" and what’s more, they’re different from what any of us might suppose. Put another way: disability is a fractional part of experience.

Some days I fear that in our theory driven age we’ve forgotten the Enlightenment. We can categorize the things of this world. We can even transform our experience. But just so, we shouldn’t see the life of the mind as a subset of worlding.

I think it was Heidegger who made "world" into a verb. It’s early. There’s still some hope for my memory.

S.K.

Merging Hunanities with Medicine

Professor making University of Iowa community look at disabilities in new ways: an article in the Iowa City Press Citizen, Wednesday, April 16, 2008 by Brian Morelli.

"People with disabilities often are labeled either as a social problem
or a medical problem, University of Iowa professor Stephen Kuusisto
said…"

(Click the link above to to proceed to the article.)

~ Connie

Project 3000

My mornings are usually hectic just as yours must be. Coffee? Stain on your shirt? Hurry. Oh hurry please.

Not too long ago I had the good fortune to talk with "Insight Radio" in Scotland. This is a radio channel that offers programming about blindness and low vision to listeners in the UK.

I found myself sipping coffee in the early Iowa dawn and talking about denial. Lots of people who have disabilities struggle to admit their physical differences and that’s an old story.

I said that the way to beat denial is to admit that you desire a larger life.

I learned to be a cane traveler and a guide dog traveler precisely because I wanted to see what might lie beyond the next hill.

Lots of blind folks will tell you the same story.

It was a good interview.

Lo! And then I opened my e-mail and discovered this story about "Project 3000"–a research initiative that’s underway here at the University of Iowa under the direction of my friend and colleague, Dr. Edwin Stone.

You can visit the story in this issue of USA TODAY, and as a supporter of Project 3000, I wish you
would.*

There are a thousand ironies concerning disability. For instance: one may well decide to live without thinking about being "cured". This is an important position because one can get stuck on a medical model merry-go-round of doctor visits and depressive subjectivity.

Continue reading “Project 3000”

The Unvarnished Truth

The price of milk is up 50 per cent over last year. But heck, who expected that the price of "mystery meat" would go through the roof? Accordingly school lunch programs will now feed children bread and water. I kid you not. See today’s Today Show online. A school lunch official says that they are switching to flour products.

This schoolroom diet will of course be a good preparation for "later life" in this haunted nation.

Last night here in Iowa a "hog containment" facility exploded. Officials are unsure what caused the accident. I’m no agriculture wonk, but I can spell "methane". I prefer to think of this story in Dickensian terms: the hogs simply combusted spontaneously, so terrible was their lot.

American Airlines is back in the air today. Passengers can buy micro-packets of pretzels for 10 bucks. Correct change required.

Off now to garner faith among imaginary flowers…

S.K.

Dispatch From the Dog House

If you do not post a post about your anniversary before your spouse you are, well, a louse. Of excuses I have none. Did I forget it was my anniversary? No. Did I think the matter unimportant? Decidedly not. Am I a low down, un-uxorious varmint? Decidedly.

Now what’s to be done? First, crawl ever so stealthily from the canine shanty and cook her breakfast.

It’s a good thing we’re still in love. Imagine the omelet otherwise.

S.K.

Happy Anniversary!

Now why do you suppose my husband would post to the blog today and not
mention that today is our 10th Anniversary? Honey, as Ricky Ricardo
would say to Lucy: "you’ve got some splainin’ to do…"

Here we are on our wedding day, April 11, 1998. Steve and I are pictured with my son, Ross, then 9 and my daughter, Tara, 11 1/2. We were married in Jamaica where we took a "family-moon" and stayed at a Beaches Resort in Ocho Rios. Oh, what memories!

I wish I could say we are there again today, celebrating our 10th, but instead Steve and I are here in cold, windy, wet Iowa City. Never mind. We’re just as happy here as anywhere else. Just wish Ross and Tara were here with us…

Happy Anniversary to my dear husband!

"Happy marriages begin when we marry the one we love, and they blossom when we love the one we married." — Sam Levinson

Channel Surfing

Geraldo Rivera; Donald Trump;

Charles Colson; Forest Gump;

Ibuprofen; foaming goo;

Sunday sermon; tar shampoo;

Dagwood Bumstead; W. Bush;

Mystery meats; baby’s tush;

Higher Ed; window shade;

Rainbow trout; Dennis Quaid;

Dental Hygiene; Je m’appelle "Joe";

Alka Seltzer; Edgar Poe;

Ersatz Shakespeare; "fungal toe!"

S.K.

Personism, Affirmed

It was Frank O Hara pointed out

You could just as well use the phone

As write poetry—solo instruments

Being equal. Bell, A.G.

Discovered the telephone

Hoping to find a machine

For the deaf—his bride

Couldn’t hear him;

Think of that first gizmo

As a sort of love poem…

I wish most days

I could describe how the phone works.

About poetry

We have all said too much—

The best of us know

We shouldn’t try to explain things

Now Spring has come.

S.K.