Author: stevekuusisto

Today I talked with my students at the University of Iowa about Mary Shelley’s novel "Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus". The course is called: "Disability in Contemporary Literature and Theory".

Some days when I walk into a classroom I decide to throw away my lesson plan and try something different. I asked the class to think of Mary Shelley’s novel as being a kind of cookbook. (We all know it’s a "Gothic" novel. (In a prior class we talked about the early "Romantics" and their place in British social and intellectual history.)

I wondered aloud if today’s students even read cookbooks. "I mean," I said, "I mean you are all from the microwaveable food generation."

But my students are from Iowa and God Bless Them; they have all read at least one cookbook.

"What if," I asked them, "Mary Shelley’s novel can be read as a recipe for how to make a disabled person?"

Here is what the class came up with:

Recipe: "How to Create a Disabled Person"

Ingredients:

A hundred human parts

Equal portions dread and hubris

At least 1 "mad scientist"

Needle and thread

Science without ethics

Next:

Throw big switch (otherwise known as vast, industrial gizmo)

Once disabled person "comes to life" do the following:

Make certain the "DP" can’t have access to language

Deny that the "DP" exists

Refuse to let the "DP" have a husband or wife.

Stigmatize the "DP" because he or she looks very different from the rest of the children.

And while you’re doing all of this, tell everyone you meet that you’re a very advanced thinker…

S.K.

Of course, to put this "creature" together, we’ll need BOLTS

I have ten minutes til the bus gets here.  I can’t tell if it’s going to be a hot day or a cool one.  I will either be over dressed or under dressed. I will likely be late for something.  I will certainly spill ketchup on my shirt.  I will track dog waste into the conference room.  I will press the wrong buttons on the elevator.  I will get lost in an ordinary neighborhood.  I will sing all day under my breath that old standard: "Eating Goober Peas".  I really did wake up this morning with that song in mind.  I was dreaming about that song.  I was trying to sing it in my sleep.  Thank God for the Unconscious!

Here I go…

SK

I was walking in the rain when it came to me: the umbrella was probably the first ever disability accommodation. Now stay with me: a hat is just a status symbol—"always was"—kings wore hats and papal retainers, etc. Roman centurions…But the average ancient schmuck didn’t have a hat. (Have you ever seen a picture of a caveman with a hat? I thought not.)

So let’s say that for the majority of human kind’s time on earth only .0005 percent of the tribe had headgear. This is a conservative estimate. There should probably be another couple zeros in there.

As always, there’s an argument about who first invented the umbrella. There’s usually a dispute about the origins of anything that’s held dear by the citizenry. The Russians claim to have invented baseball long before Abner Doubleday. Everyone knows that the Chinese invented pasta but no one knows why they invented it since they didn’t have Romano cheese. I digress…

Throughout most of human history the vast majority of people have had to walk places in the rain and without hats.

Think about it: the umbrella (which was probably first constructed from a failed attempt to make bagpipes…) was the first "thing" that made up for a human design flaw. Unless you were the king or the pope or a Roman centurion you weren’t born with a hat.

Like all reasonable accommodations the umbrella inconveniences nearly everyone.

Don’t kid yourself. The bumbershoot is our prosthesis.

"Why," you ask, "is walking hatless in the rain a disability?"

Because it causes uncontrollable mumbling and direction loss.

Of course if you have to ask the question you need to get out of the castle more often.

S.K.

I have a friend who is "hard of hearing" or perhaps, in certain instances she is "deaf" and depending on the further circumstances, she is sometimes "big D Deaf" and sometimes she’s "little D deaf".

I can easily identify with her because I’m totally blind in many environments and then in other situations I have a vague visual sense of my surroundings and I never know from moment to moment what will happen.

My hard of hearing friend who is sometimes one or two kinds of deaf is adept at using American Sign Language and sometimes she uses "real time captioning" or special hearing aids.

One thing she never uses is the telephone.

If people leave messages on her office phone she doesn’t know it. She has a message that says "don’t leave a message because I can’t hear" but people do it anyway.

I got to wondering this morning if these people who leave my friend messages on the answering machine are the same people who put the Braille on drive up bank machines?

I suppose they’re also the same people who say, when I ask for directions, "over there" and point.

And these people water their lawns, even in the rain.

I can sort of understand how people who want to give me directions will say, out of habit, "over there" and point with habituation. This is an ingrained habit.

But who leaves a voice message on an answering machine when the greeting says, "I can’t hear so please send me an e-mail"?

Do they say things like: "Oh, can’t hear me huh?  Well good, let me tell you where I stashed the keys to my husband’s Jaguar now that I’m leaving him.  They’re under an industrial wheat threshing machine just north of Ottumwa."

Or maybe they say: "I’m the Empress Alexandra and I’ve been living for 70 years inside a replica of an 18th century British warship, eating hardtack in a scullery closet."

I don’t know.

I do know that leaving a voice mail message for someone who has identified herself as big or little d deaf is like sewing seed after the Romans have marched through your country.

It’s like painting a battleship with a jeweler’s brush.

It’s like the thing I do when I walk into a room and talk to empty space because I don’t know that the person I’m looking for has left.  I just talk.  And when I figure out that there’s no one there I say, "And don’t you forget it."

But at least I can claim ignorance.

Leaving a voice message for someone who tells you the enterprise is pointless is totally weird.

I’d say the act is "passive aggressive" but it’s too stupid to be passive aggression.  The act is "sub-Cartesian" by which I mean:" If I don’t think, maybe I don’t really exist."

"Nuff said?

S.K.

One of the worst things that can happen to a writer, especially if she or he is associated with a college or university, is the possibility that the writer in question–(hereafter known as the WIQ) will start to believe that credentials and a beefy CV are intrinsically significant beyond the narrow walls of higher education.

Some of America’s best writers never went to college and they were no worse the wear for that. Later on, those same uneducated poets found themselves teaching at colleges, largely because there have always been a few progressive professors of English throughout the ages who implicitly realized that having Robert Frost or Kenneth Rexroth on the faculty was a shrewd move.

Still, though I am a writer who teaches, I love Kenneth Rexroth’s characterization of the university as "a fog factory". (Rexroth taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara but he meant "the university at large").

My dad was a college president and he used to say that higher education is hamstrung by its fidelity to what he liked to call "late medieval deviance" by which he meant that colleges are the direct descendents of monasteries which were in part constructed because of primogeniture–that is, there weren’t enough farms to go around so plenty a late medieval boy had to go to the monastery since he couldn’t find a niche anyplace else.

My dad was a funny man. He had private nicknames for the quarrelsome faculty members that he had to listen to over and over again in what must surely have been nearly unendurable faculty meetings. I remember that one professor in particular (who never supported any initiative as far as is known) earned the title: "the singing capon".

WIQ are all too often impressed by their academic rankings, titles, affiliations, publishing bibliographies, not to mention the conferences they’ve attended and the fellowships and awards they’ve received.

I fear that far too many of them fail to get out of the fog factory long enough to experience or endure the actual lives of their fellow citizens.

I was talking last night with my friend Gary who met his wife Lorraine in Manhattan while they were both volunteering in a Catholic soup kitchen.

I seldom see American writers in my rounds visiting non-profit organizations that provide relief for disabled citizens.

A few years ago I tried to convince some academic writers that it would be a fine thing to develop a summer writing program for teenagers who have disabilities much like the programs for teens offered by organizations like the Dodge Poetry Festival.

The look of horror on the WIQ’sfaces was palpable even to a blind writer with a speck of something like seeing.

But I can tell you without hesitation that the best thing I ever heard in a poetry class was a poem by a blind and deaf teen from Ethiopia who worked with a laptop that had a refreshable Braille display and in turn had a human translator by his side.

He wrote a true "out of the body" lyric that involved riding the spines of other animals.

I think it’s really really good to get out of the "fog factory"  once in awhile.

S.K.

Always there is someone who will tell you to get in line. In the American idiom "get in line" means to adopt the prevailing point of view. We also like to say: "get in step" and by contrast, when referring to someone who doesn’t reflect the majority’s conventional wisdom–"he’s out of step with America."

I’ve always found this dross of Americana hard to square with the revolutionary independence of mind that is best signified by the phrase: "Don’t Tread on Me."

As I grow older I sense that there’s a terrible problem within the disability advocacy community.

In the field of Disability Studies we call this problem the "defective people industry" and what this means is that there are venerable organizations and points of view both public and private that depend on the status quo. This phenomenon can take many shapes:

Continue reading “Down on the Farm”