Category: Say It Ain’t So

The Memoir on Steroids

The New York Times reports that there is a new memoir scandal afoot in American publishing.

At issue is the discovery of what appears to be an entirely fictionalized memoir by a young woman who purported to have grown up in foster care and then to have lived a sub-rosa life among teen gangs in Los Angeles. Like the scandal involving James Frey’s notorious false memoir it turns out that this gangland narrative is simply fiction. 

As a teacher and writer of literary nonfiction I want to hold my head. My first instinct is to feel alarm for the art form that I love. Literary memoir is a genre that could be irreparably tarnished by repeated disclosures that something smells rotten in Denmark.

I worry especially because as a teacher I aim to encourage younger writers to write sophisticated and brave nonfiction. I worry because we live in an era when commercial publishing is in serious trouble. I fear that the avenues for the publication of autobiographical nonfiction could be significantly narrowed by the kind of malfeasance we’ve been seeing lately.

What’s worse in my view is that the “trouble” doesn’t lie with the genre. Though it’s tempting to blame “the memoir” in much the way we blame major league baseball for the steroid scandal, the problem doesn’t rest with the “game”—the difficulty lies in the demand for instantaneous and sensational profits.  Commercial publishing is driven today by a relentless, starving shark: a shark like all sharks—its momentum driven by sensation and the promise of instantaneous rewards.

It costs too much to run a baseball team or a publishing house nowadays. So you have to get a juiced up superstar to break a time honored record or you need a shocking and quasi-lurid book to make fast profits. Today’s corporate business model is entirely built on fast quarterly earnings.

Book publishing wasn’t always like this. In the good old days publishers could receive tax credits for the unsold books in the warehouse. But in the Reagan “go go 80’s” the tax laws were changed and publishers found that they couldn’t afford to keep books in print. In turn, the industry went from “publishing” to “producing”—and until the incentives are changed this is the way it will stay with literature and with baseball. 

Memoir isn’t the same thing as a Hollywood “kiss and tell” story. While an artful memoirist may disclose painful or disturbing facts about the personal past, the larger aim of literary consciousness is largely concerned with ambiguities of all kinds.

Another way to put this is that the true writer of memoir doesn’t overcome anything. A true memoir isn’t a self-help book any more than a poem is a manual on how to build a boat.

Yet in  commercial culture the Reagan go-go 80’s lead to the “Oprah 90’s” and both circumstances call for a tabloid friendly form of personal narrative—what I have come to call the “memoir on steroids” which, like the suspicious record keeping in baseball is entirely a function of fast profits.

No one would say that the memoirs of James Baldwin or Mark Twain or Mary McCarthy were sensational narratives about overcoming a singular and crippling one-sided misfortune.

Don’t blame the memoir for contemporary greed.

S.K.    

Crimes Against People with Disabilities

Crimes Against People with Disabilities: A brand new blog and A Place to Tell It Like It Is 

In 2002, Professor Mark Sherry, then at the University of California, published an intriguing article about the grievous underreporting of hate crimes against people with disabilities in the United States.

The most important dimension of this piece resides in the FBI’s
suggestion that hate crimes against the disabled are statistically
negligible. The findings of an accompanying study by the UC Berkeley’s
program in disability studies suggest that police and law enforcement
officials are often reluctant to categorize crimes against people with
disabilities as hate crimes because officers aren’t sufficiently
trained to identify biased based crimes. Additionally, it is easier to
classify a crime as simple assault.

Alas, not much has changed in the six years since this article was
published even though disability rights advocates have continued to
point out the seriousness of this underreporting problem.

The aim of this blog is to give people with disabilities and their
fellow advocates a place to publicly record narratives of abuse against
PWDs. These narratives might be first person accounts or associated
stories drawn from the news media or the internet. They might be links
to blogs or links to announcements concerning public policy and law
enforcement initiatives aimed at addressing these problems. Other posts
might include articles or bibliographies about these issues.

Above all
else it’s safe to say that the gathering of this information will be
timely.

Cross-posted on Blog [with]tv

How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up?

If you ever wonder about what it’s like to be blind or visually impaired I can attest that the story below is “legion”.  Both blindness and low vision are poorly understood by the general public.  I personally have been mocked by service employees in almost every kind of setting from airports to restaurants to hotels, bus stations, you name it.  Our hats are off to Alice Camarillo.  She is fighting for everyone on the Planet of the Blind.

S.K. 

The following article is forwarded to you by the DBTAC-Great Lakes ADA Center

New York Daily News (New York, NY)
February 9, 2008

Fast food employees mocked a blind woman who needed help reading menu
BY THOMAS ZAMBITO
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Continue reading “How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up?”

Oprah, If Only You Had Read the Book!

In 1998 I published a memoir entitled “Planet of the Blind” and much to my delight some good reviewers praised the book.  The memoir received strong reviews in The New York Times and USA Today and suddenly I was invited to be a guest on National Public Radio’s superb program “Talk of the Nation”.

This was heady stuff for a guy who had been writing poetry for 18 years.  In the poetry world you are very lucky if you have a hundred readers and let me tell you, 100 readers is pretty much beyond the wildest dreams of most of the talented and deserving poets I’ve met along the road.

Each time something good happened where the book was concerned my wife would say, jokingly, “Yeah, that’s great; just let me know when Oprah calls”  We would chuckle about that.

The reason we’d laugh about Oprah is that “Planet of the Blind” is not the kind of book that haunts the bestseller lists.  The book isn’t lurid; it’s not angry; it doesn’t even have much of a plot.  In fact it’s such an odd book that it’s difficult to describe.  It’s in part a history of blindness in America and part a “coming of age” story by a writer who largely grew up feeling ashamed of his blindness.  The story isn’t particularly unusual and even worse from a sales standpoint; I have an addiction for big words. 

Continue reading “Oprah, If Only You Had Read the Book!”

Still

As written by Simi Linton:

Definitions of the word “blind” found in my computer’s Thesaurus
support the idea that blindness limits . The terms ignorant,
imperceptive, insensitive, irrational, oblivious, obtuse, random, rash,
stagger, unaware, unconscious, uncontrolled, unknowing, unplanned and
violent came up on my screen. My Roget’s Thesaurus also provided
inattentive and purposeless. These meanings lurk under the surface when
the word “blind” is used whether on its own, or in pairings, in such
phrases as “blind passion”, “blind rage”, “blind justice”, “blind
drunk” and “blind faith”.

How can the culture get away with attaching such an absurd
proliferations of meanings to a condition that affects, simply, visual
acuity? Of all the impairments, blindness seems to call up the most
fantastical of responses. These are used, uncritically and without
apparent irony by many and often.

Read Simi’s post in its entirety:  Blind Blind People and Other Spurious Tales

The Wheelchair Runningback

Alright, I admit that I haven’t had enough coffee. Accordingly there are cobwebs in my belfry. But here’s the thing: I go to bed with a disability and when I wake up I still have it. And in turn this means that even in the half awake-half asleep intersection, the state that Edgar Alan Poe admired, I am still blind. I am blind when counting backwards by sevens. I’m blind when I watch the TV.

The experience of disability is invariably the “half-awake-half asleep” World view of Edgar Alan Poe: at once terrifying, revealing, darkly beautiful, unforeseen, foreseeable, sacred and profane, you name it. Disability defies our notion of stable space both in physical and metaphysical terms. Disability is the sore thumb of a saint: it reveals where culture must go if society will be just. And yes, people aren’t ready for it.

I remember being in a meeting some years ago with administrators whose job it was to provide services for the blind. The meeting had something to do with hum drum budgetary matters. I was the only blind person in the group. Everyone was talking about the legal battle between Casey Martin, a professional golfer who had sued the Professional Golfer’s Association over the right to use a golf cart during PGA sanctioned golf matches. Casey Martin won the right to use a motorized cart as a means of getting from one tee to another—a right that was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices agreed with Martin’s assertion that his disability didn’t prevent him from hitting a golf ball and they disagreed with the PGA’s assertion that allowing Casey Martin to ride from one spot to another would fundamentally alter the nature of the game. I agreed with the Supreme Court on that occasion and I was surprised by the evident distress of the other men in the meeting. They felt that allowing Casey Martin to ride in a golf cart from one fairway to another would radically destroy professional golf.

Continue reading “The Wheelchair Runningback”

Say It Ain't So! CNN: Mother Seeks Girl's Womb Removal

Oh No.  Here we go again.  This article was brought to my attention via a link from Femineste who already has quite a string of comments in response.  Check them out. 

Apparently the "Ashley Treatment" debate had not made it’s way across the Atlantic Ocean.  At least there is no indication of such in this CNN article: Mother Seeks Girl’s Womb Removal

Follow the link and you find these "Story Highlights"

  • Mother seeks to have womb of severely disabled daughter, 15, removed
  • Briton wants to prevent cerebral palsy sufferer feeling pain of menstruation
  • UK doctors seek legal advice to see if they can perform hysterectomy 
  • Charity for disabled says move could infringe human rights

Perhaps before a definitive decision is made on behalf of this young lady who they claim has no say, all parties might want to consult with Anne McDonald.  Granted, the mother seeking to remove her daughter’s uterus is not talking about a "growth attenuation" procedure.  But where does one draw the line?

Brace yourselves for another round of, shall I say, "spirited" debate.

~ Connie

Here goes:

"Ashley’s Back" by Emma;
UK Mom seeks hysterectomy for daughter with CP by Wheelie Catholic;
We Do Know Better by Penny L. Richards;
Another Assault on Human Rights by David

Tragic update as of today, October 10, 2007: "Doctor at center of stunting debate kills himself"