Category: Uncategorized

Believing in Ars Poetica

There's a breeze coming from the sea of my childhood. There is heat at mid-day and mail arrives. And I have chance meetings with the people I should know better. A live story is sung in my head. I am not certain about much else. Thinking of Tolstoi who said poetry should infect the reader, silly I think, a metaphor from the age when germs were new–but yes, there's something going around.

Essay: Disability Balloon Animals

I was in New York's Central Park and a very green man was twisting equally green balloons into animals. It was St. Patrick's Day and hundreds of green clad adults and children were about.

I didn't buy a balloon animal. I didn't even linger. I was in a hurry to cross Fifth Avenue before they closed it off.

Something happened to me over the course of the day. I thought of the balloon man as a kind of Pythagoras, who understood early in the morning just how the day would progress. All day, jammed in the crowds were wheelchair users, people with canes, elderly people. And their forms were struggling to unfold.

Essay: Disability and the Syllables

Hearing is a syllable, and gravity, balance–all fit inside words. Sight fits there like the string at the center of a ball, fits so tightly you'd think the ball is made of wood, like an old fashioned toy. And all the nerves are sparking in the hiccup of an instant–maybe not enough for a vowel, but a clotted thing at the back of the throat will do. Notice how crows land on the telephone line.

What Writers Will Tell You These Days

A friend of mine recently tried to invite Barbara Ehrenreich to speak at the college where he teaches and she demanded $25,000. This same friend reports that another writer demanded fresh cut flowers in his room. Yet another said he wouldn’t answer questions or meet with students. All asked for fat five figure honorariums.

I asked a novelist to come to Syracuse to help us brainstorm about developing a creative writing program for young people with disabilities. “Call my agent,” she said. We were standing about 14 inches from each other.

Something has happened in literary land–a predatory and mercenary cash cow entitlement scene has evolved and with it the erosion of genuine noblesse oblige.

I am not better than other people, but I’m not a highway robber. Not yet. Not yet.

The Politics of Sight

There's an excellent article by David Sirota over at Salon which opens just so:

 

"Would Americans eat less meat, and would animals be treated more humanely, if slaughterhouses were made with glass walls and we all could see the monstrous killing apparatus at work? This is the query at the heart of Timothy Pachirat’s new book, “Every Twelve Seconds” — the title a reference to the typical slaughterhouse’s cattle-killing rate.

Before you think this is a column merely about food, recognize that Pachirat’s question isn’t (only) about the immorality of the cheeseburger you had for lunch. It’s about the larger phenomenon whereby modern society has reconstructed itself to hide so many horrific consequences from view.

Calling this the “politics of sight,” Pachirat’s blood-soaked experience inside a slaughterhouse spotlights only the most illustrative example of how we’ve divorced ourselves from the means of producing violence — and how, in doing so, we have made it psychologically easier to support such brutality. Sadly, billions of factory-farmed animals dying barbaric deaths are just one subset of casualties in that larger process."

I look forward to reading Timothy Pachirat's book, but can attest meantime that as a visually impaired person who travels widely, I'm struck almosty daily by how many sighted people are wandering around–in airports, on the street, you name the place–and seeing absolutely nothing. 

My take on this has always been that seeing nothing, when you can see, is an imperial habit, an assumption of your superior place in the world. These are the same people, who, seeing you approaching a door with a guide dog, precede you, and let the door slam in your face. 

 

 

Lucky Life

Well that's the title of a poem by Gerald Stern and a darned good poem it is, but I'm not thinking of Gerry Stern–though now that I've paused I can remember him telling a very entertaining story in Iowa City about how he deflected aggressive telephone calls from the credit bureau by telling them he wasn't Mr. Stern, but the piano tuner. Imagination is sometimes the old tin pail one puts under the leaking roof. As for me, I am in the mind of a lucky life because I have friends in the blogosphere and some of them actually take time out of their works and days to have dinner with me. I had dinner with Blue Girl (In a Red State) the other night, and I've had many a lively conversation over many a curious repast with my friend Lance Mannion (who met me in Iowa City when Reagan was fleecing the country the first time around). Ah, those were the days! I actually believed the nation would be smart enough to vote for Walter Mondale. 

Blue Girl told me she doesn't think people get wiser as they age–she used to think so, but now, well, look at the world. I mumbled something about emotional intelligence–if you have the capacity to see yourself, as though you're a character in a play–that is, see outside your subjective responses, then you have the type of irony that allows for wisdom. We got into a great conversation which veered toward post-industrial capitalism (which I believe is far more destructive than its predecessor since it demands buying as a principle of citizenship–George Bush after 9-11: "Just go out and shop.")

In order to be a citizen in PI Cap you have to spend. If you can't spend you belong in prison. Or else you should borrow from your parents, as Mitt Romney said yesterday, right here in Columbus, Ohio.  The heartlessness of Mitt Romney is only exceeded by his cluelessness. He's a good example of someone who doesn't get wiser as he gets older. He's also an example of someone who didn't inherit his father's compassion. Where did George Romney's compassion disappear to? It's a good question because it's the question that covers the entire GOP. Now we're back to PI Cap, since our current heartlessness (GOP style) has to do with the marriage of racism (disdain for LBJ's embrace of civil rights–packaged first by Nixon, then Reagan, and now wildly out of the can) with the disappearance of blue collar manufacturing jobs. George Romney could march for civil rights because he understood implicitly that minority workers were terrific, he saw them every day in the auto industry. George Romney wasn't threatened by people of color. PI Cap says that every person of color is dangerous, needs to be "dealt with" –hence the wild hatred of the GOP for Obama who is, after all, a Republican.

It's amazing to see the heartlessness bubbling over in this proud nation. I heard a Catholic priest talking about the same thing on one of the cable networks just the other day–I was jogging on a treadmill in the hotel here in Columbus and I heard a priest–a PRIEST–say that the GOP is pushing social darwinism on the nation.

We're living in creepy times.  I'm beginning to think I should rename my blog "Creepy Times" but someone has probably taken the title already. 

 

Here are the opening lines from Gerald Stern's poem:

 

Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors 
and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows. 
Lucky I don't have to wake up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, 
on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill overlooking 
Kuebler Brewery or the hill overlooking SS. Philip and James 
but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to. 

Each year I go down to the island I add 
one more year to the darkness; 
and though I sit up with my dear friends 
trying to separate the one year from the other, 
this one from the last, that one from the former, 
another from another, 
after a while they all get lumped together, 
the year we walked to Holgate, 
the year our shoes got washed away, 
the year it rained, 
the year my tooth brought misery to us all. 

 

Thanks to Blue Girl and Lance Mannion for posting me!

 

syracuse.com: NYS Comptroller circling back to audit CNY Developmental Disabilities Office

A story from syracuse.com:
NYS Comptroller circling back to audit CNY Developmental Disabilities Office
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Stephen Kuusisto
Director
The Renee Crown University
Honors Program
University Professor
Syracuse University