Category: Uncategorized

Local Radio in New Hampshire

The announcers are still your neighbors. They don’t know precisely how to pronounce “The Heifetz Institute” but they give it their best. They do know how to pronounce Winnipesaukee. They report with equal earnestness about Brownie Brewster’s victory in a kid’s athletic contest and the exploits of the Red Sox. It’s the earnest quality in their delivery that is so affecting. Local radio isn’t fully sanitized for your ingestion. Here’s to the Rotary annual lobster boil.

SK

Podcast Hell

I don't know what came over me. I clicked on a British website devoted to theology. Soon I was listening to an infantilizing lecture about God's plan, which as near as I could tell was and is all about remaining hidden from human beings because we are small. I tried to turn off the podcast but the button wouldn't work. Click. Click. And all the while this treacle voice telling me how tiny we are. Tiny and undeserving. So I did what all inestimable creatures must do: I went out into the world. I walked around. When I came back the podcast was over. But the voice lingered in memory. Tiny. Tiny. The colonizing Bishop. So sweet and so cold! 

 

S.K. 

Simpleton: An Essay

 

A friend of mine, a poet, wrote: How  do raindrops house all the components of a man or a woman?

I was alone all day. I was not of myself.

I wanted simple talk. There was no one in my vicinity.

The light of October was all about.

Jung said each of us has two souls.

I stood in my garden in the light that is so terribly insufficient.

I was helpless before the end of the day.

I traced the veins of the oak leaf that had fallen beside me.

“What an amateur you are,” I thought. “What a jester, talking to yourself in the raspberry bushes.”

“Lean your head on the larch, my boy…”

Think of D.H. Lawrence:

And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see:
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of
     things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so still
in the thunder air, all strangers to one another

as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden.

So I think to myself: to be a creature of moods is one thing; knowing what to do with them is another.

Ah, there’s the rub. Do moods have to be productive?

Must we go on and on as the children of Freud?

I am sad, or more accurately, “tender”.

This is simply a fact like a shoe horn or a dropped glove.

Garden sadness…

Robert Louis Stevenson to the wind:

“O you that are so strong and cold,

O blower, are you young or old?

Are you a beast of field and tree,

Or just a stronger child than me?”

 

Garden sadness is the stronger child.

 

I pull berries off a yew tree. Walk in a slow arc. Find that my lips are moving. What am I saying? Maybe I’m turning into a Victorian poet in her garden, say someone like Violet Fane? 

 

“Let me arise and open the gate,
to breathe the wild warm air of the heath,
And to let in Love, and to let out Hate,
And anger at living and scorn of Fate,
To let in Life, and to let out Death.”

By my yew tree I think of the Victorians and their fevers, poxes, how opening the gate of the garden is akin to opening the window of a sickroom and letting in the air of health as well as of heath—“to let in Life, and to let out Death” is really the poetics of Florence Nightingale.

The garden is a ruse; we hope to abjure thoughts of dying; but death appears there, has always appeared there.

“I want death to find me planting my cabbages,” said Montaigne.

And of course that’s where the old rummy will find you.

One thinks of Fernand Lequenne, the botanist who remarked:

 

“If you really want to draw close to your garden, you must remember
first of all that you are dealing with a being that lives and dies; like the
human body, with its poor flesh, its illnesses at times repugnant. One must
not always see it dressed up for a ball, manicured and immaculate.”

 

Understood this way, my garden is as melancholy as I am. My garden is young Werther. My garden is crazy. The poor thing. No wonder the wind is soughing in the unkempt willow. God help us, the whole world is a sallow and neurasthenic poet.

 

Silly. Talking in the garden, uttering old New England cliches:

“Bless the flowers and the weeds, my birds and bees.”

I was alone. I was not of myself.

It was a cold day. It was sharp in my heart. Come my love, my autumn garden, let us lie down together. It was sharp in our shared heart. O I was not of myself I tell you.

 

S.K.

Krugman's Dark Humor

There aren’t many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.

Yes, that's Paul Krugman in today's NY Times. One fair imagines that such humor is made possible because Mr. Krugman has his money in the Cayman Islands. Sorry. I'm a funny man but there's no humor in this situation at all. Those of us with disabilities are frightened to death. 

 

SK


Open Society

There’s a fine piece over at The Nation by Richard Sennett entitled “A Creditable Left” which proposes that progressives can gain lost ground in the U.S. by engaging with civil society rather than expending energy on electoral politics. Those of us who hail from historically marginalized positions know this is often true and I will add that civic engagement generally reveals and affirms progressive values, particularly at the local level.

One reason for this is that when they’re not watching television Americans are (for the most part) fair minded and generous. I remember a town hall meeting some years ago in Worthington, Ohio where the issue of installing two talking crosswalk signs for the blind was under discussion. I had been invited to speak as a disability advocate and I pointed out that since the town was using federal money to upgrade the crosswalks, a request to install talking street signs was actually a reasonable accommodation under the ADA–my point was that in essence installing these signs was not only the right thing to do, it was also required. I think I also made a reference to the old Fram oil filter commercial where the mechanic says “You can pay me now or pay me later.” In the vernacular I was telling the city council to “just get her done.”

An interesting thing happened when a firebrand malcontent (who was obviously a familiar figure at the council meetings) stood up and began haranguing the representatives about how entirely inappropriate it was for the town to be spending his tax dollars on street signs for blind people. It’s hard to capture just how venomous this guy was but I can attest he was the human equivalent of the famous Burgundy Goliath Bird Eating Tarantula of Venezuela. (The largest and meanest spider in the world.)

He tried to argue that a survey should be done to ascertain just how many blind people lived in their town.

I pointed out that civil rights laws don’t work that way. One doesn’t survey how many black people are in your town before segregating the public school, etc.

He tried to argue that a talking street sign would keep his children awake–his house was just a few steps away from main street.

I pointed out that his house was just a few steps away from the fire station. Did he really propose having no fire engines?

In any event, the town unanimously adopted the talking street signs. And Spider-Cum-Tea Party-Man went home as antisocial and poisonous as ever.

I shouldn’t generalize. I’ve had my share of local defeats. But never because people lacked decency. Fear will trump the common cause; people will vote down a new elementary school because they don’t want their taxes raised, and what the hell, their children are no longer of school age; locals will vote down a levee for the library–but not forever. Fear has a half life. Decency does not.

The Tea Party is not really a local phenomena and therein lies its true weakness.

S.K.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Try to Remember Some Mercy

The following comes to us via http://www.InclusionDaily.com and we pass it along.

 

Blind Vermont Law School Student Sues Bar Examiners Over Test Accommodation
(Washington Post)
July 11, 2011

MONTPELIER, VERMONT– [Excerpt] Deanna Jones says she might like to devote her legal career to representing people with disabilities. But it appears she'll have to win her own fight first. 

The 44-year-old Vermont Law School student, who is blind, is suing the National Conference of Bar Examiners and the Act Inc. testing company, saying they aren't providing the accommodations she needs in order to take the legal ethics exam all lawyers must take before they practice in Vermont and most other states. 

Those accommodations — two pieces of computer software that help the visually impaired read — enable Jones to work at her best and have been key to the high B average she's maintained as a law student, she said. 

Trouble is, the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination is still administered as a pencil-and-paper exam: no computers, so no computer software allowed.

Her lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Burlington, put it this way: "Unless Ms. Jones takes the MPRE in an electronic format with Kurzweil 3000 and ZoomText screen access software, her results will not accurately reflect what the examination purports to measure, but will instead reflect her impaired sensory and processing skills."

Entire article:
Blind Vermont Law School student sues bar examiners over test accommodation
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2011/red/0711c.htm