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By now everyone knows that the French killed literature. They did it the old fashioned way: they held it in their arms and kissed it. It was, of course, a liberal kiss, tasting of cigarettes and coffee. But it was a liberal kiss nonetheless which means it had method behind it. Shall we explain further? Perhaps. But first we must tell you that love, true love, a committed love is simply a lie. Darling you must add it to all the other lies: justice, fashion, memories, motherhood and religion. (I am not French so I’ve left a few out.)
Anyway,here’s how you smother literature the French way:

1. Read Freud as a cookbook. Repression is desire frustrated by bad translations–all desires must be cooked with ever complicated recipes. The more complicated and frustrated you are the better. This is not your grandfather’s sponge cake.

2. In the backwards colonial algebra of equilibration, imagine that bad domestic ideas are equal to bad foreign policy. The battle of Algiers is akin to the devaluation of the ideas of the Enlightenment. That is, people are greedy and cruel because they’ve lost faith in language. This is of course not a political idea though it looks like one. Killing literature depends on the appearance of an idea, but not the possession of a true principle. This is very important but never say it.

3. The above means that you pretend to economic justice as an idea, but you don’t analyze as Marx did, the means of production, rather you take up language and decry its potential for honesty–this is the Derridean paradox. If clarity is impossible, nay, suspect, than in effect, and cynically enough, everything is equal. As William Gass once put it: “Culture has completed its work when everything is a sign.” To this we can add: “A culture without wonder.”

4. Killing literature depends on killing astonishment. And the more hieratic you can be with this principle the more Quislings you will convert.

**

I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’ve let myself become entrapped in administration–a matter that can make one feel like Boris Gudinov, both honest and cruel, just and duplicitous. But I’m trying to work my way back to the good table whereon rests the good tea pot.

My sister who is a doctor and who is studying acupuncture reports that according to Chinese medicine the liver doesn’t like windy days. And the spleen doesn’t like cold water. The latter fact if it is a fact is the reason they serve hot tea in Chinese restaurants. Tea makes the spleen happy.

Judging by this, Samuel Johnson was a happy man.

And he certainly believed that words had efficacy.

**

If you are a commenter on this blog, please note that in order to defeat spamming I’ve had to turn on the “approve comments” feature. I’ve been bombarded with junk and this is the only way I can prevent it. I promise not to edit your comments at all. No post-structuralist I.

Hot tea for everyone.

S.K.

Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express:

COPAA: Senate’s IEP Provision Strips Away Protections From Restraints And Seclusion Bill
(Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, Inc.)
October 26, 2010

WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt] On September 29, 2010, Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) introduced S. 3895 to address abuse through the use of restraints, seclusion and aversive interventions in schools. It is well-documented that the use of restraint and seclusion in schools is neither effective nor therapeutic. Instead, it is mentally and physically abusive. Thousands of cases of restraint and seclusion occur in our nation’s schools annually, often with tragic results, including the death of children.

COPAA is appreciative of Senator Dodd and Senator Burr’s efforts to pass a bill in the Senate that sets forth minimum standards for states to protect children from what has historically been the unacceptable use of these methods and set up a structure to prevent future abuse. However, we have grave concern regarding the provision that allows restraint and seclusion as planned interventions, and believe the current bill language weakens parents’ and children’s existing rights.

COPAA supported the provisions as passed in HR 4247. We continue to support the need for a federal bill and minimum standards, and we are sensitive that some view passage of a Federal bill establishing minimal standards as a formidable step forward for many States.

Unfortunately, despite the many important provisions and minimum standards in S. 3895, the current draft of the bill permits inclusion of restraint and locked seclusion (defined as alone in a room or space from which a child is unable to exit, as a planned intervention in IEPs [Individualized Education Plans], behavior intervention plans or safety plans for students who have a documented history of behavior within the past two years that has created an imminent danger of serious bodily injury). This language weakens protections under IDEA, could allow important decisions to be made outside of the IEP process, will increase use of restraint and seclusion, and will diminish parent and student rights.

Entire article:
COPAA Expresses Grave Concern Over S. 3895
http://www.copaa.org/news/s3895.html

You ask why the airlines are so hopeless about disabilities? Perhaps it’s because they view taking the time to properly train flight attendants about disability etiquette as a waste of their money. After all, treating the larger public like cockroaches seems to be working out just fine.

From Inclusion Daily:

American Airlines Tells Blind Passenger To Give Up Cane
(KDKA)
October 22, 2010

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA– [Excerpt] A blind man was told if he tried to use his cane he’d be removed from a flight and arrested and now he’s asking for an apology.

Bill Diamond is legally blind and sees nothing from his left eye and shadows from his right eye. He lost his sight 15 years ago due to diabetes.

He’s a Navy veteran and spent 13 years in the service. It was on a recent trip to a special veterans school in Chicago to learn how to use a talking computer where he ran into real trouble on an American Airlines flight.

Diamond caught his flight to Chicago out of Pittsburgh. He was brought to the plane in a wheelchair. He got on board using his cane and was told he had to give it up even though it was folded up.

Entire article:
Blind Man Asked To Fly Without Cane On American Airlines Flight
http://kdka.com/local/blind.man.flight.2.1971310.html

From the Inclusion Daily Express:

Amusement Park Rejects Advocates’ Plea To Stop Negative Portrayals
(Sandusky Register)
October 21, 2010

SANDUSKY, OHIO– [Excerpt] Call ’em crazy, but Cedar Point won’t alter or remove any of its attractions, despite a request from mental health advocates to do so.

A Cedar Point spokesman said “changes are not required.”

On Thursday, the National Alliance on Mental Illness asked the amusement park to immediately remove two offerings focusing on fictional mental health patients: Dr. D. Mented’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and The Edge of Madness: Still Crazy.

One is a haunted house, the other is a separate show.

The attractions promote the false stereotype that the public should fear mental health patients, the alliance said.

Entire article:
Cedar Point responds to mental health advocates: No changes to haunted houses
http://www.sanduskyregister.com/2010/oct/10/cpfollow100910xml
Related:
CP haunted asylum angers mental health advocates
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/1021d.htm

Read the following link about the soundtrack to Wretched and Jabberers.

S.K.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/10/wretches-jabberers-autism-j-ralph.html

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

The first thing I want you to do is go to this website:

http://www.wretchesandjabberers.org/mobile/

I am lucky today to be in Burlington, VT for the premiere of Gerry Wurzburg’s new film: “Wretches and Jabberers”–a film that follows the travels of two non-speaking autistic men from Vermont as they circle the globe to meet other autistic people who communicate by typing.

The title of the film comes from an observation by one of the autistic “stars” of the movie, a young Finnish activist named Antti who declares in a memorable scene in a Helsinki cafe that the world can be divided into two camps: those who see people with autism as “wretches” and the wretches themselves who see “normate” people as “jabberers”.

The observation is provocative, politically incorrect, sharp and smart. The “Jabberers” talk without taking thought for what they say, speak automatically, and by turns their thinking, especially about disabilities is largely flip and uninformed. The “Jabberers” think that autistic people are wretches. Why not then be a self styled politically awake and poetically aware “wretch”?

Why not indeed.

(The Finnish word for wretch is an old one by the way–it appears many times in The Kalevala. A wretch is someone who is suffering outrageous bad fortune and all alone, typically lost in a dark forest.)

As a blind person I know all too well that the general “able bodied” population thinks that people with disabilities are barely on the human railroad. (Just check out how few of us pwds are employed here in the United States or abroad).

Poetry comes from a great distance to reach the page. All poets know this. Each word is as old and strange as a sea shell or the tooth of a mastadon. Words are as magical as the alphabet itself. Imagine if you can how astonished the first readers were when they saw how letters could be combined into diamonds, moon beams, eye lashes, the hooves of horses. Language is pregnant with dream stuff and body stuff we can scarcely exhaust in a thousand lifetimes. This is why we love poetry so. And its why we return to people like Antonio Machado or Cesar Vallejo or Basho. Poetry reminds us that every instance of being alive is stranger and more interesting than you may have thought. Words are surprise engines. Words are the tickets to the unconscious. Words are pure love when they come to the page from a great distance.

We could argue that “jabberers” don’t write poetry.

For all too long now, the jabberers have believed that people with autism who are not speaking or who are not conventional speakers are devoid of substantive intellectual lives and talents. We are lucky to be living in an age when these dreadful presumptions are on the wane. They are of course not on the wane “fast enough” and I put that in quotes because its too easy to type it without quotes and because if you’re an autistic person who is brilliant and who needs to type to get your words across you need a world that understands this, celebrates it, conceives of it as part of the human railway.

This film is rich, not just for its narrative of autistic travel but for its discovery of a worldwide “battalion” of young autistic activists who need not only to share their stories but who also need a worldwide revolution in understanding about their culture.

It’s the latter term that really makes the “Jabberers” nervous. There are tons of education department exceptionalists and autocratic behavioral psychologists who have staked their careers on the notion that non-speaking autistic people are not talented or reachable or smart on the inside. The very idea that autistic people can learn to type, first with help, then later quite often independently is still a troubling idea to the more conservative elements in education circles, or some circles.

But I know poetry when I find it. Always have. The stars of this film are poets, philosophers, activists, spiritual, funny, sad, desperate, alive and ready for a world stage.

They have named me an honorary wretch.

I can’t tell you how proud this makes me.

See this film when it comes anywhere near you.

S.K.

Burlington, VT

By Andrea Scarpino

My dearest friend on the phone, telling me her 17-year-old daughter was in a car crash. Another girl was dead. Her daughter was airlifted to a Trauma II hospital. Severe brain injury. Coma. Broken back. Broken neck. This is why we invented prayer, another friend said. To have a sense of control, action, power in times of utter powerlessness.

I don’t normally believe that a higher power listens in to my desires. I don’t believe in an afterlife, in a heaven, a place where good souls go and bad souls long to be. I don’t believe in burning fires. I don’t believe that any one of us is born saved or damned. And push come to shove, I don’t believe the universe cares about any one of us. It’s just out there, doing its thing.

But with my friend’s voice on the phone, with her daughter’s picture in my hand, I prayed. To anyone or anything who would listen. I imagined her daughter bathed in blue healing light. Imagined her brain repairing itself, finding new connections. Her body bathing her brain in oxygen. With each breath, I reminded her how strong she is—a skater, an athlete. Told myself youth was on her side. I called my mother and asked her to pray. Called my step-mother. For the first time in decades, I kneeled beside my bed, clasped my hands in front of me, and begged, pleaded for recovery. This is the time for even atheists to pray, another friend said. I agreed. Blue healing light. Deep breaths. I repeated her name like a mantra, repeated, You are so strong. Over and over, You are so brave.

Then more news came: a follow-up MRI showed irreversible and widespread brain damage, no chance of recovery. This girl I’ve known since she was 4 years old, who I babysat, took to ballet, who squished her feet under my legs when she slept. Who wrote poetry, was incredibly sensitive to the world, loved her friends, her brother and sister, her family. Who painted her bedroom by hand, had beautiful hair and soulful eyes, who ended her texts to me with a smiley face. This girl.

So as my dear friend disconnected her daughter from life support, I sat with candles lit, a photograph. Zac and I told stories, held each other’s hands. I wished my friend strength, wished her daughter wouldn’t suffer. I asked her to go quickly, told her she could come back to visit any time but now, she needed to go. I thought about the lyrics to one of her favorite songs. An hour passed. As we each sent up one final wish and blew out the candles, I thought, again and again, I’ll follow you into the dark.

Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at http://www.andreascarpino.com

 

“Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved. Many policemen and narcotics agents are precisely addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk, I call it—rightness; they’re right, right, right—and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms. The picture we get of the whole Russian bureaucracy, people who are exclusively preoccupied with power and advantage, this must be an addiction. Suppose they lose it? Well, it’s been their whole life.”

 

–interview, The Paris Review 1965

The following excerpt is from Inclusion Daily:

 

Passenger: Airline Said I Needed A Companion To Fly
(Peter Greenberg Worldwide)
October 15, 2010
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN– [Excerpt] The airline industry has caused controversy over “too fat to fly” policies this year, but after US Airways booted a man last month for being “too disabled to fly,” it might find a new debate brewing.

Johnnie Tuitel, a motivational speaker with cerebral palsy, says a US Airways gate agent escorted him off a flight from West Palm Beach to Kansas City because he was deemed “too disabled” to fly by himself.

According to Tuitel, after being helped onto the plane by a gate agent, he was later told that he would need to fly with a companion, since he was a danger to himself and others if an emergency were to occur.

Tuitel, who says he has flown more than 500,000 miles over the past couple of years to attend conferences and deliver speeches, was born with cerebral palsy and has been wheelchair-bound his entire life. Tuitel says this is the first time an airline has required him to fly with a companion.

Entire article:
Too Disabled To Fly? US Airways Boots Disabled Traveler
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/1015c.htm
Related:
Grand Rapids man with cerebal palsy removed from US Airways flight (WZZM)
http://www.wzzm13.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=135336&catid=2

Top of page

The National Association of Ableists, a focus group of the American Association of University Professors has announced that because students with disabilities are hard to see, it’s clear they no longer exist.

“We don’t provide classroom assistive technologies, we don’t teach our faculty anything about working with students with disabilities, our disability services are virtually impossible to find, we don’t have accessible facilities, we’re really doing a bang up job of eliminating disability from the world of human affairs!” said Denbar Flook, Professor of Cablevision Studies at Open Moat College in Stuckyville, Wisconsin.

“Now that there are no people with disabilities we can get back to the important business of training young minds to live in a lifeboat,” said Flook.

Flook who is himself 4 feet 2 inches tall says that inside himself he’s really big.

“If you think small, you’ll be small,” Flook says.

Flook doesn’t think his elevator shoes are a reasonable accommodation, instead preferring to think of them as a fashion statement.

 

S.K.