Category: Uncategorized

 

“Why are you taking us to the cemetery, Professor?”

I remember D.H. Lawrence saying: “I like to try new things so I can reject them.”

“So you can see how the Victorians pictured their place in history,” I said.

I was with 9 students from Ohio State.

Ravens were sitting atop Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s tomb.

“They buried him with a little bell, in case he should wake up and need rescuing,” I said.

“Karl Marx didn’t get a little bell, and you’ll notice there are no birds on his tomb.” I said.

“George Eliot doesn’t have any birds either, and look, her tomb is sinking. That’s because they buried her with all her books.” I said.

“How do you know her tomb is sinking if you can’t see?” asks a girl.

“Because I read,” I said.

You could hear a day laborer spading up wet earth beside a fallen stone.

 

 

S.K.

I’ve borrowed the following abbreviated definitions of disability, that is, disability understood as a sequence of models—that is not a static position at all—from an entry by Deborah Kaplan, Director of the World Institute on Disability. Her full remarks can be found at The Center for an Accessible Society. The nuanced analysis of disability allows us to see that it is a variegated and polysemous construction, and can be understood to encompass: 

 

A medical model of disability which regards disability as a defect or sickness which must be cured through medical intervention;

A rehabilitation model, an offshoot of the medical model, which regards the disability as a deficiency that must be fixed by a rehabilitation professional or other helping professional; and

The disability model, under which "the problem is defined as a dominating attitude by professionals and others, inadequate support services when compared with society generally, as well as attitudinal, architectural, sensory, cognitive, and economic barriers, and the strong tendency for people to generalize about all persons with disabilities overlooking the large variations within the disability community."

 

In general terms these descriptions serve as a starting point for useful conversations about disability which ought to be understood not as a condition of bodies but as an offshoot of cultural thinking. In many cases the latter is marked by some rather old assumptions.

Most of this blog’s readers are familiar with this puzzle, many of them are, like me, living that puzzle. Many of them are alertly, day by day building lives of evident accomplishments with or in spite of disabilities; many are still misunderstood when they’re on street. “How do you know when you dog has made a poopy?” asks a woman. And one wants to say, “Well I have an advanced degree Madame.” Mostly one winces. Moreover, one says something benign: “They teach you about that at the Guide Dog School”.

Reading my friend Andrea Scarpino’s post below I was reminded (or more properly, re-reminded, and isn’t there a better word than this?) that the general public, liberal or conservative, rich or poor, educated or not, doesn’t understand disability “a wit” and that’s a great shame—especially when, as Andrea’s post shows, the incomprehension of disability is tied to very low expectations of what people with disabilities are all about.

I used to think that the problems regarding disability and the public eye had a great deal to do with the medical model and/or the rehabilitation model alluded to above. But more often now I sense a fealty or dark fidelity between the broadcast media and magazine industry, a kind of “know nothing” stance toward disabled people that reintroduces the twin dynamics of “miracle cure” and “heroic determination” as the only ways to talk about profound physical differences. And that’s a shame since most of us can’t be cured and heroism is a category of human imagination that doesn’t fit into daily life very well. And the media doesn’t like to talk about character and steadfastness and patience and hard internal work, the work that goes on inside a man or woman.

I remain convinced that Oprah Winfrey has done more damage to real people with disabilities than almost a hundred years of mediocre doctors. Her support for Jenny McCarthy with her “cure for autism” cheapness (here I’m borrowing Frank Zappa’s sense of the word) is just the latest in Oprah’s silly, uncomprehending tricked out chatter about people with disabilities. I think a show about the character of real people with real autism who by turns exemplify marvels of temperament and imagination would be worth watching.

 

Okay. That’s me. Here I am, tonight and blogging after a long day of creative work. I’m ready for some new stories and a newer media. Even doctors get what I’m talking about.

 

S.K. 

 

 

The photo above was taken last evening just around sunset by the playwright Craig Lucas.

 

S.K.  

 

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

I’m a pretty big fan of the Planet of the Blind blog, and include my correspondent status in my bio for readings and poem publications. In the past year that I’ve been blogging, I’ve had many people comment and ask questions about it. One person introducing me said, “I can barely read my own handwriting; I feel like I’m on the planet of the blind right now!” Another introducer had gone to the website and added some kind comments about its content.

But this weekend, my introducer riffed a bit about blindness, said that having a blog about blindness seemed a little counterintuitive. “I mean, how could the blind people read it?” he asked. Then he inexplicably said something about pornography for blind people and called me to the stage to read my poems. It was a fundraising event, and didn’t seem like the time for a lecture on assistive technology or the ways in which culture creates disability. It was supposed to be a good time, with drinks being sold at the bar, music, glamorously dressed audience members.

So when I got to the microphone, I told about the time I bought a copy of an old Playboy magazine written in Braille for $5 at the Cincinnati Public Library, how “porn is written for everyone.” Even though I can’t read Braille, I loved having the thick magazine in my apartment, loved bringing it to class to discuss with my students. Then I read my poems about death and grieving and left the stage for another reader.

But that moment sits uneasily. I believe in teachable moments, but I can’t tell if that was one: a bar with drinks being served, music in the background. I looked for my introducer after the fundraiser wrapped up to speak to him privately, but couldn’t find him anywhere. What I would have liked to say to him is that there’s a difference between physical biological limits and being seen as a having a disability, that his ignorance to the fact that people who are blind are able to surf the internet demonstrates our low disability IQ, that in truth, almost every one of us will experience some sort of disability at some point in our lives. That joking about how a person who is blind couldn’t possibly surf the internet isn’t even much of a joke, doesn’t even have much of a punch line.

Instead, I’m left preaching to the choir. I’ll play triangle. Steve, you sing baritone?

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

 

I used to be a modernist

Then I was a fink,

Used to be agrarian

Then vegetarian,

But post-mod

Pre-lapsarian

Cuts the slack I think.

 

Percy Dovetonsils

 

It used to be Bill Clinton was the first black president. I never entirely understood the appellation as Clinton, while still in the throes of a hot primary race for the Democratic nomination back in 1992, “took a powder” and let a profoundly mentally disabled black man be executed in the state of Arkansas—a matter that every decent minded person found rightly appalling.

I first heard the “black Jimmy Carter” business from right wing blogs like townhall.com but now, without using the term the remnant newspaper progressives are lining up to declare President Obama ineffectual. Yesterday’s Frank Rich column in the NY Times is a case study in the art. Rich argues that Obama has lost his compelling narrative; that the campaigner who stood for youth and change has become muddled or muffled somehow and accordingly the president’s popularity is dropping in a calamitous freefall. He points to a score of likeminded prognosticators including Jon Meacham at Newsweek and Ken Auletta at The New Yorker.

What interests me more than the spindrift alarmist game of liberal minded editorialists is the fealty of their opinions, as if Washington or New York “insiders” are (ARE) the nation—and by turn they may declare the supernatural fate of Thebes. They’re all Tieresias and they’re all seeing Jimmy Carter where three roads meet. And what interests me more than pile-on liberal prophesying is that this ought to be necessary at all. (One understands the world of Sophocles and the role of the Sphinx, but really, who needs a sphinx, small “s”?)

When FDR was in the White House he had the unimaginable luxury of a healthy national newspaper industry, and even luckier, a local newspaper industry that still believed in writing about national affairs by contextualizing them in local terms. FDR was merely popular because of his radio chats, he was actively the recipient of a local press that wanted him to succeed.

Since we no longer have a local press to speak of (or where we do, it takes its national news prefabricated from Washington and New York) we can’t root for the president as a people, not in the way our fathers and mothers could when Franklin and Eleanor were fighting “big money” in DC and were, for all their efforts, labeled traitors to their social and political class.

Those of us who have disabilities are generally mindful that Barack Obama has been steadfast and rather brave about insisting that Washington do something progressive—nay, moderately progressive about the human crisis in health care. I still believe that’s worth rooting for and if President Obama has common sense he will go on fighting despite the quisling reportorial and opinion class that’s looking for dolorous gibberish of no consequence.

 

S.K.

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

 

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Chris gave me an Eve Ensler piece called “Fur is Back” about a woman who is angry. Angry at how women are treated around the world, at patriarchy, at American Imperialism. Angry that when you mention the terrible things that go on, you’re not very fun anymore, you ruin the party. You’re just angry. That old stereotype: the angry feminist.

But I was raised with parents who took anger seriously. My father and grandmother once had such a terrific argument that they threw eggplants and tomatoes at each other. My father wasn’t afraid to tell you when he was angry, and while that sometimes scared me or hurt my feelings as a child, the truth is, I learned that anger is healthy to express, that sometimes we need to rage a little bit in order to be honest with one another. That after anger is through, we can come together again, our relationship just as strong. My mother, too, can articulate her anger in great detail, and especially when I was little, used it to fight for me against school systems that weren’t accommodating, against doctors who didn’t take me seriously.

So when conflict arises, I run straight into it, try to figure it out, work through it. And it feels good, that puzzling. Even when it doesn’t. And yet, I think most Americans would prefer not to show anger, would prefer if women especially didn’t show it. Would prefer not to acknowledge it. Which has made me feel very lonely at times—that girl at the party bringing down everyone. Insisting on a movie’s sexism when everyone else just wants to laugh, insisting on looking for problematic undercurrents and bringing them up to everyone’s distaste. As Ensler writes, I am the person who, for some reason, has to see it, say it, and make everyone aware. And later, and I am ruining the party, embarrassing my friend.

But I think, when confronted by racism, by sexism, by any sort of discrimination based on a body’s weight, ability, color, genitalia, by any sort of mistreatment, oppression, anger is the appropriate response. Sadness, too, frustration. But anger is what motivates us to act, to picket, to write our senators, to work for presidential elections. It can be empowering, successful. It can be an agent of change, help us better the world. So I would like to reclaim anger, reclaim its expression, encourage people who are uncomfortable with anger to sit with it for a while, to see how it can work in their life. Instead of turning our backs on anger, trying to brush it under the rug, I would like to harness its creative potential, its ability to help us see ourselves and the world around us more clearly.

As Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, wrote, Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.

And William Saroyan: Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Auden wrote: “It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.”

Well yes, but the observation is much more interesting if we substitute “paint” for “point”–in which direction shall you paint your nose?

I will paint my nose pointing south. My nose, my canvas, my lady at the prow…

Here: I’m painting a nightingale on my nose; not Keats’s nightingale, but Shelley’s. (A distinction for English majors perhaps?)

Now I’m painting a circus, the world’s smallest. The lion tamer has fallen asleep in the cage…

O what will happen?

Let’s keep painting.

My point? I love Auden; but like all poets he generalizes and forgets things. In the quote above he’s saying something important about art, namely you can have details galore but you need to make use of them or its just a lonesome game of Scrabble.

But I think the game of Scrabble must go on while you race into the unkown. Today I’m painting my nose all the way across Italy. I will make an old woman laugh to see such sport. I will be painting my nose with the world’s smallest brush. 

Right there on the street. No cops in sight.

Let the world go to hell. I’m painting my nose which I’m told was my mother’s nose, and her mother’s before…

I’m painting something Melville would have seen in passing, something on scrimshaw, something from mornings at sea.

How beautiful it is to make no sense and have an audience in an otherwise busy locale.

 

S.K.

 

We might say as Auden did the stars are all indifferent

But now, past fifty I don’t know, the conceit may turn

From a life of cheer as the poet had good drink

 

& those who loved him; we may call the stars unfriendly

When we are snug at home, the fire banked

Our Paschal lamb with pepper, the wine dark.

 

We might say we are more loving and be true

As love is to sky a small advantage

& love-me-not is the name of its tune

 

Which stars cannot know.

Here’s a succession of rooms,

Dresses & trousers, our heaped books;

 

The ailanthus we hope to plant come May—

In the garden we’ll be powerless,

Ailanthus cannot grow

 

Until the leaves are strong

& we would

Be more loving

 

If we but knew the words.

Still I will call the stars unfriendly

Only when I’m far from home.

 

S.K.

 

All the marrow of a man or woman, green & sub-rosa,

As if we ourselves were our gardens

Before today—I think I could will it so…

 

I was my garden, was the yew tree;

Was oleander,  or the uncommon weed

Which now we can’t identify

But think it’s a flower

& leave it alone.

 

S.K.