Category: Uncategorized

Well I don’t know about you but in my Finno-Ugrian culture we celebrate the concept of International Workers Day with a vast party–one that by an American analogy would be the combo of St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve. The Finns (who threw out the Communists not just once but three times) are not disposed to waxing nostalgic about the Bolsheviks and the Menshiviks but they are very certain that the rights of workers really matter in the life of a free state and by God they work hard and they go out and celebrate like, well, like Finns. Lock up the delicate china and watch out for your feet: there will be wildfire revelry in honor of all who work like hell. I wish I could be in Helsinki by the end of the week.

 

S.K. 

 

Dear Senator Arlen Specter:

 

As  a life long Democrat who grew up in a life long Democratic household where we sang the praises of F.D.R. and we knew all the words to “Happy Days Are Here Again” and wherein we knew the difference between the National Industrial Recovery Act and the W.P.A. all I can say is God Spead Arlen Specter!”

You see being a Democrat in the years after L.B.J. means having to say you’re endlessly sorry about every position that you have stated publicly and then changeing your mind at least a hundred times before finally comprimising whatever it was you were thinking in the first place and then in a final rhetorical collapse you say that you didn’t say what you said you said, you just said (insert incomprehensible tautological assertion here).

So being a Democrat will be a challenge for you. IN the G.O.P. no one ever says they’re sorry. There’s no crying in baseball and certainly there are no tears in the Republican Party.

You will have to figure out how to say things that you mean and then un-mean them before meaning them while suggesting it all might have been otherwise. This isn’t a prevailing skill in your old party but its the lingua franca among the Dems.

Maybe you can toughen the old donkey up a bit? She used to be tough. She really did. 

In the meantime don’t get me wrong. We’re proud to have you. You’ve stood on the side of fairness for children and for the ill and you are a sagacious and reasoned pollitician in an age when these qualifications have all too often been routinely overlooked by demagogues and spinners.

 

We are rooting for you sir.

 

S.K.

Dear M. Proust,

First, an apology. When I tried to read excerpts of your tome In Search of Lost Time as an undergraduate French major—well, let’s just say I wasn’t your biggest fan. Your sentences are often very long, and as a student of French, it seemed impossible to keep track of the subject and predicate of each sentence, let alone come to any deeper understanding of your meaning. I complained a lot, and am pretty sure I read some Cliff’s Notes in the bookstore on more than one occasion, although in my defense, I never bought them.

Fast forward ten years. Several months ago, I saw that a local independent bookstore, Skylight Books, is hosting a Proust reading group that over the course of the next year is dedicating itself to working through all six volumes of In Search of Lost Time. I signed up immediately, thinking that if I’m ever going to get through all six books, I will need a support group. Plus, the book group is reading you in translation instead of in your original French, which is a definite bonus.

Tonight, I’m headed off to the third book group meeting and I can only describe my feelings for your work this way: I am in love. Granted, I’m only a couple hundred pages into Volume II, Within a Budding Grove, which technically means we’re still in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, but so far, I’m in love. I’ve actually said in the course of an ordinary conversation with other people, “This reminds me of something I was just reading in Proust.” And in describing your work, I think I have actually used the phrase, “my Bible,” which probably made you throw-up in your mouth a little. I know this means I’ve entered some strange new circle of the elitist world of literary snobbery with which I already run, but I can’t help it. I’m in love. And here’s the thing: I thought I would be the youngest person in the book group, that it would be me and a gaggle of octogenarian women (my interests—and sometimes my clothing—tend towards the 80-something crowd), but I was totally wrong. I’m not even closest to the youngest person in the group, which apparently has had record community interest.

And in this world of Twitter communication and overly busy people answering email while waiting in line for their coffee, isn’t it wonderful to spend seven pages reading a description of a woman’s dress? Isn’t it wonderful to make the time to relish four pages of description of one flower in a vast garden of flowers? One phrase in a musical composition? You write with such wit about social interactions that I’ve actually laughed out loud while reading your words, and your writing about love is nothing short of amazing. In just the first two volumes, you’ve already touched on classism, homosexuality and even disability, subjects I didn’t expect to discover in a work written almost one hundred years ago.

I’ve said it already: I am in love. And I want to thank you for your keen eye on the intricacies of the world, how we interact with and honor and hurt other people, how memory works, how we fall in love and grieve and rally ourselves beyond unbearable pain. I feel transported every time I open your work and while I’m eager to get to the end—to find out how Swann and Odette actually ended up married, what happens with Gilberte, how young Marcel finds his way in the world as an adult—I also feel so grateful for the journey. This time, there won’t be any Cliff’s Notes—I’ll take every page you wrote.

Most Sincerely,

Andrea

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief of POTB

 

You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

I’ve been a Boston Red Sox fan since I was a mere babe. There’s actually a family photo of me in myBoston Red Sox  “one-sie” taken circa  1956 around the time I was 1.

I’ve listened to a million hours worth of ball games on the radio and though blind, I’ve followed an equal number of hours watching games on TV. And never in my roughly 48 years of baseball consciousness have I seen someone steal home. And so the sight of Boston’s Jacoby Ellsbury diving over the plate last night against the New York Yankees was extrasweet.

Mr. Ellsbury is the fastest man in baseball and he has a very good eye.

Check it out: http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=bos

Of course as a blind person who navigates in traffic with my cane or my dog I like to think about plunging headlong into the unknown. I love all such stories whether they’re about sailing or leaping over the parapets. I like what Mr. Ellsbury had to say about how he spotted the Yankees’ pitcher Andy Pettit looking inattentive and then deciding to go:

“Once he rocks back into his windup, he has to go home with it,” Ellsbury said. “From that point, it’s a footrace.”

“The biggest thing is getting the courage to go, I guess. … In a situation like that, you’ve got to make it. It could be one of the worst baserunning mistakes. When I saw Andy go in his windup the previous pitch, I thought, ‘I can make it.’

“It’s just a matter of going at that point. It’s bases loaded and a 2-1 ballgame. The last thing you want to do is get thrown out at the plate.”

I know just what he means.

S.K.

I dreamt last night that angels were wrapping me in newspaper though they were quick to reassure me I wasn't dead. One of the angels who looked like Eleanor Roosevelt said that I was a man of letters and that wrapping me in newspapers was the best way to transport me. Dreams of course have their own currents and I didn't get to inquire where they might be taking me. I remember thinking that the 19th century French poet Stephan Mallarme said that the newspaper was fit only to wrap fish in. (He was distinguishing "the news" from poetry.) I wondered if maybe I had turned into a fish. Had the angels been hiding something from me?

But dreams of course have their own insistences. Sometimes I think that dreaming is like the childhood learning curve one experiences if you grew up along the ocean. You grow comfortable sailing in a small bay; then you're suddenly out on the sea. The big ocean doesn't care a whit about your navigational prowess. You're just taken by larger forces.

So my angels bundled me up in the daily news and then before I knew it I was in a field somewhere. I was standing along a dirt road. I was simply standing there. I thought about the story of Beckett's play and how he came to name it. One is simply waiting by a roadside for a bicyclist to appear. His name is Godot. Life is just that simple and is equally divided between meaning and meaninglessness. How the rational mind hates this!  Things must have hieratic meanings, even symbolism. The Victorian doctors who wanted to reform the conditions in mental hospitals had to come up with a taxonomic system for madness in order to render it treatable as opposed to thinking of it as an inalienable fact. And so the modern mind has invented symbolism and its thousand analytical variants from Freudianism to post-analytic philosophy and French deconstruction.

Ah but dreams resist all of it. I was in a field and waiting for spring and some angels had left me there with ink stains on my body. Why not?

S.K.  

Dear Dad:

 

I hope things are going well in the afterlife. I imagine that its more complicated where you are than the Judeo-Christian tradition supposes. My guess is that even if you’re in Heaven its set up so everybody has to go to Hell at least once a week just to refill the gall dispensers. I’m guessing that’s your job since when you were alive you never saw the Red Sox beat the Yankees in a playoff or win the World Series. You had a lifetime of gall and also plenty of wormwood.

I thought of you when Kevin Youkilis hit a walk off home run last night to beat the boys from the Bronx at Fenway. I hope you were hanging out with Old Joe Wood and Ted Williams and watching the game on    Elect TV.

Do you remember the night we went to see “Field of Dreams” at that sticky little porno theater in Geneva, New York? As I recall we were both moved gently to tears by the idea that there is a Kairos to baseball. Eternity and teamwork are the signatures of every moment in this most mystical of games.

Accordingly even the rich can’t ruin it.

By the way, how’s Kurt Vonnegut doing? Does he get to smoke Pall Malls behind a cloud shaped like Indiana?

 

S.K.

Information regarding this Conference to explore creative writing, medicine can be found at the U of Iowa's Med Ed Update

The UI Carver College of Medicine and the College’s Writing Program
will host “The Examined Life: Writing and the Art of Medicine,” April
29-May 1 at the UI.

The conference will feature presentations by physicians, writers,
and scholars from across the nation exploring the links between
creative writing and medicine. The program also includes skill-building
sessions on writing, editing and publishing, a poster session and book
fair, attendees’ readings, and a tour of the John Martin Rare Book Room
at the Hardin Library for Health Sciences.

 

I remember it was late spring at the small college by the lake. The flowering trees were suddenly little factories of joys we hadn’t remembered to ask for. Winter does that. It takes away parts of one’s hope though it does it so slowly you’ll never sense your individual losses. I was walking in the twilight with two splendid friends, both of them were poets and the tiny fingers of night were pushing each of us along as if reminding us we’d been asleep and should make up for it. In turn we were trading bits of poetry. “Do you remember this one,” I asked. “Its by Antonio Machado: ‘Music! A naked woman runs mad through the pure night!'”  

One of my friends (who I’ll call Joseph) said: “The men in the white coats chase naked music disguised as a madwoman through the night.” “Boy, poetry can lose its flavor pretty quickly.”

My other friend (who I’ll call Henry) said: “The men in the white coats are stunned by the naked music and forget the ascendant madwoman who becomes a laurel tree.”

“Oh,” I said, “If madwomen live inside trees then I say they don’t live in the laurel, they live in the locust.” 

We were happy and walking to the home of friends where we would have a fine dinner and more than a little wine and where we would talk about anything at all. The anticipatory pleasure of free talk–real talk, the talk that arises from mutual happiness , that’s as lovely as the trees and the nearly full moon and the first instance of spring dusk when the day’s heat doesn’t vanish but lingers the way our bodies secretly hope it will. We are all farmers who long to stand at the edge of a field, end of day, hands in our pockets.

 

(Excerpt from “Times of Joy: the Art of Conversation” by S.K.)

 

S.K. 

I remember Roland Barthes’ description of Paris after a flood and his sense of astonishment, a wonder so unbidden as to have dazzled a boy. The familiar streets were gone, replaced by nothing more than water and reflections of the sky. Buildings leaned or stood as they always had but with a fiercer or softer air about them. The boy who was Barthes saw visions wherever he turned.

As a visually impaired person this dislocation of solid and liquid images is the daily material of a life. I don’t say  an artistic life or a philosophical one–I find I can’t make distinctions and I veer sidelong in a long shadow walking fast holding my breath waiting to see when the shadow will end and light will course around my head and shoulders. I burst out of a cloud and into a stream. I wash like a spindrift driven fish onto a reef of vari-colored lights I can’t explain.

As Walter Cronkite used to say: “And that’s the way it is.” I am in and out of churchly shade and light. I’m not thinking about it much. I’m not captured by street advertising or passing strangers. I’m suspended in a strain of a thousand wonders, boyish, open, trusting, fast, aware that when the shapes and sounds of raw beauty are about us nothing in the steadfast world is or ever will be the same.

The trick then is to be happy in your astonishments which are also limitations.

Paris will never again be the flooded Paris in quite that way and Barthes would have to demand his astonishments from ideas. Blindness has hundreds of vexations but oddly it still triggers motile cadmium blues and fingerling darts of light that are weird and as they are unasked for, they’re a gift.

 

S.K.     

There’s a wonderful blog post by Penny L. Richards over at the Temple University Disability Studies site that’s devoted to the names of towns or counties that are directly related to people with disabilities. See what she has to say about Erastus Deaf Smith.

Of course it comes   as no surprise that there are places named “Idiot-ville” or “Idiot Creek” for in the 19th century the word was in such frequent usage that its hard to deliver it entire in our contemporary  age. Idiot meant feeble minded, simpleton, “dumb” –and in turn it was seldom an accurate description of real human beings though it was a terrific tool or prosthesis for social control.

Real human beings were labeled idiots because they were deaf or blind or had developmental disabilities and in migratory and impoverished America no one had a clue how to educate or communicate with people with disabilities and a good solid word covered a multitude of social problems just like a certain scarlet letter made famous by Hawthorn. Which gets me to my point of course: the pejorative appellations that haunt American fancy are largely Puritan in nature.

The evolution of the word “idiot” is tied directly to the history of literacy for its not until the advent of the printing press and the development of rudimentary public education in Europe that the word is transformed from its original Latin meaning idiota “ordinary person, layman,”  to something more sinister.

By the time of the Puritan migration to America the word meant uneducable and in turn it could be used with great effect to excoriate a child who proved resistant to his or her education. A scarlet letter indeed.

Idiot-ville is where you were sent if you didn’t do your homework. And if for some reason you were unable to do your homework you were also sent there.

Nowadays of course we would call such places “Retard-ville or “Special-Education-ville” for we haven’t yet outgrown the Puritan notion that we can send people elsewhere and give them a   scarlet token in the bargain.

Me? I live in Can’t See Shit-ville” and you can put it in your GPS.

 

S.K.