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There’s a line in a poem by Lorca where he says he wants to get down on all fours and eat the grasses of the cemeteries. One night when I was a college student I went out with some friends by moonlight and we made our fugitive ways into the grave yard and together we crawled over the wet grass and with the help of some cheap wine we sampled that green hair growing out of the graves. We felt very poetic. It was cold and dark and the gibbous moon was behind the twisted branches of a cemetery elm and we were rather a solemn team as we put Lorca and Sir Walter Whitman to the test. The grass didn’t taste like much. Or to be precise it tasted like grass. There wasn’t a hint of spice or some other dhark humor belonging to the dead.

One of the things about being young is that one is seldom disappointed. We didn’t mind that the uncut grass growing out of those graves tasted like all the other grass that kids have always sampled since the dawn of time. We didn’t feel betrayed by Lorca. We sat together under the elm tree and sipped our wine and we smoked Marboros and we recited poetry and we were as fully alive as it was possible for us to be. As I recall the matter I think we even dimly understood that we had an obligation to the dead to recite poems. There was for us a little ecumenical jazzy naivete and it was a beautiful night.

 

S.K.

by Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

This weekend marked the 40^th wedding anniversary of my partner Zac’s parents, who began dating after they finished high school and have been married longer than they previously lived apart. I’m in awe that their relationship has survived so long, through two children, serious illness and disability, moves across the country, frustrating jobs, two Bush administrations, etc.

Thinking about his parents’ wedding anniversary made me think about spending 40 years with Zac. It’s a lovely idea, but also one that causes confusion and consternation in family members and friends who really want us to get married, not just be together. I have even had, albeit in rare cases, people pity me openly and vocally for having a partner seemingly unwilling to commit to marriage. Of course, Zac is never pitied—societal expectations say marriage should be paramount in a woman’s life, but a thing of terror and horror in a man’s life. The truth is, neither of us wants to be married for a plethora of social and political reasons, none of which has anything to do with fear of commitment. I mean, Zac and I own a house together in Ohio, lease our apartment together in Los Angeles, share a joint checking account and a credit card, let alone three very needy cats. If any two people wear the signs of commitment, we certainly do.

But that wedding ring and ceremony is still such a big part of American society that many people refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of a relationship until the wedding commitment has taken place. So why are we so standoffish about the whole thing? Why not just have a wedding and call it a day? At the very least, we could haul in bountiful wedding gifts—and I would very much like a vegetable juicer.

Here’s one reason: even though the tides are turning on opponents of gay marriage, I like to think of myself as an activist, and taking advantage of a “privilege” (meaning that marriage is currently constructed as a legal, religious, cultural, etc. privilege but shouldn’t be) when others are denied that same “privilege” makes me pretty uncomfortable To paraphrase a friend, I like to think of myself as the type of person who wouldn’t have gone to “whites only” restaurants in the 50’s, so signing up for a “heteros only” institution really isn’t high on my to-do list.

Another reason is that the language around marriage, well, makes my skin crawl. I’m always reading in magazines from self-help type people that “marriage is hard work” and takes “a lot of time and energy.” And I already work really hard—on my chosen career (poetry) and two jobs (teaching), on improving my running speed, on choosing healthy food that is locally grown and doesn’t contribute to environmental collapse, on presidential elections and conference papers. Why take on marriage when everyone agrees it’s such hard work and I already work so hard? Our relationship, as it is, is wonderful and kind and not-at-all hard. Plus, having someone call me his “wife”—well that carries too much cultural baggage to express in this one little post.

So as I celebrated Zac’s parents’ 40-year marriage this weekend, I also celebrated something even bigger—their 40-plus year relationship. And I continue to wish everyone the love and joy that finding another person with whom to share your days can bring. Whether or not you choose marriage. Whether or not marriage is allowed you. Whether or not your relationship is with a partner or dear friend or sibling or long-lost soul mate. To paraphrase the Beatles, all we need is love, but let’s expand the shapes that love can take. I promise, only good things will result.

 

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

www.andreascarpino.com

Advocates Protest Plan To Eliminate Certain Fines Against Care Centers
(Des Moines Register)
April 9, 2009
Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express.

DES MOINES, IOWA– [Excerpt] Advoc

ates for seniors are protesting legislation that would eliminate fines imposed against Iowa nursing homes for a range of violations, including failure to follow a physician’s orders, failure to meet basic fire-safety regulations and failure to provide adequate nutrition for residents.

The bill recently passed both the full Senate and a House committee without a single dissenting vote.

But advocates now claim that lawmakers have been misled about the impacts of the legislation, which would give nursing homes the opportunity to avoid fines for what are called “Class 2 violations,” if the facility corrects those problems before state inspectors become aware of them.

“This really makes me angry,” said Charlotte Walker, an Iowa City advocate for seniors. “I wonder if even one of our senators bothered to ask what was really included in these so-called low-level violations.”

Entire article:
Advocates protest plan to eliminate certain fines against care centers
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0409a.htm

Johnny Munchausen has been able bodied since birth but he hasn’t let that stop him from his dream of becoming ill. The forty two year old vending machine repairman from Muncie, Indiana recently told Planet of the Blind that although his good health is seemingly a test from God he’s still confident of overcoming it some day. 

“I dream all the time of being in an Iron Lung,” said Munchausen who prefers being called “Munchie” since he likes to eat snack foods.

His wife Cindy Lu who is also blessed with good health says that her husband has never stopped believing he can overcome his physical condition.

“He’s like  you know, I’m gonna fall apart one of these days, you know, like an old Chevrolet, he’ll just drop his engine block right in the street–he’s incredibly optimistic.”

Munchausen’s neighbor Clyde “Harry” Cuddeback says that being healthy has never gotten in Munchie’s way. 

“He eats total shit and he drinks like a Nebraska wheat lobbyist.” Cuddebacksays. “Munchie really works at overcoming his good health.”

The president of the Muncie Vending Machine Repairman’s Association Knut Clapper says that Munchausen inspires everyone.

“He reminds every one of us  that we’re lucky to be sick. Me? I’ve got gout and I thank my lucky stars to be swollen and inflamed and barely able to move. I always get the best parking places and the high school kids carry my groceries at Wal Mart. That’s why Munchie is so heroic. We all know he will get there. He’s just got so much faith and energy.”

“one of these days,” says Munchie, “I will rise up singing.”

Meanwhile he has the whole town rooting for a miracle.

 

S.K.

There’s a post over at NPR’s blog world entitled “Scot MacIntyre and Soft Bigotry” (or maybe its the other way around–I could check again but I don’t want to)–and the gist of this post is that when Mr. MacIntyre was voted off the island known as “American Idol” last evening he was treated to a heapin’ helpin’ of paternalism even as he was being shown the door.

“Heavens to Murgatroid! Exit, stage left you blind guy you!”

Scott MacIntyre is a musician first and foremost. He’s also a scholar. He happens to be blind. A useful analogy is to say that Ernest Hemingway was a writer first and a smart   dude and he happened to be 6 feet tall with a nice moustache when he kept it trimmed.  

American TV doesn’t know how to handle disability. Accordingly it can’t present real people with disabilities because in North American TV Land disability must always (and here we need to emphasize “always squared” be represented in quaint, saccharine or monstrous Victorian symbolism.

So despite his classical musicianship and his superb scholarship Mr. MacIntyre had to be represented as Tiny Tim–he   had to be inspiring and so forth and so on.

People with disabilities struggle with this cultural dynamic every day and I’ll bet that Scott MacIntyre can tell us plenty about the matter.

I kept thinking about Scott during his Idol sojourn in terms of another famous singer and musician. You won’t guess who I’m talking about. Let’s see how long it takes you?

He was part of a rock band that sold more than 400 million records.

He was most likely “legally blind” but he kept the matter hidden.

When his band used to play in dark clubs the others would have to lead him through the tables and clutter.

When he was younger he refused to wear his glasses.

He could scream when he sang but he wasn’t a superb singer by any means.

Are you guessing John Lennon yet?

My point, such as it is, is that John Lennon wouldn’t make it on “American Idol” because they’d be asking him to sing the songs of Tammy Wynette or Marvin Gaye or what have you and his own brand of talent wouldn’t have had a chance.

I think Scott MacIntyre has more raw talent than the Mormon Tabernacle and he’s going places. He will be an artist “first” as Mr.Lennon was an artist first.

The judges and viewers and producers at “American Idol” made a big honking deal out of Scott’s blindness because that’s what TV does–the only narrative for blindness is the “overcoming” narrative and its silly and trivial and tiresome and they do it every single time they get their hands on a real life blind person who manages to do anything outside his or her house.

I wrote a book about it.

Meantime Scott knows how to twist and shout and fans everywhere will rattle their jewelry when he comes to a town near you.

I’d like to hear him sing what he prefers.

Mazel Tov! Mr. MacIntyre.

 

S.K. 

Those who have been caught up in the quest by Scott MacIntyre on “American Idol” know he has “the chops” to be a sensational performer. The man has talent and that’s why he’s made it this far on a program that’s designed to knock off its musical contestants.

I think the truth of the matter is that Scott is a classically trained pianist and accordingly he really feels what he’s playing. While he’s not always the most powerful vocalist he’s always the most “in touch” with what he’s playing and singing and that’s what comes of being deep down in the notes. Next to this level of perception and presentation the others on the show just seem like lip synchers.

As Igor Stravinsky once said: “There’s no merit in hearing. A duck hears also.”

What old Igor meant is that a true musician has more advanced listening skills.

Have you ever paid deep attention to Beethoven’s playful and almost irreverent timing in his last quartets? Timing is the main element of comedy of course and by turns its also the signature of musical intelligence.

Mr. MacIntyre has a big brain and a big set of ears and a correspondingly big heart.

 

S.K.

I am not a big fan of Tom Wolfe's novels. This is mostly because I can hear Mr. Wolfe banging his shoe like Khrushchev at the United Nations–he's not  one of those fiction writers about whom one might say that verisimilitude and subtlety are available in equal measure. In fiction (so it has always seemed to me) realism is best delivered by indirection. I take this to mean that ugly people can be heroes; lost souls can demonstrate some good. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov falls in love with a real flesh and blood woman and with the Virgin Mary because frankly, whatever we might say about his brand of illness Raskolnikov is a human being and therefore he's complicated. The characters in Mr. Wolfe's novels are not complicated and their collective fidelity to social status and possessions and the concomitant thoughtsthat accompany their social status and their ownership of posessions are insufficiently mysterious as explanations for real human behavior.

The reason Mr. Wolfe's nonfiction works so well is that the writing is essentially a form of documentary film making–he provides the "status life" details of the characters–we see Twiggy modeling a plastic dress and swaying before the flashbulbs like a child who is lost in a strange city; Chuck Yeager limping after his collision on horseback with a cactus; the details are crisp and yet Mr. Wolfe is freed from the expectation that he's going to wrap up the story with a tidy plot.

Ah but in his novels Tom Wolfe hits you over the head with the tidy plot. In effect he spoils all his clarity by imagining that realism might well be a morality play and as Raskolnikov could tell you, things are so much more complicated than that.

I've been in mind of Tom Wolfe lately because while the snow flurries are still evident in Iowa City one can spy on any given night but especially on weekends large migrations of college girls wearing scanty cocktail dresses and spiked high heels–all of them bombed to the gills and staggering along the sidewalks and across the downtown pedestrian mall. And one is reminded of Wolfe's most recent novel I am Charlotte Simmons which offers a view of undergraduate life in which young women are expected to parade before the boys in the skimpiest of cocktail dresses.

The novel portrays a campus culture in which the morays of the 1950's (all that male dominance) are wedded (if you will) to the 1970's expectation of sexual promiscuity though unlike the 70's when women on campuses talked openly about equality and about Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex   Wolfe describes a "meat market" version of undergrad culture where there's no hint of student feminism anywhere in student life save when the students, groggy and hungover chance to attend a class taught by some fossilized leftist professor who Wolfe is at pains to demonstrate has zero social consciousness outside of books.

While Mr. Wolfe splenetically presents "the campus" as a Roman sewer we see young Charlotte Simmons, a working class girl on scholarship who is caught up in a social status madcap rock wall climb  for legitimacy by means of "being chosen" to accompany a popular fraternity boy to what the frat boys like to call "a mixer" which in the contemporary world means binge drinking at a hotel and then date raping the girl in the cocktail dress.

Which is of course exactly how it goes in Wolfe's novel. So as the college girls totter in the late spring cold and lean against downtown store fronts for support, wearing nothing but red or black cocktail dresses I am naturally in mind of the maestro's latest novel.

I don't think Wolfe has it entirely right. He's spot on about the contempt for women that's felt by scores of today's undergraduate boys and he's correct that this contempt renders women as nothing more than trifling sex objects. He's also correct when he describes the fraternity boys as being overtly and unironically declarative about the role of porn in their daily lives. IN effect, for the boys, girls in cocktail dresses are just "cum dumpsters" and of no more consequence than a mouse click.

What's missing from the novel is how we got here. How did undergraduate women go from an emergent sense of their bodies as a measure   of social and political reality and yes, of possibility, to a more terrible abjection than even the 50's had to offer?

In Crime and Punishment we are allowed to see that Raskolnikov becomes a socio-path in part because he lives solely in a world of ideas–that is, he lives without people. Dostoevsky shows us what modernity is going to do to people. In effect if your neighbors aren't real but have become ideas only, why then you can do what you like with them. Kill your landlady.

But how did today's college boys get here? And the girls too?

Porn of course renders all human beings as abstractions. The internet furthers this by making suggestive online conversation possible even while both partners imagine the other is only a phantasm.  

But the acculturation of porno-abstraction, masculine rage, binge drinking, and severely reduced feminist expectations are all symptoms and not the cause of the Charlotte Simmons epidemic.

My own guess is that middle class Americans hated feminist activism as much as they hated the Viet Nam era anti-war movement. Nixon's "silent majority" was Reagan's "its morning in America" crowd and they now have other names perhaps or are too diffuse to be easily characterized but their disdain for the E.R.A. or for a woman's right to choose is well documented and surely the GOP's fascination with Sarah Palin has more than a little connection with middle class disdain for NOW. 

These are the children of the Reagan and Bush 80's and if you cast memory backward you'll remember the first bloom of the GOP's flip characterization of feminists as "femi-nazis" –as if those who sought to teach gender equality  were thought police.

By the early 90's one could discern on college campuses a deep resistance to  feminism as if a course or symposium that promised an analysis of gender inequality or an event that asked students to think about date rape was all some kind of conspiracy. Kids after all just want to have fun.

But that resistance to feminism is now a quaint idea as I see it. Reagan's children are out in force and they are very drunk and very confused.

IN turn the girl in the coctail dress is nothing more than Raskolnikov's landlady.

S.K.

On behalf of Jo Anne Simon and the Reading Rights Coalition

Dear Friends and Neighbors,
Over the past few weeks, I have been organizing with colleagues from around the country to ensure that Amazon’s Kindle 2 is accessible to people with print disabilities. (I am a founding member of one organization (Assn on Higher Education and Disability) and president of another (International Dyslexia Association-NY Branch). The Reading Rights Coalition is engaged in a campaign to obtain access for the blind and others with print disabilities to e-books available for Amazon’s new Kindle 2 e-book reader. The new reader, which Amazon is working to make fully accessible, has the ability to use text-to-speech to read these e-books aloud; but under pressure from the Authors Guild, Amazon has announced that authors and publishers will be allowed to disable the text-to-speech function.  
This is very unfortunate because Text-To-Speech opens the world of books, magazines, newspapers, and other print media to children and adults with disabilities such as vision impairments, learning disabilities, paralysis, traumatic and other brain injuries. Current alternatives, such as Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic cannot meet the need because that technology is far too limited in selection and timeliness of production.  Technologically, once text has been digitized, it’s digitized.  The reader’s choice of media format (print image or audio) is merely a matter of display option – not a different product. 
Over 25 organizations have joined to form the Reading Rights Coalition, which has set up an on-line petition to urge the Authors Guild and Amazon to reverse course. Visit www.readingrights.org to learn more about our work and see our Open Letter to Authors.  We’ve scheduled an informational picket in front of the Authors’ Guild, 31 East 32nd Street in Manhattan, next Tuesday, April 7^th from 12:00 to 2:00 pm.
Please read and sign our petition here: http://www.readingrights.org/take-action-now
Please note: If you are using screen access technology, the first three fields on the form to sign the petition may not be announced. They are, in order: (1) a drop-down menu from which to select your prefix (Mr., Mrs., etc.); (2) an edit field for your first name, and (3) an edit field for your last name. The rest of the fields should announce themselves as you tab to them.
We hope you can join us.  In the meantime, join the Reading Rights Coalition Group, http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=67290717289#/pages/Reading-Rights-Coalition/67290717289?ref=mf .
Then sign the petition site http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/We-Want-To-Read and forward to everyone in your network. 
If you use Twitter, please tweet the information as well!

Thanks,

Jo Anne Simon

Los Angeles

by Andrea Scarpino

 

A  few weeks ago, I wrote about my support of Syracuse in the Men’s NCAA basketball tournament—they were my dad’s team, and it felt important to me in some strange way to support them. Well, they’re out of the tournament now, after a pretty embarrassing loss to Oklahoma in the Sweet 16. More upsetting than their loss, however, is some of the commentary I’ve heard while watching the tournament. Granted, this may be old news to everyone else, but I usually don’t follow sports—I didn’t even watch the Olympics last summer—so listening to the announcers this past couple of weekends has been a pretty eye opening experience.

Although I’ve been offended by a bounty of subtly offensive statements, the worst I’ve heard so far happened last weekend when an announcer said a player was “raped from behind” when his shot was blocked from behind by another player. Now I’m no genius, but I’m pretty confident that what I saw happening on the court does NOT constitute rape.

I would have higher hopes for the Women’s NCAA tournament except that a couple of friends just attended the BNP Paribas Open Tennis Tournament, and they reported that some pretty stupid things were announced while the women were playing their tennis games, including multiple comments on their beauty. Apparently at one point, the announcers thanked the “ladies” for coming to play and asked everyone in the audience to give them a hand just for showing up with their rackets. Suffice it to say, none of the men were congratulated for being attractive and for showing up to play.

Why does it matter that sports announcers use sexist or otherwise problematic language? To me, it matters because language helps shape and form our understanding of the world. When I heard a woman at a writing conference dismiss a question about her use of the term “autistics” instead of “people with autism” as a choice of “mere semantics” and nothing we should worry about, I bristled. Language is never mere semantics; it’s how we make sense of society, how we make sense of ourselves and those around us. Writing about a person who has autism references just one of that person’s character traits, which is very different from discussing an autistic—that language makes autism his defining attribute, as if there could be nothing else interesting to say about him.

Similarly, when a national TV announcer describes a meaningless basketball block as being “raped from behind,” that makes actual instances of rape seem much less serious, much less dangerous. I would go so far as to say it legitimizes rape as an acceptable means of interacting with other people. Which of course, it isn’t. And when women are still being congratulated more for their appearance than for their ability to play a sport well or be a successful politician or argue a case successfully, well, it means we haven’t come all that far after all. So with Syracuse out of the men’s tournament and a general discontent with the announcing I’ve heard so far, I think I’m done with sports for a while. March really is full of madness; just not the fun kind I had hoped for.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the West coast Bureau Chief of POTB and you can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

Will we be among people with heart enough to say they don’t know enough? I am in mind of this just now, here in Austin, Texas where last evening I read some nonfiction at Austin Community College. Good writing is always about the limitations of what a writer knows or, parenthetically its about the limits of the odd persona we sometimes call the narrator. Dostoevesky called it “the double” and heck that’s good enough for me.

I want to open my hand in the rain and feel, as I did when a boy a small, blue dragonfly walk over my life line. I want to know as I did when a boy that that’s my twin brother calling from somewhere we can’t see. And I hope for the humility to know that nothing I believe is final and that doubt is its own reward.

Early. Thoughts on waking. Coffee to come. The day a little island in the infinite.

 

S.K.