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I’d just gotten off a flight from Iowa and was about to board another for Brainard, MN and I was standing near the gate in a cerebral limbo quandary thinking about time vs. getting coffee when a woman’s voice said: “Will your dog bite my cleaning cart?”

“What?” I asked.

“Will your dog bite my cleaning cart.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your CLEANING CART?”

Now she was impatient.

“Yeah, I’m cleaning the women’s room and I have a cleaning cart. I thought your dog might bite it because it has chemicals.”

“No, my dog won’t bite anything or anyone.”

“Well good.” Cleaning cart woman pushed her appliance with its chemicals and foamy liquids right on by us.

I wondered if as a girl this woman had been attacked by a dog while pushing a baby sized cleaning cart.

 

S.K. 

Like everyone I’ve decided I need a spring outfit. Something cheerful to the eye. In this way I am thinking of my fellow citizens. I’m thinking of their eyes. What will lift their spirits? Make them feel young, coltish, have them gambol by the river? 

What shall I wear? First I think a new spring hat is in order.

In a kitchen store I find a spaghetti strainger made of aluminum with a couple hundred little holes. I take it home and put tinfoil wrapped Q-Tips in every hole. Its a lot like reading Braille. Soon I have a wonderful space age topper with glittering ex-cephalic dendrites stretching toward the sun. Its perfect for spring. 

For a shirt I’ve chosen a serapemade from a hundred  store bought bread wrappers. Wonder Bread works best. Red, blue and yellow dots all over and words too. Words like poly-sorbate 80 and partially hydrogenized particulate matter. I’m a poet from the shelf life school! I’m vertiginous as Charles Dickens writing another happy ending. So what the bread wrappers are a bit hot? Its no different than living in Tucson in July.

Pants? Nah. I’ll wear my uncle Mert’s tartan plaid swim trunkswith the attached telephone lineman’s toolbelt. (His boat you see was always in danger of sinking.)

I think this will get me started.  

Anyway its really spring in Iowa. Yesterday a bumble bee about the size of a baseball followed me as I made my way down the sidewalk outside the library. He had a little spaghetti strainer on his head and these cute little tartan shorts.

 

S.K.

The poets of my time are muscular. They eat Capitalism for lunch and fight to digest it much as wild dogs keep down their food by staggering. The poets are staggering in the alley between the old fisherman’s church and what used to be the Bowery in lower Manhattan.

**

It is hard to hold Capitalism down; difficult to breathe; nearly impossible to hold one’s head up. No one is less admired than a ruined dog. Even so the poets wave their diplomas and their grants and awards as if they were selling programs at a ball park. Surely someone will admire a poem. 

 

**

Mise en scene: three or four poets retreat to an abbey and try to make a go of interpolation. The grounsman comes around with a sack of potatoes; tells them they’re still Capitalists.

 

**

Electricity cam make a poet look taller. I know a poet who rubs himself with a cat’s skin imported from Helsinki. When he feels tall enough he goes to a fine restaurant.

 

**

The poet next door looks up from the newspaper. He sees a girl’s bonnet, a yellow hat floating between the poplars. Because he is a poet he thinks he must know what this means. It is terrible really to suspect it means nothing. 

 

**

 

The poets have been on the sea. They’re mercantile poets. They carry goods and hold tight to what remains of their instincts. Meaning or no meaning there must be money. Poetry in our time is tromp le oleo and  there must be poems on the shelves.  Poems with which you can butter your bread…Of course then you have to keep the stuff down. The poet who can hold the most Capital in his gut is the winner and  gets invited to Washington. 

 

**

 

They have been eating money the poets. They appear very strong. It is hard to walk or concentrate with money inside you. Of course this is when traditional forms come in handy.

 

S.K.

 

I have watched the outsourced members of the Bush administration “newspeak” about torture and I’ve also observed the middling Democrats and the Washington “bubble” media caste their own sugared bread upon the waters. “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” and the “ticking time bomb” are engineered narratives designed as justifications  for illegal statecraft. I saw Condoleeza Rice telling a Stanford student that we never used torture at Gitmo. You could see the intoxication of saying so. She looked like she believed it. One wonders if she ever read Hannah Arendt. Surely the former U.S. Secretary of State knows that subborning the rights of human beings and breaking international law are addictive behaviors among the tyrant classes and that Orwell didn’t have to look far to the left or far to the right to see the grievous material effects of propaganda and all the ideologically corrupted language of the 20th century.

Former Secretary Rice wants it both ways. We didn’t torture anybody. Oh but we were forced to take tough positions because 3000 Americans died on September 11, 2001. Presumably revoking habeas corpus and spying on tens of millions of innocent U.S. citizens is co-determined with the right to torture captives in her revisionist view of human rights–which is to say that human rights are conditional. Therefore we should rename human rights. We might call them “occasional operations of dignity” or “symptoms of engineered equality”–anyone can find something suitably evanescent.   

The emerging struggle to name torture for what it is becomes by turns the most important debate of our time since repairing our standing in the world and reinvigorating diplomacy are the keys to achieving everything from a reduction in greenhouse gasses to cooperation on peace talks wherever conflicts may be.

It is not a comfort to hear from our former Secretary of State that whatever you call it, torture is legal if the president says it is. Where’s Rosemary Woods?

 

 

S.K.

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on increasing my running speed and I’ve turned recently to a style of running called forefoot striking. Naturally, it seems, I land very heavily on my heel, so running more on the balls of my feet is supposed to not only help me run faster, but also help save some of the stress that running can cause on the rest of the body (at least some researchers believe that the balls of our feet are better designed for weight bearing landings than our heels).

As a side note: I tried running barefoot on the cement last week as an experiment to see what my feet would do without high tech running shoes. Since humans have spent most of our history running barefoot, I thought it would be telling to see what my feet did in a more “natural” state. Interestingly enough, barefoot, I run on the balls of my feet.

Trying to change from striking my heel when I run hasn’t been easy in part because my running shoes have thick, sturdy heels that practically beg to hit the ground. But as I was out struggling this morning to make my stride longer and land more fully on my forefeet, I was struck by an irony of this attempted transition. I was born with severely clubbed feet, which means that my feet turned inwards and wouldn’t flex at all. When my father used to tell me about my birth, he would always describe the moment when he first saw me, and how one of his first thoughts was to wonder “why your feet were so pointed.”

After an unsuccessful series of casts and metal braces, when I was four months old, orthopedic surgeons clipped my Achilles tendons to lengthen them, allowing me finally to flex my feet. Apparently, they did an excellent job, because here I am decades later, trying to transition back to running more in line with my original foot position, on the balls of my feet.

So as I was running today, concentrating ridiculously hard on the position of my feet, I thought about how different my life would have been if I hadn’t received first-rate medical care as a baby, or had been born before the surgery technique I received was practiced. And also, how strange it is to try to transition to a more “natural” stride that disregards all the modern technology and convention associated with running and running shoes.

Left in my “natural” state, I probably wouldn’t have been able to walk at all, or would have walked with a significant limp and pain. Medical technology allowed me to have a more “normal” gait, walking without much difficulty. And here I am eschewing modern technology in an attempt to return to that “natural” running state. I’m not sure exactly what my point is here, other than the inherent complexity of ideas like “natural” and “normal,” of allowing technology to help us when it can, and eschewing it when we so choose, of appreciating our contemporary lives as the strangely ironic things that they so often seem to be. But I’m going to continue to think about it—and continue trying to reconnect with my long lost pointed running feet.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the west coast Bureau Chief for POTB

 

You can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

 

Diversity Inc has just posted its top ten list of the best and boldest corporate employers of people with disabilities. There are some stellar names: IBM; Aetna;Proctor & Gamble (whose animal experimentation programs still cause great concern for many); and still one is pleased to see that strong efforts are underway at V.I.P. corporations to hire and celebrate people with disabilities.

Its interesting to observe that there are no educational institutions listed. With their multi-billion dollar endowments why aren’t we seeing Harvard University or Brown? Or at least some compiled nominative like “the Ivy League” or the “Big 10”.

The sad truth I’m afraid is that we’re still in the era of rehabilitation modeling in the higher education arena. The model says that students “Must” be accommodated in order to get an education. The model isn’t very interested in seeing a seamless bridge between the academic accommodations that are provided in a classroom and the rich opportunity to put that accommodation process into a new model both of pedagogy and of employment possibilities.

 

OH but we can dream yes?

 

S.K.

The neighbors are afoot with their gasoline driven machines. When I walk with my guide dog at twilight they’re still at it, fouling the air, obscuring the birds, working mindlessly but without the muscle of Buddha.

One guy has a weed whacker which sounds like 42,000 mosquitoes amplified by a 70watt Marshall amplifier. He could play with “The Clash” except of course he has no genuine outrage. He thinks his taxes are too high and that all politicians are liars and that’s enough in the idea department to claim world citizenship.

Asleep I can still hear them. The bastards have entered my dreams. They’re mowing the orgonocity of my nautilus. The dream mowers are rectilinear, dim, unfeeling, plodding, stinking of fuel and hypo-minty deodorant. 

Gadzook! The American lawn! A pastoral jail with commodity fetishized pre-bagged toxins and ride ’em cowboy tractors and little white baseball caps. 

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans spend 3 billion hours annually mowing their lawns. One thinks inevitably of all the things they might be doing instead but if I tread there I will be susceptible to the charge of intellectual snobbery. Ah but occasionally some “I.S.”   feels good. Although his article isn’t about the depredations of lawn mowers I like Tom Vanderbilt’s essay over at Slate: “Lawn Pox: Children’s Play Equipment and the Decline of the American Yard” Mr. Vanderbilt’s vituperations are about the dread sprawl of overdetermined, plastic play devices that he sees in every suburban and ex-urban yard–all of it in iridescent oranges and reds and collectively modeled on the playlands at McDonalds.

He notes that children don’t actually play on this crap. They’re all in the house playing Nintendo. He wonders if Americans no longer believe in community playgrounds. We know the answer of course. The playground is a dangerous place. Of course this is likely to be true. There aren’t enough stay at home moms and cops on the beat to keep the old time swingsets free of meth addicts.

My point such as it is has to do with the fortress of the home, the manicured lawn its pastoral invitation, the unexamined sentimentalization of the English garden superimposed on American frontier fantasies, each further influenced by the suburban super-ego and the lawn equipment industry. Why not grow wild grasses, pachysandra,lilacs untrimmed, plenty of trees, force some germinal natureback into our lives?

Of course smarter people than I have written about these matters of American pastoral and the cowboy rancher at home next door. Michael Pollen and Debrah Tall   come to mind.

I’ll merely add that when you’re blind and hoping for some walking joy and all the little ball cap wearing Bubbas are erasing the soundscape you feel the stultifying and sleepwalking misery of the business. 

 

S.K.

I’ve been reading Paul Theroux’s excellent travel memoir about Britain: “The Kingdom by the Sea” which is a walker’s paradise of emerging images. Tired of London’s ingrown self-satisfactions and smug urbanity the writer takes off with his knapsack for a stroll along England’s coast. The writer is slightly irascible. (A Theroux trademark–ever just enough but not overblown; never cheaply ironic or decadent)and in this way he is akin to Melville’s Ishmael who must get to sea or knock the hats off the heads of strangers.  

There is more of course. Much more. Mr. Theroux rides the rural branch lines of the rail system and provides preter-nostalgic views of provincial culture and its affection for 19th century travel. But despite the endangered charm of local rail lines (where the Brits get to dress up as Victorian porters) the British coast is a late Bictorian hell of cheap amusements, fried foods, bad pubs, dirty hotels, crumbling architectures, toxic landfills, rainy weather, roving skinheads and sad families “on the dole”. 

As a walking writer by necessity I love the slow image. What is that ahead of me? Is that a man or an elephant’s ear? I see only provisionally so I’m trapped in phantasmagoria and that’s the way it will always be until some neurologist figures out how to plug a donated eye into a functioning brain without a manual. I adore the slow image. Mr. Theroux walks us into assemblies of modernist legacies with a rolling gate:

“I was happy, going to places I had never been, that had only been names to me, or descriptions in books that had falsely fixed the place in my imagination. In Rural Rides, William Cobbett had said, “Deal is a most villainous place. It is full of filthy-looking people. Great desolation of abomination has been going on here … Everything seems upon the perish …” And I had assumed it was like that, the judgment was so strongly expressed. But it was a small mild town, without a seawall or much of a beach, and few trees, and open to the breezes from France. It was raggedly respectable. The boats on shore looked practical — slow, clumsy, and made for one purpose; they had numbers but no names; rusty ironwork: fishing boats. Men still went out every day from this old trampled coast and its crowded houses, and they made a living at the hard work of catching fish.”

“They were winching up the fishing boats when I set out from Deal that day in bright sunshine. Winches on shore always meant there was serious fishing being done in a small way; and more than the usual number of public houses also suggested a fishing population; and timbers and rope hanks and a kind of tar-smeared and indestructible litter on the foreshore meant fishermen, too. Another thing about fishermen was that they never looked as though they could swim.”

These images are better than slow: they’re insistent and methodical like the tread of feet, like the sound of a parade to a blind man. The country is everywhere slowly in decline. People ever so slowly are repairing their shoes. Margaret Thatcher is slowly playing at Victorian war in the Falklands. The exhausted locals play at exhausted jingoism. Nothing has any glory”

“I walked a half a mile south and found Walmer altogether different. The newsstands seemed especially gruesome that day, with the headlines gloating over the sinking of the Argentine battleship and all the deaths. I crossed the grassy patch from Deal into Walmer, beside the low shore (“generally believed to have been the first landing place of Julius Caesar in Britain”). Walmer had the smack of a London suburb — flower gardens and elderly shoppers and a whiff of the sickroom and the sight of people dressed a little too warmly. In some coastal places people were living, and in others they were dying. Deal and Walmer, side by side, illustrated each type. There was further proof in Walmer. After a certain age, English people did not buy new shoes, but just went on cleaning and buffing the cracks in their old ones, and making them look decent. They looked at them and thought: These will see me out.”

“The beach here was level, a continuation of the Sandwich Flats, but ahead were the white cliffs of Coney Point and Bockhill Farm, beyond the village of Kingsdown. As I approached the cliffs I saw a sign indicating that a Ministry of Defence Rifle Range lay under the cliff: do not touch anything — it may kill you . Another sign warned walkers to “ascertain high water to prevent being cut off by the tide.” Most beach paths were subjected to tides, so a walker might find himself unable to go forward or back. The term for such a predicament was embayed: to be trapped and immobilized by the rising tide. “Walkers should be careful to consult a tide-table so as to avoid the risk of being embayed.””

We live in the age of fast image. Minimalism. Fragments. Irony cast as literary allusion. Accordingly much of contemporary nonfiction writing is imitatively addicted to the cut and forced speed of televised pictures. A walking writer is however just lost enough and just sufficiently satisfied by the business of discovery that immanence and facts are sweetly equal. I remember once upon a time teaching T.S. Eliot to a group of undergraduates. A boy said: “Eliot likes being exhausted.” “Yes,” I said. “He doesn’t have a choice.” This is the province of the slow image. People making do. Travelers waking up in unfamiliar locales. And for both groups nothing is as it should be. One keeps moving.

 

S.K.

The term is not mine but from the disability studies scholar Robert McGruer who in addition to being a cultural critic of disability is also a writer who pushes the parameters of our discourse on queerness.

McGruer properly asserts that as heterosexuality is the compulsory position of the many it is in its own way the shaper of queerness (which of course becomes reactive, performative,parodic, what have you).

And just so with disability. The able-bodied assumptions of the many are doubled and re-doubled by the placements and displacements of bodies that our disfigured, broken, require accommodations for the senses, or any variety of other taxonomic differences. Do you want  to be a freak? Well, yes. The able-bodied love to play at freakdom if its a matter of style as with Haight-Ashbury in the late 60’s or the followers of Marilyn Manson. Able-bodiedness is after all so static and on some days its boring.

Ah but the parodic is boring. Freaks of yesteryear put on their business suits. Compulsory able-bodiedness is an unremitting social expectation. Its symbolism is unavoidable. President Barack Obama plays basketball with more than passing skill. Jack Kennedy was a sailor. The able-bodiedness must still hold at the tiller when it comes to our ship of state. We may finally have a statue of F.D.R. using his wheelchair but don’t get too giddy. Its just a statue.

I do not believe that people with disabilities should engage in parody of what I’ll call the athlete-worshipping, or half-starved feminine followers of commodified and highly stylized body images. Nor do I think people must be cured to be included at the roundtable of culture.

But the compulsory able-bodiedness continues because Americans aren’t capable of asking questions about their body assumptions. Looking thin and even less than thin is an apriori expectation of the millions though owing to genetic inheritance and factors of poverty millions are either overweight and ashamed or they are shaped like their forbears who were tough country people and who held no resemblance to a Madison Avenue model.

But people are depressed by their bodies in numbers that are not merely indicative of a reasoned hope for simple better health–you know, let’s lose a few pounds and get into summer activities. The depression I refer to is deeper, inspired by the compulsory able-bodiedness  industry which is far more powerfulthan the average persons capacity to ask: “does this image of the body really do me any good or even matter  very much?”

I’m blind and I’m different. I don’t like being different on every occasion for in fact I don’t like the business of being stared at when I walk into a new barbershop.No one likes this. But letting  this go can bedone. You simply tell yourself:”I’m the most interesting thing to happen to these sad barbers at least for today.”

 

S.K.  

By now everyone knows that Sarah Palin (who is the putative governor of Alaska and a former Republican Vice Presidential candidate)  likes to be photographed in the company of dead or dying animals.

This is what anthropologists call “a primary need” and what the heck–so what she needs dead critters to feel the sparkle of her inner life?

Liberals and moderates should try to understand this. You see, dead things have a radio-theric quality–that is, they give off minute electrostatic signals that only the most rarefied human beings can receive. These special human beings who I will call “Dead- Flesh Radio Receptive Hominids” are actually healed of illnesses when they are surrounded by defunct animals.

IN ancient times such people were called “stay at home moms” since the men would bring the bounty of the hunt back to the cave and some of the women would leap to their feet (where formerly they had been nearly comatose in the dank and bosky darkness) and they would be restored to giggling animation.

Men can experience the therapy of dead critters as well. Apparently men can also experience the joy of dead fish. Women don’t seem to care for dead fish. Some scientists believe that men are related to dogs but that’s another story.

When Sarah Palin leans back on a dead bear she is being healed. My Finnish grandmother could tell you about the benefits of rubbing yourself with a cat’s skin. Its nothing. Its just like aspirin.

All those blue state people who think Sarah Palin is trying to be Caribou Barbie or a mega-biker-chick are missing the point.

Sarah Palin has gout.

 

S.K.