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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.

by Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles

 

Last week, I attended the annual conference of the Association for Death Education and Counseling. I presented a paper on elegy, a poetic form that deals with death, dying and grief, but I also attended a very interesting presentation on Lucy Grealy’s memoir Autobiography of a Face. I’ve read Grealy’s memoir (and highly recommend it) but was struck in this presentation by the very idea of a face—what our faces present to the world, the assumptions people make about us because of our faces and the way we look, and the ways our faces can tell the truth about us, as well as the ways in which they misconstrue the truth.

Grealy was disfigured as a child because of her battle with a type of cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma. One third of her jaw was removed as doctors attempted to save her life, and chemotherapy and radiation treatments weakened the bones in her face. She subsequently underwent some 30 facial reconstruction surgeries but never seemed to be able to make peace with her face, and ended up dying of a drug overdose at the age of 39. Hers is a terrible story for many reasons, and the conference presenter was using it in part to examine how Grealy was treated by medical professionals throughout her initial illness and subsequent surgeries.

When I returned from the conference, I found that a British woman by the name of Susan Boyle had become an internet sensation in part because her singing talent doesn’t seem to “match” her physical appearance. I watched the youtube clip of Boyle auditioning for the British talent competition Britain’s Got Talent and was struck by the meanness of the judges and audience members when Boyle initially walked out onto the stage. There were snickering and catcalls from the audience, and the camera panned to show audience members rolling their eyes at Boyle’s admission that she was “trying to be a professional singer.”

Apparently, Boyle didn’t look like what we assume someone should look like to sing on television, although she did have all the trappings of femininity including a lovely dress and high heels. As the youtube clip progressed, Boyle began to sing in such a lovely voice that even the meanest judge, Simon Cowell, couldn’t hold back the look of shock and surprise on his face. Gradually, he even smiled. And as she sang, one of the show’s sidekicks looked at the camera and asked, “You didn’t expect that did you? Did you? No.” By the end of the audition, the audience and judges all stood and applauded wildly. Clearly, basing their expectations solely on her appearance, no one in the audience expected Boyle to be able to sing.

What puzzles me is how, even in the year 2009, we as a people still believe that a face means something important about the person it contains. This is the foundation of racism and sexism, of course, as well as ableism, classism, etc. Those of us interested in Disability Studies specifically and activism more broadly argue constantly that “just because” a person has a visible disability or a darker skin color or appears to be a woman or wears fancy suits, “just because” of those things, we can’t make assumptions about their abilities, their kindnesses, the people they love and who love them. Whether they can sing or write or cut hair or work at the post office. It’s just such an old argument that I get tired making it, and assume, I guess, that most people have learned it by now.

Unfortunately, Lucy Grealy’s story and the sensation around Susan Boyle have reminded me that we still have a lot of work to do to convince the world that faces don’t tell us much in the grand scheme of things. A face certainly can’t tell you that a woman can sing a moving rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” or that another woman’s heart is breaking, over and over again.

 

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

 

www.andreascarpino.com

 

Now that he’s out of retirement the “Landshark” of ’70’s era TV fame has been busy. Besides eating suburban poodles and stray cats and advising local school boards and Sunday schools on how to mistreat children–besides these usual pursuits the Landshark has now decided to join Karl Rove as a phony news analyst on Fox.

 

“Its time to do Satan’s work,” the shark said in a phone interview with Planet of the Blind. “Nowadays its not enough to hang out under the Tree of Knowledge, you have to give up on knowledge and just go where the preternaturally uninformed spend their time. For me the answer is simple: just appear on Fox. Those people haven’t told the truth about anything for a decade and they’re sufficiently mean for my ilk.”

 

The sharks spokesperson who resembles Bill the Cat said that no one should be confused about the shark’s appearance on TV alongside Karl Rove: “He’ll still be off camera behind a door, he’ll just be his usual charming liminal lying self.”

 

S.K.

At the age of 94 Studs Terkel finally sat down and wrote his memoir “Touch and Go” –a book so capacious in its varied carols and its assemblages of American curios that reading it is like falling down a flight of stairs while pasting rare stamps in an album. One is astonished by the worlds revealed and simultaneously affected by the simplest details. One is tempted to cry out: “Let me too be 94 if by God I can sound like the American Henry Mayhew.”

But its the small details that really get me. Writing of one of his brothers Terkel points to an American street tradition born in Italy and Ireland which has utterly vanished today. The street song which persisted until the 1950’s but which is now gone forever like the Studebaker. Here’s Terkel on a casual street corner opera and a local boxing match without rules:

“My brother Ben was a true neighborhood boy. Schooling was not his true love; his mentors and patrons were the big guys on the corner. There was little doubt that of all the kids Ben was their runaway favorite. I can still hear their requests for his throbbing rendition of “Break the News to Mother.” They tossed nickels and dimes at him, though there was nothing patronizing about the gesture. It was as though sentimental passersby were paying tribute to a street singer. He picked up enough change in that manner to occasionally take me to a Saturday feature and a Pearl White serial. The Civil War song was to Ben what “Casey at the Bat” was to DeWolf Hopper, or “Over the Rainbow” to Judy Garland. Just break da noos to mudder Y’know how deah I love ‘er Tell her not tuh wait fer me F’r I’m not comin’ ho-o-me. Now and then, Dutch or Irish or Greek would engage Ben and Quinton, the ten-year-old wonders, to box a wild round or two. Winner take all–a dime. It would usually wind up in a draw and each warrior would be a buffalo nickel richer. Neither Ben nor Quinton knew of the Marquis of Queensberry rules nor did they much care. They aimed for each other’s groin; they rabbit punched. And even pivot punched, a maneuver that was outlawed a half-century before.”

Of course this isn’t a good paragraph and yet I couldn’t care less.The man is talking aloud on audio tape and he’s remembering the vitality of provincial culture–we were a land of neighborhoods until the auto really took over and for the sake of argument I’ll say that you can’t find anyone singing on a street corner in America nowadays unless perhaps they’re selling something out of desperation like religion or spurious free merchandise. No one has permission to be moved in public anymore though fighting persists but not as sport.

IN fact what you feel reading Terkel’s Mayhew-esque reminiscences is nothing like nostalgia but more a wonder or a fear that local culture can’t be resuscitated in a time of ear buds and i-phones. Nowadays if a crowd assembles on the street they’ve been told to go there by Fox news or they’re hoping to see a celebrity but no one’s going to stand on a soapbox and talk about anthroposophism or anarchy or sing a slave song or even something by the Coasters.

But you canread Terkel’s  memoir the way I read Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” as a literary museum in which you can see how America was supposed to be.

S.K.

I am so American I must hold my head. Last night while dreaming I held a shot gun in my arms and discussed its beauty with a medical doctor–though not a real doctor–he was a TV Landdoc but I don’t remember   which show he comes from. We were standing together outside the dream world hospital and we each had a gun and we were mutually excited about the prospect of duck hunting. I remember my gun was oddly shaped like a golf club. It was probably a white cane before it became a Remington. Then the doors of the hospital flew open and a gruesome retinue appeared. There was a former boss of mine (who will remain nameless) and a life long friend who I first met 30 years ago at the Iowa Writers Workshop. There were several people who I knew I “knew” from various periods of my life but they weren’t clear. And then the dreamland camera focused on a character who I can only call “the central scrutinizer”–a tall, thin man with a small wooden box over his head with a square slit where his eyes would be. His  job was to interrogate my friend from the Writers Workshop and my pal had to sit in one of those little tents you see as the backdrop for a Christmas creche but there was no manger or baby Jesis. The rest of us were told to stand far away while the scrutinizer with his box head and eyeball slit was given the okay to cross examine my friend about his life. We all sat far away like passengers in an overcrowded airport whose flights have been delayed–we sprawled on the floor and leaned against walls. Box man asked my friend if he had written anti-American poetry. You could scarcely hear him. My friend who in real life has a hearing impairment couldn’t understand the question. I got to my feet and walked straight up to box man and stared into his little eyevall slit and told him that he had to speak up because there were lots of hearing impaired people. The others were horrified that I dared to confront the scrutinizer. But then he was gone. My friend came out of the creche and made a joke about feces. Say what you will, authority counts on the public to obey its orders to sit down. In real life I have never gone duck hunting.

 

S.K.