Category: Uncategorized

Scott MacIntyre: Artist First, Blind Person Second

There's an interesting post over at the web site of the Foundation Fighting Blindness entitled: "It's Time for America to Idolize Scott MacIntyre" which I'm quoting in full. I'll follow up on the south end of it:

Congratulations to Scott MacIntyre! His dynamic performance on Tuesday night secured him a place in the Top 10 on American Idol! Thank you to everyone who voted for Scott. Be sure to tune in again next Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. EST and cast your vote for Scott as he performs in the next round. With FFB’s support, Scott MacIntyre is destined to be the next American Idol!

Millions dream of making it to the final rounds of American Idol but for Scott MacIntyre, the dream has become reality. Born with severe vision loss from Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), Scott is an incredibly gifted musical performer who has made it to the Top 10 on American Idol. With his remarkable talent, Scott is bound to make it far in the competition, and we need you to support him as he shoots his way to the top!

An Arizona State University graduate, a Marshall scholar, and a Fulbright scholar, Scott learned to play the piano at the age of three.  His piano professor, Walter Cosand, said, "He's always been able to do what everyone else could do and many things no one else could do. A lot of things he does are very remarkable, even for someone without a disability."

Scott also has a sister, Katelyn, who has lost her vision to LCA. With their brother Todd, the three siblings have made a splash performing as the MacIntyre Family Singers. Scott even shared his talents with the FFB family when he performed at the opening luncheon of the 1998 VISIONS Conference in Chicago.

Simon, Paula, Randy and Kara have brought him this far; now it’s up to us to make Scott MacIntyre the next American Idol! Scott will be performing live on Wednesday, March 25, as one of the Top 10 contestants to continue to compete. Voting is free, so be sure to vote for Scott!

Stay tuned to the Foundation Fighting Blindness Web site for more information about Scott’s progress and how your votes can help him reach the top and raise awareness of retinal degenerative diseases across the country.

Learn More About Scott MacIntyre
Visit http://www.americanidol.com/videos/season_8/scott_macintyre to view Scott’s latest video interviews and hear about his passion and talent for music, his greatest musical influence, and what prompted him to try out for American Idol. You can leave comments and words of encouragement for Scott on this page too.

Click here to read an article about Scott on MSNBC.

 

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I have written many times on this blog about the unique opportunity that's right now standing before us–we have the very real chance to cure genetically caused forms of blindness in this generation.

My colleagues here at the University of Iowa are world leaders in the effort to find a cure for Scott MacIntyre's brand of vision loss. This is an amazing moment in medical and cultural history to be sure.

Speaking for myself I hope that Scott and his family learn about the work being done here.

As a writer who also was a Fulbright scholar and who began his creative life while most kids are still chewing on wooden blocks I want to point out that Scott MacIntyre isn't an artist overcoming his disability nor is he a disabled person who is compensating for his disability through art–he's an artist who happens to be blind. In effect this is not any different than saying: Ernest Hemingway was an artist who happened to be 6 feet tall.  

The public gets easily confused about these matters because blindness functions as a powerful symbol. Symbolic language isn't always the best language when thinking about the complexities of human beings.

I'm rooting for Scott MacIntyre the artist. I'm rooting for a cure for LCA. I'm rooting for the Foundation Fighting Blindness. I can compartmentalize these excitements.

If Scott wasn't blind I'd still be rooting for him because he was a classically trained pianist and a former Fulbright scholar. Those folks don't generally turn up on the Fox TV network.

 

S.K.

In the Old Days When the Dead Stuck Around

I confess its a little trick I have of thinking about the late Victorians and the Edwardians and all that happy ghost worship they used to do. My mother was a serious ghost watcher and say what you will, such people are always happily occupied.

One thinks of Virginia Woolf talking to her grandmother:

“We sit in the dark and wait for the dead to speak,” says Virginia to her grandmother—“and they drift into the room so softly, with their faint smell of mohair and whale oil. The smell is like nothing else in the world; the entering dead who waft over our hair.”

Lately as spring arrives and the days grow longer I’ve found myself dreaming of the dead–though not the abstrract chalky missing, but rather those who I have loved and who I still miss though my days are filled with bus schedules and the nearly private gamesmanship  of getting by in the political world.

I miss John Lydenberg, Professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges who taught me how to read Herman Melville. I deeply miss his sharp, unsentimental humor and his unapologetic leftist politics which he learned at Harvard in the years before the second world war when pacifism and idealism weren’t yet sullied by all that’s come since. I especially miss his game of cutting out funny, overlooked newspaper headlines: “Young Couple Happy on Small Newspaper” was particuarly good. I thought of him the other day when I read: “Pope’s Condom-stance Under Fire” .

I miss my father who died on Easter Sunday 2000. One doesn’t need a reason to miss one’s father but today I miss him because I’ve been  reading William Manchester’s “The LastLion” about Winston Churchill and I know that he would have very interesting things to say both about Manchester as a historian and about Sir Winston. I miss my dad’s voice. I miss the way he used to sing to the dog.

14 years ago today I arrived home in Ithaca, New York with my first guide dog “Corky” who changed my life in a thousand ways. How I miss her! I could start crying right now.

So I love the odd, innocent, half-shy silliness of the Bloomsbury crowd. Tonight I want to wear a turban with a sapphire pinned to the front. I want to carry on a bit with my gorgeous and beloved dead and feel them touching my hair.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

 

S.K.

Rumors of the Death of Poetry Department

 

“Poetry’s Death?”

 

By Andrea Scarpino

Los Angeles, CA  

Some say American poetry is dead, or at least, Americans’ interest in poetry is dead. It seems every couple of years, someone of great note announces the fact that Americans don’t read poetry, don’t have time for poetry, don’t understand poetry’s value. Being a someone-of-not-so-great note, I’ve often agreed with their opinions and can speak—well—poetically about the importance put on poetry in previous generations and civilizations, and/or in other countries and cultures in contrast to the United States.

However, sometimes things happen to make me wonder if American poetry is really dead. Several weeks ago, I attended a celebration of the Tufts Poetry Awards presented by the Poetry Society of America, Red Hen Press and Claremont Graduate University. Three poets read their work that night, each a former recipient of a Tufts award: Deborah Digges, Rodney Jones and Yusef Komunyakaa.

I’ll be honest: I went to hear Komunyakaa, and I figured, as usual, the crowd would be sparse. I was ready to bemoan the death of American poetry, while taking the opportunity presented by such death to speak one-on-one with Komunyakaa after the reading. Instead, the place was packed to capacity. As the poets were reading, ushers brought in more chairs so that latecomers would have a place to sit. People stood along the sides of the theater and crowded their bags into the aisles. Not even the fact that the stage was set for the theater’s contemporary re-telling of the play Tartuffe complete with a wooden lawn full of fake grass—not even that disguised the fact that the crowd was eager to hear poetry. And forget about speaking with Komunyakaa after the reading! A long line of people holding copies of his books, eager for a bit of conversation and his signature formed before I could even get out of my seat. So maybe poetry is just on life support?

Then, this weekend, the aforementioned someone-of-not-so-great-note gave a poetry reading to support her chapbook, The Grove Behind. I’ve never before given a reading in support of a book I had written, and certainly never as a “headliner” so to speak. I was terrified, not that I would stumble on my poems or trip getting to the stage—I have stood in front of classrooms long enough to know that a joke can make even the most awkward of my mistakes less terrible. Instead, I was terrified no one would come, that I would be alone in the bookstore with the wine and desserts I had brought and no one to listen to my poems but the hapless workers who had no choice but to attend. No one cares about poetry, remember?

Much to my surprise, 25 people attended. And they bought books, spoke to me with passion and intelligence about the poems I had read, asked questions, offered their opinions and personal stories. Of course, I knew most everyone as friends or students, even one former student. But for the most part, they weren’t “poetry people,” just people willing to engage poetry when given the opportunity, when invited personally by a friend, or when—ahem—offered extra credit. American poetry doesn’t have to be dead, nor does American interest in poetry. Yes, I still believe American interest in poetry is much declined from what it should be, but after nights like the Tuft’s reading and my own small reading, I have a little more hope that poetry has, after all, a place when given the chance.

 

Andrea Scarpino is the West Coast Bureau Chief of POTB and you can visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

Murder by Police of Mentally Ill Man in Spokane, Washington Covered Up by Cops, ETc.

 

The story of the death of Otto Zehm in a Spokane convenience store where the mentally ill man was trying to buy a soda, the story of a death caused by the unwarranted use of a taser isn’t going away. Thanks again to Dave Reynolds of The inclusion Daily Express.  

 

Lawsuit Filed In Otto Zehm Death
(Spokesman-Review)
March 24, 2008
SPOKANE, WASHINGTON– [Excerpt] A federal civil rights suit against the city of Spokane and nine of its police officers says Otto Zehm died three years ago when police officers used batons and Tasers in a display of excessive force on the unarmed, passive, mentally ill man who merely wanted to buy a soda.

The lawsuit was filed Friday by the Center for Justice, five days before a legal deadline, after its attorneys spent months in private meetings with city attorneys. The negotiations failed to produce a damage settlement, a plan for changes in the way police deal with mentally ill people, or a sought-after apology.

The suit alleges the Police Department and its former acting chief, Jim Nicks, engaged in a conspiracy to portray Zehm as the aggressor after the 36-year-old janitor’s March 18, 2006, encounter with Officer Karl Thompson and other officers in a North Spokane convenience store. Zehm’s death two days later was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner.

The filing of the suit came after the Center for Justice and city attorneys failed to reach an out-of-court settlement.

Entire article:
Lawsuit filed in Otto Zehm death
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0324d.htm

 

S.K.

The Only Joke in the New Testament

 

Once many years ago when I was foolling around I told a fellow grad student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where I was tarrying for awhile in my transient bookish student days that I was going to write my Ph.D. dissertation on the subject of jokes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. “Well,” said my friend, “That ought to be a short thesis.” 

You can learn a lot about people by pulling their ambulatory appendages and in that instance I saw that my buddy didn’t know much about Emily who though a dark spirit in many of her poems was also a great master of riddles. To which I add that its no sin to not have read deeply in Emily Dickinson but I like to imagine that perhaps someday that fellow will do just that and be amused in his old age.

Jesus made a pun on Peter’s name: ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church’.

Peter is petras, a stone, in Greek.

I’ve been in mind of this moment in the New Testament for a couple of reasons: the first has to do with the magic of giving one another spiritually expansive names. As I said to my friend Gary Whittington just the other day: “Has there ever been a better name than Crazy Horse?”

My own surname means grove of spruce trees in Finnish unless you take out one of the “U” s in which case the root of the word changes from Kuusi which means spruce tree to Kusi which means piss.

Grove of spruce is, I submit, a spiritual name. Piss-pot is another matter but one might argue for its religious meaning with sufficient comparative analysis and some brio.

The second thing that Jesus’ pun puts me in mind of is that we can admire each other’s strengths and build a vision from something we’ve seen that is not immediately apparent to the naked eye.

The pun is not always the lowest form of humor.

 

Perhaps the last thing to add is that it takes only a single stone to have a church. Peter is also an alter.

 

S.K.

The Texas Two Step

Thanks are due to Dave Reynolds at The Inclusion Daily Express for bringing this story to our attention.

Victim Of Beating At State School Seeks Lawsuit
(Houston Chronicle)
March 23, 2009
AUSTIN, TEXAS– [Excerpt] Haseeb Chishty was beaten for sport.

A mentally disabled but physically healthy adult, Chishty was living at the Denton State School in 2002 when he was kicked and punched by a staff member who did it for fun, leaving him in a wheelchair and unable to feed himself or use the bathroom.

Chishty’s attacker went to prison and the family has for years been trying to sue the state, only to be prevented by legal roadblocks that grant the state immunity. But given new allegations of abuse that put conditions at the state’s large homes for the mentally disabled in the spotlight, state lawmakers may finally be ready to give Chishty his day in court.

The family is asking the Legislature to pass a resolution that waives the state’s sovereign immunity, allowing them to sue the Department of Aging and Disability Services for damages. They also want an atonement for what was done to him.

“I have many blisters on the soles of my feet from running around trying to find justice for my son,” Chishty’s mother, Farhat Chishty, told members of the House Committee on Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence on Monday.

Entire article:
Victim of beating at state school seeks lawsuit
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6334803.html

When the President of the United States is Tired He laughs Department

 

This morning on the Today Show I heard NBC’s political analyst Chuck Todd suggest that Barack Obama’s laughing incident on Sunday’s 60 Minutes was a consequence of the president’s fatigue. IN short: when asked on the CBS news program last evening about the economy the president did some extended chuckling as he framed his answers–so much chuckling that Steve Kroft of CBS asked the president to explain himself.

The president dutifully said that he didn’t think the economic state of the nation was funny but added that sometimes one has to see the dark humor in a bad situation. (The paraphrase is mine.)

“Well,” I thought. “If I ain’t a horn swoggled Deja-Vu Voulez Vous–I mean, what the heck–I mean didn’t we just get rid of a smirking sub-Cartesian-ding-Dong? I mean, weren’t we bargaining for big C Change?”

“What is it?” I asked just out loud enough that my dog looked up. “Is it the drinking water at 1600Pennsylvania Avenue? Do presidents move in, unpack their boy-toys, drink a glass of water and turn into Schmucks? Did the CIA engineer this back in 1960?    (I know of no particular incident where J.F.K. laughed at the nation’s problems but he “did” bring Thumper and Bambi onto the premises for sexual hijinks in the White House swimming pool–an activity that requires some serious smirking. 

Personally I don’t care if the president is tired. That’s what we elected him to be: tired. Tired beyond any routine level of human suspension. I want the man to be tired and serious. I want him to be serious as a Special Olympian. Serious as an Iowa farmer. Serious as all the people who are frightened out of their frigging wits because has anyone noticed–there are no jobs in Michigan?

Last night’s interview on CBS may have done the White House a whole lot of damage. CNN has a headline today: “First 100 days gone in 60minutes”. That may well be far fetched but perception is nine tenths of public relations and getting good will “back” in Washington or with the Washington “bubble” media is very hard to do.

S.K.

The Shame of Atalissa

 

Advocates: ‘Atalissa Needs To Bring Change’
(Des Moines Register)
March 20, 2009

Excerpt from The Inclusion Daily Express
ATALISSA, IOWA– [Excerpt] The Atalissa scandal must serve as a catalyst for overhauling the way Iowa protects the mentally disabled, parents and advocates told a state task force on Friday.

The committee was formed last month by Gov. Chet Culver in response to disclosures that dozens of mentally retarded men had been working for several decades in a West Liberty turkey-processing plant for as little as 44 cents an hour, plus room and board.

The task force is looking at ways to close the gaps in Iowa’s regulatory system and strengthen state laws dealing with unlicensed care centers that house the disabled.

Geoffrey Lauer, executive director of the Brain Injury Association of Iowa, urged the task force to use the opportunity created by the public’s outrage over Atalissa.

“Please, do not squander this gift. Do not turn away from this opportunity to boldly and publicly declare our system of service as one that has been, and is, stuck in an outdated and broken model of thinking and serving.”

Entire article:
‘Atalissa needs to bring change’
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0320f.htm

Some Atalissa men malnourished (Des Moines Register)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0320e.htm
Atalissa: Feds saw no need for fines at bunkhouse (Des Moines Register)
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2009/red/0320d.htm