Planet of the Blind

 

Back in 1995 a man named McArthur Wheeler was quickly arrested after he robbed two banks in Pittsburgh. He’d smeared lemon juice on his face believing it would prevent surveillance cameras from recording his image. An article in today’s New York Times by writer and film maker Errol Morris entitled the Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong But You’ll Never Know What It Is takes a delightful look at what is now known as “The Dunning-Kruger Effect“. The gist of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people who don’t know what they don’t know are prone to inflated self-assessments. See this link for Professor Dunning’s original paper on the subject.

I’ll quote the abstract of Dunning’s paper in full:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

 

As they say in a popular TV commercial: “Dogs don’t know its not bacon!” 

 

The direction of Errol Morris’ piece in the Times is that not knowing what you don’t know frames an epistemological opportunity but only if one recognizes the limits of self-knowledge. “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” (Confucius)   

One thinks of Wallace Stevens‘ famous concluding line from his poem “The Snow Man: “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” We know who we are and who we are not provided we possess sufficient skepticism about the consolations of sentiment and the errors of consciousness.

 

All of which is to say that none of this is news to poets. Consider the following short poem by Charles Simic:

 

Bedtime Story

 

When a tree falls in a forest

And there’s no one around

To hear the sound, the owls

Have to do all the thinking.

 

They think so hard they fall off

Their perch and are eaten by ants

Who, as you already know, all look like

Little Black Riding Hoods.

 

 

Or these lines by Anselm Hollo:

 

wherever there is a hole

in a metaphysical fabric

you are sure to find a

hundred metaphysicians

attempting to fill it

 

but above our residence

on earth the sky

is clear, an

uncommitted

avantgardist

 

**

 

What we do not know is the framing or incitement principle of poetry in the 20th century. Here are some lines by Gunnar Ekelof that I particularly like:

 

This music is like ankle rings

if nothing is the ankle and nothing the rhythm…

 

 

S.K.

 

 

 

 

 

The article below comes to us via Inclusion Daily Express. It is interesting that twenty years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act that “stigma and misconceptions remain in some workplaces, making it challenging for the disabled to even land interviews”. My argument is that the failure of higher education to create strong, seamless disability inclusion in all areas of academic life has meant that students with disabilities largely remain outsiders in the customary diversity dynamics of campus life. My own university (the University of Iowa) has a student disability services office located in the basement (I kid you not) of a dormitory–a basement that can only be accessed via elevators. I’ll leave it to you to imagine how a wheelchair user would get out in a fire, or how a blind person might even locate the place.)

Bad as that is, the UI also has major academic buildings that remain non-compliant with Title II of the ADA. Title II requires that bathrooms and adjacent public facilities (water fountains, doors, telephones, and the like) be made accessible whenever a renovation occurs in an older building. If you renovate a classroom (or even a broom closet) you must renovate the bathrooms adjacent to that classroom or broom closet. The UI’s student union has floor after floor of inaccessible restrooms. Recently the university put an art museum on the fourth floor of the building. You guessed it: no accessible bathrooms. My own academic building (the English-Philosophy Building) has been renovated on every floor and still has no accessible restrooms though there’s a plan to install them on one floor this summer. That installation will be of little help if you’re in a wheelchair on the fourth floor and you have a catheter and the elevators are busy. All of these problems represent a violation of the law but I’ll argue that this is less a matter of jurisprudence than it is a matter of culture. What lessons do universities teach future business leaders by relegating people with disabilities to the basement and by insisting that that pesky ADA is to be honored only rhetorically?

Occasionally I hear from some abstract administrative source that things at the UI are going to get better. Meantime I’m supposed to take the stage this summer in Iowa City with Iowa Senator Tom Harkin (who co-authored the ADA) to celebrate the ADA’s 20th anniversary. That is of course an honor and one that I will cherish. But I know and now my blog’s readers know that my university is complicit in training its future graduates to think of people with disabilities as a problem. Small wonder then, that real people with real disabilities continue to struggle with stigma and misconceptions in the workplace.    

 

Stephen Kuusisto

 

People With Disabilities Continue To Face Higher Jobless Rate
(Boston Herald)
June 18, 2010
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS– [Excerpt] Nearly two decades after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, advocates for the disabled say much work remains to train disabled job-seekers and match them with employers, especially during the jobless recovery.

Stigma and misconceptions remain in some workplaces, making it challenging for the disabled to even land interviews, advocates say. While the May unemployment rate in the United States for the general population was about 9 percent, the rate among the disabled was nearly 15 percent.

Businesses slammed by the recession have made cuts that have hit the disabled particularly hard, eliminating the part-time and temporary work that many disabled workers seek, said Jay Himmelstein, a professor of family medicine at University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Cindy Higgins of Jamaica Plain, who has cerebral palsy, worked as a peer counselor at Boston Self Help, a nonprofit group that serves the disabled, for 15 years before her job was cut several years ago due to state budget cuts, she said.

Entire article:
High jobless rate burdens disabled
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0618b.htm

 

Writing in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, Mark Borkowski observes that while testifying before the United States Congress, BP CEO Tony Hayward looked “like a tired undertaker who was rather bored with having to look mournful.”

 

 

The history of boredom has yet to be written but here are some highlights offered in a sincere effort to contextualize  Mr. Hayward’s performance: 

 

Thomas Carlyle:

“I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”

 

Viggo Mortensen:

“There’s no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there’s no excuse for boredom, ever.”

 

 

John Updike:

 

“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

 

Mark Twain:

“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

 

Of course when you mix the advice of attorneys with a penchant for the appearance of upper class disinterestedness you’ve got a helluva a PR cocktail.

 

The best book on boredom (in my view) is Patricia Meyer Spacks’ Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind.

If boredom is a modern preoccupation–one that is a co-efficient of leisure and of dramatic or comic narratives (the novel) then yesterday’s performance by Mr. Hayward was an engagement in cynicism and despair. Boredom as a condition means that the bored “subject” no longer believes in the future–either his or anyone else’s. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Hayward is in this camp. But the infusion of legal discretion as a necessary dynamic of public testimony invariably must lead to a dire absence of personal narrative–and hence the hyper- cognition and soiled drama of the politicians.

 

Boredom for everybody!

 

Sic semper borianus!

 

 

S.K. 

 

 

An article in the Albany Times Union highlights the cross country journey of Matt Eddy who is crossing the United States in his motorized wheelchair to highlight the independent living movement. Matt is being accompanied by his friend Ron Steenbrugen who is following him on a mountain bike.

 

There are still tens of thousands of people with disabilities warehoused in hospitals and state institutions who have the desire and the ability to live in their own communities. The independent living movement and groups like ADAPT are on the front lines advocating for the rights of citizens with disabilities to live like, well, “citizens”. 

 

As the Marines would say: “improvise, adapt, and overcome…”

 

S.K.

The following excerpt comes to us by way of The Inclusion Daily Express:

 

When Asperger Syndrome Becomes Cool

(The Globe and Mail)
June 15, 2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO– [Excerpt] In an interview with The New York Times, the musician Moby talked about how he was a purist when it came to tea, preferring it untainted by milk or sugar. “It might be a function of Asperger’s,” he said.

“You have Asperger’s?” asked the interviewer.

“No,” Moby said. “I just like to pretend I do. It makes me sound more interesting.”

No, actually, it makes you sound like a pretentious numbskull. No matter what you think of a privileged pop star pretending to have a rather serious neurological disorder to increase his street cred, there’s no doubt that Moby, for the first time in eons, has his finger on the cultural pulse.

In novels, movies and on television screens, autism is suddenly the go-to disorder when you need a charmingly strange protagonist; it’s become a plot device.

Entire article:
When Asperger’s becomes cool
http://www.InclusionDaily.com/news/2010/red/0615a.htm

It is said Ernest Hemingway wasn’t a good boxer, that he was a poseur in the ring and accordingly he got his head handed to him on many occasions. And although he once said that “courage is grace under pressure” Hemingway was evidently a sore loser. 

As Woody Hayes once said: “There’s nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.”

Of course Woody Hayes could generally console himself with the thought that after receiving a good ass whipping, his Ohio State Buckeyes had probably “given it their all” as they say in the vernacular. This is called getting beaten fair and square.

Hemingway was a pugnacious drunk and invariably, after downing way too many, he would insist on fighting men who were better boxers than he was. In turn, upon waking the next day, his lip split, his teeth loosened, and with welts on his shoulders, Hemingway couldn’t say that his soul had been cleansed.

Hemingway wouldn’t have been a better boxer if he’d been sober. But he’d have given it his all.

Speaking of Woody Hayes, as they note over at Wikipedia: “After losses or ties, Hayes would conduct locker room interviews in the nude. A journalist from his tenure noted, “He was an ugly guy so it would clear the locker room out pretty fast.”

 

S.K.

 

Dear Marcel Proust,

Here we are, at the end of 4,200 pages of your writing. Over the past year and a half, I’ve read your words book by book, month by month, and met with my reading group to discuss you, to bemoan your obsessions with sex, to marvel at your descriptions of grieving, to remind each other of how each character fits within the larger work, how your own life overlapped with the lives in your novels. For 18 months, I have read very little fiction except your own, have allowed myself to become enveloped by your life and your writing and your ideas about the world.

And so I want to write to say that you’ve changed my life. I know that sounds silly. I know that my friends would say my life actually looks pretty much the same as it did 18 months ago. But you, of all people, understand the inner changes that can happen to a person without anyone on the outside noticing, how the life of the mind can shift dramatically, how suddenly, a person can understand light in new ways, understand politics and social movements in new ways, understand family dynamics and love affairs and creativity, all in new ways, without anyone on the outside noticing a difference at all.

So I want to be clear about the ways you’ve shifted my thinking. You’ve helped me to understand what it means to create art, whether that art is fiction or music or painting or poetry. How a lived life nourishes art, but how the artist must also hermit herself away from all that life in order to get her work accomplished. How we shouldn’t feel bad about that, even as social invitations call and family obligations tug. That art can be bigger and more important than life, but cannot exist without it.

You’ve taught me about neuroscience and memory, how the brain can log memory without us noticing so that one smell, one taste from a moment years in the past can rocket back to us without our calling. How that memory can then change our life. You’ve taught me about technology, how strange it really is to talk about taking a train at 1:18pm. What it means to have concepts like “1:18pm.” How cars change everything. How war changes everything. How a pair of perfectly constructed red shoes changes everything.

You’ve taught me about love. How loving another person is really projecting our own ideas about love onto that person. How love can rise and fall just like life, and that, in life, what can seem intolerable one day can be forgotten entirely the next. To hold on, basically, and see where life takes you. To rise when life is rising, and fall when it’s falling, and be comfortable in each. Be comfortable in Time, in Time’s passing.

And you’ve taught me most of all to pay attention. To look around, eavesdrop, smell hawthorns, admire paintings, really listen to music, really listen when artists speak, ask questions. Be present in the world. Be present in this short life.

You write in this last book, In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. So most of all, I want to thank you for holding up that optical instrument, for helping me, through your writing, to better see myself, better understand my own inner workings. I can’t wait to begin your work, our work, again.

Andrea

 

Andrea Scarpino is soon-to-be the Michigan correspondent and Bureau Chief of POTB. You can visit her at:

www.andreascarpino.com

 

California man, Gary Brooks Faulkner, was on mission to ‘kill Osama bin Laden’: police
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/06/15/2010-06-15_california_man_gary_brooks_faulkner_was_on_mission_to_kill_osama_bin_laden_polic.html#ixzz0qvB5jSkO

 

Or a few other Faulkner characters? Flem Snopes? I’m just sayin’…

 

Flem Snopes:

“a thick squat soft man of no establishable age between twenty and thirty, with a broad still face containing a tight seam of mouth stained slightly at the corners with tobacco and eyes the color of stagnant water, and projecting from among the other features in startling and sudden paradox, a tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk. It was as though the original nose had been left off by the original designer or craftsman and the unfinished job taken over by someone of a radically different school or perhaps by some viciously maniacal humorist or perhaps by one who had only time to clap into the center of the face a frantic and desperate warning.”

 

S.K.

 

 

 

If you are of a certain age, say over fifty (and certainly not much under it) you recall (for better or worse) Johnny Weissmuller as Hollywood’s Tarzan. Perhaps (like me) you were credulous and a bit romantic and saw nothing silly at all in those paleo-Darwinian leitmotifs to nature-meets-nurture. (When I was 8 I broke a broom stick and whittled it sharp with a kitchen knife to make a spear.) Perhaps (if you were a certain kind of boy) you rose from your latency in love with Maureen O’Sullivan as “Jane” and by God was there ever anything as sexy as Jane teaching Tarzan how to use a fork?

 

 

Ah me. And today, browsing my dusty book-shelf I found an old poem by John Bowie, a poet who died young (at 27) and whose only book of poems “Screen Gems” is long out of print. Bowie, who was a big fella, who probably felt as hopeless in the public square as any customary person with a disability–Bowie wrote a fine little “Ode to Johnny Weissmuller” which carries its schadenfreude rather gently and is well worth reprinting here.

 

Ode to Johnny Weismuller

 

Why are there never thorns

On your jungle floor, Johnny?

Why no mango stains on your loincloth?

The rain-forests you slip through

Are too free of ants, of flies,

Of all the eager microbes

That must grind a visitor down.

 

Crocodiles and thick-headed lions 

Are too easy to slice up,

Too easy to trample

With the help of a few restless

Elephant chums.

 

Try to think of Cheetah

Nursing a green banana

Through his intestines,

Johnny, or Jane picking

Tree-lice from her arm,

Daydreaming of a freshly-painted

Tract home in San Berdo.

 

Try to think of yourself

Laid up in the tree-house

With ringworm, while your eyes

Follow the pattern of a

Sluggish mosquito on the dry

Palm-leaf wall.

 

 

S.K.

 

I was walking along a country road with my friend Ralph Savarese somewhere on the outskirts of Wilmington, Vermont, when Ralph spotted a lumber truck in a furrow among the pines. “Look!” he said. “Now there’s a disgusting advertising slogan!”

On the front of the immense, red truck, right above the grill, was a sign that read: “Puttin’ the Wood to “Em!”

Across the road was a brand new forest clearing which presumably represented the handiwork of this outfit.

 

 

Puttin’ the wood to ’em…

 

We wondered who this slogan was intended to attract? Isn’t the nature of advertising to draw customers? Was this an outfit that imagines its clients to be citizens who hate “tree huggers”? Clearly there’s something passive aggressive about the motto. And also something vulgar, patently sexual. Or violent. A semiotic trifecta!

 

It certainly looked like truth in advertising to me.

 

Puttin’ the wood to ’em…

 

S.K.