Planet of the Blind

Happy Anniversary!

Now why do you suppose my husband would post to the blog today and not
mention that today is our 10th Anniversary? Honey, as Ricky Ricardo
would say to Lucy: "you’ve got some splainin’ to do…"

Here we are on our wedding day, April 11, 1998. Steve and I are pictured with my son, Ross, then 9 and my daughter, Tara, 11 1/2. We were married in Jamaica where we took a "family-moon" and stayed at a Beaches Resort in Ocho Rios. Oh, what memories!

I wish I could say we are there again today, celebrating our 10th, but instead Steve and I are here in cold, windy, wet Iowa City. Never mind. We’re just as happy here as anywhere else. Just wish Ross and Tara were here with us…

Happy Anniversary to my dear husband!

"Happy marriages begin when we marry the one we love, and they blossom when we love the one we married." — Sam Levinson

Channel Surfing

Geraldo Rivera; Donald Trump;

Charles Colson; Forest Gump;

Ibuprofen; foaming goo;

Sunday sermon; tar shampoo;

Dagwood Bumstead; W. Bush;

Mystery meats; baby’s tush;

Higher Ed; window shade;

Rainbow trout; Dennis Quaid;

Dental Hygiene; Je m’appelle "Joe";

Alka Seltzer; Edgar Poe;

Ersatz Shakespeare; "fungal toe!"

S.K.

Personism, Affirmed

It was Frank O Hara pointed out

You could just as well use the phone

As write poetry—solo instruments

Being equal. Bell, A.G.

Discovered the telephone

Hoping to find a machine

For the deaf—his bride

Couldn’t hear him;

Think of that first gizmo

As a sort of love poem…

I wish most days

I could describe how the phone works.

About poetry

We have all said too much—

The best of us know

We shouldn’t try to explain things

Now Spring has come.

S.K.

Half Asleep in Wartime

Because we have a very old dog my wife Connie and I "trade off" sleeping on the sofa downstairs so we can be near our pal "roscoe". We used to carry him upstairs to our bedroom but he weighs close to 80 pounds and though we’re strong enough for the task you can tell that being carried like a sack of potatoes is uncomfortable for the old guy. So we try to be near him in his dotage.

Last night I listened to the BBC while drifting in and out of sleep. At one point I dreamt I was in Iraq with the poet Brian Turner who was being interviewed about his experiences as a soldier and poet. I was asleep and yet abel to hear my radio. I half dreamt I was in a bombed out house staring out at the night sky. I heard Brian Turner reading a poem entitled "Here, Bullet" and then I was truly asleep and struggling to navigate a complicated and unfamiliar house.

The unconscious is always clever.

Brian Turner’s collection of poems Here, Bullet takes us through houses and landscapes of terrifying moral and psychological struggle.

You can read more about his remarkable book at:

http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/here_bullet.html

S.K.

Stigma, Redux

Why would a group of teenage girls attack one of their own and proudly videotape the crime? One expert said on television this morning that this collective psychopathology is related to the easy "star making" power of YouTube and My Space and the internet.

This is nonsense—the assertion that a form of media desensitizes people and turns them into stone cold predators is ridiculous. Americans invariably swallow this "media-centric" explanation every time we witness a scene of unexplainable violence. "It’s Elvis Presley’s hips!"; "It’s Moe, Curly, and Larry!"; "It’s MTV!"—and on and on.

People who video their own acts of cruelty are not emulating TV or cyberspace. They are simply vicious and heartless and proud of it. How do such people materialize?

Nature or Nurture? The crème filling in Twinkies?

Why did a whole nation follow Hitler? They didn’t have YouTube or junk food.

The answer to such questions invariably forces a return to the concept of stigma and its associated concept of "spoiled identity". The best book on this subject is the famous study by Erving Goffman.

Societies hand out permission to stigmatize certain groups of people. Today’s teens are more materialistic than their predecessors. Issues of identity and social value are prevalent. Who will be the chosen outsider?

As Goffman notes: the stigmatized individual is almost always a person with a disability.

Why?

Because social legitimacy depends on the act of casting an atypical person "out".

I don’t know enough about this current story, but I can safely say that the matter at hand is far more complex than the availability of YouTube. One could argue that YouTube helps us catch such predatory and atavistic people before they can do any further harm.

"I’m just sayin’"

S.K.

LINKS:

Full Story, Today’s Insanity, Fame Was Motivation

Why "Normal" People Can't Talk to People with Disabilities

The normative people who won’t talk directly to a person with a disability are legion as the comment below from Ruth reminds us. How many times have we heard this story? The power chair repairman doesn’t talk to the woman who uses the chair, prefering to speak with her companion. My wife Connie can attest to this same peculiar dynamic. She’s a veteran when it comes to saying: "Well, why don’t you just ask HIM?"

I’ve read lots of books about stigma and disability; books about the unconscious; books about social history; cultural theory; you name it. The bottom line is that "normates" fear pwds because they believe down deep that they could catch a disabling condition by means of discourse.

This offers further proof that people can talk themselves into anything.

My grandfather used to make a private cocktail with gin and dynamite. He imagined that this drink produced beneficial health. The man expired from clogged arteries.

All of this is to say that sub-Cartesian thought has its drawbacks.

"What," you may ask "does gin and dynamite taste like?"

It’s the flavor of terror under the tongue.

S.K.

Initial Conditions

It’s raining in Paris but it’s not raining in my heart. Verlaine.

It’s raining in Iowa City, but it ain’t raining in my heart. Anselm Hollo.

It’s raining in my head and the heart feels it’s a little island in the infinite. Kuusisto/Lorca

Oh, and what kind of rain do you have in your head, sir?

Clavichord rain. Johan Sebastian Bach, early spring morning, lights coming on in the houses.

S.K.

Disability History on the Go

We are cradled by History. You? No. Not you. You are shrewed. You are exceptionally literate and therefore you’re in charge of History—why heck, you probably conductHistory the way Toscanini conducted the Metropolitan Opera. By God! You’re an autocrat of both facts and influence.

But if you have a disability chances are good that History has its hooks in you. It builds its little walls around you. Frankly, for people with disabilities History functions like a portable play pen; it accompanies us from room to room—encloses, keeps us contained; holds us on display; and we sit inside our baby cages with our appearances by turns sentimental and cute or red faced, temperamental, shaking our rattles.

Every day I step from my house with the goal of finally rejecting this image of History. Yet I am followed down the street by memories and ghosts and the constraining or imprisoning realities of architectures and social systems that won’t let go.

I get on the bus in Iowa City and the driver tells me that they don’t accept dogs. I go through the dumbed down rigamarole explaining the so-called "White Cane Laws" and the ADA. The bus stands still while I try, dispassionately to explain. The driver finally says, "Well I thought those dogs wore blue blankets." "No," I say, as warmly as I can, "They wear a harness."

It’s only 9 in the morning and I’ve already had to shake my rattle while trying, ever so desperately to appear cute.

"Look, Driver! I’m wearing my pajamas with the little feet!"

No wonder those who temporarily seem to have no disabilities are terrified by those who do: they see us in every public setting, still wrapped up and sequestered by our traveling cages.

S.K.

A Poem for Kai Nieminen

When I was twelve years old and you were seventeen the poet Ed Sanders tried to levitate the Pentagon by chanting. He had tons of help. Robert Lowell was there; Norman Mailer; Allen Ginsberg…and approximately ten thousand young and old people who were fed up with the military industrial complex. The crowd chanted the names of all the gods and goddesses they could think of. "Help us,Gods and Goddesses," they cried. They danced and wept and begged the divinities to spirit the Pentagon from the Earth. And they went home disappointed. And nowadays no one is singing or chanting in this country.

Citizens still protest, of course. There are websites. People occasionally march in the streets. But unless I am mistaken no one dresses in red feathers and calls on Hermes to turn the brutal engines of Capitalism into straw.

I hereby resolve to shake a homemade amulet and dance in a field of soybeans. I won’t worry about the neighbors. I have just enough irony to be sincere and winningly unscientific, which is to say, I remain philosophically hopeless, Confucian as always…

S.K.

If the Nightingale Could Sing Like You

–for David Weiss

Watching the Marx Brothers in Ashtabula
is, of course, the title of a poem yet to be
written. I expect you will write it? I love
an earlier scene in the film where Harpo
and Chico, disguised as barbers, destroy
the captain’s mustache while feigning
concern for aesthetics. It’s the first fully
post-modern movie ever made. Stowaways
in the bilge of capitalism. Each of them
driven second by second by hormones
and appetites. And every moment Harpo
forgetting what he’s doing because he
sees a Bryn Mawr coed in a tennis outfit.
Every authority figure is a fraud. Dirty
money and guns everywhere. Thorstein
Veblen gagged and bound in the Purser’s
office. And the funniest joke of all —
they have to sneak into France. No
one sneaks into France. Only the pure
of heart would have trouble getting in.
Only the pure of heart would pretend
to be Maurice Chevalier and to disguise
themselves solely by singing like him.
The jokes are all so elegant, and
they are always stealing dinner rolls.
Once I was in Ashtabula, did I ever tell
you that, where the lake is Erie. What
else but Harpo batting his eyelashes
could make the ashes on our plate
palatable? So, here’s to Pig Alley
and to the girl (Lillian Gish) who rejects
Snapper Kid but lies to protect him from
the police. Sometimes that’s all you get.
And let me know how it comes out.