The Week That Was

The Week that Was

Flew east.

Flew west.

Bought bialys at College town Bagels in Ithaca, New York. (One of those places that smells of hot bread, even at night.)

Spoke at State U of New York at Oswego.

Spoke at Metropolitan Museum in New York, New York.

Saw my friend Karl who was teaching "The Elephant Man" and who was mildly affected by his students’ disaffection for the flick.

Saw my old friend Jim who has a new book of poems coming out soon.

Saw my pal Ira who is just home from a long sojourn in Thailand. Ira is the world’s largest Buddhist monk. Hands down.

Watched beloved New York Mets go down the drain.

Ate bacon with Clea who is studying all of Asia and cooking Middle Eastern street foods.

Talked with glass artist, Katherine who is trying to find a video camera fast enough to film breaking tempered glass.

Met fellow from MIT who believes above can be accomplished, maybe.

Talked to flight attendant who is scared of dogs. Told her Vidal’s most dangerous feature is his breath.

Ate glorious take out food from Zabar’s in Manhattan.

Talked about a poet’s recent suicide with my literary agent Irene. Talked about death with old friend David whose wife passed away almost one year ago.

Talked about living with David who is working gently at the art of light and breathing. They are the same art.

Talked to my wife Connie about starting a bell choir.

Talked to old dog Roscoe about the scent of love.

Talked to young dog Maggie about same.

Talked to my father in law Bill about miseries of selling the house.

Talked to my mother in law, Norma, about misery of selling hand made crafts in era of Chinese knock offs.

Talked to stepson Ross about his first college paper.

Tried on silly hat made from pine cones while dreaming.

Talked about human rights with fellow from South Africa whose car broke down in South Dakota. He was dropping off rental at airport.

Got back to Iowa City just in time for tornado sirens. It was a real tornado. It didn’t do significant damage except to say that it scared lots of creatures.

While the tornado was coming I put on my New York Mets warm-up jacket. I figured disaster had already struck the Mets so I’d be safe if I wore it.

Had a second dream about a hat made of pine cones. Suspect it might be my father checking in from the afterlife. Hi dad.

S.K.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Mark Your Calendars!

At about the same time I stumbled on this post which neatly summarizes the Split This Rock Poetry Festival now being organized in Washington, D.C., we received an e-mail from Sarah Browning, the Festival Coordinator.  The excitement over this event is building and I thought it time to mention it to our friends so you can mark your calendars.  Steve has been asked to participate in this event and what an honor that is.  Just look at this list of featured poets, will you!

The dates chosen for this event coincide with the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
The only "glitch" is that Easter turns out to be very early this year, falling on March 23, 2008, the last day of the festival.  Easter, spring in Washington, D.C., poetry – could be lovely!

Blue Girl, here’s your chance to soak up a lot of poetry!  See you there?

Georgia?  Lesley?  Andrea and Zac?  David?  See you there?

~ Connie

Thoughts While Shaving: Or, My Muse

What does it take to drop old habits of thinking about disability? I want to see a day when people with disabilities are not conceived of as a separate category of the citizenry, as say, "disabled museum patrons" or "disabled scholars". If the field of disability studies has any intrinsic value it must lie in precisely this area of engagement. PWDs are not exceptional learners or spectators. They are the public.

If you’re really reading me you’ll notice that I don’t see distinctions between able bodiedness and the compensatory notion that there exists a specialized learning process for PWDs.

The blind don’t learn something special by having a tactile experience of a painting. The sighted do not learn anything special by walking around blindfolded.

Each of the examples above can only be illuminating if the exercise is conceived of as a performance not about what we know, but rather about what remains unknown.

Just because a person can see a painting doesn’t in turn mean they know how to talk about what they see. And just because a blind person can walk around New York and "know" the place by alternative means, doesn’t automatically suggest that their impressions of this experience are going to be worthy of poetry.

The arts are invaluable insofar as we’re challenged to think about the poetry of each exquisite minute. In the end, the muse doesn’t care what your body looks like.

S.K.

Art Beyond Sight

This morning I had the privilege to deliver the keynote address that opened a two day conference at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. The conference is called "Art Beyond Sight" and I want to post my comments on the blog so that people with hearing impairments or anyone else for that matter can see again what I said about art and blindness.

I had to leave the museum after my talk because my guide dog Vidal was having an upset stomach. If you were at the conference and would like to write to me, please feel free to do so. I had to leave the lecture hall for the sake of the museum’s carpet.

S.K.

 

Continue reading “Art Beyond Sight”

Disability Blog Carnival #23

Have you "met" Jennifer Justice yet?  She is an artist, writer and independent publisher, the creator of two popular ezines, Pedestrian Hostile and This Is Living, and has served as a contributor and editor to numerous publications (including Blog [with]tv).  She also happens to be the hostess of this month’s Disability Blog Carnival.  Penny L. Richards over at Disability Studies, Temple U. had this to say when introducing this month’s carnival:

"Superheroes, folksongs, naked lawyers, beach wheelchairs, and a
Therevada oasis–it must be another edition of the Disability Blog
Carnival, with your host Jennifer Justice at Pedestrian Hostile.  A fine mix of hilarity, personal accounts, serious news and commentary, there are links for all tastes.  Go check it out!"

Need we say more?

Cross-posted on Blog [with]tv

Never, Never Talk to the Customer

There are physicians working in America right now who don’t talk to their patients.

While many in what we loosely called "the medical community" are aware of the aforementioned matter, there’s a corresponding assumption that the problem will resolve itself.

I recently decided to chat with some professionals from other fields just to see how they handle this kind of "disconnect" in their respective areas of inquiry. The names below have been changed because, well, that is how they do things in the witness protection program.

Jasper Schunt is an internationally recognized architect. He is thin, appears to be in his early sixties, and he looks a good deal like the comedian Don Knotts. You would never guess that he’s the man behind the blueprints for the world’s first "Fast Food" indoor playground. In fact, the more you look at him, the more you suspect he has never had anything to do with kids.

"You’re right!" Jasper says while wiping his hands with what looks like an oil soaked baby blanket. "I really don’t know a darned thing about kids. In fact when I get near children I tend to get hives."

I ask Jasper how he designed commercial playgrounds for children if he never talked to any kids.

"Rats," he says. "You put them in a tube and they’ll always go to the other end. And of course the more rats you put in, the more they’ll keep moving. Kids are no different."

When I ask him if he’s ever read Robert Coles’s book "The Political Lives of Children" he says that he doesn’t have time for "touchy feely" stuff. "Look, I gotta keep the nation’s insufficiently medicated offspring moving through these plastic tubes."

Before I leave him, I ask Jasper about his latest project.

"It’s a spin off of the Chuck-E-Cheese playground concept: I call it "Senior World"–I guess you could say it’s a kind of "roach motel" for the old folks–you know–"they check in but they don’t check out"?"

Vilnius Trap is a licensed plumber. The man has a Ph.D. from Cornell University in linguistics but after years of grinding poverty he decided to turn his back on the adapted neurological semiotics of the great "vowel shift" for good, old fashioned Victorian threaded drains.

"Yeah, I know," he says, "lots of people say I look a whole lot like Jeff Goldblum in that movie ‘"The Fly’–I have these really big eyes and forget that I’m staring at people. Plumbing work is good for me because I tend to be under sinks or behind walls."

"How do you talk to your customers?" I ask.

"I don’t actually talk to them," he says. "I mean, you know, they’re just going to tell you how the ceiling is leaking above the living room and they’re going to tell you a long, boring story about the piano from Latvia and blah blah blah."

"I haven’t got time for the domestic palaver, not if I’m going to rip out walls and floors and take a week to do what’s really a one day job."

"I’m never rude about it. I just tell them they have only one option because the situation is so serious."

"The really good thing is that people are generally terrified of their plumbing. You know, they feel grateful just to have it at all, and most people are secretly worried that if they don’t call a licensed plumber, well, something unimaginable will happen deep below the earth."

When I ask him if he’s ever asked his customers about anything having to do with their houses or apartments he waves his hand dismissively.

"No," he says, "why spoil things for them? I mean let’s be real: every plumbing job is only about 3 things: 1. the customer is friggin’ terrified that his water main is going to break at any moment; 2. they trust that the plumber has almost occult powers; and 3. they expect to pay vast sums of money to an essentially anti-social expert who is wearing ill fitting pants."

It is reassuring to know that uncommunicative professionals are still in demand.

S.K.
 

The Defective People Industry

In the world of disability advocacy there’s a term called "the defective people industry" which designates modes of thinking or organizational conduct that relies on the status quo. The "DPI" is vigorous in its self preservation and it tends to make a lot of dough.

Suppose you wanted to cure something innocuous like loud gum chewing.  (I’ve chosen this one because I have this problem.  Give me a stick of gum and within a minute I’m grinding, snapping, and gnawing like a weasel caught in a trap.)

The first thing you do is gather up a group of experts.  You will want some social scientists, some anti-social scientists, at least ten thousand social workers, an equal number of social security administrators, and you will want dentists and folks from the false teeth industry.  Of course you’ll also want the chewing gum manufacturers and a vast array of representatives from the therapy industries.  You might also want to involve at least one aroma expert.

After you’ve gathered all these authorities you raise a bunch of money.  Sometimes you already have the money before you gather your experts but most often it works the other way.

Then you print some fancy brochures.

You will also need to have catered lunches, new carpeting in your headquarters, and lots of meetings.

You will want to have many studies about annoying gum chewing.

Its really important to foster public debate about the mystery of the phenomenon. For example:

The "loud gum chewing is caused by creepy Freudian anxiety" camp. vs. the "traumatic gum chomping caused by hard to isolate neurological defect in the lizard brain (otherwise known as the limbic node).

While all of this is going on you will want to create a mechanism whereby you give out small amounts of research funding to a vast array of researchers.  These grants should be enough for the researchers to buy coffee filters and post-its.

By analogy the method is akin to giving ten thousand people enough money to study the feasibility of manufacturing one isolated part of an automobile.  No one is given the money to actually make a real car part, much less an operational vehicle.

The DPI can work like this for years.

No sector of society is without its varieties of the defective people industry.

There’s government of course but also don’t forget non-profit agencies, universities, and industry .

In "real life" there are lives in the balance because the DPI is a very entrenched system.

There are people today in the United States who are trapped in hospitals because even though their respective medical conditions will allow them to live in the community, local and state governmental agencies have a vested interest in keeping hospital beds filled.  This travesty continues despite the fact that community based living is less expensive for many of the people who are currently being warehoused.

This situation is no joke.

"Who gets warehoused?" you ask?

People who have been paralyzed in the manner of Christopher Reeve but whose insurance has run out.  One fine day your hired attendant is no longer available.  Then the local state government says, "well, don’t confuse us with the facts, we have a hard to find and dark little room for you far away from your community.  We will put you there even though it would be cheaper to let you live your life among people."

As a friend of mine would say, "In the United States you have the right to live in a closet if you are paralyzed and your insurance runs out."

S.K.