Tag: disability

The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film

 Kudos to all involved in making this happen.  It is so long overdue:

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will dedicate the month of October to exploring the ways people with disabilities have been portrayed in film. On behalf of Inclusion in the Arts, Lawrence Carter-Long will join TCM host Robert Osborne for The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film. The special month-long exploration will air Tuesdays in October, beginning Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. (ET).

TCM makes today’s announcement to coincide with the 22nd anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) on July 26. And in a first for TCM, all films will be presented with both closed captioning and audio description (via secondary audio) for audience members with auditory and visual disabilities.

Read on…

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Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012.  As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com

Poetry as artful plagiarism

“Poetry is an artful plagiarism sometimes, where odd combinations of words influence our language and heightens our experience.”    – Stephen Kuusisto

 

Professor Stephen Kuusisto is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. His second collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, “Letters to Borges“, is scheduled for release in October 2012.  As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy. www.stephenkuusisto.com, www.planet-of-the-blind.com

Things are moving along with Copper Canyon Press

Just got the copy edited manuscript of my new book “Letters to Borges” coming soon from Copper Canyon Press. Michael Wiegers has done a fabulous job. Who says editing is dead? Not in Port Townsend!

Thinking About Disability, Just After Lunch

“In most circumstances, disease is not an inevitable outcome of a single event occurring at a point in time but generally a probabilistic result of many events, each impinging on the organism at separate times and each producing its own sequence of biological reactions. The sum total of these events produces sufficient discomfort to the person to be recognized as illness….

 

Although the ultimate tissue reaction that has clinical expression may be the same in different persons, suggesting a uniform illness and, by extension, a disease entity in its own right, each person nevertheless probably has a unique and separate illness by virtue of the probability that no one else has the same combination and permutation of antecedents and their time relations. In this sense, every disease consists of multiple diseases; in this sense, too, there are no diseases but only sick people.”

 

W. Jeffrey Fessel, MD

 

In this sense too, there are no disabilities but only physical life in relation to time. Taken this way disability is simply an analogy to the multiple dynamics of entropy, for which, at present there are no solutions.

 

 

The Barefoot Review seeking submissions

Jamie Sue, from The Barefoot Review, made contact and asked us to share the following post. Happy to do so…

What is it?

The Barefoot Review is a new publication. We welcome submissions of poetry or short prose from people who have or have had physical difficulties in their lives, from cancer to seizures, Alzheimer’s to Lupus. It is also for caretakers, families, significant others and friends to write about their experiences and relationship to the person.

What’s the Purpose?

Writing can be a tremendous source of healing and allow difficult feelings and ideas to be expressed. Unfortunately, every piece submitted can’t be published, however every piece is important. The process of writing, verbalizing feelings that may be subconscious or unexpressed is more important than the acknowledgment of publication.

We hope sharing this work online will help people facing similar difficulties find inspiration in the words of others.

What’s in a Name?

The Barefoot Review is named to evoke several meanings: baring your soul and expressing naked feelings. Bare feet ground you, give you balance, and connect you to the Earth. The review is here from a desire to help others.

Where is it?

The review is here, there and everywhere —www.barefootreview.com

Please be sure to read the submissions guidelines before sending us your work.

submissions@barefootreview.org

Question, compliment or complaint?

info@barefootreview.org

When Bob Marley Saved My Life

Photo description: black and white photo of a smiling Bob Marley.  He’s standing outside and almost appears to be leaning on a guitar, the neck of which he’s holding in his right hand.

First let me say that anyone who has known discrimination also knows that going forward is steep. You have, after all, been told you don’t belong and worse, you’ve been instructed to get the hell out of town. As a blind person I’ve been in that spot throughout my life. Grade school teachers, high school principals, college professors, graduate school instructors–even a college president–have told me that because of my visual impairment I should go away. Perhaps the worst moment was in 1985 when I was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Iowa and two senior faculty along with the department chair told me I didn’t fit, that my need for extra time to complete assignments was ridiculous, and that I was a whiner.

This is a familiar story among people with disabilities. Even today (over 20 years after the passage if the ADA) only one in four college students with a disability will graduate. The unemployment rate for pwds is still estimated at 70%.

If you’re blind you can’t wait tables, drive a cab, or do most of the available jobs that are perfectly honorable. In 1985 all I could imagine was reading and writing vs. nothing. Nothing would mean living on Social Security Disability checks and moving in with my parents. If i embraced Nothing it would be an admission of failure so great that I would have to retire from my life, live as a kind of back room invalid, a prospect that terrified me since my mother was an alcoholic and slept all day with the shades drawn– would that be my life?

As it happened, I did move home and lived for quite some time in my parents’ basement. I had a beat up typewriter, an exercise bike, and a tape machine and that’s when I began listening to Bob Marley in earnest. I’d been gently listening to Bob ever since his first US album “Catch a Fire” appeared in 1973 but now I was soaking in his rare and utterly astonishing combination of rage and redemption, a combination you will not customarily find in the arts–a combo like milk and iodine. In poetry very few possess this–Yeats comes to mind and Nazim Hikmet, and Neruda. In popular music almost no one has Marley’s quality of the sword in the cloud–the rage is just rage or the milk is just syrup.

In my basement with the volume up I began working. Bob Marley’s voice and lyrics moved through me and I felt a half weightless sense of a pending disembodiment and then the authentic tears of deep deep discrimination salted with hope came to me. I could go on and on about the songs, the lyrics stitched from sublime wing shadows of the soul that fans the body, but it’s enough to say that Bob Marley remains for me the most authentic voice of “becoming” that I have ever heard.

Previously published on Steve’s other blog, Planet of the Blind

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Professor Stephen Kuusisto, blind since birth, is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. He has also published “Only Bread, Only Light“, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy.

 

Disability and Poetry, Part 145

Thanks to Chris B whose blog, Through Alien Eyes, is a thoughtful and lovely place for disability reflections. He heard me speak recently on disability and poetry at The Ohio State University and has written a kindly analysis of my presentation.

When I am In New York City with my guide dog the happiness of the city is mine. Swiss tourists want to tell me about their Labradors at home. Doormen call out as we walk by. It’s a different city for us, communal, improbably humane even at moments ecstatic. This must go into the living poem of physical difference.

So too the damages and the ugliness. What I like to call the mercenary labeling of ableism. People with disabilities experience the crackling, unspoken diminishing glares of strangers. Until they are spoken. Then the day tilts like a bad amusement park ride. This must also go into the living poem of physical difference.guide dog, Nira

What the guide dog schools won’t tell you, or by turns, tell you imperfectly, is that guide dog teams will encounter public incomprehension and outright discrimination as they walk around. In my case this discovery came 18 years agoin New York City when I tried to get into a cab and the driver began screaming expletives. Despite this I got into the car. His language and mine became an instant study in art for all the ingredients of creativity were present: tension, incomprehension, passion, and spontaneity.

Sitting stern as a tree in the backseat, I told him that the law permits guide dogs for the blind in all taxis–in fact guide dogs are allowed everywhere. Hell, I even had an ID card from the school with my picture and the dog’s picture and all the appropriate legalese. But the driver, my driver, did not believe in the bravery or happiness of others. He began revving his engine and revving up his shouting.

What can you do? My driver hated me and my dog and was refusing to budge. I was reciting the law. Oh the godforsaken wilderness of human rage. When you have a disability every moment of discrimination evokes all the others: you’re again the boy who was told he couldn’t play with others, couldn’t go to school with them, sat alone in a room. This must also go into the living poem of physical difference.

Then again, the shy, unanticipated joy: in Central Park a man says to me, “You can’t tell, but I am the statue of liberty.” “Me too,” I say.

Previously published on Steve’s other blog, Planet of the Blind

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Professor Stephen Kuusisto, blind since birth, is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. He has also published “Only Bread, Only Light“, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy.

Kudos to NPR on the Subject of Chen Guancheng's Blindness

Thanks to Alan Greenblatt of NPR for writing today about the issue of Chen Guancheng’s blindness and the overtly dynamic positioning of the “b” word in the press coverage of the Chinese dissident. Greenblatt’s piece, entitled “A Factor in a Much Larger Life: Debating Chen Guancheng’s Blindness” does a nice job of arguing that people with disabilities are not, in fact defined by those disabilities, and I’m glad to have been asked for some comments on the subject. Kudos to the folks at NPR for bucking the media’s fixation on the blindness as a determinant symbol of what is indeed a much larger life.

Previously published on Steve’s other blog, Planet of the Blind

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Professor Stephen Kuusisto, blind since birth, is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. He has also published “Only Bread, Only Light“, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy.