Mickey Davis was the DDN features editor then. He wrote a column three days a week. He was a feature writer’s feature writer.” I pitched him a ton of stories over the years of our professional association, and he ran with a lot of them. He told me once, “Mark, everyone has a story worth telling in the newspaper, if we only had time to tell them all.” I am blessed that he took the time to write this story about me:

Civil rights law caps long effort by local backer

by Mickey Davis

After the birth of his son, Brendan, six years ago Mark Willis says today ranks as the most significant day in his life.

Willis, who is Partially blind from Stargardt’s disease, will be at the White House in Washington this morning as President Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Willis, 37, communications director of Wright State University’s Medical School and public affairs director of the American Council of the Blind of Ohio, has visited Washington six times during the past two years and has worked diligently for the passage of the bill.

The landmark legislation; which will affect an estimated 43 million Americans with physical and mental disabilities, will give the disabled the same civil rights protections in jobs, accommodations and services that currently apply to minorities, women and the elderly.

Still reads newspapers

“Disabled people have fought long and hard for this, and now they can’t be discriminated against in going after a job if they are otherwise qualified for that job,” Willis says. “This is a very significant day for people with disabilities. America will be a better place because of this.”

Willis, who lives in Yellow Springs with his son, grew up in Beavercreek. Six months after he graduated from Beavercreek High School in 1973, he was diagnosed With Stargardt’s disease.

He was taking a class in Russian at Wright State and couldn’t decipher the formations in the alphabet.

“Basically (with Stargardt’s) I have a narrow area of peripheral Vision but my central eyesight is greatly diminished,” he said.

No longer can he drive a car:

He gets most of his news by listening to public radio (WYSO-FM) and reads the Dayton Daily News and New York Times via a large monitor on which the newspaper pages are enlarged on a screen with a video camera.

“It takes me several hours to read a newspaper,” he says.

He is able to read three books a week, however, through the Library of Congress’ Talking Books program and listens regularly to the tapes of several magazines — Atlantic, Harper’s and the New York Times large-print edition.

Misses eye contact

“People might not recognize I’m partially blind, but I need to be up close, from three to four feet away, to distinguish faces,” he says.” I miss being able to make eye contact and I’m probably at the point where I’ll need a mobility aid such as a cane to walk with,”

Willis, a Wright State graduate who has worked in the medical school’s communications office for five years, is delighted, however, with the bill protecting’ the rights of the disabled.

It’s the first piece of civil rights legislation to be passed since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“A lot of people assumed that a law protecting the rights of people with disabilities was already in place,” he said. “Discrimination was against the law within the federal government or by recipients of federal contracts, but the same kind of law has not been applied to the private sector or to local and state governments.

“Up to now there has been a little amendment here, a clause there, but this act makes a clear and comprehensive statement about the rights of the disabled.”

As he watches President Bush sign the bill today Willis says he’ll be there representing “all the grass-roots people” who fought for the bill’s passage and who will benefit from it.

“This is just the beginning,” Willis says, “but what a wonderful beginning.”

Dayton Daily News | July 26, 1990

The Dayton Daily News opinion page and Matter of Opinion blog published my op-ed about the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act:

I remember the day 20 years ago tomorrow, July 26, when I went to the White House to watch President George H. W. Bush sign the legislation. The event was held outside on the South Lawn, between the White House and the Ellipse. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors to enter. The Secret Service surely had a crash course in disability awareness, because it was the smoothest security check I ever had.

As I walked through the wrought-iron gate, I looked around and marveled, “Wow, they let me in here!” They let me in, and a thousand other people. We had every kind of disability in the human condition, and we used every kind of assistive device available at the time. I like to think we were the most diverse group of citizens ever gathered together at the White House.

The ADA signing ceremony was held outside, not because it was a beautiful summer day, but because the White House itself was not fully accessible. Many in our diverse group of citizens could not have entered the building. Long gone were the wooden ramps installed five decades earlier to accommodate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair. Read more.

Poetry comes in lines, like gasoline comes in gallons. If you wanted the name of the creature that is the poet, they are like homo linearium — they’re like line-making creatures. And that’s what we do, we make lines. Charles Olson, the poet, said no line must sleep, every line in a poem should be wakeful to the lines around it. And when you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet’s decision, it becomes the device’s decision…. You know to a poet, it’s quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I’m not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets. I mean I know the rest of the population of America isn’t, so why should they be? I’m all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod. And poems are perfect for something to listen to while you’re walking around, because they don’t take very long.

Collins said in an AP story (via Yahoo News): “The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.”

Red-necked Grebe (Podiceps grisegena). [Source: Alaska Loon & Grebe Watch Monitoring Program]

Lake Ontario looked like this Monet painting yesterday morning before the fog burned off. When the atmospherics feel like this – when sky, wind, light and water match the scope of what remains of my eyesight –  I could sit on the jetty for hours and never tire of looking at the lake.

I was surprised twenty years ago when I began to see double-crested cormorants at Isle Royale. I never saw them on the Great Lakes when I was a kid, when DDT pressure on bird populations was at its worst. In time I saw more and more cormorants from Lake Superior to Lake Erie. A decade ago I witnessed thousands of them gathering at Kelleys Island in the fall migration. Around that time I also began to hear fishermen grumble about “fish thieves.” Soon thereafter came talk of “managing” cormorant populations – that’s what wildlife officials called it. Some fishing guides just went ahead and shot cormorants whenever they saw them in the name of vigilante justice.

This week I’ve been sitting on the Navy Street jetty in Oakville, Ontario. I while away the ours watching the aerobatics of common terns and Caspian terns feeding at the mouth of 16-Mile Creek. I haven’t seen or heard a cormorant yet.

It may be that cormorants pass through Lake Ontario only in the spring and fall migrations. I hope the darker explanations in this story from The Environment Report do not apply here:

Thirty years ago, the double crested cormorant was a poster bird for toxic contaminants like DDT in the Great Lakes. Wildlife biologists used to take live birds with crossed bills and other deformities to public meetings to press for cleanup of the lakes. Since then toxins have been reduced and cormorant numbers have rebounded dramatically. There are now roughly 60,000 of the large black duck-like birds in Michigan alone, but that’s put anglers in an uproar.

For the last decade they’ve been complaining that cormorants are a plague on popular fishing grounds.

Wildlife officials responded by reducing the number of cormorant nests in Michigan by 40% over the last six years, and they want to cut the population in half.

They do that by shooting birds each spring and spraying vegetable oil on their eggs to smother them. In one popular perch fishing area, they took cormorant numbers down by 90%.

Dave Fielder is the lead researcher in the Les Cheneaux Islands of northern Lake Huron for the Department of Natural Resources and Environment. He says he now sees the fishery there doing better and people catching more perch.

“You can’t go in and tweak it a bit and expect to measure. You’ve got to really punctuate the system in a big way so that you’re sure you can measure a response. And that the response can be attributed back to that management action.”

But not all researchers agree with Fielder’s findings.

Jim Diana is a professor of natural resources at the University of Michigan and director of the Sea Grant program in the state. He says many other factors, such as invasive species, contribute to fluctuating perch populations, and Diana says the evidence just isn’t there to show that if the cormorant population is cut in half there will be twice as good a fishery or even any better fishery over time.

“And so it’s all a guess work in my mind. And a guess work at the expense of a fair amount of management money to try to control them and also a cormorant population that many people would say has rights of its own.”

Another place DNRE officials want to hit hard is the Beaver Island chain. They say a large number of cormorants there may be feasting on smallmouth bass.

Nancy Seefelt is a bird specialist at the Central Michigan University field station on the island. When she examines the stomach contents of dead cormorants she finds they are not eating bass. They’re primarily feeding on a small fish called the round goby. The goby is an invasive species that’s exploding in numbers in the Great Lakes. Gobies feed on the eggs of perch and bass. Seefelt says cormorants may actually be helping those game fish populations.

“I think that cormorant control should be based on science and the data that we have as opposed to politics. So the current, I guess, control that’s happening in the Beaver Archipelago is not something I’d say I support.”

DNRE managers argue that cormorant numbers are so high they can’t wait ten years for researchers to come up with more definitive answers, and this summer they expect federal approval to double the yearly kill in Michigan to 20,000 adult birds.

For The Environment Report, I’m Bob Allen.

By the way, the Great Lakes population of cormorants winters in the Gulf states. It’s not yet clear how the oil spill will affect them.

On the surface, Henry Thoreau and Marcel Proust seem to be as different as two men could be. Both writers have been tutelary spirits for me, though, so the synapse connecting them in my mind had already formed and was ready to fire when I heard Damian Searls say this on Open Source with Chris Lydon:

Proust himself was a disciple of Emerson’s; his first book is dotted with Emerson epigraphs all over the place. And it’s kind of staggering to think about, but at one time he had planned to translate Walden into French. Wouldn’t that have been something? When he read excerpts of Walden in another translation, he praised them in a letter to his friend by saying, “It is as though one were reading them inside oneself, so much do they rise from the depths of our intimate experience.” And that’s such a great Proustian bit of praise. That’s what Proust is always looking for. I think of Proust’s cork-lined room and Thoreau’s cabin in Walden as the two iconic places where a writer burrowed into himself in solitude and got to a place that spoke incredibly intimately to his readers. That’s the kind of Emerson project of becoming self-reliant, and that’s when you become universal. And Thoreau and Proust—which is a strange combination, but I think it’s really right, I mean Remembrance of Things Past is one of the only books almost as long as Thoreau’s journal—but they’re the ones who really did it.

Damian Searls has edited a one-volume abridgement of Thoreau’s Journal. It is organized around the insight that the Journal wasn’t a serial diary or lapidary notebook but rather a sustained inquiry stretching over 25 years and 2 million words. Searls also finds an affinity between Thoreau and Rainer Maria Rilke: That connection isn’t firing yet for me, but I’ll give it a chance. Here’s what searls said to Chris Lydon:

… Rilke is such an aesthete, but it’s kind of remarkable how many of these Thoreau journals end up sounding like Rilke poems in prose, or vice versa. So I think that in terms of the generational stuff it took a while. Thoreau was seen as this kind of crusty Yankee, and then he was seen as this civil disobedience hero and this environmental prophet, all of which are true. There’s a book called Senses of Walden by the great philosopher Stanley Cavell in the early 70s that started to really read Thoreau’s writing as this very dense literary, connective, pun-filled, textured thing of greatness that it is. And so I think it’s only been recently in the 70s and 80s and 90s that people have paid as much attention to Thoreau’s prose as I think it deserves.

The BBC Radio 4 program about les bouquinistes aired this morning, and I am thrilled to be part of it! Many thanks to producer Geoff Bird for bringing me into the process, and for Phil who alerted me to the broadcast. Listen now. Or launch the audio player from the BBC Radio 4 web page:

Paris has many grand monuments dominating its skyline, but for regular visitors to the ‘city of light’ there is a sight every bit as ingrained into its terroir as the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and Sacre Coeur – that of the riverside booksellers who for centuries have plied their trade on the banks of the River Seine. Les Bouquinistes can count Presidents (including Mitterand and Thomas Jefferson) as regular customers, and boast a proud history of providing a source of literatures thought subversive to the prevailing authorities of the day. More recently, many have branched out from books to supplement their income, offering plastic souvenirs instead of Balzac, plastic tat in place of Monserrat – a practice the city council, worried about tarnishing the image of playground Paris, has fought against. In ‘The Paris Bouquinistes’ Kirsty Lang takes a long stroll along the Seine to meet some of the current crop and discover how confident they feel about the future prosperity of their time-honoured trade.