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About the Flaneur
I walk through my blindness the way I wander down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, alert to the raw material of the senses. I am a flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. Then stay tuned.Letting Go of Sight
I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.Not This Pig
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).Media in Transition @ MiT
Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]
Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]
Category Archives: birds
A Hawk in the Library
Cicero envisioned paradise as a library in a garden. This week his vision could be amended to include a hawk in the library. A Cooper’s hawk (above) somehow found its way into the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. It perches near the top of the library’s magnificent dome, and from time to time it circles over the main reading room. The bird is a juvenile female, and its only repast in six days was a frozen quail. Falconers will try to net the bird today so it can be released outdoors. (Below) The hawk is seen circling beneath a Edwin Blashfield mural restored recently in the dome of the Library of Congress. [Photos by Abby Brack/Library of Congress/NPR] Continue reading
Teaching Whooping Cranes To Migrate
This Way Survival: An ultralight plane piloted by an Operation Migration team member guiding whooping cranes from Wisconsin to their winter nesting grounds in Florida. [Photo by Mark Peterson/Redux/NYT] Ever since childhood, Whooping cranes have animated for me a personal … Continue reading
California Dreamin’: No Coot Poop Allowed
This news story reminds me of something I overheard several years ago when bird flu was the paranoid craze. Why doesn’t the Air Force go up and take out all those birds? According to NPR: “Can coots (a black and … Continue reading