About the Flaneur
![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](../../wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
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
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](../../wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
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: blind
Georgina Kleege on Beauty and The Gaze
My friend Georgina Kleege was interviewed today on x with John Hockenberry: “We’re talking this week about beauty: How we define it, how we perceive it, and what it means historically and socially—and to you, our listeners. | Today, we approach the topic beauty with someone who has a unique perspective: UC Berkeley English Professor Georgina Kleege. |Kleege is blind, and has written about how she sees the world in several books, including “Sight Unseen,” and the essay “Beauty and the Blind.” | And as Kleege explains, you don’t have to see beauty to understand its value. In her words: “I live in a visual culture, so I know what people say.” Continue reading
Gene Therapy Helps Children With Congenital Retina Disease
I wrote about the complex relationship between my genetic disease and its possible “cure” in Not This Pig. At my age and stage of blindness, I don’t know whether I’d choose the experimental gene therapy published Oct. 24 in The Lancet (reported below by Jocelyn Kaiser in ScienceNOW), but I can understand its prospect for young children with retina diseases.
“They also serve who only stand and wait’
Today is the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton. Over the years of my losing sight, 35 years to be precise, I’ve conducted a lengthy and private dialogue with this man. Sometimes it is disputatious, sometimes profoundly loving. … Continue reading
When the Flawlessly Hip Need the Blind (to exploit)
Some things have to be documented, no matter how repulsive. A blogger named Spots in San Francisco linked here to snatch Paul Strand’s iconic photo, Blind. She probably grabbed it off Google Images, and certainly never thought twice about the … Continue reading
