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]
Tag Archives: 1990s
‘I don’t see problems… I see problem-solvers’
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. Continue reading
Internet Freedom From John Perry Barlow to Hilary Clinton
On a day when U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton gave a major policy speech about Internet Freedom,, it’s worth revisiting A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, a libertarian rant delivered at the 1996 World Economic Forum in Davos by John Perry Barlow. When I went looking for the full text, I came across this 2005 video mashup. The stereotypical computer voice is a little hokey, but I like what it adds to the artifact effect. I’d love to hear Barlow ranting it, if anyone knows of an open-source recording.
San Francisco 1990: A Prose Poem
On the day I called my sister and she said her daughter’s baby died, just two days old, I held a bronze Buddha in my hands. Cast by monks in Thailand, the shopkeeper said, just $400. If you really like … Continue reading
What Hope for Bad Parents? A Book Deal
When the craze for publishing memoirs heated up in the 1990s, all you needed to get a book deal was a troubled childhood in a dysfunctional family. Think The Kiss and Running with Scissors. Well, guess what? The troubled children … Continue reading
