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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]
Tag Archives: Lake Superior
Dancing on Wild Rice
When the loons gather in migratory rafts on Lake Superior and salmon begin to run up its tributary streams, it’s time to harvest wild rice. Native people there call it manoomin. They hold a Wild Rice Camp on Tubbs Lake near Mecosta, Michigan, where tribal and non-tribal people alike can join in the harvest and preserve the ancient cultural tradition of ricing. Continue reading
For Brendan the Navigator at 25
A memoir from Big Water (1999) Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com] When we shoved off the pebble beach, the outer islands that rim Malone Bay looked like green humped turtles on the horizon. All day long we had watched … Continue reading
In Paradise, A Prayer For More Snowmobilers
Ordained minister Edson Forrester presides over the Paradise, Michigan ‘s annual snowmobile blessing . Edson burns cedar and tobacco, then spreads smoke over each vehicle, saying, “Creator, protect this snowmobile on its travels.” This year, people in Paradise say they’re … Continue reading
Global Warming and the Future of Isle Royale
A bull moose wades in the water at Isle Royale National Park. [Photo by Jim Scurlock, a winner in Lake Superior Magazine’s 1998 photo contest] You don’t have to look for polar bears in Greenland to find the impact of … Continue reading
Brendan The Navigator: Just A Little Fog
Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com] We set a westerly course midway between Wright Island and shore. I sensed something uneasy about the way Brendan hunched in his life vest. He wasn’t talking. “Want to go for Hay Bay?” I … Continue reading