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: Odette
Remembering Proust’s Swann in “The Hare with Amber Eyes”
I’m thinking about giving this book as a gift… and now I’m beseeching Santa to consider giving it to me, too! Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes” tells the story of a family that included Charles Ephrussi, the prototype for Swann in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Renoir immortalized him in The Luncheon of the Boating Party (he’s the gentleman in top hat seen in profile in the background). Here is Nancy Pearl’s thumbnail book review on NPR: Continue reading
Méry Laurent: “The tall fair woman like a tea-rose”
Stéphane Mallarmé with Méry Laurant. [Source: Wikimedia Commons] George Moore remembers Méry and Manet in Memoirs of My Dead Life: Were she not dead I might stop at her little house in the fortifications among the lilac trees. There is … Continue reading
Méry Laurant: The American Dentist’s Mistress
Méry Laurant. [Source: Wikimedia Commons] THe Irish writer George Moore considered Méry Laurent “the epitome of the witty, charming woman of fashion, an embodiment of the spirit of liberation from hypocrisy.” He asked her once why she did not leave … Continue reading
Méry Laurent: Manet’s and Proust’s Model
Édouard Manet. Woman in a Bathtub. 1878-79.pastel on paper 55×45cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Méry Laurent was the model for Odette, the actress who married Swann in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She also was Manet’s lover and muse … Continue reading
