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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: ransack
Lost Poem For Another Princess
Amadeo Modigliani. Nude on a Blue Cushion. 1917. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ms. Modigliani ransacked her archive in search of a poem we could remember but couldn’t recite. She found this one instead. I won’t forget it now. … Continue reading
Ransacking The Archive: Sobruquet
My mother asked me once why I didn’t invite her to my poetry readings. “My poems talk about sex and drugs and things I’d be embarrassed to say in front of my mother,” I said sheepishly. She nailed me with … Continue reading
Fashionista Street: Arachnophilia 1
[Photo by Bill Cunningham/NYT] Bill Cunningham’s latest On The Street photo essay returns to Paris. “Many members of the fashion world at the recent Paris shows,” he says, “seemed to pay homage to the look of a Louise Bourgeois spider … Continue reading
Ransacking The Archive: San Francisco 1990
Every poem asks the question, what is a poem? A prose poem seeks the boundary between the modes. I don’t have an answer, but this one pointed me in the direction I wanted to go. San Francisco 1990 On the … Continue reading
Ransacking The Archive: Letter to Tom Roberts
This was written for Tom on the August night in 1975 when the world learned of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich. Letter to Tom Roberts I stopped reading books. Is that possible? My eyes hurt. My doctor says there are … Continue reading