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: Yellow Springs
True Grit: Eat Your Heart Out, John Wayne!
Brendan and I saw the Cohen Brothers’ remake of True Grit at the Little Art Theater. Hailee Steinfeld was brilliant as 14-year-old Mattie Ross. Every father should hope his daughter will face the world with such brio. When she rode her pony across the river, I felt like I was running away with her, with Huck, lighting out for the territory. Jeff Bridges as one-eyed Rooster Cogburn sounded like a force of nature. Eat your heart out, John Wayne! The ornate, 19th-century diction, carried over with some fidelity from Charles Portis’s novel, was astounding and hilarious. The Cohen Brothers do Violent American Weird better than anyone. After two hours of gunfights and mayhem, the Yellow Springs Sunday matinee crowd cheered as the credits rolled. Continue reading
Flaneur’s Gallery: Knit Graffiti by the Jafagirls
The Jafagirls gave me a guided walking tour of their textile art installations. Some of it is in this video montage, and some of it I had seen (and touched) before, but I had no sense of the scope of their project until they took me around the block, literally. I’ll have more to say about it. For now, I am thrilled that I don’t have to pine for street art in Paris (à la Miss Tic and the Ethics of Love). I can stroll anytime to the end of the street where I live. It’s a perfect place for flânerie. Thanks, Corine and Nancy!
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Laredo Loses Its Last Bookstore
When I heard an NPR story this morning about the closing of the one and only bookstore in Laredo, Texas, a city with a quarter million inhabitants, I was heartened anew by the fact that my humble village of 4,000 has three bookstores. And I can walk to any of them in less than five minutes. That’s the flaneur’s definition of a walkable, readable neighborhood. Continue reading
Huck, Is It Time to Light Out for the Territories?
The Yellow Springs in early March, 2008. [Photo by a blind flaneur] See Orgy Songs of the Maenads. Oh, no. My humble, walkable village has been named one of the best 10 small towns in America by Outside magazine (August … Continue reading
