"[Juan] Hamilton became the handyman, assistant and friend of [Georgia] O’Keeffe when he was 27 and she was 85."

"He worked and travelled with her for the next 14 years, helping her to paint again as her eyesight was failing, to mount exhibitions and to publish an acclaimed book about her life and work. But it was also noted by neighbours in New Mexico that he was tall, dark and handsome. O’Keeffe’s former agent, Doris Bry, noticed that he was invited to accompany O’Keeffe on a trip to Morocco, apparently in her stead and later filed a lawsuit alleging that he was interfering in her business relationship with the artist. And after O’Keeffe died in 1986, without children, her surviving relatives noticed that he had been made the sole beneficiary of her $70 million estate and filed a suit, later settled out of court...."

From "Juan Hamilton, Georgia O’Keeffe’s caretaker and friend, dies aged 79/The artist’s assistant inherited her entire estate when she died in 1986, but her relatives sued him and they settled out of court" (London Times).

"I once felt that I would rather die than go blind. Now I feel the opposite. Daily life has a renewed delight and vigor."

"I am learning new things constantly. The most ordinary tasks, like going to the post office, have become terrifically interesting. In terms of everyday life, I feel that I am finally in there, more mindful and alert, more fully present. I have chosen curiosity over despair. When my disability was invisible, I irritated strangers constantly — they thought I was rude or dithering or both. People are impatient when they don’t know why you’re holding up the line. Now that I signal my disability with a white cane, I find that I have tapped a well of visible kindness.... Like a Buster Keaton film, my life is full of mishaps and averted disasters...."

Writes Edward Hirsch, who has been going blind for 20 years, in "I Am Going Blind, and I Now Find It Strangely Exhilarating" (NYT).

Beautiful! And I like that he brought up Buster Keaton. I've watched 3 short Buster Keaton movies in the last month — "Neighbors," "The Goat," and "Playhouse":

"Over the years, Rushdie’s friends have marvelled at his ability to write amid the fury unleashed on him."

"Martin Amis has said that, if he were in his shoes, 'I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquilized three-hundred-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs.' And yet 'Victory City' is Rushdie’s sixteenth book since the fatwa.... During the pandemic, Rushdie... was already toying with an idea for another novel. He’d reread Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain' and Franz Kafka’s 'The Castle,' novels that deploy a naturalistic language to evoke strange, hermetic worlds—an alpine sanatorium, a remote provincial bureaucracy. Rushdie thought about using a similar approach to create a peculiar imaginary college as his setting. He started keeping notes...."

From "The Defiance of Salman Rushdie/After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act" by David Remnick (in The New Yorker).

"Yes, ban the office cakes. Obviously.... I have been campaigning [against obesity] for more than 20 years...."

"And all I have met is anger, abuse and accusations of 'fat-shaming.' From the right, because I seem to be after restricting people’s right to choose how they live; and from the left because, since obesity disproportionately affects the poor, I must be motivated by class hatred and snobbery.... I have moved on from any notion I might once have had about personal culpability and now hold the government and 'big sugar' (which pulled a nefarious con on the public by repositioning sugar as 'energy' when it is, in fact, sloth, weakness and depression) entirely responsible. Which is why I am with [ chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, Professor Susan Jebb] all the way in calling on people to stop buying this poisonous shite in pretty packaging and forcing it into their ailing colleagues like corn down the diseased gullet of a Perigord goose. An unrelated story in The Times on Wednesday celebrated a new wonder-drug proven to prolong the lives of mice, inspiring the dream... that it might work on humans. But do you know what is also proven to prolong the life of mice? Severe calorie restriction. Cut their intake by a third and they live up to 40 per cent longer. Before we plough billions into yet more drugs, shouldn’t we at least give that a go?"

Writes Giles Coren in "Cake debate is no laughing matter — seriously/Snigger at comparisons with passive smoking if you must, but only if you’re blind to the scale of our obesity crisis" (London Times). 

"Several years ago, an optometrist ambushed me during a routine exam: 'Do you know you have retinitis pigmentosa?'"

"... I had no idea what she was talking about. She followed with another question: 'Are you night blind?' Indeed, I was. I’ve never been able to see in the dark; it’d been something of a running joke among family and friends since I was a kid. 'Clumsy,' we called it.... I had a progressive eye disease that eventually results in blindness. There’s no cure."

Writes Jon Gingerich in "How I wrote my first novel while going blind – and kept it a secret" (The Guardian).

"I sold my novel last year. In a decision that was fully on-brand, I didn’t tell my publisher I’d lost my vision.... [M]y worst days are the ones when I realize I’m left to work with pieces of myself, that I’ve become unmoored from the human experience in some fundamental way. But... [w]e are a collection of small losses, and each of them have a distinct weight. We have no idea what others are walking around with, the weight they’re carrying on their shoulders.... [C]ommitting to the cane was the most terrifying development yet, because it meant my secret was out.... I felt relief that no one batted an eye. Why would they, anyway?"

"We have no idea what others are walking around with"... unless they use a cane or its equivalent (and we, ourselves, have the vision to see it).

"Emptying the dishwasher is my morning tai chi, bending low for the sparkling glass, then stretching into the empty shelf and filling it."

"Sweeping is a dance. Folding laundry is origami. Our king bed is a canvas for a still life of colorful pillows and blankets. As I work, I repeat one of my many low-vision mantras: In doing, I can be. And being is the sweetest remuneration."

Writes Sam Harper, a man who has been married for 40 years and on a path toward losing his eyesight for 60 years, in "Please Let Me Do More Laundry and Vacuuming! For decades, I avoided domestic tasks. My failing vision has made me cherish them" (NYT).

"The idea that some hapless, well-meaning person would put up a poster like this, thinking that they had a cat..."

"... it just seemed so funny to her. So it was obvious that it was a joke. She really didn't expect the calls."

 

I highly recommend "The Possum Experiment," the new episode of "This American Life," which is centered on the question whether people are basically good and can be trusted. 

All the segments were high quality, not just the part about the possum experiment. There's also a part about a black male comedian who went blind:

Here's something that I philosophized this little trip. It's a trip for me. This fucks with my head a little bit. My blindness is diffusing the scariness of my Blackness. That was one of my secret weapons to be a big brother, and people get nervous. Oh, fuck. There's a big Black guy. Watch out. That shit is powerful. It was a thrill. Once people find out that I can't see, my Blackness is out the window. They treat me like I'm a Make-a-Wish baby. Uh oh, watch out. There's a big Black guy. Oh, he just walked into the broom closet. OK, no worries.

And the last part is about the alternative endings to "Clockwork Orange."

According to [the novelist Anthony] Burgess, when the book was published here in the States, the publisher told him they wouldn't put it out unless they could cut chapter 21. This was way before the movie was optioned. It was still just a novel. They said the optimistic ending was Pollyanna-ish, naive, and bland. They were like, we Americans are tougher than you Brits. We can handle a nihilistic ending. Some people are just beyond hope. That's more realistic.

But the story wasn't so simple, and Burgess seems to have been bullshitting.

"She was defended by Alexander Graham Bell, and by Mark Twain... with a thumping hurrah for plagiarism, and..."

"... disgust for the egotism of 'these solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart with their ignorant damned rubbish! . . . A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they’ve caught filching a chop!'"

I'm reading Cynthia Ozick's "How Helen Keller Learned to Write/With the help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, Keller forged a path from deaf-blind darkness to unimaginable artistry"  — from June 8, 2003 in The New Yorker.

I'm reading that because — and I can't remember why — I got to thinking how hard it is to believe that Helen Keller could have acquired the language skills needed to write the works attributed to her. (You, who are not blind, can see the entire text of her "Story of My Life" at Project Gutenberg.)

Ozick writes:

The "legally blind" 65-year-old woman who mountain bikes "along knifelike cliff edges where one false move would mean a 2,000-foot fall."

Profiled in the NYT, here: "At 65 and Legally Blind, ‘Sister Shred’ Has Never Met a Slope She Wouldn’t Ride/Kris Nordberg still loves rolling through rock gardens and shredding powder on her ski bike — sometimes, in a nun costume." 

She has pseudoxanthoma elasticum, a progressive genetic disorder, and "riding with her head turned to the side, she can use her peripheral vision to make out people ahead of her on the trail and shapes and colors."

When she encounters a particularly tricky section of a trail — for instance, a rock staircase with jagged boulders that could snag a front wheel and send a rider over a bike’s handlebars — she sometimes asks strangers for guidance. She carries a bright orange strap and politely asks other riders if they could use it to mark the path of least resistance.

"Sorry but I don’t think it’s a big deal... Im just sad people get their feelings hurt so easily. And they are going into Theatre?"

Wrote Coastal Carolina University theater professor Steve Earnest — who we're told is "politically conservative" — quoted in "A drama professor told students they got their feelings hurt too easily. They decided to fight back" (L.A. Times).

If there was one thing Earnest tried to instill in his students, it was toughness. He would warn them that acting is a brutal profession full of rejection and requires a sturdy exoskeleton to survive. He himself is a rare species in the world of theater: a Donald Trump-voting conservative from a small town in Alabama with a deep passion for avant-garde European theater. 

Among the videos his freshmen watch in class is a postmodern remake of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” that includes a scene in which a father places his penis on a table while his blind daughter swings at it with a hammer....  

As more speech is construed as hurtful or even dangerous, can a professor be dismissed for creating an “uncomfortable” learning environment or “endangering” students?...

Much more at the link. I got past the paywall by clicking "Reader View." My post leaves out everything about the incident that set everything in motion. I've selected the material about teaching toughness on the theory that students are going to need it to succeed in the world. 

ADDED: I kept thinking about that blind daughter swinging a hammer at her father's penis, so I googled and found this in a philosophy dissertation, "Theatres of Reality, Fiction, and Temporality: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Ibsen-Saga (2006-2015)" by Andrew Friedman:

"Giving a description of yourself for the benefit of blind or visually impaired people – when meeting a group of people for the first time; when speaking at a conference or seminar – is good practice, and part of your professional responsibilities."

I'm reading "Self-description for inclusive meetings" (at VocalEyes), which gives some insight into what was going on in the video we were talking about a few days ago, in which a couple Microsoft employers, introducing themselves, let us know that they were "Caucasian" and (in one case) had long blonde hair.

In the comments at my post, Lurker21 said:

Even if you accept that saying your race and gender before large groups of people is now appropriate and necessary you might puzzle over why physical descriptions of the face became necessary before references to sexual orientation. Maybe a large part of the audience is blind (but not blind from birth since visual appearance wouldn't mean so much to them)?

And it turns out these extended descriptions of looks do seem to be motivated by a desire to include the blind. I'm sure the blind are aware that they are missing something other people are getting, but do they appreciate extra explanations that are just about how people look (as opposed to explanations of nonverbal communication like gestures or things written or drawn on a whiteboard)? 

At that VocalEyes website, you're told that, when introducing yourself, you should "restrict yourself to three key elements and one or two sentences." And it's "a political and personal act." There are suggestions about which elements to choose:

"It’s as much a war movie as anything else, with a woman as the general, and her gender isn’t the chink in her armor."

Wrote Frank Bruni, in the NYT last October, in "Sigourney Weaver Goes Her Own Way/Delivering performances both profound and eccentric, the actress has refused to be pinned down or defined throughout her nearly half-century career. At 71, she’s still going her own (mischievous) way." 

There were 9 other articles with the word "chink" in The New York Times in 2020. Today, the NYT's delightful word puzzle "Spelling Bee" challenges us to make words out of these letters....

... and it rejects the word "chink." If you try to enter it, you'll be told "Not in word list." 

I wasn't surprised to see this. I'd long observed the Spelling Bee's rejection of the word "coon," which can be a racial slur but, obviously, is also what people who call an opossum a "possum" call a raccoon. Last November, I blogged (at great length) about the Spelling Bee's rejection of the word "nappy."

The reason I'm blogging about this issue again, with "chink," is that the NYT printed the word "chink" 20 times in its own articles in 2020! When is a bad word so bad it's censored when it appears in a non-bad context? Take a position.

You know what? I took a position back in 2012. ESPN had fired a reporter for using the phrase "chink in the armor" in a headline that was about a Chinese basketball player. I felt sorry for the reporter, who'd used "chink in the armor" many times before and didn't mean to crack a joke about the player's race, but I wrote:

How the NYT and the Washington Post have caught up on the New York Post Hunter Biden story.

The NYT has this story, which, it says, went up 11 hours ago: "Allegation on Biden Prompts Pushback From Social Media Companies/Joe Biden’s campaign rejected assertions made in a published report that were based on unverified material from Trump allies. Facebook and Twitter found the story dubious enough to limit access to it on their platform." 

The reaction of the social media companies — censorship — is most prominent, followed by Biden's reaction — rejection of the assertions and questioning of the material. The social media reaction is presented as reinforcing the Biden campaign rejection and — it is implied — justified by the "dubious" quality of the report. That the NY Post put the material in a news article isn't mentioned in the headline.

The Washington Post story, which went up at 10:45 CDT, has a much shorter headline, stressing the aggression of Trump supporters and the lateness of the attack: "Three weeks before Election Day, Trump allies go after Hunter — and Joe — Biden." 

From the NYT article: 

"The deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security says federal officers in Portland suffered 113 eye injuries while guarding a courthouse from activists armed with powerful lasers."

"The usually green beams produce uncomfortable heat, unlike common small red pointers, Ken Cuccinelli said Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing on the clashes in Oregon. 'We’ve had a number of officers who have days-long blindness. So far they’ve all kind of come back, if you will,' Cuccinelli said. 'But you also get what’s called flash blindness. Think of it as the old Kodak cameras where you get that blue spot and you can’t quite see your entire field of vision for a period.'... Although Cuccinelli said all officers recovered their sight, he said activists appear to be aiming to maximize damage.... Cuccinelli said lasers create problems for officers, who cannot look toward the beams to identify suspects.... Cuccinelli said some protesters are indeed peaceful, but others aren’t. 'This is sort of the Portland formula: there’s peaceful protesting until 10 or 11 o’clock, and then they go away. And maybe some of them come back, but the group that comes back is A.) much bigger, but also they come back for violence,' Cuccinelli said."

The New York Post reports.

"And that was his plan. He was going to live his normal life as if normal 'was living in darkness for the rest of my life.'"

"He had 720 hours and absolutely no distractions – and he’d use that time to improve himself. 'How can I give myself a better sugar scrub ... how can I stretch it deeper, how can I be more calm, how can I be more patient?' he says.... With so much time and only himself for company, Alati’s thoughts were a source of entertainment and a lifeline. 'The thoughts would just come to you, and if you don’t make sure that they go in a good direction, they can spiderweb out of control and lead you to a bad place,' Alati says....  '[Prisoners in solitary] are not given a bathtub with sugar scrubs, and essential oil and food, and a yoga mat. They’re not given that stuff, so if I didn’t have that stuff, and I wasn’t actually free and I wasn’t being paid, that’s why [it would be a] punishment.'...  When he finally emerged, the noise and commotion was overwhelming.... Friends and family surrounded him, and social interaction was 'a bit of a culture shock.' He was surprised by the number of choices he had and that social niceties needed to be observed. 'I knew how to do everything – I just forgot,' Alati says. 'I can’t just start doing push-ups on a bathtub in front of people. I can’t just start walking around with no underwear.'"

From "Hallucinations and $100,000: the poker player who shut himself in a pitch-black room for weeks/Rich Alati had a six-figure sum in his sights. As long as he could survive 30 days in the dark with no human contact" (The Guardian).

ADDED: Alati had control: If he could stay in, he'd get $100,000 and if he came out he'd lose $100,000. That's $200,000 of incentive, for a 30-day effort. The other guy, Young, could only wait and see what Alati would do. Young's advantage was that he didn't have to do anything difficult, and he might win $100,000. One alternative was that Young could communicate by audio with Alati and make an offer to end it earlier. And that's what happened, with Young paying $62,400 for Alati's 20 days in the bathroom.

Was there any real danger that Alati would lose his mind? If so, Young faced the risk of having to feel bad about what he'd lured Alati to do, and Alati risked suffering that would extend beyond the 30 day period. But Alati also stood to gain from the 30-day experience. There was the enforced meditation in solitude and the chance to see what visions grow in darkness. And then there was all that physical exercise. You'd do a lot of push-ups and sit-ups. It would be fun to look at yourself in the mirror after all that, no?

"She takes pills for three months, the pills make her unbelievably obtuse, and the obtuseness then defines itself as mental health! It’s like blindness defining itself as vision. 'Now that I’m blind, I can see there’s nothing to see.'"

I've been reading "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen.

"Get rid of the (expletive) Braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it."

So said Trump, back in the 80s, according to Barbara Res, the former vice president in charge of construction at the Trump Organization, writing in The Daily News.

The Braille was in the elevator control panels. According to Res, who wasn't present for the incident, the architect told him it had to be there, because it was required by law, and: "The more the architect protested, the angrier Trump got. Donald liked to pick on this guy. As a general rule, Trump thought architects and engineers were weak as compared to construction people. And he loved to torment weak people."

One could also say that architects and engineers are the elite, and it's fun or good for them to knock them around. "No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower" sounds like a joke — not the kind of joke designed for public consumption, but it is funny. You've got a tall glass tower that's all about great views. You pay a big premium for those views, and a blind person has (the premise of the joke is) no use for them. I mean, I can see a use: a very rich blind person might splurge on a feature that he himself cannot enjoy but he could show off to visitors.

That makes me think of Picasso's last words: "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink anymore."

"I can’t technically take maternity leave. Because if I take maternity leave, then I won’t be allowed to sponsor legislation or vote during that time period."

Says Tammy Duckworth, the pregnant Senator.

Key word, "technically." When Senators want personal time, don't they just take it? I can understand a politician wanting to purport to exemplify problems that everyday people have, but Duckworth doesn't have the problem of needing authorization to take time off from work to deal with childbirth and the care of a newborn.

There's also the breastfeeding question:

“You are not allowed to bring children onto the floor of the Senate at all,” Duckworth pointed out. “If I have to vote, and I’m breastfeeding my child, especially during my maternity leave period, what do I do? Leave her sitting outside?”

Obviously, you bring the baby onto the Senate floor and everyone loves it (or acts like they do). It's about like the way they'd deal with the no-dogs-on-the Senate floor rule if there were a blind Senator with a seeing-eye dog. Everyone would instantly and automatically understand that there was an implicit exception to the rule. This is like the first-year law-school problem of the sign that says "No motor vehicles in the park" and the question whether a paraplegic in an electric wheelchair can go in.

But I'd love to see a Senator try to bring an emotional support animal— perhaps a bichon frise — onto the Senate floor.

"On November 24, blind balloon artist HongSeok Goh opened his first US exhibit at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum."

"The installation is a representation of the cosmos, with a massive elephant depicting space and a plodding turtle for time. The colors and shapes he chose are also allegorical – the elephant’s legs are the colors of the South Korean flag, and its trunk, which unfurls into the head of a dragon, symbolizes the universe expanding. The turtle’s head is covered with stars to represent the United States. The sculpture, which is 20 feet long, took a team of six balloon artists from South Korea and two from America six days to complete."

HuffPo.

There are 3 main questions, I think, about an artist who is blind:

1. How can he make the art object if he can't see what he's doing? In this case, we're told that he had a team of not-blind artists doing the handiwork. But another way to do it would be by how it feels, and it might be interesting to sighted people to take a look at what felt good. Alternatively, the blind artist could work by his sense of touch alone, and museumgoers could be required to encounter it by touch alone, either by darkening the room or obscuring the object inside a box.

2. Was the artist blind from birth or does he have memory of seeing? This question is not answered in the article, but it's the main thing I want to know. He's creating visual art so what vision does he have in his mind? The objects in this case look like giant animals (made of balloons), so perhaps he's heard of these animals and touched them, and he simply told other people to make a giant example of this made of balloons, and that's all he did, without ever having received a visual image into his head.

3. Why would a blind person want to be a visual artist? That question is also not answered in the article. I'd like to know. It could be some idea of the importance that nothing should exclude blind people. But it might be some subtle concept about the visual dimension of the mind of a blind person that enables him to show sighted people something they cannot otherwise see.

"The camera feed is reduced in resolution to a grid of four hundred gray-scale pixels, transmitted to his tongue via a corresponding grid of four hundred tiny electrodes on the lollipop."

"Dark pixels provide a strong shock; lighter pixels merely tingle. The resulting vision is a sensation that Weihenmayer describes as 'pictures being painted with tiny bubbles.'

From "Seeing With Your Tongue" in The New Yorker.