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Off the Page: Notebooks of an Occasional Optimist (A Rededication)

For almost twenty years this space has been called “Planet of the Blind”—a nod to my first memoir and, for a long time, an accurate description of its subjects: blindness, accessibility, the struggles of opposing ableism. That work isn’t done — it never will be — but the blog has quietly outlived its name. Over the years I’ve used this space to write about disability rights, but also about history, horror films, wordplay, literary biography, and the jottings of other writers. Its time for the title to reflect the writing.

So: welcome to “Off the Page”

I’ve always been drawn to the notebook as a form. Years ago I co-edited (with poets David Weiss and Deborah Tall)  “The Poet’s Notebook” for W.W. Norton, a collection of the fast jottings, marginalia, and half-formed thoughts that poets keep before a poem exists. There’s something clarifying about the notebook— unpolished, occasional, closer to thinking out loud than to argument. This blog has always worked that way too, even when I didn’t say so. A post about accommodation law sits next to a post about Bela Lugosi which in turn sits next to a fragment from an actual notebook. That miscellany was never a flaw. It was the point.

As for “occasional optimist” — I chose the phrase carefully. More than thirty years of working on accessibility at universities, watching the gap between institutional assurance and grassroots reality, teaches you not to be naive. Optimism, for me, isn’t a temperament so much as a discipline — something closer to what Gramsci meant by pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I don’t expect things to go well. I do the work anyway, and every so often — reading a poem, watching a student’s reading habits change, standing at a lectern in a room full of people who came out for disability poetry on a summer night in Washington — I catch myself feeling something like hope. Occasional is the right word. Earned, not constant.

So this is still the same notebook it always was: kept in the old commonplace tradition of writing things down because they mattered enough, that day, to write down. The title’s new. The habit of attention behind it isn’t.

Thank you for reading, then and now.

— Stephen Kuusisto

I asked Claude to Write as Dorothy Parker Imitating Philip Roth

A Small Complaint, Delivered at Length

My mother believed that a man who skipped breakfast was a man who had given up on the future. I skipped breakfast on the morning I turned thirty-four, and by noon I was sitting in Dr. Feldstein’s waiting room in a suit I could not afford, reading a magazine on the subject of lawns, trying to determine exactly when in my life I had become a person who sat in rooms like this one, thinking about her.

I don’t mean my mother. I mean the girl in the elevator, the one with the ankles, who looked at me with such perfect, merciful indifference that I wanted to confess everything: the lies, the lusts, the unreturned library books. She said “Going up?” and I, a grown man with a graduate degree and a pulse, said “Historically, yes.” She laughed, and the laugh lasted exactly as long as a courtesy and not one second more. I have been in analysis for six years, and I tell you that laugh cost me forty minutes of billable hours.

Feldstein says I use my wit as a screen door: it keeps out the flies and lets in the dread. I told him that was very good and he should write it down. He did not. Everyone is a critic, and no one is a patron.

Here is what I know about love: it is a fire that begins in the loins and ends in the Tupperware. Here is what I know about guilt: it is the only thing my family never let go to waste.

I went home. I called my mother. She asked if I’d eaten.

I said I was too busy suffering.

“Suffer after,” she said. “Eat first.”

I have never heard better advice, and I have spent my entire life ignoring it.

Clickbait, Baby!

I just saw a headline in The Guardian, that stout and dependable newspaper which asks: “What’s the Future of Lightning”? Now I don’t know about you but for me, this is a meretricious pun. We know its future is flashy. Of curse we do. Don’t we? I better read this right away. 

With climate catastrophe the future of lightning is not a trivial subject. It’s the headline I’m complaining about. Editors nowadays use what’s called  “curiosity gap headlines” to grab the reader. I’m sick of it. Just tell me lightning is getting worse. Give it to me straight. Don’t play with my overtaxed brain. 

With the overtaxed brain let’s be gentle. What is the future of the brain? Oh oh oh its not secure. AI is coming for your mind. You know it. And yes, in this area curiosity gap headlines are everywhere. I asked Claude to write me one: Scientists Just Discovered Why Your Brain Is About to Change Forever (And It’s Not What You Think)

Homage to the Doo-dah Man

I’ve never been much for the “Grateful Dead” though I don’t look askance at those who love them. Taste is not a barometer of character. So I don’t listen to them and that’s that. But inexplicably a song of theirs has surfaced in my head. The song is “Truckin’” which was everywhere when I entered college. Picture me cleaning the grout in my shower and hearing it in my noggin. Where did it come from? What nefarious joke from my sub-conscious is being foisted upon me?

Jung said you always become the thing you fight the most. Its a clever line but I don’t buy it. I’ve been fighting ableism all my life and I am not in danger of hating the disabled or sneering at their plight. Of course Jung was talking about inner demons. But even there he was wrong. I have a monster under my pillow and while he’s capable of piercing my heart while I sleep, he ain’t me. It frustrates him. How I wish Jung was here so I could argue with him. Anyway, “Truckin’” is stuck on replay in my frontal lobes and I finally figured out why?

Its the Doo-dah Man. He’s part of a list of nasty street people who the song’s narrator must get past or leave behind—gotta keep going, “truckin’”. What is a Doo-dah Man? According to my friend “Claude”:

 “Doo-dah” has a long vernacular life in American English. Its most famous appearance is the nonsense refrain of Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races” (1850), which gave us “doo-dah, doo-dah” and “all the doo-dah day.” By the late 19th century it had spread into general slang as a catch-all for a gadget or trinket (doodad, doohickey, doodah) and for fuss or excitement. The British idiom “all of a doodah” means flustered or agitated. So the word already carried a feel of the generic, the unnamed thing or the faintly absurd.

In “Truckin’,” the Doodah man is a roadside oracle who hands the narrator some hard-won advice about playing the hand you’re dealt. That fits the song’s cast of street-corner figures, hustlers, and half-trustworthy cats who sound like they’re selling something. A name built on a nonsense word suits a character who is a type rather than a person: the cheerfully shady wise guy, the carnival-barker sage.

And there I was with an old toothbrush scrubbing grout when I realized the Doo-dah Man is Donald Trump. He’s a type rather than a person, the oft times cheery wise guy selling hate. 

But now this Doo-dah is wearing off. He sneers at “affordability” in front of ever smaller audiences. Maybe, just maybe we’re truckin’ past him. You may say I’m a dreamer.

Dorothy Parker Writing as Thoreau

I confess: its a dark time around the world and I’ve been using “Claude” the AI platform built by Anthropic to amuse myself. I’ve been asking it to write in the voice of Dorothy Parker, Parker in turn writing as other writers. This is Claude’s rendition of Dorothy Parker as Henry David Thoreau:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. I stayed because the alternative was being asked how I was.

The house cost twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents. I know the half cent because I mention it constantly, usually to people who have only asked me the time. I have been told that thrift is a virtue. So is silence, and I notice no one has pinned that one on me.

My mother sends a pie every Saturday. I accept it in the spirit of a man who has renounced the world but not baked goods. Ask me whether I have simplified my life and I will say yes, with my mouth full.

I keep three chairs: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. The third is for show. Society has never once required a chair. It stands in the doorway, comments on the draft, and leaves before the dishes.

The pond is the color of a clear conscience, which I admire in the way one admires a stranger’s. I bathe in it daily, to remind myself that I am alive, and to remind it that I am not impressed.

The mass of men, I wrote, lead lives of quiet desperation. I meant it kindly. I have since noticed that the mass of men also have dinner invitations.

I do not own a clock, having discovered that time passes perfectly well without my supervision. It is the only thing in Concord that does.

Be warned that I shall not be pitied. I have the beans, the birds, and the unshakable conviction that I am right. It is a modest estate, but the upkeep is nothing, and I never have to share it.

All Together Now

“Alright” says the autumn mushroom “I have stories but I don’t think people are ready for them—who among the poets would be most receptive? I never met no poet who could speak mushroom save for John Clare and you know what happened to him!”

Or so I presume

Not speaking fungi

But freely admitting 

They’re the closest things in nature to the tongue…

**

Remember school days when the classroom was stifling and the clock was lugubrious? One can still feel this at any time. Accidie is the term for academic exhaustion but there’s no word for the mournfulness of childhood schools.

**

No one who has lived through the isolation of disability ever feels nostalgia for the good old days. Nostalgia is privilege. 

**

I don’t know about you, I really don’t. This circumstance is the incitement for religion and science. In the former, interpersonal curiosity is replaced by dogmatic nonsense; the latter, with bleached analysis. Either way you lose your neighbors. If I’m wrong about this, just chalk it up to the mournfulness above…

**

Anyway, I go around telling people I’m an optimist. Why not? I mean, really, why the hell not? Glass half full or half empty? Dang! At least you have a glass. Do you have any idea how many thousands of years it took human beings to invent that thing?

Of or Pertaining to Tenderness

One day in a museum a companion described for me exquisite, soulful, miniature drawings by Daumier. She said there was a little dog, a dog made of curlicues. He was jumping in the wholly invisible wind. And I loved him, though I’d never see him. This is what Rainer Rilke understood as creaturely love, a tenderness.                    

Of tenderness there’s much to say. “Be tender with the world’s wounds” Rilke says. 

Robert Bly:

“I am proud only of those days that pass in

undivided tenderness.” 

I love the link between prideful satisfaction and tenderness. 

The crucial word in Bly’s lines—“only:—-

We can assess our tenderness success. 

My neighbor built an ugly fence behind my house. I don’t like him. Ans so I am a tenderness failure on the days where I talk unkindly under my breath. 

It is harder and harder to achieve tenderness let alone sustain it.

Oh my tenderness we’ve been through so much. The discrimination in employment. The ableism and all the accrued distresses of a painful childhood. I walk about the streets knowing that the strangers who pass me by have suffered the same or even worse.

Oh tenderness, you’ve kept me alive. Don’t forsake me now. 

My Uncle’s Nether Parts

I had an uncle who used to scratch his nether parts rather frequently. While most people agree that alleviation of this sort should be done in private, he’d go at his crotch without mercy while standing in the dining room. He knew he was doing it. “I worked my balls off today” he’d declare as if clawing his nuts and capitalism were connected. 

Of course he was correct about this but not in the way he thought. The man simply had jock itch and loathed his job. “I worked my balls off” was code for “I’m about to drink my face off and you best take cover.” “I worked my balls off!” Vodka. And guzzling. After many snorts he’d go out to the barn and toss heavy metal objects around while howling. 

I have no desire to moralize. He was unhappy. He drank. He was unintentionally funny. Then scary. Even as a boy I liked the man. 

Mark Fisher writes: “Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.” (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?) 

Uncle M was resisting zombie-hood. He’d scratch his nuts like a bonobo. 

Karl Marx wrote: “Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.”

I don’t know how this relates to my uncle. 

AI (Claude) Writes in the Manner of Dorothy Parker Imitating Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice, After Dark

Dorothy Parker writing Jane Austen:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, and one I have personally suffered through at three separate dinner parties, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. It is further acknowledged, though less frequently admitted, that he is generally in want of very little else, least of all conversation.

Mrs. Bennet, who had five daughters and the nerves of a cat in a thunderstorm, received the news of Mr. Bingley’s arrival at Netherfield with the composure of a woman who has just been told the house is on fire and the fire is eligible. “A single man of large fortune!” she cried. “Four or five thousand a year! What a fine thing for our girls!” Mr. Bennet, who had long ago taken refuge in his library the way other men take refuge in drink, replied that he did not see how it could affect them, and went on reading. It was the most sensible thing anyone said all evening, and it was wasted entirely.

Elizabeth, the second daughter, had a lively mind and an opinion of herself that she would have called discernment and her enemies would have called a hobby. She disliked Mr. Darcy upon sight, which saved considerable time later when she had to reverse herself. He was tall, proud, and rich, three qualities that in a woman would be called a character flaw and in a man are called a catch. He declined to dance with her, remarking that she was tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt him. She laughed about it for the rest of the evening, in the bright, brittle manner of a person who will be thinking about it in the carriage, and at four in the morning, and probably in 1847.

Love, as it developed, proceeded the way it always does in these matters: with a great deal of walking about in the rain, a number of letters better left unsent, and a good many words that would have to be eaten later without so much as a pinch of salt. Everyone concerned behaved abominably, and was rewarded with an income. I have always said that virtue is its own reward, but I have noticed that it is considerably improved by ten thousand a year and a house in Derbyshire.