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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

Dorothy Parker Does Dickens with Help From Claude

It was a damp morning in the marshes, and a small boy named Pip sat among the gravestones of his family, scouting the neighborhood. He was an orphan, which in Dickens is less a misfortune than a career.

Out of the mist lurched a convict, who seized Pip by the chin and demanded a file and some food. Pip complied, being a child of tender conscience and no sense whatsoever, a combination that would serve him well for the next four hundred pages.

He was raised “by hand” by his sister, Mrs. Joe, a woman who kept an immaculate house and an immaculate grievance, and who dispensed love in the form of a cane called Tickler. Her husband, Joe, the blacksmith, was so good and so gentle and so thoroughly a doormat that one longs to see him lose his temper just once, if only to confirm he has one.

Then Pip was sent to Satis House, where Miss Havisham had sat for decades in her wedding dress, jilted, rotting, and delighted with herself. Every clock was stopped at twenty to nine. She had kept the cake on the table to molder, which is the sort of thing one does when one has money and no friends. It is not grief. It is a hobby.

She had adopted a girl, Estella, whom she raised to break men’s hearts, a pastime I understand is otherwise reserved for the middle classes. Estella told Pip his hands were coarse and his boots were thick. He fell in love instantly. Some people are born to be insulted by beautiful women, and Pip, to his credit, took to it like a vocation.

Then came the news. A lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, a man who washed his hands after every client, which is the most honest thing a lawyer has ever done, announced that Pip had Great Expectations. A benefactor, unnamed, would make him a gentleman.

Pip assumed it was Miss Havisham. Of course he did. It is the fatal flaw of the young that they believe the universe has been arranging itself on their behalf.

He went to London. He learned to dress, to dine, and to be ashamed of Joe, the only person in the book who had never wanted anything from him. He ran up debts with the easy grace of a man who believed he was owed them. A gentleman, I gather, is someone who has been told so often that he is one that he has stopped checking.

The benefactor, naturally, was the convict from the marsh, who arrived in London smelling of Australia and gratitude. Pip recoiled. The man had spent twenty years making a fortune in order to buy the boy a better class of contempt. It is the most touching thing in the novel, and Pip treats it like a stain on the carpet.

After that, everyone is punished, as is customary. The convict dies. Miss Havisham catches fire, which seems to have been the least she could do, and begs forgiveness, which seems to have been the most. Estella marries a brute named Drummle, because Dickens felt someone ought to pay for the cold hands, and that someone ought to be a woman.

And Pip, chastened, penniless, and finally humbled, went back to Joe, who forgave him at once. This is what is known as a happy ending, and also, I think, the cruelest thing in the book. Nothing is so unbearable as a man who will not hold your worst against you.

The last scene is a ruined garden, a mist, and two people who have wasted their lives on each other. Dickens wrote two endings. In the first they part forever, and in the second they may not. I prefer the first. I have been to a few reunions, and nobody ever looked better for the wait.

This one is meaner toward everyone, Pip included, and goes after the novel’s gentility, its love of punishing women, and the way goodness is mostly a license to be taken advantage of. Want Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities next?

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.