Planet of the Blind

Take any man, add a dog, and you’ve got a better man. If you need any more proof of this, go read Steve Kuusisto’s memoir Planet of the Blind. It is beautiful, funny, heart wrenching, and also gut wrenching. If you meet this self-possessed and accomplished Kuusisto person, who teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, you will not believe he was ever as insecure and self-hating as he seems throughout the first three quarters of his memoir. Kuusisto had the weird fortune to be brought into the world by middle class parents who stubbornly refused to accept that their kid was blind; following their example, he himself chose to deny his blindness for decades and so wandered around inside a dim kaleidoscope, pretending the light shards added up a visible world. When he finally took a cane in hand, he realized he needed a dog.

Read this book. Kuusisto writes with plain honesty and dark sweetness, and if you are not blind, then he knows a lot that you don’t know. And the book has a happy ending. You can’t beat that.

And this book will probably make you realize you need a dog. Not a seeing eye dog, necessarily, but maybe a staying sober dog, a dog who will growl when you are about to drink too much. A story-telling dog who will bark when you start to tell the same story again to the same group of people, or a stomach-eating dog who will prevent shameful acts of overindulgence. We all need the brain-thinking dog, the heart-loving dog, the start-dancing dog. You will admire the adventuring Steve Kuusisto in this book, as he falls in love and falls into wet cement (literally), as he travels to Helsinki and encounters the most surreal carnival of humans you’ve ever seen, um, I mean, encountered. Until you get hold of the book, read his blog ( http://www.planet-of-the-blind.com/ ) to hear his rants about disability politics and poetry. If you go to his entry for January 27, 2009, you can link to a You-tube video of “Kuusisto Does the Kennedy Nixon Debate.” Kuusisto-as-Nixon makes his points using poetry by Wallace Stevens, while Kuusisto-as-Kennedy channels William Carlos Williams.

In Seaside, Oregon, Steve Kuusisto and I were both teaching at a residency for Pacific University's MFA creative writing program, and at dinner one evening, he told an anecdote about Babe Ruth eating at his grandparents’ apartment in New York (the Babe wouldn’t eat the asparagus they’d gone to great lengths to acquire out of season—can you guess why?) In the bar one night, Steve sang out Doris Lessing poems in the voice of Bob Dylan. Our table was kind of crowded, and his dog, Kira, was lying partly under my chair. I had made a point of respecting Kira’s working-dog status, but at the critical moment, when the wild swirl of humans was getting to be too much, the good man let me pet his dog.

Jack Driscoll is an Angel

Jack Driscoll lives in northern Michigan and teaches fiction writing to graduate students at the Pacific University low residency MFA program in Oregon, and when the folks there were looking for another fiction writer, he put my name forward, and Lordy, Lordy, I got hired, and I just spent ten days in Seaside, Oregon on the seaside, teaching and listening and meeting writers and students. I had been starting to worry that I was too goofy and exuberant and peculiar to ever find a place I could teach and belong without moving away from home, and Jack has generously helped me find a place. I pause here to go outside in the cold Michigan air and cry out my gratitude. At the ten-day residency, I was looking forward to spending time with Jack Driscoll; he's a quiet and mysterious fellow, always kind. He was one of the readers of my new book, American Salvage, suggesting to Wayne State University Press that they publish it, and also he offered me some good suggestions for editing. Jack is also an angel because when his latest book was published, How Like an Angel he came to my class at Kalamazoo College for nothing more than traveling expenses, which was all that I could get the school to pay him. On the third day of the residency in Oregon, something terrible happened. Fiction writer Pete Fromm had a heart attack, one of those bad ones. Jack accompanied Pete to the hospital and stayed with him for more than a day until Pete's wife could get there to take over care. (Pete's going to be okay, they said.) I shared the teaching of a workshop with Jack, so that we alternated teaching days and the students told me how much they loved him, and they told me that he shared with them his CD of eighteen versions of Danny Boy. On the last night of the reading series at Pacific, we read together, and it was an honor, but I can't say I know him any better for spending time with him, except that I am more convinced he is a wondrous spirit. In this world of writing, we need to construct writing families. My writing mama has always been Jaimy Gordon, my first writing teacher, but I've never had a papa. I'd be too shy to ask Jack to fill that role, but next time I see him, I'll try to get him to agree to becoming some sort of uncle, weird or otherwise.

When the Ee-rye-ee's a Rising and the Gin is Getting Low

My mom sings that lyric whenever we get flood warnings for the St. Joseph River. It's from a song written by Bobby Darrin and Walter Raim in 1962, the year I was born. The chorus is:

Ooh ... the ER-I-EE was risin'
And the gin was gettin’ low
And I scarcely think
We'll get a little drink
til we get to Buffalo
'til we get to Buffalo.

Well, just last week the river was real high and frozen and then the ice melted all of a sudden and a lot of loose ice came piling down the river fast and hard, so hard it knocked down the tree to which my uncle Terry's float was attached with a cable and so the float went loose. On the float were chained two aluminum boats. We knew the float was gone, and we figured it had just traveled down the road and got stuck on somebody's dock, but then I got a call from the coast guard. And they send me this note, because one of the aluminum boats was last registered in Darling Christopher's name.

Dear Mrs. Magson

Your vessels and dock are located on the Morrison Channel in Saint Joseph just abeam Ann Street at the very first set of private docks on the left hand side as depicted on the attached chart.

Good luck with the recovery efforts, and please call if you have any questions or concerns.

JD Ryan
Auxiliary Flotilla Commander
Communications Watchstander

First of all, what a delight to know there is an Auxiliary Flotilla Commander and a Communications Watchstander, and so much the better that he will help me with recovery efforts and use words like "abeam." (You might also note that I was communicating in the guise of the innocuous "Mrs. Magson," a persona I have found valuable as people called "Mrs." seem harmless to men in the public sphere.) The surprise was that the float traveled a lot farther than just down the road. It traveled about five miles, almost all the way to Lake Michigan.

My brother George drove to St. Joseph with his friend Todd, whose house was full of in-laws, and they found the float, unloaded the boats, returned them to the island, but couldn't figure out how to get the float back up without a powerful boat or a crane and a big truck. George sent me this google map to show me the path the float traveled. Have current, will flow!