Remembering David Rakoff

In 2012 I saw David Rakoff give this talk and performance, three months before he died. I just heard it again, rebroadcast on the radio, and found a video of it that I've put at the bottom of this post. A lot of what he says resonates with me both as a person of difference and as a person of dis/ability:

It was an exercise in humiliation and trying to make myself as invisible as possible. 

That was how he felt going to dance classes as a young man. That was how I felt in gym class as a kid. The difference between us that as a kid in gym class, I was coming to terms with disability, and the young David Rakoff wasn't. Not yet.

On becoming dis/abled, he says:

Everybody loses ability—everybody loses ability as they age. If you're lucky, this happens over the course of a few decades.

David Rakoff's "if your lucky" referred to his cancer and resulting string of operations, the last of which left him with a flail limb, meaning that he could neither move nor feel anything in his left arm. His descriptions for accommodating to this disability, though different from those that a person with low vision performs, are pretty familiar in their perfunctory absurdity:   

If I retained anything from dancing, it's a physical precision that certainly helps in my new daily one-armed tasks. They're the same as my old two-armed chores. They're not epic or horrifying. Some of them don't even take much longer, but they're all to one degree or another, more annoying than they used to be, requiring planning, strategy, and a certain enhanced gracefulness. 

Oral hygiene: Hold the handle of the toothbrush between your teeth the way FDR or Burgess Meredith playing The Penguin bit down on their cigarette holders. Put the toothpaste on the brush, recap the tube, put it away... Then reverse the brush and put the bristles in your mouth, proceed. 

Washing your right arm: Soap up your right thigh in the shower, put your foot up on the edge of the tub, and then move your arm over your soapy lower limb back and forth like an old-timey barbershop razor strop. 

Grating cheese: Get a pot with a looped handle, the heavier the better. This will anchor the bowl that you want the cheese to go into. Put the bowl into the pot. Now take a wooden spoon and feed it through the handle of the grater and the loop of the pot, and then tuck the end down into the waistband of your jeans. (Clean underpants are a good idea.) Jam yourself up against the kitchen counter and go to town.

In memory, here's David Rakoff's complete talk and performance:

After he died, This American Life ran an hour-long tribute to David Rakoff's life and work. Listen here.

Blind Book #2: The Country of the Blind

One short story, told three different ways: print, radio, and animated film.

H.G. Wells mastered science fiction by generating stories from simple questions. Questions like, "What would a man do if he became invisible?" or "What if our planet were attacked by aliens?" or "What would life on Earth be like many millennia in the future?" yielded some the most well-known novels, radio plays, and films in over a century of sci fi. Wells' questions also spun into shorter stories, with "what-ifs" that, like The Time Machine, put an ordinary person from his day into another world. The exploration is twofold in these stories: the protagonist must contend with the strangeness of that world and its inhabitants who, in turn, try to figure out their unusual visitor. As readers, we become a third fold, interpreting the experiences on both sides of that relationship.

"The Country of the Blind" first ran as a magazine piece in 1904. Wells later published it with a very different ending, and every adaptation has hence taken liberties with it, leaving it up to readers (or viewers or listeners) to guess how any given version will end. The story lends itself to the sightless realm of audio theatre, and was perfect fodder for the radio suspense series Escape, which dramatized it in 1947. This restored version of that broadcast is pretty faithful to Wells' original, though the tagline about "a band of blind men who want your eyes" misses the essence of the piece by over-demonizing the story's blind populace. Listen and discern, as Wells did, how "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king."

This wordless 1995 Russian animation took even greater liberties with the original story and all sorts of stuff could be read into it as post-Soviet, post-Industrial, and even post-Medieval allegory. This all-pictures-no-words version makes for a nice counterpoint to radio, though any blind person who "saw" would think it funny how the people are depicted moving about in a place completely familiar to them:

Amazing Grace is Overrated

"Mike May is a skydiving, downhill skiing, daredevil of a man who just so happens to be blind. And then one day, he is faced with his biggest challenge."

Fascinating piece from the fantastic podcast, Snap Judgment.