I watch the film unfold with a mixture of admiration, bewilderment, and, for purely selfish and private reasons, disappointment. My potentially global work has been made local. It is now locked into Germanic culture. It portrays the German media world, a distinctly German sensuality, a concrete Tyrolese. Well, haven’t I written frequently in admiration of the artist happy to engage with his local community and ignore the global? Indeed I have. But this local is not my local. And of course, thanks to the complex laws of film rights and copyright, something else I have recently expressed a few opinions about, it will now not be easy for English or American producers to make their own version of the film. Like it or not, Cleaver, Cleaver, really has expatriated. He’s Cliewer now.

-Tim Parks

Parks has a very interesting blog post in the New York Review of Books on the German film adaptation of his novel Cleaver. It raises a number of the issues I hope our ACLA panel can address. 

Park’s essay is about film adaptation, cultural adaptation, and the specificity of the local (a phrase that I believe I have stolen from Seamus Heaney’s nobel lecture). It falls squarely into the concerns I hoped to address when I proposed the panel, but it also touches on issues of accessibility that I think are too rarely discussed in literary circles. Park’s essay is not about disability, but the disabling nature of copyright. I want to push his questions to disability, regardless of whether he wants to go there. 

I think we might find these same concerns raised in debates about sign language and the potential for cultural erasure in body modification (Drury University has a quick, if somewhat dated summary here). I have previously reblogged two striking posts by others about braille as part of my own ongoing reflections about what accessibility means in the worlds I inhabit as a writer, academic, and teacher, and I hope to recruit a few presenters for our panel who might consider how translation interacts with ongoing debates about accessibility. If this is your field and you’d like to participate, you can submit here anytime before Nov. 15th.  

——

Parks, Tim. “My Novel, Their Culture.” Nybooks.com. The New York Review of Books blog. 3 Oct. 2012. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. 

Reblogged from explore-blog: [photo: a braille rubik’s cube]  One of my colleagues has been blogging a bit lately about accessibility, and this post by Explore resonated as I’ve been thinking a great deal about how frequently we assume some conditions (visual impairment for example) to be widely prohibitive, when access is simply a matter of thoughtful innovation.  On GOBA I was surprised to see the extent to which I had assumed cycling to be prohibitive to a range of disabilities. I was, of course, wrong. One of our riders was blind and rode partnered with another rider on a tandem bicycle. Several riders engaged protheses, some reworked their bicycles to drive them with alternate limbs, some used mirrors to accommodate hearing impairments.  I was humbled to see myself feel surprised at the innovation with which cyclists participated in the ride. It left me with a clear sense of how much we assume disability means access simply isn’t an option. I place a great deal of value on awareness and accessibility; that alone, however, doesn’t make me “aware.” Awareness isn’t simply a value, it is a habit of mind, and one I suspect we all struggle to develop.  How do we develop habits of mind that are disability aware and that work with the assumption that access is always our goal? How do we translate that to the classroom? We have policies in place for this, yes, and programs like Disability Services, but these can’t be sufficient. Faculty and staff need training in awareness and in creative thinking; no one will develop these on their own. I’m inclined to say that Disability Services should not be a location to which we simply send our students with disabilities and assume that is the extent of our responsibility. Rather, it should be like the writing center or the CTE—a program that offers constant interaction, training, and resources to everyone in need (i.e. everyone).
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Reblogged from explore-blog: [photo: a braille rubik’s cube] 

One of my colleagues has been blogging a bit lately about accessibility, and this post by Explore resonated as I’ve been thinking a great deal about how frequently we assume some conditions (visual impairment for example) to be widely prohibitive, when access is simply a matter of thoughtful innovation. 

On GOBA I was surprised to see the extent to which I had assumed cycling to be prohibitive to a range of disabilities. I was, of course, wrong. One of our riders was blind and rode partnered with another rider on a tandem bicycle. Several riders engaged protheses, some reworked their bicycles to drive them with alternate limbs, some used mirrors to accommodate hearing impairments. 

I was humbled to see myself feel surprised at the innovation with which cyclists participated in the ride. It left me with a clear sense of how much we assume disability means access simply isn’t an option. I place a great deal of value on awareness and accessibility; that alone, however, doesn’t make me “aware.” Awareness isn’t simply a value, it is a habit of mind, and one I suspect we all struggle to develop. 

How do we develop habits of mind that are disability aware and that work with the assumption that access is always our goal? How do we translate that to the classroom? We have policies in place for this, yes, and programs like Disability Services, but these can’t be sufficient. Faculty and staff need training in awareness and in creative thinking; no one will develop these on their own.

I’m inclined to say that Disability Services should not be a location to which we simply send our students with disabilities and assume that is the extent of our responsibility. Rather, it should be like the writing center or the CTE—a program that offers constant interaction, training, and resources to everyone in need (i.e. everyone).