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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoThreepenny: Sacks, On Libraries2018-04-22T18:21:49+00:00
https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/sacks_f14.html
robertogrecolibraries oliversacks 2013 learning howwelearn education roaming books unschooling deschooling informallearning identity informalhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2d3b4a3f0863/avoiding the high-brow freak show | sara hendren2017-07-20T19:40:56+00:00
http://sarahendren.com/2017/07/20/avoiding-the-high-brow-freak-show/
robertogreco“A story needs a conclusion whereas a case-history may not have one. In fact, stories have all kinds of needs that a case-history will not supply, and Sacks is insistent that he is writing the stories of his patients, not their cases. This is not intended to fudge fact and fiction, but to enlarge patients into people.
On the other hand, he is describing people with more or less devastating illnesses— that is his raison d’être—and his explicit purpose is to generalize from these, usually unhappy, accidents of life and nature, to a greater understanding of the human condition. In Awakenings he states: ‘If we seek a “curt epitome” of the human condition—of long-standing sickness, suffering and sadness; of a sudden, complete, almost preternatural “awakening”; and, alas! of entanglements which may follow this “cure”—there is no better one than the story of these patients.’
He is offering life, death and the whole damn thing in the metaphor of his patients. And it is true that these patients and others show us what it is like, as he says, ‘to be human and stay human in the face of adversity’. But metaphors are not in fact descriptions of people in their totality. They are intentional, and consciously or unconsciously edited tropes, not complete, contained narratives.
I don’t know any kind of narrative, fictional or otherwise, that can present people in their totality, so perhaps it doesn’t matter, but Sacks is offering us people because of their sickness and the manner of their handling it. This is hardly an overturning of the medicalizing tendency of doctors. And when we read these stories, as we do, to tell us more about ourselves, we read them as exaggerations of what we are, as metaphors for what we are capable of. Their subjects may not be patients as freaks, but they are patients as emblems. They are, as it were, for our use and our wonderment. Around their illness, the thoughts of Leibniz, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Proust are hoisted like scaffolding, as if to stiffen their reality into meaning.”
Stiffening their reality into meaning! It’s a cutting and exact criticism, especially when it seems that Sacks was utterly sincere in his search for human and humane connection—with these patients as clinical subjects and in his engagement with readers.
Diski hints at the pushback Sacks got from scholars in disability studies, too; scholar Tom Shakespeare took a swipe at him as “the man who mistook his patients for a career,” calling his body of work a “high-brow freak show.” And when I re-read Sacks’s New Yorker essay, excerpted from the Anthropologist book, on autistic self-advocate Temple Grandin, I see a little bit what Shakespeare meant. There is something of the microscope being employed in that encounter, and somehow we walk away fascinated but maybe less than conjoined to Grandin’s experience. It’s rich with connection and with pathos (in a good way!), but there’s distance in it too. So—it’s not perfect.
And yet: people read and loved that book, saw themselves in it. And Grandin went on to write several books in her own voice, to have a wide audience for her work and wisdom. The visibility of autistic self-advocacy has been greatly amplified since Sacks’s writing about it. (And yet—also—Diski says that Sacks has a way of making meaning out of disability that’s essentially a wonder at the human body via its ailments, as in “My God, we are extraordinary, look how interestingly wrong we can go.”) Is there a way to affirm the extraordinary without ending at: there but for the grace of god…? Without ending with gratitude that we don’t share someone’s plight? I want readers to come away uncertain: about where there’s joy and where there’s pain, about how they might make different choices, ordinary and extraordinary choices, if handed a different set of capacities in themselves or in their loved ones.
But can a writer really calibrate that level of nuance? Lately I’m thinking that I can only write what I can write, knowing that it will be incomplete and partial in its rendering.
I want a world full of disabled voices, people telling their stories in their own ways, with their own voices intact. But I also want a world of people to read about the collective stakes inherent in disability—and not just the rights issues that are being ignored, urgent as they are. I want people to see that spending time thinking about disability is an invitation to see the world differently, and to locate one’s own experiences differently. Not to erase the particularity of any one person’s very material experiences, but to help remedy the invisibility of disabled experience outside the inner circle of people who talk to one another, who know that these issues are important. And some audiences will need some interpretation, some cognitive-linguistic bridges to understand the import of disability—its wonder, its overlooked importance, and yes, even its lessons, if we may call them such. Lessons without moralizing, lessons without abstractions.
*Yes, “disabled people,” not “differently abled” or even always “people with disabilities.” There’s no one right answer or moniker, but soon I’ll write a short piece on why “disabled people” is a preferred term among many activists."
[See also this response from Alan Jacobs: http://blog.ayjay.org/writing-by-the-always-wrong/ ]]]>sarahendren oliversacks disability 2017 diversity morality moralizing difference humanism individualism interdependence variation jennydiski conclusions case-histories sickness sadness suffering life death storytelling narrative tomshakespeare templegrandin pathos correction autism self-advocacy meaning meaningmaking uncertainty joy pain grace writing howewrite voice invisibility visibility erasure experience alanjacobs disabilitieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:321f2bad2fe3/Scratching the Surface — 24. Sara Hendren2017-04-23T03:05:43+00:00
http://scratchingthesurface.fm/post/159741582440/24-sara-hendren
robertogrecosarahendren jarrettfuller design 2017 interviews johndewey wendyjacob nataliejeremijenko remkoolhaas timmaly clairepentecost alexandralange alissawalker michaelrock alfredojaar oliversacks bldgblog geoffmanaugh nicolatwilley amateurs amateurism dabbling art artists generalists creativegeneralists disability engineering criticaltheory integatededucation integratedcurriculum identity self teaching learning howweteach howwelearn assistivetechnology technology olincollege humanities liberalarts disabilities scratchingthesurfacehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:002a00de6d14/Notes on Blindness is one of the most eye-opening documentaries you'll see all year - review2016-07-01T23:13:43+00:00
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/06/30/notes-on-blindness-is-one-of-the-most-eye-opening-documentaries/
robertogrecoblindness sight film documentary 2016 jamesspinney petermiddleton johnhull oliversacks landscape audio sound via:subtopeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b71f6f704931/Oliver Sacks: Sabbath - The New York Times2015-08-30T20:50:11+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/oliver-sacks-sabbath.html
robertogreco2015 oliversacks sabbath religion work rest life traditionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3ecd521c5e23/Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer - NYTimes.com2015-02-19T21:14:45+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html
robertogrecocancer death life neuroscience living oliversacks 2015 legacy individuality davidhume health dying mortality audacity clarity goodbyes perspective humanism privilege adventure consciousnesshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b13de102d560/Open Ed 12 - Gardner Campbell Keynote - Ecologies of Yearning - YouTube2014-05-13T01:25:58+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIzA4ItynYw
robertogreco2012 gardnercampbell nassimtaleb academia web participatory learning howwelearn hierarchyoflearning love habituation adaption open openeducation coursera gregorybateson udacity sebastianthrun mooc moocs georgesiemens stephendownes davecormier carolyeager aleccouros jimgroom audreywatters edupunk jalfredprufrock missingthepoint highered edx highereducation tseliot rubrics control assessment quantification canon administration hierarchy hierarchies pedagogy philosophy doublebind paranoia hepephrenia catatonia mentalhealth schizophrenia life grades grading seymourpapert ecologiesofyearning systems systemsthinking suppression context education conditioning pavlov gamification freedom liberation alankay human humans humanism agency moreofthesame metacontexts unfinished ongoing lifelonglearning cognition communication networkedtranscontextualism transcontextualism transcontextualsyndromes apgartest virginiaapgar howweteach scottmccloud michaelchorost georgedyson opening openness orpheus experience consciousness purhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ecf07b87f162/The Old Ones | The American Conservative2013-07-09T23:00:11+00:00
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobs/the-old-ones/
robertogrecoalanjacobs 2013 oliversacks aging age old new nothingnewunderthesun neoteny ideas readiness impacthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4e579c984eee/“Sometimes the stories are the science…” – Blog – BERG2011-11-23T03:24:12+00:00
http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/11/21/sometimes-the-stories-are-the-science%e2%80%a6/
robertogrecooliversacks learning deschooling unschooling education berg berglondon mattjones timoarnall storytelling design understanding newgrammars conversation meaning meaningmaking glvo tcsnmy classideas art paulklee domains interdisciplinarity interdisciplinary crossdisciplinary multidisciplinary crosspollination perspective mindset wbrianarthur jackschulze mattwebb technology future dansaffer rulespace simulation believability materialquality film video invention creativity time adamlisagor brucesterling vernacularvideo victorpapanek jasonkottke andybaio johnsculley apple stevejobs knowledgenavigator prototypes prototyping iteration process howwework howwelearn communication simulationshttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:375a7d45e33b/Don’t leave learning to the young. Older brains can grow, too. - NYTimes.com2011-02-21T19:29:05+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/01/opinion/01sacks.html?pagewanted=all
robertogrecobrain neuroscience plasticity oliversacks learning openminded curiosity adaptability flexibility challenge growth 2011https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:43715b19992d/Angela Ritchie's Ace Camps - Why We Travel - Pico Iyer2010-08-24T09:07:23+00:00
http://www.ritchieacecamps.com/why-we-travel-pico-iyer/
robertogrecopicoiyer travel learning identity glvo self knowledge tcsnmy ignorance slow time love santayana thoreau ralphwaldoemerson wakefulness awareness noticing observation familiarity transformationcompassion empathy work life freedom proust language camus fear disruption odyssey grahamgreene dhlawrence vsnaipaul brucechatwin samuelbutler paultheroux oliversacks petermatthiessen marcelproust albertcamus theodysseyhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9a9283d5e6cf/WNYC - Radiolab: Memory and Forgetting (June 08, 2007)2010-07-19T06:00:31+00:00
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/08
robertogrecomemory radiolab forgetting neuroscience music brain culture psychology science oliversacks stevenjohnson jonahlehrer joeledoux karimnader andrecodrescu elizabethloftus joeandoe deborahwearing clivewearinghttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ea4d521578f7/WNYC - Radiolab » Strangers in the Mirror [Bonus: Close talks about academic failure, Robert Rauschenberg, dyslexia, and empathy.]2010-07-18T20:24:39+00:00
http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2010/06/15/strangers-in-the-mirror/
robertogrecopsychology perception neuroscience prosopagnosia faceblindness empathy dyslexia robertrauschenberg education vision radiolab faces chuckclose oliversacks art painting science interviewshttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4881f665c740/Seed: The Listener2007-11-04T12:40:05+00:00
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/10/the_listener.php
robertogrecooliversacks neuroscience music mind brainhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:81f69ee909c2/WNYC - Radio Lab: Clive (June 08, 2007)2007-09-27T02:49:25+00:00
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/08/segments/71874
robertogrecooliversacks music brain neuroscience science psychology memory radiolabhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f7f14348be07/Audio: Music and the Mind: Online Only: The New Yorker2007-09-27T02:48:48+00:00
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/07/23/070723on_audio_sacks
robertogrecosound music memory radio audio oliversacks psychologyhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a9e0fe293d4c/A Neurologist’s Notebook: The Abyss: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker2007-09-27T02:47:59+00:00
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_sacks
robertogrecooliversacks neuroscience psychology music memory science healthhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5a00707e003c/Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain2007-09-26T06:04:30+00:00
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/15-10/ff_musicophilia
robertogrecobrain music books interviews oliversacks memory psychologyhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:397a07f11e6e/