[accessibleimage] diarist, talking crosswalk, birdsongs, Mehta, School for the Blind and Visually Impaired
- From: Lisa Yayla <fnugg@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: art_beyond_sight_learning_tools@xxxxxxxxxx, art_beyond_sight_advocacy@xxxxxxxxxx, artbeyondsightmuseums@xxxxxxxxxx, art_beyond_sight_learning_tools@xxxxxxxxxx, accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 06:42:38 +0100
Hi,
Sending links to articles, two about exhibits where in one a
tactile exhibit is mentioned and in another a information
design exhibition, mention about Japanese subway information
for the blind. And keeping on the subject of wayfaring
information, an article from New York and talking crosswalk
signals. An article from South Dakota from School for the
Blind and Visually Impaired and a book review from Time
about Ved Mehta's, a staff writer at The New Yorker, book. I
am not familiar with his work and it is off subject, but
thought it might be of interest to some.
Regards and best,
Lisa
exhibit about diarist William Johnson which includes a
tactile exhibit for the blind.
http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/articles/2005/02/06/news/news79.txt
Visual artist comes to School for the Blind and Visually
Impaired
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/10844958.htm
Article about Ved Mehta's book
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501050214-1025212,00.html
'TALKING' CROSSWALK SIGNALS TO HELP BLIND
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/39560.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/02/07/bamap05.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/02/07/ixartleft.html
Design Museum
Where am I? What's happening?
"When you walk into the exhibition, the first information
you will consume will be aural," says James Peto, the show's
curator. "It's birdsong used by the Japanese underground to
guide blind commuters to the station
exits."
Posted on Tue, Feb. 08, 2005
Visual artist comes to School for the Blind and Visually
Impaired
From staff reports
South Dakota Arts Council visual artist Nancy
Losacker, formerly of Aberdeen, is working withstudents this
week at the South Dakota Schoolfor the Blind and Visually
Impaired.
She is working with students from kindergarten through the
12th grade. Her residency began Monday and runs through
Friday.
Losacker will help students create three-dimensional art
forms using clay. Her residency is part of the South Dakota
Arts Council's Artist in the Schools and Communities
Program.
Losacker, who lives in Vermillion, is a 2000 recipient of
the South Dakota Artist's grant and has exhibited
extensively, including a 2003 solo show at the Allison
Gallery in Greenville, Tenn. Shealso exhibited at the South
Dakota Art Museum in Brookings during its re-opening show.
Her residency is sponsored by the South Dakota School for
the Blind and Visually Impaired, with support provided by
the South Dakota Arts Council. Funds are provided by the
state of South
Dakota through the Department of Tourism and State
Development, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
'TALKING' CROSSWALK SIGNALS TO HELP BLIND
By HEIDI SINGER
February 7, 2005 -- Crossing Park Avenue will becomesafer
for blind people starting tomorrow, when three
state-of-the-art voice signals will be unveiled at two
Midtown intersections.
At the same time, a bill is being prepared in the City
Council to expand the pilot
program to 10 new intersections ? and advocates hope most of
the city's
12,000-odd traffic-light intersections will sport
the talking traffic signals some day.
"This is monumental," said Lenny Goldstein,
a blind New Yorker who works for
Lighthouse International, a charity for the
blind that supports the new signals. "I
[tried] it today, and I was
super-impressed."
Three signals will be unveiled tomorrow, two
at 59th Street and Park Avenue and
one at 59th and Lexington Avenue. The East
Midtown Association is sponsoring
the $20,000 project.
Lighthouse officials have been pushing for
voice signals for more than a decade. In
1999, a similar pilot program failed because
it required blind people to carry
transmitters to activate the device,
Goldstein said.
Under the new system, the device will give
off a vibrating noise that will allow blind
pedestrians to locate a button on a pole
that will activate the voice signal.
Then a male voice announces "the wait sign
is on" or "the cross sign is on."
Most
of the several hundred
thousand blind New Yorkers
use
canes rather than guide
dogs,
and those people are
often
afraid to walk city
streets without help,
Goldstein said.
The
model being used on 59th Street boasts two dozen
options such as countdowns and broadcasts in several
languages, said its manufacturer, Chris Pagniello of Traffic
A Return to Exile
In the final book of his epic memoir series, Ved Mehta
reveals more about his family life?but less of himself
BY ARAVIND ADIGA
Monday, Feb. 07, 2005
In 1996, an obscure,
retired New York
schoolteacher named
Frank McCourt
published Angela's
Ashes, the story of his
childhood in Ireland.
The book became a
best seller, won a
Pulitzer, was turned into a
movie?and
revolutionized the status of the
memoir. Until then,
the privilege of telling
one's life story to a
paying public had been
the preserve of
celebrities, but after
Angela's Ashes, the
memoir was thrown
open to anyone, however young or unimportant.
The point was no longer to
pack a book with facts about your life
(studied here, married there) but to
produce a narrative, preferably of the
gut-wrenching variety (dropped out
here, cheated on her there) with which the
reader could connect. The literary
sensation of 2000 was another memoir by an
unknown?this time, an
American journalist named Dave Eggers, who hit
it big with a recap of his
harrowing childhood called A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius.
All at once, memoir writing became one of
those things everybody was doing:
celebrities such as Bill Clinton were writing
memoirs to show they were just
ordinary people, and ordinary people like
McCourt and Eggers were writing
memoirs and becoming celebrities.
Despite the recent swarm of pretenders,
however, the heavyweight champion
of memoir writing is still Indian-born Ved
Mehta. Back in 1972, long before
memoirs became hip, the 38-year-old Mehta, who
had already authored an
autobiography in his 20s, got down to
composing his memoirs in earnest.
Thirty-two years and 11 books later, he has
just ended his tale.
The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period,
the last book in Mehta's
memoir cycle?collectively called Continents of
Exile?concludes the most
comprehensive autobiography of the past
quarter-century. His topics range
from going blind at the age of four to his
childhood in Lahore, an education at
Oxford, working for the New Yorker, love
affairs in India and America, and
the trials of house building in Maine. The
unifying theme is loss, and the
recovery, in unexpected places, of part of
what has been lost. Going from his
blindness, Mehta adds other privations, such
as his bad luck with lovers, to
turn his life's story into an epic. Because
its author has had a head start on
other memoirists, Continents of Exile, now
that it's done, gives us an advance
preview of how far the memoir is likely to
succeed in its quest for upward
mobility.
Mehta's life certainly has the raw material
for a
great novel: a stark mix of cruelty and grace
and the sharp demarcation of light and
darkness common to fairy tales. As a boy he
is struck blind by meningitis; when he is 13,
his
country is divided and his family, finding
itself
in Pakistan, is forced to leave Lahore for
India
and to start over again. A special program for
blind children sends him to America; there, a
wealthy woman becomes his patron and
sponsors his studies. Mehta's calm, unhurried
prose captures the fable-like events of his
life.
His effortless description of how good and
evil
things just happen to him and how he manages
to cope as best as he can is the principal
charm of his memoirs. In All for Love, about
his love affairs, women walk into his life,
announce that they love him; then they
announce that they don't anymore and leave.
In Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker:
The Invisible Art of Editing, he is a young
man
with no job and on the verge of leaving New
York when a friend suggests that he call the
New Yorker on the off-chance it might be
interested in publishing one of his stories.
Mehta calls. The man who picks up the phone
is legendary editor William Shawn, and a
little
while later, Mehta finds himself as a staff
writer at the world's most famous literary
magazine.
In The Red Letters, the fairy tale takes a
turn
into darkness. The principal character of this
last book is not Mehta himself but his
father?fittingly, since the memoir cycle began
with Daddyji, a portrait of the elder Mehta.
The Red Letters gets going when father and
son write a story together. To Mehta's
surprise, it becomes one of extramarital
infidelity. Eventually it is revealed that the
story is an account of an affair that
his father had, years ago. He learns of the
letters that his father exchanged with
his lover. He understands what his father's
affair did to his mother; he explores
how his mother's anxieties influenced him as
he was growing up. The
estrangement from his past that spurred the
writing of the memoirs has, to
some extent, been assuaged. Ved Mehta has made
sense of himself.
But have his readers made sense of Ved
Mehta?and, in doing so, learned
something about themselves? In The Red
Letters, as in much of Continents of
Exile, Mehta's prose is so polished that
readers skate smoothly upon
it?without ever breaking the surface, falling
in, and getting lost in his life.
What's missing from these memoirs, oddly
enough, is evidence of the traits that
define him. As a journalist for the New
Yorker, Mehta refused to be limited by
his blindness; he traveled on assignments with
guides who described how
things and people looked, and he insisted on
going everywhere and "seeing"
everything. He wrote essays and books on
Oxford philosophy, German
theology, Gandhi's fight with his sexuality,
the life of the writer R.K. Narayan,
and Indira Gandhi's political fall and
resurrection. His masterpiece is a long
essay on Calcutta called "The City of Dreadful
Night"?a jarring, clangorous,
minor-key symphony, alive with the bustle and
despair of the city, which ends
with Mehta's quietly following Mother Teresa
as she walks through a lepers'
colony. At their best, his articles and essays
throb with unforgettable
details?how the English philosopher Bertrand
Russell spoke with exaggerated
e's, how Gandhi was extremely eager to know
more about Sigmund
Freud?that leave the reader with a vivid sense
of Mehta's personality, and
with his gifts of curiosity, sympathy and
intellect. Above all, it is his essays, not
his memoirs, that testify to the tenacity and
talent that allowed this blind man
from an impoverished country to sidestep his
bad luck, take full advantage of
his good luck, and turn himself into one of
the world's best-known journalists
of the 1960s and '70s.
Many books in Continents of Exile deal with
Mehta's struggles, whether with
parents or lovers. Yet the difficulties seem
to be overcome too smugly; the
books too often end with a complacent cadence
that seems to say: "Thus I
prevailed over this hardship too. Thus I
grew." Perhaps this will always be one
of the shortcomings of the memoir: that it
takes a superhuman effort on the part
of the writer to distance himself from these
stories that are, after all, his own
life. Continents of Exile, now that is
completed, will probably induce other
memoir writers to undertake works of
corresponding scale and ambition. But
it should also serve as a cautionary example:
a man who has just finished 11
books about his life reveals more of himself
when describing how Mother
Teresa walked among the lepers.
From the Feb. 14, 2005 issue of TIME Asia
Magazine
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