Transcripts of Lennard Davis

So, can you, one of the things that we like to start, people off with is talking about any stories you might have of how you learned to read and write when you were young, the first experiences that you had. Well my first experience with language was speaking American Sign Language, and my parents were both deaf. And my first word when I was 6 months old, was "milk." And so I grew up in this house where my parents spoke. Because they did what was called total communication, so they signed and then they also spoke. And my brother was 10 years older than me and he had learned to speak and write by that point. In terms of, I came from a working class family, we didn't have that many books in the house and so I had a few kids books, but I only remember a couple of them. And what I would do is whenever any guest came I would make them read to me. And I had one book that was about a little lamb, and you could feel it's fur. Fleece. And it was ok but looking back on it, it was obviously a racialized message which was that there was, the lamb was black. And all the white lambs didn't like him. And then one day he fell into some paint and he became white and they all liked him. But then when it rained the paint came off but they still liked him at that point. So it was a story kind of about, about that color didn't matter. But I loved that story. My mother used to read to me, I don't know my father didn't really... My mother read to me, and she would mispronounce a lot of the words because she was deaf and she had learned to pronounce it. And there was one story about a raccoon. And there was a hunter who was after him, sort of like a roadrunner thing. Wiley Coyote, Roadrunner. Let me just turn this off so it doesn't do anything. And he was a French-Canadian hunter, he had a raccoon hat, and his name was Pierre, but my mother used to call him "Pirey." Told me a story about "Pirey did this and Pirey did that." And that was actually another issue because my mother, she became deaf when she was 7, and she had like a little bit of a Liverpudlian accent, she was from Liverpool, from 1911, and so I learned, I spoke with her accent as a kid. I would say "Tomahto and Banahna" and then particularly the Liverpool accent I ended up saying "Coo-kie" for cookie and "Poonch" for punch. And then on top of that I had all of her mispronunciation of words. So she used to say "Turn off the electric city!" Because it had like, electric, city, you know? And she would always say that she was "Emberressed, to be embarrassed." So I had all of these it took me a little while to figure out how language in my house was different was different from language out in the world. So where did you figure that out? Well I think just playing with kids, going to school, I learned to read in school, I didn't read before. I was interested in books, but my parents never tried to teach me to read. It wasn't a thing you did, you waited til you went to school. Then as soon as I could read I just took off and I loved reading. And I had a special, I had a teacher, the principal of my school. Who I can say his name, his name was Sydney Levy, Sydney Nathan Levy. And he took an interest in me because my parents were deaf I think, and he spotted me as a smart kid. And he first called me into his office and everyone was like "Ooh, why is the principal calling you in?" And I was probably in, 2nd grade maybe 3rd grade. And he called me in and he said, you know, "I know your parents are deaf, what are you interested in?" And I was very interested in science, and he said "Well here" And he gave me books on science, and then he said "I can't unless you come to my office, I really can't show you favoritism. But I have a little sting, I'll go like this to you and you can go like that to me. And when we walk down the hallway you know, if I see you, you can go like that, and I'll go like that, and no one will know." And so whenever I would see him in the hallway like that I would go like that. And it definitely made me feel like a little special. And I would go see him every once in a while and he would give me more books. And he actually knew that I was very interested in astronomy, so he gave me... One day this other man came, and the other man was from, I don't know, I don't know who he was. But I said I was dying to have a telescope. So he gave me lenses and told me how I could make a telescope out of cardboard tubes. Which I did, and it was great. So that got me interested, you know it pulled me in, to learning. In a certain kind of way. What about when you began to write, think of yourself as a writer in school? Did you, did the challenges of learning about the differences between home language and language at school have an affect on the experience of learning to write as well, I don't really remember there being a problem once I had learned to write because a lot of it was pronunciation, it wasn't really words. And my father was, considered himself a writer. And he wrote a column for the national deaf magazine, which at the time was called "The Silent Worker." But they changed it during the McCarthy era to "The Deaf American." Instead of worker. And he had a column for New York, and he would always... It was a joke among, because my father would always use the phrase "A wonderful time was had by all" He would describe so and so visited so and so, and "A wonderful time was had by all." So I learned not to use that phrase But he also wrote plays, and he was participating in a deaf club, in putting on amateur theatricals, and he was the president at one point. My mother was a president of the sisterhood. So they used language very well. And actually years later I published their love letters, because they were separated for two years and they wrote to each other. And the letters were, I mean neither of them had more than a 6th grade education. They were trained at the Lyndon School for the Deaf and Dumb is what it was called at the time. But the letters are really, really well written. And my mother's especially was very well written. And I had always thought my mother was kind of illiterate, that my father was the writer. But when you read the letters, my mother's letters are better than his. In some ways. If there's, if we can also put artifacts in this story. So if you think of it when you go home if it's possible, if you could scan a letter from each of them, and we'll put it in there so people can see what you're talking about. And can you also talk about like, so when you I'm fascinated by... Ok, you learned these pronunciations at home, you go to school, the kids must have made fun of you, the teacher must have said "That's not the way you pronounce it." No, I caught on really fast (Laughing.) So did you code-switch? I definitely code-switched. And in fact I code-switched so much, but it's not in the way you're thinking of. It's not exactly like going from Spanish or English or something. But when I would sign to my parents, I would also speak. And I, until I met my wife, and I was in my late 20s, I didn't realize that when I spoke, I spoke in their deaf voice. And I spoke with a British, deaf voice. What did it sound like? You want me to do it? Yeah, can you? It's a little hard for me to go there right now, but you know, I would say "I can't do that" And it was like I didn't even know that I was switching in that way. What made you aware of it? My wife. She said, "You know, when you talk to your parents, it's really strange, you do this thing..." And the other thing I would do is very visibly make my Ls, so my tongue would come out, you don't want me to do that. And you know, so there was like little things, my brother's wife noticed it about him. So otherwise it was... Because when you were home talking to your parents you, there was no one else observing, so I was just completely unaware of that. But I mean I know I made mistakes because my vocabulary was somewhat limited. I remember my teacher in 2nd or 3rd grade asking the class what a pedestrian was, what the meaning of pedestrian. And I said "street-walker" And she was laughing hysterically all the other, the class said "Say it again." And immediately, because I was smart, I immediately figured, "Wait, what's this?" So I went and found out, but, you know, I think the thing for me is that I because I was in this sort of a special relationship with language, and it was also my job as a kid to be the interface between their world and the hearing world. So I had to be I'm a CODA, a child of deaf adults, and many CODAs are very articulate and are very aware of language. And so it was very, I was just kind of fascinated by language, and like I said as soon as I started to read, I read through all the books that we had in our house, which didn't take very long. And so, and then I just went to, as soon as I discovered the library. We didn't have much money, we were poor, but I could go to the library, and that was just... Take out all the books and read them as fast as I could. I had no guidance on anything. So like I remember I was a kid, I saw this book called "Greased Lightning" and I was so excited because I was interested in science and I thought "Wow, you can grease lightning." So I took the book out but it was a story about a little pig, whose name was greased lighting. But I just sort of randomly go through books in the library and try to... And the librarians weren't very helpful. You're just a kid you walk in there and you like, look at one, take it out. So it all felt like it kind of belonged to me. I didn't feel like anyone else owned it. I know my kids, I've written books, I think their sense of language is a little bit more complicated, for me it was just like "Wow, this is this great thing that I can do." And I started writing stories right away, and I wrote poems. I remember when I was in High School, I wrote a poem that I thought was really good. It was called "Sonnet from Youth to Age" And it was kind of about me and my father. My father was 52 when I was born. So he was quite a bit older at that point. And I wrote and I thought "This is really good." And I sent it to the New Yorker. I was like in, I was like in my Junior year in High School. Do you have that one? That poem? Yeah. I don't think so. If you have any of your poems or your earlier work... I might, I might, but you know it's going to require a serious archival work (laughter). Hillary Shoot, who was here, she sent us an early multimodal book that she did. And so we have that. I probably could find a poem somewhere. Anything that you have, that you might help to illustrate. But they sent me a nice letter back But, so, and then when I went to college, we threw the High School.... I want to talk you back one minute, one of the things I'm fascinated by. You said your parents weren't big readers, but your dad wrote this column, right, for the deaf newspaper. I mean so there was a lot of writing going on, so he must have read. He was more writing than reading. He was a person who was on transmit more than he was on receive. You know, and he was very narcissistic, so the acting was all part of getting attention. Can I ask before we go on to the college years, about, because then the whole set of interviews with deaf and hard of hearing people, we also often ask them to articulate if they have a relationship to sign language, and how that fit in the literacy picture. Because I think there's a literacy itself in the learning of sign language, that, can you tell us about that? My experience with sign language? You know, being literate in sign language. You know it was my first language, it was complicated for me because my parents were British, came to the US So their signs were a mixture. And they were, in some sense, second language users. So my signs are mixed, and even now they're old, because they don't have that much contact with the deaf community now. And I mean sign language for me was very primal language and very expressive. That's a cliche about it, but in some ways it was, the words that you learned first, the feelings you had first. So the sign, my sign for milk is this, which is different from the American sign, which is this. But for me, milk it makes, it feels more milky, and I can see myself in the crib, with my hands out going like this. You know, use a word like cry, it's all this sort of primitive things. I didn't know words for disability studies, or categorical imperative or something. So the words were all very elemental, very primal, very you know... Did you have any opportunities to sign with people who were native ASL speakers? Yeah all the time. So did you notice that same difference between the home signing and... No, I mean, it's hard to say because... First of all, in that era, in the world that I was in, sign language did not feel like a language. It just felt like a way of saying something. It's a little hard to explain, it took a long time for sign language to be accepted as a language. And I think if you asked my parents, they would say it was just gestures. So I wasn't, it doesn't carry the freight, you know, of "Oh, ASL, oh..." Just that's how you did it there, that's how you got around, any means necessary. If you were hungry you made it clear. You wanted to call somebody you did it in whatever way would get their attention. So it didn't really have like a defined boundary as, "Oh this is all ASL, that's British Sign Language, this is..." I knew it wasn't hearing, but we spoke at the same time. So it all seemed to merge together. Just communication. I was just going to ask, do you ever find yourself signing? Oh yeah, absolutely. Sometimes I sign to myself. Sometimes I'll walk along the streets, like I'll say something in sign language to myself. When do you do that, I mean, why would you sign to yourself? Are there any particular circumstances, or just you feel like talking to yourself that way? I wish I could be more articulate about that, it's just, it'll just strike you as a moment for sign. Like I just did that to you before. There are signs that there aren't translations for. And this is one of them. And it's when a deaf person says "yes" when they don't really understand you. So, and Brenda was doing that to me. (Laughter). But that would be something I would do, because there's no word for it in English. I know that sometimes when I sign to myself, I think it's very, just about a physical remembering. Because when you're just running the thoughts through your head, they might at least at my age, they might be gone again in another 5 minutes. So I find myself like finger spelling things, like lists if I want to remember. I'm very dyslexic on numbers. So it's very hard for me to remember the numbers to dial. So sometimes I know that if I say the numbers in my hand, I'll remember it much better. 674... I remember 674 rather than 674 is different. That's really cool. It's like a pneumonic. I didn't realize that people signed to themselves. Well because you know it's hard to say, it's more wired into your nervous system in a way. Like 674 could be 476, but 674 could only be that, do you know what I mean? Cool, that's very cool. Well let's, can we go on a little bit to the college years? So as your reading and your writing, what happens to you in college? Well I can say it would be, maybe it would be my high school years. I went to, I always went to, I went to New York City Public Schools. And they were very key teachers who were very influential for me, they were all English teachers, and it was that thing of getting caught up in reading. And then these old men were very inspiring to me, and they were like the older brother, but like something between a parent and an older brother. And they seemed cool, and they had all kinds of interesting things to say about this, and they recognized in me a willing student. And a good one. You know, and so I had a Junior High School English teacher named Peter Polackis, who had us read all these sci-fi books "Brave New World" And that was a great unit, and I really was fascinated by that. And then in Junior in High School, I had a teacher named Ronald Greenhouse. And in his class I decided that I was going to read. Back to the library, we moved and I had a different library. And I don't know why but I came across James Joyce, in the library. And I thought "Ok", and I took "The Dubliners" out and that was, and I took out "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Which was somewhat easier to read. And then I decided I was going to read Ulysses. And I plowed my way through it in maybe my Senior Year. And was completely confused. And I kept going to my teacher Ronald Greenhouse, and saying "What does this mean? What does that mean?" And this was in the 60s, right. So there was one reference to LSD. And I thought, wow, how could, what could that be, LSD? And were people taking LSD then? So I went to Greenhouse and I said, "What is LSD?" And he said "Let me look it up" And he came back in a couple days and he said "L stands for Leopold Bloom, SD is Steven Daedelous." And I went home and I don't know why but I asked my father, and he said "It's Pounds, Shillings, and Cents" Which is what it was. So my father was right, and Greenhouse was wrong. So, and then I, I guess I started writing short stories, and I went to a summer camp that was, it was a house camp from the Bronx. That was in the Berkshires just for the three weeks in the summer. And there was a group of people, and we all started writing stories and trying to outdo each other. And you know, reading each other's stories, and... I sort of got myself into feeling like I was a part, like a short story writer, poet, at that age. And then I was lucky enough to go to Colombia University. And I was sent, I mean I had a full scholarship from my mothers union, my father's union, from the New York State Regents scholarship. And all I had to do was work for my food. So that was where everything really took off, because, you know, Colombia has this course on, that's the great books course. And my eyes just completely opened and you know, reading, you read through all the great philosophers. Of course they were all men at the time. And you know, and then you read, and one is the Humanities course and the other is contemporary civilization. And I had no... There were a lot of kids coming from prep schools and private schools and they had read the thing in Greek or whatever. It was just all new to me, and it was just incredible, amazing to go through all that material. And hungry and interested in and skeptical, you know, I mean... And I kept thinking, "What do I have, why do these kids who have read it in Greek and Latin and read the Iliad, the Odyssey, everything beforehand...?" But I just felt like I had a certain kind of street smarts, and that would carry me through. And a little bit of my own interpretation of things. And so that was important. And also I remember reading Marx for the first time. And I had come from a working class family, but I had no analysis. And my parents were very good working class people in the sense that they completely bought the whole working class subservience. Although my grandfather was an Anarchist, and my father was a wobbly, even for a short time. By the time I was growing up he was, you know, voted for Nixon. But there was no analysis, and suddenly reading this and understanding "Wow, we're not just poor because we're incapable. There's a system, an explanation." That was very very empowering for me. In the same way that disability studies was much later on. But it was sort of like because there's an objection to being working class, and there's an objection in being in a disabled family. And sort of the idea that it isn't just that there's this huge massive failure in your family and around you. But really that there's an explanation. So that was important to me, but then when I was a Junior, I took a course with Edward Said, and Edward Said really became my mentor for the next ten years, and stayed my friend my whole life. But I really learned a tremendous amount from him. It was a course on modern British literature. So, and we didn't, at that time he wasn't particularly identified any way with the Palestinian issue, but I sort of went with him as he got to the connect with that issue. And I saw him find this cause. Otherwise he was kind of, he was interested in modernism, and if you read his first book it's not a very interesting book, I mean it's smart, but it's not compelling. And then he found his moment, and that became very important to me in terms of disability studies, because Edward would always say to me "Look at this, this a terrible thing, why don't you go research it. Why aren't people doing this?" And everyone said that and I would say like "You have your cause, you have this thing, what am I going to do?" And it never occurred to me that deafness was a cause, it was just a condition, it was a condition of abjection that my parents suffered, and that I had basically escaped from. So Said was very important, I took courses with him for 2 years, and then I got into graduate school, and I was at Colombia. I had been at Colombia as an undergraduate, as a graduate student. And I just basically worked with him. And in 1972 I got a letter of introduction from Said to Roland Barth, and I went to Paris and I spent the year there. And I took a seminar on Rolan Barth, and I was a go-between, between Said and Foucault. And Said and some other people, I used to bring things and a courier. And that added a whole other level of my interest in literacy, because at that time I was, structuralism was just coming on the scene. And it was all about linguistics, right, and you know, so it was a whole other way of thinking about language. And I took linguistics courses, I read linguistics, I went to (...) class in Paris, and Levy Strauss, and the whole idea that language was like a science. And it was not just purely expressive, but there was a science to it, and from language you could study everything in the culture, and it all made sense in a semi-logical way. So that was an important other step. And when did you get in to Disability Studies then? Well it was one of my, I did my dissertation with Said, and I did it on the origins of the English novel. And the other person I was working with was this person called Steven Marcus, who was a Victorian. And when I was rooting around, trying to figure out what I should do my dissertation on, he came from the Bronx like me, and he knew about my background, so he said "Why don't you write something about gesture in Dickens?" And I was furious, and I was like "No I don't want to have anything to do with that. And plus it's not gesture isn't what sign language is." And I knew that at that point. So it was something I just completely flipped from. I left home at 16 and I never went back. And part of it was also, this was something we didn't talk about, but in that position of being the go between, between your parents and the world. It's a very hard position for a kid to occupy, and I hated it. It wasn't like, I liked the mastery of it, but I hated the... My father was very controlling, and he wanted his message to come across exactly the way he wanted. He wanted to control the interpreter. And he, the most painful thing for me was to make phone calls for him. And that experience was a very common painful experience with CODAs. So my father would write out everything he wanted me to say. And he would then... And a lot of times it was dealing with the phone company, the phone was a whole issue itself. So he would claim that they had charged us for something. Or there was the old thing of message units, and he would count the message units, and, you know, too many. And he would write this thing of page of detailed thing and he would want me to read it. It's not the way people talk. It wasn't just his deafness, it was also a kind of weird formality he would write. He would want me to say like "I am Lennard Davis, the son of Morris Davis, my father is very disturbed..." and I'm making it even more kind of colloquial than it was. It was stilted. And he, and I would read it and sort of try to change it to the language that the person on the other end of the phone would understand. And he would watch me like a hawk, and every time I deviated from the text, he would yell at me. So I'm talking on the phone to somebody at the phone company and he's going like (Makes yelling noise). And I'm just "What?" They would always say "What is it, ma'am?" Because I was yelling I sounded like a woman. And he would say "Tell them exactly..." So that was just kind of metaphor for the whole thing. I can see where that would be. (Laughter) (Phone ringing). Sorry, that's probably my son. Yeah that is my son. That's fine, it's just fine, don't worry about it. Well he's delivering the soda. Oh dear, oh the soda. So anyway, so that was difficult, and I just wanted to get away from it. And the other thing was that when we would watch TV, my father would ask me a million questions. TV was hard, he loved baseball, baseball was easy. They had the fingers for the signs, you know, "You're up!" "Safe" So there was sign language involved. Actually there's a whole interesting story about that. Well there's a guy, whose name was Dummy... Dummy something, Dummy Hodges or something. And he was a deaf baseball player in the early part of the century. And the hand signs that they use in baseball are because of him. Oh, really? Who did he play for? I don't know. I'll go look him up. You could look it up yeah. Anyway, but then when we would watch like Harry Mason or something, you know where there was a complicated plot. My father would always ask me. And he was interested less in the plot and more who was related to whom. So he would say like "Who's the brother, of sister, of who? Father, is the mother, who's the?" And then he would also want to know who was Jewish. And I said that actor is Jewish, that actor is not Jewish. And so it was very annoying because I would be trying to watch the plot and my father would ask me all the time. So I built myself a little tent out of the blankets so I could sit under the tent and not be bothered by him. It sounds kind of mean, but it was the only way that I could survive. So I was happy to get away from it, and I thought "That's the end of it" I never had anything to do with it again. So 1990, I started writing, and I was doing journalism of various kinds along with my academic work. And I've always done journalism. And it's actually connected because you know, a lot of what I do in that journalistic mode is to try to take an idea from, say, academia and make it available to the general public. So I'm actually doing that interpretation, that I grew up doing. Only I'm doing it for different elements. Or even in Disability studies is a way for me to mediate, to mediate between me as a non-disabled person, this abled world, and the world that doesn't get it. So I was, I had heard about his organization called CODA, and I thought.... And there was an article in the New York Times or something about it and how they had a conference. And I thought "That would be kind of wacky, to go there and do a kind of piece for the Sunday Times magazine on this group of people who have deaf parents" So, and I had also been, I had lots of funny stories about my family, and my wife had always said "Why don't you write them?" You know, write them down. So the combination of that I decided I was maybe going to do something. And I went out to Dallas, Texas, to this conference. And you know I went there like complete outsider looking in on this weird phenomenon. And somewhere on day 2, I just had a complete transformation. And I realized that I hadn't left this thing behind at all. And that I was really bicultural. And I had sort of been denying the bi-cultural, bilingual side of myself. And there was this thing of all these hearing people in this conference speaking in sign language to each other, and telling stories and doing what they called CODA speak, which was to put in syntax sign language itself. So, you know, you would take the sign language order, and you would put it, and we had our own language then it was verbal, but it was sign, it was like this hybrid language. And I just realized that, you know, this was something I had pushed out of my life, and it was an important part, and I really was deaf, in some way. Part hearing, part deaf. And sign language was a very important part of my life, And I met people there who were academics, who were academics in deafness. And it never occured to me that deafness was an academic field. So at the time I was interested in literary theory and critical theory and cultural study. And it just occurred to me that, "Why couldn't I do for deaf people, what Said was doing for the Palestinians? And why couldn't I do some kind of theoretical work that would be interesting?" And I went back home and started reading, and trying to find all the material that I could find that was published. And began to realize that there was this field of deaf studies that was very interesting, and I started to think about that. But that led me to see that, to Disability Studies. And to see the work that was done at the time. And at the time I felt like no one had really theorized it. So I started writing this book, which I originally called "Theorizing Disability" But then eventually it became "Enforcing Normalcy." And it was my attempt to bring a theoretical cultural studies element to disability studies. And at the same time I was looking around for people who were doing something like what I was doing. And all the work in disability studies was basically from the social sciences point of view , and from applied point of view, you know. How to take care of... So, I don't know how I found out, but there was a woman in New York, who was at Hunter, named (...) And she had what was called, she had some kind of name like the Disability Archive Center, you know. So I got in touch with her and I went to her office and of course that center was just a file cabinet. And she was kind of doing what I was trying to do. And she was in sociology and she was trying to do it. So we put our heads together, and we started, and we did a special issue of Radical Teacher Magazine, which is... What I had been on the Radical Teacher board for, you know, the editorial collective. And I suggested to them "Let's do something on disability" And they didn't know anything about it, but they were kind of "Ok, fine." I had been on it for 10, 15 years and I said it was an important subject and people let me go with it. And so we did that And that was sort of the beginning of disability studies in the humanities I think. Was her and I working together, and then the story goes on, but you know. It's interesting how Said's work I think influenced your take on that. I like that way of finding a mission for yourself. Let me ask a couple of questions from Melanie now. Because this is part of her dissertation, we truly always want somebody to finish that. Ok, so, can you talk a little bit about the multiple modes of writing and speaking and the connection with disability studies. I mean she, her theory is that online work is so much easier for people to work with in terms of aspbergers. Because they can communicate from a whole variety of modalities. Do you have anything to say about that? Does that make sense to you? Sure, it makes sense to me, and I think there's a different kind of attention that goes on with a computer. Than goes on with a book or with pen to paper. Do you have any stories about yourself communicating in digital environments? I mean, do you, when you work in environments, do you communicate primarily by print? I mean I don't sign, I know people who do that, I don't have anyone to sign with. I've seen, you know, what do they call them, vlogs? My ASL is not great, so I miss a lot on those. I've noticed myself, just getting older, that my attention is changing, it's harder for me to read books. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but it's harder for me to maintain the concentration unless there's certain things. Like if I'm on an airplane, I have tremendous concentration. And I'm on the airplane a lot. But at home, I don't know whether it's a result of the internet itself being so distracting, but it's harder for me to just sit and read. But it's easy for me to spend the day on the computer. Because there's a different kind of attention, it's more random. So you can use that randomness, you know. Like I'll be writing, and then I'll just have this urge to check my e-mail, and the e-mail will lead me to a website, and then I'll read the thing on the website, and that might actually be something that could take me back to what I'm writing about. So it's more of a kind of unfocused... It's not super-focused, but there's focal points. And it's kind of a wandering, you know, that I've always been pretty comfortable with wandering, intellectually, in many ways. So it's kind of a daily drama of wandering and then coming back to something. Like that notion that it's not unfocused but it's focused at particular points. It's like a (...) focus. Yeah, and it's, this is very much me, is just a person who... I get intensely interested in things. But not forever, you know. I mean that's why there are people in academia who are like "I'm the world's expert on Wordsworth" And that's all you've ever done. For me, I can get very, very interested and very focused, it's almost a compulsion. Or an obsession. But then it passes, and my wife knows this very well about me. Whatever she objects to me doing, she knows that after a while, I'll stop doing it anyway. I mean I was a beekeeper for a while. She was actually into that except when she got stung. But that passed, now I'm starting in February I'm raising chickens. And she is completely opposed to it, but I think that she knows that the chickens will be around for a while, but not probably forever. You need to meet my husband, he reminds me a lot of you. So here Melanie says, "If you could fill in these blanks" "Disability is..." And if you could just repeat the first part of that. Oh dear. Let's see. I don't have anything interesting to say, other than disability is disability. Ok, well how about "Impairment is..." I'm going to talk about that today. Oh you're going to talk about that in your talk, ok. How about "Identity is..." A contradiction. And "Normalcy is..." You know it's hard when you've written an entire book on it to pull it down to one word. "Is a sloppy habit of thinking." Yeah, that's cool, it just doesn't have to be one word. Just as long as, I mean, her idea... She also says "Is there, or can you talk about the term "Disabilities culture" Is there a Disabilities culture?" Yeah I think there is, I mean as much as there is a culture of anything. I mean it's something that's new, it's developing. I think if you asked people 15 years ago "Is there a disabilities culture?" They would be hard pressed. If you said "Is there a deaf culture?" people would be more easily able to answer that. But I think there is something evolving over time by people who identify as disabled. You know, and not everyone who is disabled is part of that culture. But if you see yourself as part of the culture, then yeah. Or as Brenda says "temporarily abled people." Temporarily able bodied. Bodied, that's right. So, let's add intersection between disability studies and literacy. I mean is that, what's that land look like for you? I haven't really thought about that. For me it's about... For me particularly it's about the interface between ASL and the non-ASL world. And the hearing world. Do you belong to any list-serves or anything like that, that put you in touch with other scholars? Yeah, the best one is DS Hum. That's the one that I follow the most. And it's disability studies and the humanities. The Society for Disability Studies list-serve... I don't know whether it's... I'm not following it lately, or I stopped following it or whatever. But it doesn't seem as interesting to me. Plus I have... You're sort of like me, I got too busy, I can't possibly keep up with that, and write and whatever. There's a zillion things. It's, of 25 entries there's like 2 or 3 that will interest me, but I get the digests, so I don't have to be constantly... Just out of curiosity, if you were talking to young people who were raised as CODA, what would you say to them? Now? Yeah. Well it's what I would say to their parents. What would you say to their parents? I think it's really important that the parents appreciate the child, and don't just see them as an instrument. And also you know, I, there's a book that I read recently, a memoir by a guy who grew up as a CODA. And it was just published by Bantam I think. I can't remember his name now, and the thing about it was that his relation to his father was so different than my relation to my father. Even though they were about my parents were the same age as his parents, they were Jewish, New York. But his father was very mindful of the fact that this was a very hard thing for him, and felt bad about it. Whereas my parents never ever said, it never occurred to them that this was a tough road aho. And that they really appreciated me for what I did for them. So I mean that's one thing. The other thing I would say is "Don't not teach your children ASL. Because you want them to be part of the hearing world." Because it's really important that, I know a lot of kids who were CODAs grew up, and their parents deliberately didn't teach them ASL and they regret that. It's that being sort of the notion that you're an instrument. That you're, like a pen is an instrument, it's not sentient. Right? It's just, that's a job that you use it for. Yeah, yeah. And then you get angry at the pen. Well I've never done that. Let's see, anything I've forgotten Louie? Don't think so. Did you talk about technology? We haven't talked all about technology. But maybe one more question would be Are there any other technologies that you used other than your work or your daily life, in addition to like just computers, list-serves or anything like that, that you used maybe because of your own abilities or because of what you're writing about? I love my iPhone. Why do you love your iPhone? Just curious, asking, because I have one too. I like being able to, I actually check, I'm a terrible checker of e-mail. And I actually check less on my iPhone than I do on my computer. So it's like I can just quickly like "Nah..." Whereas on my computer I feel obliged to open every letter. I like that, I also love the apps, and I love how it orients you in the world. I think that's a lot of it, you need basically, it keeps you in touch and it orients you. Which really goes back to the deaf thing. Because I think as as a kid I felt very disoriented because I didn't have parents who could orient me. You know my father was, I mean unlike that guy in the memoir, he was not handy, he did not know how to fix anything. He knew his own little world, but he couldn't help me with the larger world. I never went to him, I never asked him for anything. I knew I couldn't get an answer from him. I mean I got no advice from him. But my iPhone is great, it gives me lots of advice. All I have to do is pick it up and say into Google "Where am I?" And it will tell me, and you know. Plus it connects you, and the other thing is that a kid, and you're connected to the deaf world but you're very disconnected from the hearing world. So the iPhone connects me. What are your favorite apps? I have like that flashlight one. Oh yeah flashlight's good. I also like the little mappy thing that shows you your moving. So like if you have to find directions from... Yeah that's what I was thinking of, the GPS stuff.