vital functions

[kaberett]

Reading. This week I have got very tentatively started with The Story of my Life, Helen Keller, because it was available for immediate loan from the library while I was browsing ebooks and it felt more appealing than any of the other non-fiction I have on the go.

Watching. Planet Earth: ice worlds. Fun stat: 90% "of all ice" is found here.

OH NO WHAT A GOOD ZOOMY PLAPPY PENGUIN HELLO PENGUINS
+ I did not know tha the chinstraps you could take aerial photographs and see the guano buildup!
+ oooh, nunatuks are used for egg laying purposes also because they are bar e rock instead of ice! SNOW PETRELS
++ after laying eggs they go have a snow bath to clean plumage???? are they taking shifts on the egg or are they REMARKABLY resilient to hideous cold weather?
+ skuas hang out waiting for the snow petrels to show up because. they're the most southerly predators???

what a good sploosh spiral!!!! who are you????
+ DRAMATIC HUMPBACK WHALES
+ they do coordinated spirals and release bubbles to herd the krill!!!!!!!!

oh that is NICE timelapse photography of ice advancing 2.5 miles per day during the freeze, hurrah extended ice shelf
+ but! one creature is just arriving!
+ THE EMPEROR PENGUINS
+ oh gosh this is some of the best Penguins Wearing A Suit footage I have ever seen
+ ... AND THE MOST UNDIGNIFIED SEX
+ huh, March of the Pnguins implied that it was Bad for the eggs to touch the ice At All, but this just suggested that brief contact with ice during transfer is not lethal???? do we just... not know
+ ... oh NO TIMelapse photography of males doing the I Have An Egg waddle, which shows the patterns of huddles!!!!
+ they make Good Patterns
+ okay fine I'm actively interested in the crowd dynamics of how movement from middle of huddle to exterior is coordinated

... by the way the ARctic exists...
+ conceptualised as a vast frozen sea surrounded by land, huh

eider ducks!!!!!!
+ oh huh they overwinter in the Arctic, aren't they brave! in flocks of like 40,000
+ all heading to a polynya: An Duck Pond!!!! overnight sanctuary (from bears rather than sharks, presumably -- oh and also foxes), and during the day: Food, because dense mussel beds! ... but only while the tide's at extremes?
+ A is charmingly surprised by how elegant they are at swimming

hello who are YOU
you are a MUSK OXEN
you DIG YOUR OWN HOLES
oh no your heads are SO GOOD
(to eat the vegettion below)
they make Good Noises
... and get followed around by ptarmigans, who eat the holes
... Adam found an arctic hare and it's his new fave
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, says An Fox
OH NO BABY OX
"I did think that was a BIT ambitious" says A re the fox attempting to sneak up on th calves
OH NO THEY ARE SO BAD AT WALKING I LOVE THEM THEY AREM YNEW FAVOURITE CAN I CUDDLE THEM AND IF NOT WHY NOT
oh no they are Implacable in the blizzard
and NOW we get an Arctic Wolves, which are really very difficult to see in the whiteout, but Up They Go To The Higher Ground
oh no are the smols.... going to fall over and get squished!!! oh no
oh no good we are getting a defensive ring around the Babs
oh NO a calf HAS been left behind in the panic and is making a tiny sad bleating :((( nature red in tooth and claw but... also they DIDN'T show us a kill, hmm.

HEMLO bab polar bear
emerge from den doing a YELL
"mother stretches legs after five months buried in the snow" by doing a HUGE INELEGANT SLIDE down the sope
... oh NO the babs aren't heavy enough to achieve momentum a need DRAGGING down the slope... by their BUMS oh no this is great
this script is unsurprisingly almost identical to the previous episode on polar bears we watched but I'm pretty sure it's new footage
oh no distress bear with inadequately supportive ice :( (so of course they CAN swim but I've somehow only just realisd that currents are a problem??? wow Alex)

Little Auks are EXTREMELY good colours ("in some ways, these birds are the penguins of the north" -- lay rocks on bear eggs, Good Colours)
eggs go in scree slopes -- in burrows up to a metre down! EXCELLENT footage of Suspicious and Affronted nesting one

... w h o are YOU you are LONG and POINTY with RED BITS
...... BABY SANDHILL GRANES. BAB. BAB.

sand pipers!!!! sand pipers??? S A ND PIPERS

the foxes look Most Inelegant during the summer but the bouncy bab is V Good
... and disappears squeaking into the borrow very rapidly when a Big Bird comes to Attempt To Eat It
+ lol hi Skuas, you Fight the Reindeer

ooh, back to male polar bear... who does in fact Take To The Sea because HE doesn't have CHILDCARE RESPONSIBILITIES
+ once-rare sight, polar bears now get spotted over 60 miles from shore; ouch
+ ... oh no we are indeed being tld that Bear Will Die :(

... WHAT good clicking and clackings the walruses make, and HOW much more elegant they are in the water than out
... on the one hand I am glad that the polar bear is going to achieve Not Immediate Death, and on the other I am Concerned for the Bab Walruses, which were born on sea ice but are being raised on wee islands... but walruses are hecking enormous and fighty, so, Nature Red In Tooth And Claw
... I had not... quite realised... how much bigger they are... than the polar bears holy shit they are ENORMOUS

... hi aurora australis
timelapse penguims
IMPORTANT EGG HATCHING SEQUENCE
I'm really enjoying the majestic sweeping music accompanying the Family Reunion
oh no the males are reluctant to let go of the Small Bab it has been looking after all winter!!!
oh no the babs are TOO SMALL and require Rapid Transfer
I not WANT go outside, say the bab, it COLD
... Fine I Suppose It Also Warm In Here, say the bab
oh no this is Excellent Baby Penguin footage oh NO
they are so ROUND
and so SHIT
and so YELL
oh no the the Fighting, there are like Six Penguin fighting over an orphaned chick to adopt and... they're so shit they squash them

oh no grup of chicks separated from colony :((( oh no they shiver :(((((
like I understand the principle of non-interference but DO YOU HAVE TO they only SMOL

oh holy shit to get the penguins footage two cameramen spent A YEAR living out with only 20,000 penguins for neighbours
"it's a bit cold and windy" YES THANKS FOR THAT
... the film. jams.
OKAY GOOD THEY HAD A HUT. and are feeling Very Sorry for the penguins.
...... t w o m i l e w a l k to the colony
did they. did they??? have a line??? to take them back to the hut??? what the fuck this is not best practice
OH HURRAH THEY DIDN'T NON-INTERFERENCE because a Small Chick fell into a HOLE and then stuck its head out and made NOISES but it STUCK
... chick parent did a Watch of ?OH YOU FOund IT WHERE DID IT GO
oh no it did so many WHAT THE FUCK yell at it parent and then GOT A FOOD. good. GOOD penguin.

... the polar bears came to visit the Arctic filming crews oh Dear the hut is only made out of wood so uh oh dear out they go with guns -- firing blanks to scare them off, good
"Day one: Bear outside the cabin."
"This is just a bit of a problem, you know, when they get as close as this to the cabin." And it WOULDN'T FUCK OFF.
so now it's time for flares
Planet Earth got special permission to film on remote Norwegian island -- first human visitors in 25 years, motor vehicles forbidden, so they had to haul everything on a heckin sledge
"I'm gonna call mine [bleeping] Awkward Heavy Object"
"Doug's sledge," says David, "seemed determined to live up to its name" (turning turtle)
oh no they were having Difficulty finding Babs

"I thought... I thought I heard something?" POLAR BEAR POKES ITS FUCKING NOSE RIGHT UP TO THE WINDOW DOES IT A SMOOSH
oh dear this is hecking terrifying
they were hiding from the bears and keeping down and uh Had To Get Out The Shotgun
but did not show us what happened In The End. for some reason. which does not exactly bode well for the poor thing, does it.

Listening. WE ARE UP TO DATE ON TMA. I want to launch into a relisten; I think I'll enjoy it much more on the second run-through, and despite having been more than somewhat spoiled there's a lot of detail I am wanting to have another go at.

Synchronous chat is generally the best way to get me to shout about the thing but I'm going to try to go back and yell at rydra_wong some more, too.

I have also, this week, been listening to more music than usual, on the grounds that I had a bunch of tedious data-entry to do and that goes Better with Obnoxiously Upbeat Music.

Cooking. Notably: candied ginger jarred up with its syrup; roast onion & celeriac soup. The latter did not end up quite as I'd envisaged -- it was roast garlic, and the celeriac roasted with onion and nigella seed, plus veg stock -- and while it was very tasty (to my mind) beige, I clearly needed to put Another Flavour in it. (Also: another round of puttanesca; some slightly disappointing sea-spicy aubergine, where I suspect mostly I just didn't cook the aubergine for long enough because we were Hungry; lots more Things With Rice.)

Creating. Vieussieuxia fugax finished! I'm finding the results decidedly dissatisfactory when viewed up close, but oddly enough if I go away for a while and then glance over from the sofa I'm much more favourably disposed.

Technical aspects I'm particularly pleased with: I mixed all of these greens; none of them came as A Green Pencil. I used two sizes of brush, my Series 16 #3 and my rather ratty Series 12 #000 (both acquired at a charity shop), and was beginning to get the hang of the #000 by the time I ran out of flowers, I think. With the #000, I got particularly good use out of wetting both the brush and the tip of the pencil, picking up pigment, brushing off excess on a convenient thumbnail (to pick up later!), and then applying it.

And, of course, I kept going after getting thoroughly disgruntled with myself over the leftmost stems. That counts too.

Most of this was done while listening to TMA.



Growing. Sown today, Sunday: two types of pea (Serpette Guilloteau and Sugar Magnolia); one bean (Greek 'Gigantes'); two types of summer squash (dwarf bush courgette Verde di Milano/Black Beauty and Pattison Blanc). I'm working up to some brassica (purple sprouting and calabrese both).

And apparently the tray of leeks was only put together earlier this week as well, gosh (Bleu de Solaise).

I've moved the lemon (still has two leaves!), the walnut (growing away enthusiastically) and the oak (... affected by... something) outside. I've unwrapped the fig. The tomato seedlingsare spending some of their time outside in the sun, and putting forth some proper grown-up leaves.

I have, also laid out for imminent sowing, several types of lettuce; carrot, parsnip, root parsley, and beetroot; two types of cucumber; some more brassica (cabbages and sprouts various). I need to (1) work out where to put them in an immediate sense, (2) fetch in some more coco coir from the garage, and (3) have some more of a go at working out where I'm going to actually put them at the plot, which is a problem all of its own.

Observing. A heron! I think. I was attempting to do some Pilates on the living room floor, ergo lying on my back staring at the sky, when... Something flapped by overhead. "That's a bloody big seagull," I thought, "with bloody long legs. It's an awfully... pointy seagull." I don't think I'd ever previously seen a heron in Enfield, so this is very exciting!

Playing. Some excellent PoGo luck: incense has netted me a 100% IV Trubbish and a (kinda terrible IVs but) shiny Sudowoodo. Also feat.: bonus shiny Beldum.

A round of Splendor with A on Sunday lunchtime.

Still adjusting to A being home all the time in terms of horn practice; I want to spend some concerted time retuning the thing, but I'd started to get into a workable habit of "bit of practice in the morning, bit of practice in the afternoon" that... isn't really terribly sociable when there's someone trying to, you know, do their Salaried Job in the same room. (I'm pretty sure the noise-cancelling headphones don't cut it. :-p)

Comments

[ewt]

Ooooooh we ate some of our dried 'Gigantes' beans the other day and they were GREAT. We got nearly half a kilo (dried) off one plant (the other ones got slugged). They took ages and ages to set any beans, to the point that I thought they were broken, but then they did. I can't remember whether I gave them a mineral supplement just beforehand or if I was just thinking about it.

They did get southern shield bugs toward the end of August, I didn't recognise the small ones at first but the internet found them for me. So, I got all enthusiastic with the diatomaceous earth that week, and they didn't cause a lot of damage.

[kaberett]

oh EXCELLENT this is fantastic intelligence; I'll hold off on getting any more than the 9 I've just set going started ;)

Thank you also for the warning about the shield bugs, ugh.

[ewt]

They also really hate the cold. I put a load of my beans out too early last year and was sad at how many I lost. Peas, on the other hand, are mostly okay with it.

[ewt]

Also hurrah for the enthusiastic walnut.

[kaberett]

Thank you again for finding it!

[azurelunatic]

My childhood neighbors the Large Animal Research Station would like us to stop calling them The Muskox Farm plz.

(They sell HAIR.)

[kaberett]

:D :D :D

[jenett]

Story of My Life is a fascinating book on about six levels. (I have professional opinions about this, naturally.) I am also here for further recs in that line (either Helen's writings or other stuff about her that is not cloyingly sentimental and awful) should you want them.

[kaberett]

Oh, I was hoping you'd weigh in! And yes, I would be delighted for further recs as well as the opinions themselves.

(I am aware of her primarily via you, so.)

[jenett]

Push button, get content! I, um, wrote a bunch.

Since this is a public post and I avoid crossing the streams of identity namespace, I'm going to be vague here about why this is relevant to my professional interest. Anyone reading this who's curious, I am generally glad to add access to anyone interested, and there's a bunch more (and I am glad to take up other questions related) in my own journal. Short version: I'm a librarian working with an unusual and awesome collection that has a bunch of stuff related to blindness and deafblindness.




Second, since this going to get long, I can tell, I'm also going to do several comments here roughly by topic, and also stick the whole thing in a (locked) post on my DW in case people want to talk about it more in a place where I can also point at some work resources more usefully.
 (Again, generally very glad to add people to my access list).

Third, since this always comes up: you'll see both deaf-blindness and deafblindness (and sometimes DeafBlindness) used. There isn't really one standard in the community as a whole. (US Law uses the hyphen, where I work has switched to not using the hyphen, so the lattter is the default that comes out of my fingers, but you'll see both.)




Finally, the following is mostly going to focus on the stuff that isn't readily available or obvious via Wikipedia/etc. since I figure anyone who wants can go find the dates and general summaries there. 

Right. Onward to detailed comments.

[kaberett]

THANK YOU. :D <3

The background of deafblindness education

[jenett]

So, the history of deafblindness education is sort of fascinating to start with. Before the 1830s, there were a small number (under 10 I've seen names for, but a lot of that sort of "In this far distant town, I have heard tell of..." vague reference stuff floating around the edges) of people who were deafblind and identified as learning language, but basically none of them learned more than very basic functional language - enough to express physical needs, but not much else.




In 1837, a medical student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, working on a census of the area became aware of a young girl who was deafblind in a nearby village, named Laura Bridgman. He brought her to the attention of his professor, who brought her to the attention of Samuel Gridley Howe, who was the first director of Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, which had been founded in 1829 and opened to students in 1831.


Most of the schools for the blind in Europe at the time provided some degree of education, but were mostly focused on what's called "industrial arts" - making mattresses, brooms and brushes, chair caning, etc. rather than a more academic education. Perkins and several of the other schools for the blind founded in the US in the 1830s thought that it was possible to teach students rather more than that, and to have an independent life as adults. As you can see by the dates, Perkins was still quite new, but rapidly growing and establishing itself. 




Basically, Howe was the world's greatest Gryffindor, and never met a challenge he didn't want to charge at, so despite the fact that no one had ever been particularly successful teaching deafblind students the same kinds of things as blind students (and honestly, teaching them to blind students was still pretty new), he wanted to see what he could do. He brought Laura to Perkins, and set about trying to figure out how to make her understand what words did.




Laura was ferociously clever - there's a quote I can't find from Anne Sullivan that said that as brilliant as Helen was (and Helen was legitimately brilliant, more on that in a bit), Laura was if anything even more so. Through a series of intensive rote exercises (mostly done by a series of female teachers who get much less credit than Howe), Laura not only learned to communicate practical needs, but also expressed a wide range of abstract language. She wrote letters all the time, kept a dream journal, wrote poetry, and she was also a gifted seamstress and knitter. 




In the 1840s, when Charles Dickens did his tour of America, he pretty much hated America, but was fascinated by Laura (who was hugely famous at the time - there are quotes about her being the second most famous woman after Queen Victoria). He wrote about her, and his American Notes circulated widely. Laura is, these days, widely recognised as the first deafblind person who had a formal education (her curriculum was basically what anyone else in the time would have gotten.) 




She used tactile sign, square hand (a method of writing print taught to the blind), embossed type (mostly Boston Line Type, a format developed at Perkins), and people reading aloud into her hands. She adored talking to people, and at one point was banned from the staff lounge at Perkins because she was so insistent on people talking to her rather than whatever they needed to be doing. (On the one hand, conversation is great! On the other hand, tactile sign with someone who is deafblind means you can't really be doing anything else while you're talking, and the teachers were legitimately busy.) 



There were other deafblind students (at Perkins and a couple in other places) after Laura, but they stop showing up in the educational record around the Civil War (1860s) and there isn't much reference to anyone until Helen Keller. 


Some of this might be a factor in the causes of deafblindness. These days, the most common causes of deafblindness tend to be genetic, but at the time, severe illness could be a factor. Laura became deafblind at the age of two after a bout of scarlet fever that killed her two older sisters. Helen Keller's cause is more complicated, but was also an intense illness. There's definitely a difference in how to approach this with people like Laura and Helen (who had sight and hearing as babies) and people who are deafblind from birth. 


(There's also a wide range of "What does it mean to be deafblind". The legal definitions in the US these days mostly centre on "can't use one sense to supplement the other sense" function levels, but there are also, for example, a large number of elderly adults who qualify as deafblind (in terms of various legal definitions/programs), but wouldn't identify themselves that way. There are also differences in people who grow up in the Deaf community, and who are or become visually impaired, versus people who grow up in the hearing community.) 


 The last part to know before I get into Helen is that Laura lived at Perkins into the 1880s (when she died), and while Anne Sullivan was a student at Perkins, they shared a cottage (house of 10-20 students living together with staff). It's pretty clear that's where Anne became familiar and comfortable with tactile sign. 


Re: The background of deafblindness education

[kaberett]

SPLENDID THANK YOU: I was actively wondering about the mechanics of education for people without early sight/hearing, and indeed about functional vs abstract language.

I had also, which I'm facepalming over a little, failed to register prior to this that Anne Sullivan was blind (though I had started wondering).

Re: The background of deafblindness education

[jenett]

The mechanics of education are really labour intensive, basically, is where it is. (Even now, basically if you're teaching someone who's deafblind, direct instruction time is mostly one on one.

Anne's eyesight is also really interesting. Her amount of usable vision went up and down through her life, improving due to more effective surgeries, getting worse for other illness reasons. She hated reading embossed type and was not a fan of braille, and she could read print for most of her life, just sometimes with a lot more difficulty than others. But when she came to Perkins she was definitely significantly visually impaired, and was again later in life.

Things lots of people don't know!

Re: The background of deafblindness education

[fyreharper]

I did not know that about Anne Sullivan either! Why does NOTHING EVER TELL US THIS????

Anne Sullivan

[jenett]

Anne Sullivan's early life is both tragic and fascinating, but the short version is that after her mother's death from tuberculosis, she and her brother were sent to the Tewksbury Almshouse, which was fantastically overcrowded. Her brother had TB (and died of it 3 months after they got there).

Anne was seen as difficult and badly behaved, and also suffering from trachoma, a bacterial infection that causes scarring on the eyes. The almshouse was legitimately awful - rats, lots of death, untreated mental illness, huge wards where Anne as a young teenager was in the same ward as dozens of women, many of them dying from the effects of alcoholism, mental illness, or lifelong poverty. 


There were people who were kind to her, and who encouraged her, but basically it was "how do I survive this?" for a long time, with no education and not much support. While there, she had several surgeries, and eventually ended up being able to talk to a visiting commission (there are a variety of stories about how this went), but got brought to Perkins as a student in 1880. 


She'd never been to school before, but when she graduated in 1886, she was valedictorian. However, it was a pretty rocky road there. She didn't fit in with many of the other students. (At the time, Perkins focused on educating the people who could most benefit from it, so students tended to be from better-off, often Protestant homes and not have health issues beyond the blindness. Anne, a poor Catholic orphan from the almshouse didn't fit in at all.) 


One of my favourite stories is about how when there was an investigation into the Tewksbury Almshouse while Anne was a student, she wanted to go (not least because she wanted to find out about the people who had been kind to her when she was there.) She was refused permission, but went anyway. When she got back, there was a huge commotion, and they nearly kicked her out, until some reasonable person pointed out that if they kicked her out, they'd be sending her right back to Tewksbury, and she had a point that if she'd been living there, she had a right to know about it. 


Anyway, she did graduate. However, she desperately needed a job if she wasn't going to go back to Tewksbury. She was staying for the summer with the Perkins housemother who had become a close friend, when the Kellers wrote to Michael Anagnos (second director of Perkins, also son-in-law to Howe)
.

She spent the next six months reading through Howe's notes of how he'd taught Laura, and then went down to Alabama, which is where the part everyone knows about with the water pump happened. That's just the beginning though - once Helen made the leap from the physical to the abstract (being able to join words with ideas), she was ferociously demanding of more words. Anne used the same techniques as Howe had used with Laura, but she did what is now called "student guided education". Instead of having rote lessons to learn, she and Helen would go do things, and Anne would explain as they went, using Helen's interests to engage her. 


Re: Anne Sullivan

[kaberett]

ANNE IS MY NEW FAVOURITE. continues inhaling words

Helen Keller

[jenett]

So, Helen is born in Alabama in 1880, in a family that is sort of decayed social gentry - not much money left, but a bunch of familial and social connections. After a severe illness (there are about six different variations on what happened, so no one is entirely sure now), she became deafblind, and her family struggled to figure out what to do. 


Her mother ended up reading the Dickens piece about Laura in American Notes and they also reached out to someone who pointed them at Alexander Graham Bell, who was active in the deaf education community.
 

(He's now a tremendously controversial figure in the Deaf community, because he was an oralist, and like a lot of people of the time he was rather more entangled with the eugenics movement than he should have been. But his wife had been deaf since the age of five, he spent a lot of time working with people in the deaf education community throughout his life, and frankly, the late 1800s were sort of a mess in a lot of ways. I think he was legitimately coming from a place of "This is a very difficult thing for people to deal with, how do we make that both not happen, and better for the people who are dealing with it" a lot of the time.) 


Anyway, he not only pointed the Kellers at Perkins, but stayed a friend of Helen and Anne's for the rest of his life, and he wrote some gloriously supportive letters to and about both of them. 

Within a year, Helen wasn't just writing in English, but beginning to pick up French and German, and in 1888, Anne and Helen came to Boston, and spent time at Perkins, using the resources there. 


(Perkins had taken on another deafblind student almost at the same time, Edith M. Thomas. There's a great book by Anna Gardner Fish, a longtime Perkins staff member (mostly registrar) talking about the history of deafblind education at Perkins through 1937.). By the time Helen had been there for a year or two, there were two more, Willie Elizabeth Robin, and Tommy Stringer.) 


Helen and Anne basically alternated travelling and working with other teachers (Helen desperately wanted to learn to speak), and being at Perkins for several years, until what is known as The Frost King incident, where Helen was accused of plagiarism in copying a story that she sent to Anagnos as a holiday present. There was a huge fuss made about it, in ways that are, in my opinion, a lot more about people wanting to protect Howe's name, discourage people from taking Anne as seriously (the Howe family didn't like the fact she was getting a lot of credit for teaching Helen, and Anagnos, as above, was related by marriage, though his wife had died a bit before this.) 


And there were a lot of not-very-legitimate, but ongoing concerns about whether Anne was doing Helen's work for her, whether Helen was "faking" something, whether Anne was driving Helen too hard, etc. Anne was actually really careful about tracking what she'd read to Helen, or discussed with her (because of this) but other people who talked to/read to/etc, Helen weren't. 


My personal take is that it was all a huge mess, and the adults should have behaved like adults, rather than being really quite awful to Helen (who was 11) and Anne (who was coming from a very tenuous social position and had basically no external resources for support other than a few people like Alexander Graham Bell and Mark Twain - who, okay, not bad people to have in your corner, but mostly distant.) The short version is that Helen and Anne left Perkins. Anne never returned, Helen did only much later in life, though things thawed a little bit via letters once Helen was an adult.


Re: Helen Keller

[kaberett]

(Yes that has been my impression of AGB.)

I had picked up about The Frost King but not that that was the title of the piece.

And yes, good grief, what an (obviously!) APPALLING way to treat Helen & Anne.

Helen's writing

[jenett]

One of the things Helen particularly wanted to do was go to college, and not just any college, but Harvard. (Which of course was not co-ed at that point.) There were a huge set of wrangles about how to do that, which lead to Anne nearly being removed as Helen's teacher, and then ended up with Helen and Anne doing basically private tutoring.


Some of that brought them into the orbit of Ed Chamberlain, a newspaper journalist who had a house in Wrentham, MA. He had a wide circle of friends, and I am personally convinced this is where Helen started meeting socialists. He was actually and directly supportive of both Anne and Helen, and in 1900, she became a student at Radcliffe. 


Radcliffe set some amazingly high standards for her exams (Anne couldn't be in the building, never mind the room, an independent teacher from Perkins was brought in to sign and transcribe braille, etc.) and honestly, most of Helen's teachers didn't make a big effort to speak with her, but one of her professors encouraged her to start writing essays about her life and experiences that became the core of The Story of My Life. By the time Helen graduated, she'd had quite a lot published. 


(This is also how Anne Sullivan met her husband, a Harvard instructor and literary critic named John Macy: John helped Helen with editing and publishing. The marriage was not very happy, and after a bit he sort of fades out of their lives. To be fair to Anne, she hadn't had a lot of great examples of happy marriages as a model.) 


She continued writing in a wide range of publications (more on that in the "other stuff you might want to read" section), while also travelling, lecturing, performing in vaudeville shows, etc. (Money was a significant concern for them for a while). She was an active socialist and agitator for reform on a bunch of levels, though she mostly gave up doing that quite so publically when she became the main spokesperson for the American Foundation for the Blind. 


As an adult, she was quite close to Nella Braddy Henney, a writer and editor in New York who edited a number of Helen's works. Later in their lives, when Anne began to have more health issues, Polly Thomson began working as Helen's companion and aide. She was a Scottish woman with handwriting that is extremely difficult to read, which means there are huge swaths of stuff that researchers struggle with. 


Re: Helen's writing

[kaberett]

I knew about the socialism but I am delighted to have more detail -- thank you!

OH PAELEOGRAPHY, HOW GLAD I AM THAT BEYOND MY GRANDPARENTS' LETTERS YOU ARE NOT MY PROBLEM.

Re: Helen's writing

[jenett]

Polly Thomson's handwriting is The Worst, officially. (There are two volunteers at my institution who are now the world's experts on deciphering it. They are amazing.)

Further possible reading

[jenett]


(Modified from the email template of Helen related links I keep in my work email)

The American Foundation for the Blind held Helen's own archives, including much of the material about her adult life. (It is in in the process of moving to the American Printing House for the Blind.) AFB did a massive accessible digitization project (still ongoing on the transcription side) to make these available. Here's more about how to search/browse the archive.

Perkins School for the Blind has a lot of material about Helen's earlier education, as well as the Nella Braddy Henney collection (tons of great gossip, if you can read the handwriting!) The easiest place to start is from the biographical article in the museum site, which links to the various archives collections of interest.

Besides Helen's own work (more on that in a moment), there are two major biographies of her.

The first was Helen and teacher: The story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy by Joseph P. Lash, published in 1980. The downside is that Lash did not put in footnotes (there are about 5 copies with handwritten footnotes: the archives where I work has one.)

The other major work, with footnotes, is Helen Keller: a life by Dorothy Herrmann (published in 1998) which is nicely thorough.

If you want more about Helen's politics and activism, take a look at Kim Nielsen's excellent The Radical Lives of Helen Keller.

If you want to read more about Laura Bridgman, the best (and very readable) place is The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl by Elizabeth Gitter (2001).

There are also a variety of other books - two of the Howe daughters did biographies of their parents (their mother was Julia Ward Howe, famous for the Battle Hymn of the Republic), feel free to ping me if you want more in this vein.

For Anne Sullivan, I highly recommend (on the level of "If you read only one other book about this), Kim Nielsen's Beyond the miracle worker: The remarkable life of Anne Sullivan Macy and her extraordinary friendship with Helen Keller. It does an amazing job of putting their friendship, relationship, and the world they lived in into context, and Kim had access to a number of sources not readily accessible to the public for various reasons. (Ask me about this one if curious, but it's something I'll only talk about under lock.)

If you're interested in current experiences of being deafblind, Haben Girma (first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School) has a recent memoir out which is fantastic, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law and she also talks about the impact (good and bad) that Helen Keller had on her own view of her life.

Helen's own writing

As above, she wrote The Story of My LifeByline of hope: Collected newspaper and magazine writing of Helen Keller by Beth A. Haller, a collection of her writing for newspapers and magazines, or Kim Nielsen’s Helen Keller: Selected writings is an edited version of many of Helen’s writings from a variety of sources.

Oh, right, six levels.

[jenett]

I forgot to put this bit in the lengthy post, but I think all of this context I've just written about is what makes Story of My Life fascinating. Helen is legitmately a great writer, but she's writing in this context of having to explain her life and experiences to people who don't know her.

And she's had a lifetime, already, of being distrusting her own statements of her experiences, or assuming that Anne wasn't doing some legitimately ground-breaking work in educational theory, a lot of challenges to her autonomy, not just because of the deafblindness, but also because she was a woman (and to some degree, specifically because she was from a specific Southern US culture.) How she interacts with Anne (from a very different background) plays into that, and Anne's stubbornness and commitment to doing what needs to be done, as well as she could possibly do make a lot of it possible.

(I am totally an Anne Sullivan fan girl.)

At the same time at which how they interact with people in power (both good and bad) is a huge part of the story, and one that you sort of have to read between the lines about, because Helen doesn't usually spell that out, it just funnels into everything she cares about.

Re: Oh, right, six levels.

[kaberett]

Oh I am so glad about this -- obviously from my own experiences of, well, inspiration porn I was a little nervous going in, but I am EXTREMELY glad to have especially this context that, well, Helen was thinking about... all of that... very actively... too! Thank you. <3

Re: Oh, right, six levels.

[jenett]

It's really interesting, because Helen herself is so often writing because she wants people to understand her experience (and the bad and difficult and just plain human parts, as well as the good ones.) But people then turn it into inspiration porn, and it cuts the heart out.

Helen was really aware that she was being seen as a symbol of a bunch of things, mind you, and she wasn't opposed to using that to her advantage when it fit her goals. (A bunch of her activism was functionally "someone invites her to be Helen and then she is Helen Is An Activist All People Deserve Nice Things" at them, very vehemently.)

[halojedha]

I saw a heron too! A couple of days ago on my walk. It was in the stream in the woods at Forty Hall. It was standing in the stream, then Stepping Delicately along it, then before I could get my camera out it spread great grey and white wings and flew downstream. I wonder if it was the same one?

[kaberett]

SPLENDID. I wonder indeed! I don't know how large their ranges are.

[eller]

Ohhhh, that's a nice botanical drawing!

[kaberett]

Thank you! I am learning watercolours. The linework is all Water Hood Fitch's :-)

[vass]

"I'm gonna call mine [bleeping] Awkward Heavy Object"
"Doug's sledge," says David, "seemed determined to live up to its name"

I REMEMBER THAT!

WE ARE UP TO DATE ON TMA.

!!!!!

Your watercolour is very neat.

a (kinda terrible IVs but) shiny Sudowoodo.

That sounds like some sort of graphical wrapper for the UNIX superuser function.

HERON.

[kaberett]

I REMEMBER THAT!

So hey I went digging, and 1. it was chess and 2. they didn't have to shoot that bear.


h e r i n g

[vass]

Outline failed to outline, but I'm very glad they didn't have to shoot the bear. <3

[archangelbeth]

1: Oh, lovely art!

2: the "livetweet" of the show is making me giggle so much. Thank you.

[kaberett]

I am very glad you're enjoying the liveblogs! And thank you :)

[cesy]

I love your liveblog of Planet Earth, it is full of so much joy.

[kaberett]

<3

[davidgillon]

Yay for pointy seagulls!

[kaberett]

INDEED. :D

[booksarelife]

I love this phrasing: “That's a bloody big seagull," I thought, "with bloody long legs. It's an awfully... pointy seagull."!!