This post is brought to you by my Mom’s taste in audiobooks. Saturday, Feb 6 2010

After Henry was diagnosed last year I read a whole bunch of books about autism – textbooks, pamphlets (my favorite had a nine-step Kubler-Ross grief diagram), novels, memoirs, websites, ARI newsletters – anything I could get my hands on. I sat up all night reading and crying and feeling terribly sorry for myself, and after a few months I just had to stop; I had overdosed on autism and the only thing was to quit cold turkey.

Now Hen’s been in school almost a year, speech therapy for six months or so, and has come a little ways back from Planet Vulcan. He’s starting to talk in sentences; he shares with his sister; he gets himself dressed in the morning, and is sometimes crabby, and loves a good Spongebob joke. He’s still pretty Vulcan-ey, but I try to remind myself that I always liked Vulcans the best.

As for me, I am no longer a total mess, so I decided to dip a cautious toe into the waters of autism literature again. Well, okay, it wasn’t my choice. My Mom listened to an audiobook called “Born on a Blue Day” and decided I needed to read it. Every day as she got home from her commute she’d say something like, “Boy, this book I’m listening to is incredible. Just amazing. Today he talked about his relationship to numbers, and it was so interesting…”etc. Then she brought home a library copy of the print version and I read it, loving and obedient daughter that I am, so she’d quit bothering me with her excessive italics.

The thing is, it really is an incredible, amazing, interesting book. It’s a memoir, and the author, Daniel Tammet, has Asperger’s Syndrome (if you’re not familiar with the autism spectrum, Aspy’s people are at the very top end). He is also a savant with numbers and languages: a human calculator who once memorized 22,000 digits of pi, and learned Icelandic in a week.

This is pretty standard ‘autistic’ stuff – it’s rare, but not unheard of, for people with autism to also have savant abilities. We’ve all seen Rainman, right? What makes the story remarkable is that Tammet has also learned concepts like empathy, friendship, compassion, spirituality, and love. By the end of the story, he’s in his late twenties and lives and works independently. He’s in a loving relationship with his partner and able to travel and lecture publicly. He even talks about becoming aware of his family for the first time in his emotional life, something that resonated with me almost painfully deeply (do you think Spock ever hugged his mom?):

I did not always feel a strong emotional connection towards my parents or brothers and sisters when I was growing up, and did not at the time experience this as any kind of absence because they were simply not a part of my world. Things are different now: I am aware of how much my family loves me and how much they have done for me over the years, and as I have gotten older the relationship between myself and my family has continued to improve.

Aside from making me, as the parent of an autistic kid, feel more hopeful about my son’s future, “Born on a Blue Day” is also a delight to read. Tammet explains things in such a detailed, logical, oddball way – his passage on pi as a landscape gave me a whole new vision of mathmatics – that you find yourself savoring chapters and paragraphs like desserts.

The best kind of books remind you what a pleasure it is to read, to be able to understand someone else’s ideas and memories and theories even when they’re unlike anything you’ve ever come across in your own life. This is one of those books. Highly recommended, or as my Mom would say, “Absolutely a great book, and so inspiring.”

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It’s a meme! Saturday, Jan 30 2010

Here is what my bookcase says about me:

1. “I’m an Anglophile!” (Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh; a Lucia and Mapp omnibus by EF Benson; loads of Sayers and Christie; the Modern Library’s Complete Shakespeare in 6 volumes; A White Merc with Fins)

2. “I’m easily amused!” (Best American Humorous Stories; Bridget Jones’ Diary, and the sequel, The Edge of Reason; 100 Famous Ghost Stories; Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight; Zulieka Dobson, by Max Beerbohm)

3. “I like oddball art!” (9 of Edward Gorey’s books; Hammacher’s Magritte; Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, 1 and 2; Dore’s Idylls of the King; What People Wore When)

4. “I wish I was smarter!” (The Apocrypha; Selected Essays of Montaigne; Lives of the 12 Ceasars; Complete Poetry and Prose of Edmund Spenser; Outline of Abnormal Psychology; The Divine Comedy)

5. “I pretend to be too sophisticated for fantasy, but I secretly enjoy it!” (6 out of 7 Harry Potter books; Volumes 1 and 2 of the Kedrigern Chronicles; Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; The Earthsea Trilogy)

6. “I spend a lot of time in the YA section!” (Harriet the Spy; John Bellairs’ Johnny Dixon mysteries; 36 of the 3 Investigators books; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie; Phillipa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden; two excellent Hilary McKay novels)

7. “I love a good romance!” (Lorna Doone; Wuthering Heights; Hardy’s Return of the Native; Green Mansions by WH Hudson; Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond chronicles)

I tag you all, dear readers – what does your bookcase say about you?

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Whooooooooo lives in a pineapple under the sea? Saturday, Jan 23 2010

I don’t know if you’ve ever sat down and watched TV intended for kids, but some of it is pretty brutal. On the good end, Sesame Street is sweet and funny, if you can stand Elmo’s falsetto and the creepy way he refers to himself in the third person. Way on the bottom end are shows like Barney and The Tweenies, which seem to have been written by people who hate children – I mean, what sadist came up with the concept of a singing, dancing Tyrannosaurus Rex? Isn’t it logical to assume that one day Barney will start gobbling down his multicultural young friends? And somewhere in the middle are shows that, while fascinating to the average toddler, are unwatchable by anyone old enough to turn the TV on – Dora the Explorer, Thomas the Train, Rolie Polie Olie. There’s nothing overtly awful about these shows; they’re just dull, and after a while they make you want to take an icepick to the television.

Luckily, my sophisticated children have found a cartoon we can all enjoy – Spongebob Squarepants. If you’re not familiar with this show, it’s set in an underwater fantasyland called Bikini Bottom, where Spongebob and his friends – Patrick Star, Mr. Crabs, Gary, Sandy the Squirrel, and Squidward J Tentacles – have weird little eleven-minute adventures. My kids watch a couple episodes in the morning and a few more after school gets out, and half the time I’m sitting there watching with them.

Spongebob is great for a lot of reasons. The characters don’t have annoying voices, for instance. There’s a lot of absurdist humor – for example, when nematodes surround Spongebob’s pineapple to eat it, they all have their own little bendy straw. The writing is crisp and very funny, and the Jacques Cousteau voiceovers are a piece of genius.

I didn’t realize how deeply we were bitten by Spongemania until I went looking for Spongebob action figures to use during Henry’s weekly speech therapy sessions; he’s having trouble motivating himself to follow games lately, and since he can say all their names perfectly – I wish you could hear how beautifully he says “Plankton”, that “kt” sound is excellent – I thought they’d be perfect little bribes to get him to speak.

It turns out that you can buy lots of action figures in our town: GI Joes, Barbies, little plastic horses, robots, Transformers, and a whole series of Toy Story characters, but not Spongebob or any of his friends. It was disappointing. I mean, I started to feel really crushed, almost weepy. I did some thinking in the mall parking lot, and realized that what I really wanted was my very own Spongebob, with bendy arms and a removable Gary, to live on my bookshelf and amuse me whenever I started feeling low. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen – I want to have my very own toy.

Liking Spongebob Squarepants as much as I do makes me feel a little odd. You can totally rationalize this affection by saying: “It’s the great-grandchild of the Dada movement” or “I love laughing with my children” or “Pretty color make brain happy”, but what if this is the front lines of some weird midlife crisis? One day Spongebob, the next a steady diet of Froot Loops, and then suddenly you find yourself howling with fury when someone serves you orange juice instead of apple. It’s a slippery slope, that second childhood.

Still, the boy needs speech toys, so I guess it’s okay to see what they have online, as long as I don’t end up with my own set of Spongebob undies. (Although, that would be kind of awesome, now that I think about it.)

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Keeping warm Saturday, Jan 16 2010

Ah, winter in the New England countryside. If you’ve never experienced it, you might think it’s all fresh snow and crisp weather – snowy covered bridges, majestic evergreens, warming oneself at a woodstove, wearing ski sweaters, etc – but in truth, it’s more like…well, muddy slush, slippery roads, zero sunshine. You are stuck indoors most of the time, dealing with wet floors, wet boots, missing mittens and so forth. And have you ever tried getting warm by a woodstove? You become like the planet Mercury: frozen on one side and burning hot on the other. There is no opportunity to look chic in Nordic knitwear, either; the quest to stay warm turns you into a walking wardrobe. As I write this, I am wearing two shirts, a sweatshirt, a sweater, and a peacoat, long pants, inch-thick knee socks and boots. I am still not warm. I have not been warm since September.

Yesterday I was visiting my Grammie and we got on the subject of books while outside the wind howled through bare lilac branches and the sun began setting behind ominous banks of clouds while nearby chickadees, frozen solid on an overhead branch, plopped one by one into the six-foot-tall snowbank. “Weather like this,” Grammie said, “always reminds me to watch ‘The African Queen’.” And, just like that, I felt happy, because I too love The African Queen, the book version, by CS Forester, and I’d forgotten how perfect is is for reading in the winter. You know that scene where Rose and Alnutt fall in love after surviving the cataracts? There’s a gorgeous passage:

 The high banks here were not quite precipices, and there were numerous shelves in the rock bearing blue and purple flowering plants, which trailed shimmering wreaths down the steep faces…Under the rocky bank it was cool and delicious with the clear green water coursing alongside. There was no dust; there were no flies. It was no hotter than a summer noon in England.

Anyway, I have an old Modern Library copy of this fabulous book (on the dust jacket, “Romance triumphs over fate, tropical heat, and whizzing bullets!”) and I am going to be rereading it until springtime, I can tell. Any other warm books you could suggest would be wonderful – all I can think of to follow are “King Solomon’s Mines” (skipping the chapter where they lose a friend to hypothermia), “The Sea and the Jungle” and “Dune”.

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Naked people Saturday, Jan 9 2010

It’s hard to learn how to draw people from books. What you really need is an actual person, preferably a naked one, to stand there and pose for you; but it’s hard to find naked people in general, let alone in January, so when I want to practice figures I always end up sorting through my two standbys: an oversize printing of “Gray’s Anatomy” and Sarah Simblet’s “Anatomy for the Artist”.

Both these books are pretty useless for what I want to do, which is draw people who look like people. Gray’s tells you where the bones go, and what their names are, and offers obsessive details of metatarsals and kneecaps, but doesn’t talk about skin much. “Anatomy for the Artist” is more misleading – it has pages of glossy pictures, very beautiful to look at, of posed models and close-up body parts, and at first glance you say, “Aha! Two full pages of buttocks! With instructional text on how to draw buttocks! Brilliant!”

But it’s ultimately not very helpful for practice. Something about the photographs are actually a little disturbing, like the photographer found a race of aliens who look like people but are fit and good-looking, with perfect teeth and musculature, who do not age, have babies, or get fat. Against a black or white background, they are posed standing, sitting, crouching, bending, or lying sinuously on the floor. Their muscles are sharply defined and you can see how the bones of each joint fit together. They gleam. They are amazingly boring to draw.

Copying perfect torsos from “Anatomy for Artists” makes me nostalgic for the life drawing we did in college. We all had giant newsprint pads clipped to easels, and the requisite charcoals, and on a sunny day the professor would open all the shades and make us use natural light. And the models were wonderful – paunchy, tattooed, fat and skinny in unexpected areas, curved and flattened, hairy, elderly, buck-toothed, pierced, human. After the session they’d slip on a bathrobe, light a cigarette, and leave while we were getting graded (I was proud to have a solid B- average) and trying to un-blacken our fingernails. I miss those models.

“Find a lean friend,” advises “Anatomy for the Artist” “Pose them next to the skeleton and observe how the musculature defines the structure of the body.” It does not say how to make friends with lean people – hang out at the gym? The beach? Put out a classified? Scout the protein-shake aisle at Wal-Mart? – and it also does not say how you can broach the subject of nude modeling (“Say, I have this plastic skeleton at home, and I’d love to have you stand naked next to it so I can observe how the musculature defines the structure of the body. Is that cool?”) to your lean friend.

But still, drawing people remains my main area of interest.Until I find my lean, exhibitionist friend, I am stuck with stupid “Anatomy for Artists” and Gray’s, and my fond memories of Life Drawing 1.

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Buying and Not Buying Sunday, Jan 3 2010

One evening a couple weeks ago I was out Christmas-shopping for books and I bought myself a copy of Judith Levine’s “I’m Not Buying it.” This book, which you have to pay for at the counter like any other book, comes with a price tag that reads: I’M NOT BUYING IT – $14, which I thought was funny. But the real reason I picked it up was because I had been dragging crabby kids around all day and I had maxed out my credit card on presents that I was not even sure my friends and family would enjoy. I guess I was hoping that “I’m Not Buying It” would tell me how to get out of the whole mess next year, perhaps by teaching me how to macramé plant holders.

Anyway, it was pretty interesting. Parts of it, like when the author meets a man who has no carbon footprint, or attends an anti-shopping rally on Black Friday, were downright inspiring; but then there were also a lot of navel-gazing chapters on subjects like: Now my friends have to buy my meal if they want to eat out with me – is this right? And There’s a cell phone tower going up across town, but do people really need cell phones? Because I don’t! And, Boy, I should really get rid of one of my three cars, but then how would I get to my second home? Speaking as someone who has had buy-nothing spells for deeper, more philosophical reasons, such as having no money, those parts came off as being a little obnoxious.

The parts I liked talked about the reasons behind why we buy what we buy, and how our deepest fears and anxieties play a part in putting stuff in the shopping cart. But the part that really spoke to me was about how reviewing what you already have can dissolve the urge to buy more.

So I counted up books, which took a whole afternoon, and in going through my shelves I found a whole bunch that I didn’t want. In the closet, the same thing happened: I weeded out two boxes of clothes and shoes that had apparently been sitting there unworn for a year or so. I sorted out the jewelry and the bobby pins and the odd little things I picked up in my travels, such as a cast-iron fish and a nonfunctioning barometer. I got rid of some tired-looking socks that were living between the back of my drawer and the dresser wall; I threw out some expired cosmetics; I went through my art supplies (why did I buy a $25 ½ inch filbert rabbithair paintbrush and then never use it?) and my old suitcases and my extremely valuable collection of old Vera scarves. When I was done I had a huge pile of Stuff I’d been hanging on to for no good reason, as well as a few things I’d lost and was happy to find again (hello little rabbithair brush! Come live with the other brushes!) and a long list of the books I love enough to keep dragging around with me forever.

The next day I went out and bought three vintage dresses, because there was space in the closet now, and I had cash from selling the extra books.

So obviously I am not in the serene, anti-consumerism mindset that Judith Levine was after she did her inventory. Maybe I missed something? Or maybe I just really like new dresses.

In conclusion, I absolutely think you should read “I’m Not Buying It”, especially if Christmas left you broke and mad. But please don’t buy it. Get it from the library, or read your friend’s copy, because you will be annoyed at paying $14 for a book that tells you how and why you should have hung on to your $14.

Also, I highly recommend taking an inventory of your stuff. That part was pretty fun.

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