I can't wait to read this book. It was reviewed in the Weekend Australian July 30-31 2005 "The genetics of genius". I found the review by Bryan Appleyard rather grating as he referred to aspies as "sufferers" throughout the review.
Title of book:
The Genesis of Artistic Creativity:
Asperger's Syndrome and the Artsby Michael Fitzgerald
About the book:
http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/book.php/is...4310-334-6
Thanks for posting that, I went and ordered it immediately, it sounds like a must read for every serious Aspie! :wink:
I ordered it at Amazon.ca for $17.95! You must have seen it in hardcover to be that expensive.
Books, especially specially ordered imported books, seem to be overpriced in Australia. Back when the govt. was bringing in the Goods and Services Tax some political parties argued that books should not be taxed, but unfortunately they lost. I think the price of books here is the reason why bookshops seem to have so little turnover. I like hanging about in bookshops reading the books for free, and I see the same books sitting on the shelves month after month. But when we go to secondhand book sales the crowds of buyers are like a flock of stampeding cattle. It's dog-eat-dog and full-body-contact at the charity book sales!
If I see the new book at the bookshop I'll have a squiz and see what it is like. I hope the author doesn't use the word "sufferer" on every page. I can't help wondering if these writers who routinely refer to aspies as "sufferers" have ever met an aspie and have ever asked an aspie if they suffer or think of themself as a "sufferer"?
Importing books into the UK is very expensive, firstly the postage, then you can be charged import duty if it goes over a certain amount.
The book is published by Jessica Kingsley, so I guess there shouldn't be any problems with availability in the UK.
I imagine that if anyone wanted to compile the mother-of-all lists of famous people thought to have been autistic, they could just comb through this book and add to their list as they go. If the author successfully argues that many people in the arts had autistic traits, it would certainly raise questions about the importance of the supposed "lack of imagination" in autism.
Poor old Vincent Van Gogh is being given yet another diagnosis! His eccentricity and troubles have been previously explained as the effects of absinthe poisoning, temporal lobe epilepsy, schizophrenia, sunstroke, neurosis, bipolar disorder and two different varieties of the clap. I've only got one thing to say about Vincent; autism doesn't make one cut off one's own ear. I still possess my original matching set of ears, as do all of the people who I know who have autistic traits.
I hope I don't appear to be promoting this book, as I've not read it, but here is a list of the famous people that appear to be discussed in the book:
Jonathan Swift
Hans Christian Andersen
Herman Melville
Lewis Carroll
William Butler Yeats
Arthur Conan Doyle
George Orwell
Bruce Chatwin
Spinoza
Immanuel Kant
Simone Weil
A.J. Ayer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Ludwig van Beethoven
Erik Satie
Béla Bártok
Glenn Gould
Vincent van Gogh
Jack B. Yeats
L.S. Lowry
Andy Warhol.
Nice to see an Aussie in the list. I'm not surprised to see Lewis Carroll in the list, he was a true eccentric with unusual intellectual abilities.
The other day I was listening to a discussion of the Sherlock Holmes and Watson characters, as a literary phenomenon. It just confirmed my opinion that Holmes is a classic aspie fictional character (not my idea, someone else made the observation first). There was discussion about how much Holmes was a reflection of Conan Doyle's personality. I guess there must have been a lot of similarity between the writer and the character if they have both been identified as aspies. I don't believe it is possible to create a convincing aspie fictional character if the creator does not have an aspie element in their own personality. There's an Australian comedy character that is so autistic in so many different ways, and displays an uncommon insight into aspiness, that I just can't believe the character's creator isn't seriously autistic himself.
I agree about Sherlock Holmes, it's one of the very few fictional works I can read and focus on. Others seem to have far too much superfluous detail, multiple meaningless characters, and it ends up confusing.
I finally received the book yesterday, and have read quite a bit in it. And I am finding many similarities in the people portrayed and myself (as I should, of course). A lot of the things the writer says are very insightful and accurate of autistic people.
Arle, I'd love to read about that well-known Swede if you write a piece about that person. I personally don't think there is any scientific reason why you couldn't diagnose AS in a person deceased if you have enough good evidence to work with, from either interviewing live people who remember the person or from accounts from many different people and factual evidence. When clinicians diagnosed autism in live people they seek info from other people any way, so I don't see why the same method couldn't be applied to a life that was within living memory.
The more I read about Newton the more I am sure he was an aspie. You only need to look at the scant facts about his solitary life and achievements and his writings to know for sure he was a very unusual person. And some personal accounts of the less public aspects of his life are so typically aspie and eccentric that I find them amusing.
I have some questions to ask people who have read the book. Did you think there were any people in the book who were not aspie? Were Warhol's underpants and huge collection of boxes metioned in the book?
I have read all of Andy's diaries (which were huge) he ate a tin of soup every day for dinner, literally every day. That was his inspiration for using the soup cans as art.
The soup thing is very interesting. After my (probably NT) mother died, my youngest brother (mostly NT) stayed living with my dad (an Aspie). After my mother's death, my father refused to eat anything for supper other than warmed up food from a can for at least two or three years. Norbert tried to get him to take turns cooking, but my father refused. He wouldn't even eat Norbert's cooking (which isn't bad at all).
Only when Norbert's girlfriend (now his wife of eight years) moved in, she managed to finally convince him to try her cooking. She had a way with him that made him feel loved and valued (my mother never stopped putting him down and making him feel second class), and managed to win him over. She looked after him (he was truly incapable of looking after himself) until he died eight years ago. I will always be thankful to her for that.
Warhol seems to have been a real creature of habit because I have read that he wore green undies every day and went to church regularly too. I've also read that Warhol would never eat or dance in public, so maybe there was some kind of anxiety or extreme fussiness associated with food.
Having a preference for eating food from a can rather than food prepared by another person is a thing that I can very much identify with. I often prefer food from a can because I honestly don't believe most people have a genuine understanding and committment to proper food hygiene and I just cannot make myself eat anything that I don't trust 100%. Food from a can comes from some factory which I trust so much more than most amateur cooks.
A while ago my husband and I were invited to someone elses' place to visit and eat. I noticed that they didn't bother to wash the spuds after peeling them or wash the fresh salad vegies before serving them up. They spilt some soup over the kitchen bench and then scooped it up with their hands back into the saucepan, and God only knows what they had done to the soup before that. I couldn't eat a thing. I just wished they would open a can and heat something up in a CLEAN saucepan and put it on a CLEAN plate next to some CLEAN cutlery. And when I helped to dry up the dishes I had to send items back to the dish washer person often because they still had lots of chunks of crud on them. PUKE!
Having a preference for eating food from a can rather than food prepared by another person is a thing that I can very much identify with. I often prefer food from a can because I honestly don't believe most people have a genuine understanding and committment to proper food hygiene and I just cannot make myself eat anything that I don't trust 100%. Food from a can comes from some factory which I trust so much more than most amateur cooks.
Honestly, I had to laugh when reading this, and your story of being guests with people who cared nothing about hygiene. But if you think that food from a factory is more hygienic, you're mistaken.
For instance, did you know that in wieners, there is a certain percentage of mice and rats allowed, that fall into the processors during the process of making them? And of course, they are WHOLE mice, not parts of them, either. I don't eat wieners or sausage now if I can help it.
My mother told me that she went to a chocolate factory once, and it was so gross that she didn't eat chocolate for years. The factory was filthy!
So, personally, for the most part, I like eating my own food, and I avoid canned food for the most part. Because you never know what is in canned food, and you don't need all the additives, either (like MSG, hydrogenated vegetable oil and many other things that should never be put in any body).
Mind you, I'd be grossed out if I'd be expected to eat food prepared like you described. Yuck!
Arle, when finding out about some nasty things people did, that doesn't surprise me. After all, Aspies are still humans, too, and therefore nobody can expect them to be more perfect than the general population. So, Orwell was cruel and violent to a degree. A lot of NTs are cruel and violent, too.
Quote from book author
"... But it also gives hope, people are always talking about the deficits; they are able to do this, not able to do that, they are not able to do the other and what I want to say is that there are things that they can do that are 100 times better than that of any normal person. I want to give a message of hope and I want to focus on the positive for a change, rather than focusing on the negative"
Quote from Arle
The book is very good, Fitzgerald coins the term 'Asperger savant', which is when special talents are combined with a high level of functioning in people with Asperger's syndrome. In short, Asperger savants are aspies with splinter skills.
It sounds like the book is generally a positive contribution to writing and scholarshpic about AS, but I don't believe that convincing the world of NTs that aspies or auties can have exceptional talents will do, or already has done, very much to alter the pervasive belief that autism/AS is a tragedy and a thing that should be the target of interventions, selective abortions, preventions or cures.
I speak from personal experience. After I told one family member that I thought I was somewhere on the autistic spectrum, I got a phone call later from that person. This relative told me that they knew that AS could be associated with important talent in things like maths. I thought "So @#$%ing what?" It just sounded to me like my relative had just quoted some factiod that they had read in some book. The relative knew that I had never shown any special talent or interest in maths (or they should have known), so what relevance did that fact have to me? My relative didn't really have any more knowledge of AS than they could have guessed from watching "Rain Man". Once again I felt that I was in a situation in which a relative (who is supposed to be a close relative but really isn't) was demonstrating to me how very little they actually knew or understood me as a person, and know why it is that some of my "closest" NT relatives don't really know me as a person, they just aren't very interested, because they don't find me to be a fun person to be with.
As this relative continued to talk it became obvious that they still viewed AS as some kind of tragedy or emergency. I made it clear that I disagreed, I never got the chance to explain my point of view, and we haven't spoken since.
Are the terms "savant" or "splinter skills" really the correct terms to use when discussing aspies who have made great accomplishments in the world and to the world at large?If Mozart or Newton or Borcherds are/were Aspergers savants, then how would you describe the abilities of NT composers or scientists or mathematicians who have achievements of the same type and importance? Are they NT savants? Gifted? But can't aspies also be intellectually gifted? I don't believe the notion of autistic savant skills does anything at all to highlight the value of autistic people because it still leaves the question of "Are they fully human?" wide open. I'd prefer to have a regular job and the same human rights as everyone else, rather than a starring role in a freak show.
What I would really like is for some author to say "Autistic people can be smarter than the avergae person in a number of different ways, and autistic people have value as workers and members of the community, and are just as human and deserving of rights as anyone. There are autistic people out there in the community, living in the suburbs, living their lives while facing difficulties without any assistance or recognition." I'd be thrilled if I read that in some book.