Hieronymo’s mad againe

Asperger’s syndrome, we are informed, is to be removed from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which essentially means that psychiatrists in the United States will no longer be able to use it to end the sentence “You’ve got –––.” Lucy Berrington of the Asperger’s Association of New England expresses the disquiet of many, although the points being made bounce around somewhere on the border between Orwell’s Newspeak and Anselm’s ontological argument; if there suddenly isn’t a word for something, does it cease to exist? However, Ms Berrington rather capsizes her argument by placing Asperger’s in “the parade of neurologically based eccentricities”, which seems to support the notion that it’s not so much an illness, more a harmless personality trait, rather like an excessive fondness for a particular TV show. She also uses – several times – the phrase “the Asperger’s community” which, since one of the characteristics of people with the condition is social ineptitude, I find rather amusing. Sorry about that. (If you’re interested, I dealt with the whole community malarkey a few years back.)

I wouldn’t argue that people diagnosed with Asperger’s don’t have real problems, but I do wonder whether it might soon join the vague words used to explain away deaths in centuries gone by, all those agues and fits and surfeits and fevers. Here’s the writer Benjamin Nugent, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s in his teens:

Under the rules in place today, any nerd, any withdrawn, bookish kid, can have Asperger syndrome... The definition should be narrowed. I don’t want a kid with mild autism to go untreated. But I don’t want a school psychologist to give a clumsy, lonely teenager a description of his mind that isn’t true.

And I rather see where he’s coming from. When I was about seven years old, my teachers expressed concern about my tendency to switch off in class, which sometimes manifested itself in wandering out of the classroom and hiding in the toilet. First they thought there might be something wrong with my bladder – nobody bothered to ascertain that I wasn’t actually doing anything in the toilet, just sitting and thinking – then they wondered whether I might be unable to cope with the work, which in those dim and distant days would mean I was educationally subnormal. So I had a little chat with the educational psychologist. Had I been 15 years younger though, she might have been able to reach for the rubber stamp that said “Asperger’s”, and I certainly fitted – and still fit – the bill for this and other autistic spectrum disorders: socially awkward; insensitive to the social clues that others give off; unable to make eye contact; physically uncoordinated; obsessed with factual trivia; quite fond of Doctor Who. That sort of thing. Instead, she declared that I was, in her considered professional opinion, “bored”. Which seems about right, although it hardly qualifies as an eccentricity, does it? Maybe they’ll let me join their community.

Kindle wakes

Jonathan Franzen hates e-books! But he is wrong, so wrong! They are good! Well, some of them are. Look, you can buy this one by the Shark Blokes, which is full of lists and sarcasm. Or this one by Dr Hocking, which is about ice cream. Or even this one by Jonathan Franzen, but you’d probably better not, because he might get upset. Maybe someone should just steal his glasses. He likes that sort of thing.

Someone’s got to do it

On a recent episode of the weirdly compelling quiz show Pointless, a competing pair delighted the hosts, Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, by announcing that they were catastrophe modellers; only to be outdone by the next couple, who make a living by dressing up as zombies. I rather suspect that the next series will feature Professor Kam Wing Chan of the University of Washington, who has apparently “made a career out of correcting people's exaggerated claims about Chinese population statistics”. What’s the oddest job description you’ve had; or that you’ve seen applied to others?

In dreams

Developers in Switzerland are planning a project that will house people with dementia in a mock-1950s village. Most of us who have spent time with someone suffering from Alzheimer’s or a similar condition will have noticed that long-term memories often remain clear long after the banal minutiae of today has become irreversibly fuzzy; the idea here, presumably, is that if someone thinks it’s 1952, why not create an environment that supports that illusion, free from any disturbing references to the recent. The present is a foreign country; we do things differently here.

One does wonder, though, whether the 1950s that will be created outside Berne will be an accurate replica, or one mediated through multiple subsequent representations of community life, whether it’s the wholesome innocence of Happy Days or the dark-underbelly school of David Lynch, The Truman Show or The Prisoner: carers dressed as gardeners and hairdressers will ensure that nobody leaves the village. Once again, we have a perfect simulacrum, a replica of something that never existed. I can see a small, silver-haired army shuffling across the trimmed lawns and past the hat shop, muttering “That is not what I meant at all; that is not it, at all.”

Komickino

Long overcoats have gloomed their disapproval at news of Disney bringing out a t-shirt that squeezes the cover image of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album into the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. True, it’s a bit tacky, but I’m not sure that we should make the patronising assumption that those responsible don’t appreciate the bleak resonance of Peter Saville’s original design. It’s simply an act of recuperation, the absorption and appropriation of something that was once radical and challenging into the big, comforting womb of consumer capitalism. As such, it’s a) been going on for decades and b) a belated act of revenge for all the indignities that have been inflicted on the blameless rodent in the past in the name of détournement, recuperation’s persistent mirror – a process that increasingly feels like scrabbling for the crumbs that fall from capitalism’s table then waiting until capitalism has gone to the toilet and putting the crumbs back on the table in an amusing pattern.

PS: And now... Public Image Limited in Primark!

Sixteen sexual positions on the sand

Annie mentioned Philip Larkin’s poem Breadfruit, which got me thinking about some of the white, male inhabitants of Bangkok, negotiating the narrow line between depravity and pathos, as I’ve discussed in the past on CNN (see here and here). But then I thought a little deeper, and although Larkin’s specifically discussing the hopeless erotic fantasies of adolescent and/or senescent males, there’s more going on. The “dream of naked native girls” is any fond delusion in the head of anyone, whether a youthful yearning or a consolation in old age.

But while we’re on the subject of preposterous old predators surrounded by nubile flesh, a YouTube trawl provoked by the sad loss of Etta James somehow ended up here:

Citation not required

So, where were you when Wikipedia went off on its 24-hour strop? The inevitable one-liners about journalists and students suffering emotional meltdown in the absence of their fountain of facts did raise a few questions. I mean, is it OK to use Wikipedia as a source provided you attribute and cite appropriately? Or has the haranguing pedantry of the Wiki editors forced us into a state of neurotic overcitation?

I’ve succumbed to this foible in the past, desperately ploughing through some arcane text that I haven’t really read so as to give a vaguely credible sheen to my inane ramblings. A little Adorno or McLuhan goes a long way. But Simon Reynolds has a better tactic, acknowledging that something is moderately interesting, but not important enough for a full-blown footnote. As he says in Retromania: “‘Plus/and’, a philosophical term of uncertain origins (I’m told Deleuze and Guattari used it), is the buzz concept.” The vague “I’m told...” is the clever bit. The Wikipedants would insist that he identify the person who told him.

Barbed

There is a Facebook campaign afoot to encourage Mattel to bring out a bald Barbie, to offer encouragement to girls who have lost their hair because of cancer treatment. While I can’t argue with the core motivation at work here – making sick children feel a bit happier – I do have a few qualms about what appears to be the endgame. Rather than toe-poking the whole ghastly Barbie aesthetic into the prehistoric swamp where it properly belongs, these well-meaning agitators just seek to shift the parameters a little: it is as important as ever to be a beewootiful puhwincess, it seems, but you can still achieve that goal even if you’re as hairless as a porn star’s undercarriage and throwing up every few hours.

Moreover, the campaigners have apparently missed the chance to offer a sense of empowerment to the children on whose behalf they claim to act. Want a bald Barbie? Get a normal Barbie; cut its hair off. And the same goes for those who prefer their anatomically unfeasible homunculi to be black or amputees or multiply pierced; do it yourself. Many was the happy hour I spent inflicting ghastly tortures on my Doctor Who doll, including a doomed attempt to create a functioning iron maiden from Lego. Are kids today really so incapable of such acts of creative destruction? Answers, if there are any, to be carved into the severed head of Action Man and sent to the usual address.