NOTES

On Pomegranates and Life Stories: an Introduction

The real is not given to us: Einstein, Albert. ‘Reply to Criticisms’. Albert Einstein: Philosopher Scientist. Edited by Paul A. Schilpp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949, p. 680.

As a piece of a pomegranate: Song of Solomon 6:7. The Bible, authorised King James Version. Introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 50.

Loose photographs you can shuffle: Polizzotto, Carolyn. Pomegranate Season. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998.

About the pomegranate I must say nothing: Pausanias. Description of Greece 2.17.4. Translated by W.H.S. Jones. The Theoi Project, http://www.theoi.com, accessed 27 December 2010.

Reaching One Thousand

I have often admired the mystical way: Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Medici (1643). Great Literature Online, http://browne.classicauthors.net/ReligioMedici, accessed 27 December 2010.

The presence of odd family members: Siegel, Bryna. The World of the Autistic Child. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 92.

research has shown: Baron-Cohen, Simon et al. ‘Autism occurs more often in families of physicists, engineers and mathematicians,’ Autism 2 (1998): 296–301.

The American diagnostic bible on ‘mental disorders’: American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM IV). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994.

lack the ability to see ‘the big picture’, to integrate things and make sense of the world. Their ability to shift attention is also impaired: These are the weak central coherence and executive function theories respectively. See Frith, Uta. Autism: Explaining the Enigma, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

an extreme form of the ‘male’ or systematising brain: Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain. London: Penguin Books, 2004.

etymology of the word integer: Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Accessed online, http://www.oed.com, 27 December 2010.

Evidence for the human capacity for counting: Butterworth, Brian. What Counts: How Every Brain Is Hardwired for Math. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

the intimate architecture of the world: Szatmari, Peter. A Mind Apart: Understanding Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome. New York: Guildford Press, 2004, p. 15.

There are moments, as I’m falling into sleep: Tammet, Daniel. Born on a Blue Day: A Memoir of Asperger’s and an Extraordinary Mind. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006, pp. 9–10.

Raw Experience

What sweet Contentments doth the Soul: Drummond, William. The Works of William Drummond, of Hawthorden. Edinburgh, 1711. Google Books, www.books.google.com.au, accessed 27 December 2010.

Bryna Siegel explains: Siegel, Bryna. The World of the Autistic Child. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

In Buddhist cultures: Classen, Constance. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the senses in history and across culture. New York: Routledge, 1993.

In her book Worlds of Sense: Classen, Worlds of Sense.

In parts of India, smelling the head: Classen, Worlds of Sense, p. 99.

Diane Ackerman’s book: Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage Books, 1990, p. 308.

Classen suggests that smell is ‘by nature of great importance’: Classen, Worlds of Sense, p. 45.

Oliver Sacks argues: Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Pan Macmillan, 1985.

The Blank Face

The awful thing is that beauty: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Random House, 1995, p. 118.

When we call someone a genius: Nazeer, Kamran. Send in the Idiots: Stories from the other side of autism. London: Bloomsbury, 2006, p. 81.

Doreen Virtue: Virtue, Doreen. ‘Indigo, Crystal and Rainbow Children’, AngelTherapy.com, http://www.angeltherapy.com/article1.php. Accessed 1 December 2011. See also her books The Care and Feeding of Indigo Children (Hay House, 2001) and The Crystal Children (Hay House, 2003).

Other people want to protect them: Nazeer, Send in the Idiots, p. 159.

Cat balloon did not hear their loud cries: Morgan, Palo. Cat Balloon. Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1992.

‘cure or kill’ approach: Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and life writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 150.

Elspeth Probyn suggests: Probyn, Elspeth. Blush: Faces of Shame. Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2005.

Probyn quotes Gerhardt Piers: Probyn, Blush, p. 3.

Insight program: ‘Understanding Autism’, Insight, SBS Television, 8 August 2006. Online transcript, http://www.sbs.com.au/insight/archive, accessed 20 May 2007.

Cure Autism Now and Autism Speaks: Cure Autism Now and Autism Speaks merged in 2007. See http://www.autismspeaks.org.

Aspies for Freedom, for example, say: Aspies for Freedom, http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com, accessed 20 May 2007.

I am not a puzzle: Harrison, David and Tony Freinberg. ‘Autistic Liberation Front fights the “oppressors searching for a cure”’, The Telegraph (UK), 1 September 2005. Online at http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/showthread.php?tid=733, accessed 20 May 2007.

Winding

We are brought out of darkness: The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of Sacraments. London, 1660, p. 160. Google Books, accessed 27 December 2010.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers: Oxford University Press. Oxford Dictionary of English. Accessed online, 30 June 2008.

In his 1967 book The Empty Fortress: Bettelheim, Bruno. The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967.

According to Richard Pollack: Pollack, Richard D. The Creation of Dr B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim. Rockfeller Centre: Touchstone, 1997.

Even after the psychogenic approach to autism: Grinker, Roy Richard. Unstrange Minds: A Father Remaps the World of Autism. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2008, p. 97.

In 1997, Richard Pollack published: Pollack, The Creation of Dr B.

Writing about Paul Celan’s poem: Pollack, The Creation of Dr B, p. 143.

The Cage

The eyes of others our prisons: Woolf, Virginia. ‘An Unwritten Novel’. Monday or Tuesday. Project Gutenberg Australia, March 2002, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200211.txt, accessed 27 December 2010.

I have been reading Out of Africa: Blixen, Karen. Out of Africa. London: Putnam, 1937, pp. 269–70.

Telling an interrupted life requires: Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 58.

The ‘wreckage’ Frank discusses: Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, p. 60 .

Bonus

Too many have dispensed with: Albert Camus quoted in The International Thesaurus of Quotations. Edited by Rhonda Thomas Tripp. Cromwell, 1970. Google Books, accessed 27 December 2010.

The term bonus was originally: Oxford University Press. Oxford Dictionary of English. Accessed online, 30 June 2008.

Carer is a recently coined word: Oxford University Press. Oxford Dictionary of English. Accessed online, 30 June 2008.

I am reminded here of the French philosopher Louis Althusser: Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

In her book Ordinary Time, Nancy Mairs says: Mairs, Nancy. Ordinary Time: Cycles in marriage, faith and renewal. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 214.

The disability scholar Robert Murphy: Murphy, Robert F. The Body Silent. New York: WW Norton, 1990.

What Michael Bérubé calls: Bérubé, Michael. Life as We Know It. New York: Pantheon, 1996, p. 13.

Liminality, of course, may also be: Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Geometry of Echoes

And always, in our daydreams: Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. 7.

Is it, as Edward Relph says: Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976, p. 39.

When Simone Weil declares: Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. Translated by Arthur Wills. New York: Harper & Row, 1952, p. 43.

Our house is our corner of the world: Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 4.

The house of our childhood is: Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 15.

We do not have to be long in the woods: Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 185.

If the house is what Bachelard calls: Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 60.

As Mary Pershall describes it: Pershall, Mary. ‘A Home Away from Home’. Inner Cities: Australian women’s memory of place. Edited by Drusilla Modjeska. Ringwood: Penguin, 1989, pp. 111–17.

Carving, Forging, Stealing

Writers are natural murderers.: Freed, Lynn. Reading, Writing and Leaving Home: Life on the page. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Books, 2005, p. 30.

In Secrets, Sissela Bok defines: Bok, Sissela. Secrets: On the ethics of concealment and revelation. New York: Vintage, 1983, p. 10.

She says: ‘Claims to privacy …’: Bok, Secrets, p. 11.

Bok points out that ‘unwarranted access …’: Bok, Secrets, p. 27.

Bok argues in favour of: Bok, Secrets, p. 27.

This is really about power: Bok, Secrets, p. 282.

Paul John Eakin suggests that: Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 186.

Sidonie Smith suggests that: Smith, Sidonie. ‘Identity’s Body’. Autobiography and Postmodernism. Edited by Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters. Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1994, pp. 266–92.

She describes this as a form of ‘pathological ruthlessness’: Freed, Lynn. Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, p. 38.

Pumpkin Scones

School’s a weird thing: Depp, Johnny. Quoted on Thinkexist.com. Accessed 27 December 2010.

Gail Landsman has argued that: Landsman, Gail. ‘Does God Give Special Kids to Special Parents?: Personhood and the Child with Disabilities as Gift and as Giver’. Transformative Motherhood: On giving and getting in a consumer culture. Edited by Linda L. Layne. New York: New York University Press, 1999: pp. 133–65.

According to Robert Weiss: Weiss, R.S. Loneliness: the experience of emotional and social isolation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973.

I have seen research that suggests: Bauminger, Nirit and Connie Kasari. ‘The Experience of Loneliness and Friendship in Autism’. The Research Basis for Autism Intervention. Edited by Eric Schopler et al. New York: Klumer Academic, 2001, pp. 151–69. Bauminger, Nirit, Cory Shulman and Galit Agam. ‘Peer Interaction and Loneliness in High-Functioning Children with Autism’. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 3.5 (2003): 489–507.

As Heinrich Pestalozzi said: Pestalozzi, Heinrich. Quoted in Miller, Alice. The Drama of Being a Child. Translated by Ruth Ward. London: Virago, 1987, p. 52.

Frog in Girlland

There is no greater agony: Angelou, Maya. Quoted in Britt, Rugen. Black and Powerful: A career guide for tomorrow’s top leaders. Airleaf Publishing, 2008. Google Books, accessed 27 December 2010, http://books.google.com.au.

series of stories by Arnold Lobel: Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books are Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970), Frog and Toad Together (1972), Frog and Toad All Year (1976) and Days with Frog and Toad (1979), all published in New York by Harper Collins.

one of the diagnostic criteria: American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV).

I found myself reading a research paper: Low, Jason, Elizabeth Goddard and Joseph Melser. ‘Generativity and Imagination in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from individual differences in children’s impossible entity drawings’. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27.2 (2009): 425–44.

Oliver Sacks compares: Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars. London: Pan Macmillan, 1995, p. 275.

Similarly, we enacted many times the moment: Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 32.

biscuits, potted lobster, sardines: Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, p. 19.

As disabled dancer Neil Marcus: Marcus, Neil. Quoted in Levin, Mike. ‘The Art of Disability: An interview with Tobin Siebers’. Disability Studies Quarterly, 30.2 (2010): n.p. Accessed online, 27 December 2010, http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1263/1272.

Tito Mukhopadhyay, an autistic poet: Mukhopadhyay, Tito Rajarshi. ‘Questions and Answers’. Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone. Douglas Biklen et al. New York: New York University Press, 2005, p. 120.

two theories about autism: On weak central coherence theory see Frith, Uta. Autism: Explaining the Enigma. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. On theory of mind see Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Bruce Mills has argued: Mills, Bruce. ‘Autism and Imagination’. Autism and Representation. Edited by Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 117–32.

Oliver Sacks (agreeing with Coleridge): Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, pp. 230–1.

In his book How Our Lives Become Stories: Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, p. 123.

In his work with people with neurological damage: Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, p. 105.

Sidonie Smith, for example: Smith, Sidonie. ‘Taking It to a Limit One More Time: Autobiography and Autism’. Getting A Life: Everyday uses of autobiography. Edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 226–46.

Developmental psychologists have shown: See for example Siegel, Daniel. The Developing Mind. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.

Eakin argues that the development of: Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, p. 123.

It was as if he had no notion of: On the private self and other types of self, see Neisser, Ulrich. ‘Concepts and Self-concepts’. The Conceptual Self in Context: Culture, experience, self-understanding. Edited by Ulrich Neisser and David Jopling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Fancy Footwork

The meeting of two personalities: Jung, Carl G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Classics, 2001, pp. 49–50.

Jim Sinclair, an autistic rights activist, says: Sinclair, Jim. ‘Bridging the Gaps: an Inside-Out View of Autism (or, Do You Know What I Don’t Know?)’. High-Functioning Individuals with Autism. Edited by Eric Schopler and Gary B. Mesibov. New York: Plenum Press, 1992, pp. 294–302.

My selfhood is undamaged: Sinclair, ‘Bridging the Gaps’, pp. 294–302.

SavedAspie says: Posted response to ‘Autism and Empathy’ post, 4 April 2009. Accessed online, http://aspie-bird.blogspot.com/2009/04/autism-and-empathy-grief-about-missing.html, 27 December 2010.

theory of mind: See Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness.

Joel Smith says: Smith, Joel. Blog entry, accessed 10 June 2009, but this post is now archived. Joel Smith’s current blog is at http://thiswayoflife.org/index.html, accessed 9 November 2011.

Jim Sinclair makes a similar point: Sinclair, Jim. ‘Thoughts About Empathy’. Jim Sinclair, http://web.archive.org/web/20090321213935/http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/empathy.htm, accessed 9 November 2011.

Recent research on empathy: Rogers, Kimberley et al. ‘Who Cares? Revisiting Empathy in Asperger’s Syndrome’. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37 (2007): 709–15, p. 713.

although Sinclair wonders how this can be called: Sinclair, Jim. ‘If you love something, you don’t kill it’. Jim Sinclair, http://web.archive.org/web/20081020061906/http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/killing.htm, accessed 9 November 2011.

books like Teaching Children with Autism How to Mind-Read: Howlin, Patricia, Simon Baron-Cohen and Julie Hadwin. Teaching Children with Autism How to Mind-Read: A Practical Guide. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999.

I read Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone: Douglas Biklen et al. Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

I read: ‘Sometimes Grandad and me play snap …’: Child, Lauren. Clarice Bean That’s Me. London: Orchard Books, 1999.

Gernsbacher says that: Gernsbacher, Morton Ann. ‘Toward a Behavior of Reciprocity’. Journal of Developmental Processes, 1.1 (2006): 139–52, Accessed online 10 June 2009, http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/gernsbacher_reciprocity.pdf, p. 141.

DIR or ‘Floortime’: The DIR model (which encompasses ‘Floortime’) was developed by Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder. See the Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders website, www.icdl.com, accessed 10 June 2009.

The Shape of a Life

I will tell you a secret: Johnson, Susan. A Better Woman: A memoir. Sydney: Random House, 1999, p. 86.

her book Poppy: Modjeska, Drusilla. Poppy. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1990.

John Bayley’s book Iris: Bayley, John. Iris: A memoir of Iris Murdoch. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, 1998.

Jane Smiley notes: Smiley, Jane. ‘A Reluctant Muse Embraces His Task, and Everything Changes’. Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times. Introduction by John Darnton. New York: Times Books, 2002, p. 219.