[Probably not such a] Naughty Boy, Sam Smith - La la la (Lyrics / Lyric Video / Letra) #songlyricsunday

7clouds videos are awesome - along with Rachel Reyes - they are my first choice for videos which emphasise lyricism.



and here come the words [thought NOT the style!] for my choice of #songlyricsunday for 5 January 2020:

[Intro] Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain) [Verse 1] Hush, don't speak When you spit your venom, keep it shut I hate it When you hiss and preach About your new messiah cause your theories catch fire [Bridge] I can't find your silver lining I don't mean to judge But when you read your speech, it's tiring Enough is enough [Hook] I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it, I'll find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na [Verse 2] If our love is running out of time I won't count the hours, rather be a coward When our words collide I'm gonna drown you out before I lose my mind [Bridge] I can't find your silver lining I don't mean to judge But when you read your speech, it's tiring Enough is enough [Hook] I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it I'll find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na , la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, oh) Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain) I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it I find a way to block it, I go I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak (when you speak) Cause if my heart can't stop it I find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain)

And then I realise there's a reason that YouTube does that when it comes to lyrics - or the 7clouds people did what they did.



When I was a little girl I discovered author Dorothy Edwards and illustrator Shirley Hughes for the first time in a simple novel / anecdote format - the series My naughty little sister.



It was one of my first conscious trips to a beach house; subject to a friend from the civil service.



So in the best traditions, or perhaps defiant/oblivious of these same traditions, I wrecked the entertainment room with Trivial Pursuit cards all over the floor.



The outdoor landscape of that beach house though! It had a big tree at the back. I was trying to trust trees and treehouses again after I had a nasty splinter at home walking on the top of the house [my treehouse had two floors] and it was on my foot. I remember going on the porch to get the splinter out with a needle.



Some three weeks before [12 December 1990] the wonders of the video cassette recorder were revealed to me and one of my very first picks was Pippi Longstocking which was a highly musical version and vivid. I had read the Astrid Lindgren books first in the library especially Pippi in the South Sea Islands with my grandparents so I knew the Ville Villa Kuella.



And Scrubbing Day was incredible - so was Running Away and the whole The First Noël feeling when Pippi and friends came to the orphanage. I loved the Head Girl - the first I recognised as Head Girl. I had not even read Blyton school stories yet in January 1991 - that pleasure was to be some eight months away with Elizabeth Allen and The naughtiest girl in the school.



I too had been considered - one of - the naughtiest girls in my school. I think of Hermoine Granger and that scene in the film of The Philosopher's / Sorcerer's Stone.

That witch really needs to sort out her priorities! - Ron Weasley - Harry and Hermoine's friend

One of the naughty things I did was blow on another student's whistle with the residue of a frozen ice. I did not quite have the mens rea involved [guilty mind in Latin] because I wanted to know how Melisande's whistle worked and if it had nuts in it like the Physical Education teacher's whistle did. The Phys Ed teacher was yet another champion of mine - and a broker into the system. Some years later on she would have us learn and support Italian lessons. And because of this she was a really strong connector - especially when it came to a question on Copernicus/Kopernik when we were studying the stars and astronomy.



Love La la la because it has the idea of preach speech in it and it has been so popular in so many countries.



Here is a quote that shows what I [and Beverley Eley] mean by PREACH SPEECH - it is also a good introduction to a book which showed me so much about biographical craft and graft - The book of David - it is also good for anyone who wants to know It's all right to be different:

[... earlier there was something about Democritus and the atom in that paragraph]Not only is his memory phenomenal, his wit is dry and clever. One day he walked into a conversation about homilies, proverbs and adages. After patting and kissing those close at hand [my emphasis], he walked away with the comment, 'Preach speech ... it's preach speech'.

By what yardstick do we measure someone like the eccentric, yet greatly gifted, David Helfgott? [says Eley on page 7 of The book of David in its 5th printing from 1997]

Eley and Helfgott [David and Gillian] are very good friends and her biographical practice is exemplary. Hoping the Gleniffer house where she and her husband John [who The book of David is dedicated to - for being someone who BELIEVES IN LOYALTY FRIENDSHIP AND JUSTICE - if books were tablets and stones - they would be carved in like that] is okay and the land too. That land is called the Promised Land and again Eley and David Helfgott are neighbours.



Had a great time watching Marianne and Leonard - words of love - so many people came by including in groups. Of course So long Marianne is a very important song. And Marianne was such a very generous and kind person. I think of Axel who is over 60 now and was only 6 months old when Leonard Cohen came into his Hydra life - in all my years I had never heard it pronounced like that so I could imitate it and reference it. Shows you how few of my resources are Greek. And the archivist really made the film, I do believe. I would sell the farm on it. Along with Broomfield of course who had a connection - intimate connection - with Ihlen from Oslo [and Paris and London and Hydra and one more place]



What did I want to talk about with the Naughty Little Sister and my experience?



When she was in a school choir one day; she and her friend Bad Harry la la la la'ed to the Christmas carols particularly Away in a manger which was the very first Christmas carol I connected with in 1985-86. Another early one was The first Noël - ten years later I connected so hard I named a character Noelle. She belongs to the gaggle of Gilberts - the five who were born on a student exchange. [and, yes, that is five at the same time in the same caul so to speak!]



And then I remember the Blubber singing lessons in Judy Blume - especially Miss Rochelle - great name for a musical person. My 1999 self thought this too - one of the times she and my 1994 self were in agreement [the former self was the one who read the book for the first time - and she was up for it six months later when she was sick and the world didn't make sense - she also enjoyed Paul Jennings' Quirky Tales where Linda thought salt was sugar and sugar was salt and No was yes]. So there was a young girl called Rochelle who absolutely loved music and was a flower girl. And then there was breathing and melody and harmony which I confess I really did not get until Grizel Cochrane had lost her harmony book in The head girl of the Chalet School which came with me in a Lion King bag along with a manuscript - that one was about a student called Tadeusz Meliński who studied temporarily at the London Progressive College. I got quite far in the writing of Educating Tadeusz laying and paving the ground [like crazy paving in my last].



Yours truly has also discovered Music from Ceefax which is the British Broadcasting Corporation teletext service. Especially looking for ocean music and ship music and sea shanties. After I watched Little Women in the Greta Gerwig mode and went to a park and a public house, I found many of them. It was when I became sick of Scouting and Guiding songs around the campfire and the Jamboree setting that I wanted to find some sea songs.

Many of you who have read Blubber will remember that Jill Brenner was quite the stamp collector - and she knew how to bargain and broker and write good letters. What she was not so good at doing was keeping her nails tidy and unbitten. Now nerves will do that to any person - and she was carrying around the sort of nervery which would make an animal pace and scratch and do various other displacement behaviours.

People often feel misplaced and displaced too. Especially when they feel their love is running out of time and that their words mean nothing.

Hope your lives feel Funktastic this week and for the Epiphany tomorrow. Imagine that - the first Monday of 2020!

Finally deck the halls with boughs of holly fa la la la la.

La la la  was released at the Jingle Bell Ball of 2013 and subsequently charted in many nations. And it had so many remixes - I chose the Sam Smith one because it had lots of resonance and was best-known perhaps ...

In Australia it peaked at number five; hit number one in the Commonwealth of Independent States chart as it did in the Czech Republic; number two in Denmark and Germany; number six in France; and it's probably time to point out the Hungarian charts and their genre diversity as well as media diversity [stream and radio]. A lot of central European nations [Poland too] have their dance charts and in this La la la came out 9th in Poland and 6th in Hungary. Seems the Romanians loved it and put it on number 1. Top 15 in Venezuela - 14th actually - awesome!

The US charts were much more mixed. Somehow the Brits bought more than a million copies. At least two charts showed top 20 and one was actually 10th. The Rhythmic seems open for debate.

And when hearts can't stop it they find a way to block it.

Trying to block this earworm [though I don't want to so it will stay] of La La Land which I think many of my #songlyricsunday companions and compeers have chosen.

 

#31for21 - Poetry and Connections

In 1992, I had an iron and gold standard:

Think about how it would be if Princess Dani read it.

That may have saved me from some of my more egregious errors. I was going to make others of them regardless.

Because once you realise people who rock the 21st chromosome can read and write - you have a responsibility.

And once you ask - "Why in the hell don't we read and write their poetry"? - there's a connection.

Five years later - 1997 - Rosemary Crossley wrote a chapter in Speechless called What is the product of 3 times 21?

Because I was a lightning mathematician and had other STEM interests at that time - my heroes included people like Albert Einstein and Henry Cavendish - I would have said, "That's easy. It's 63, like 7 times 9".

And the Nobel Prizes for Physiology and Medicine; Physics and Chemistry are out. And Literature tonight. We have to wait another month for Peace.




In that eighth chapter, there are three young ladies - Jan; Heather and Fiona.

Jan is the one who writes poetry.

Her family come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and their general and academic English did not then extend to poetry.

In fact people with Trisomy 21 have been writing - and publishing - poetry for at least 60 years, even before Lejeune put out his genetic discovery to the world.

It's hard to read a poem to yourself -
You cannot hear the words.
You have to imagine the sound, the rhythm. The sense is there, the feeling lost.
Imagine writing a poem without being able to read it aloud. It's like playing a record in a soundproof room -
It's going round, but no-one on the outside can hear.
If I was deaf, would it be the same or different?

[Jan, Speechless, page 132].

"Pretty; shy; slightly built". So far; so wonderful and even enviable and highly valued.

She studied at a special school for the intellectually impaired - the type that Princess Dani eventually went to in two or three years from the time I studied with her.

[...]Jan was very interested in DEAL's communication equipment. She went to the typewriter of her own accord and began typing quickly without assistance. Like most people with Down syndrome she had low muscle tone, but despite this she appeared to have few problems with her fine motor skills - she looked at what she was doing and she was able to use her hands and fingers well. All that came out, however, was a few words she'd practised typing a lot previously - mum, dad, Jan.
I wanted to see what she would do if she was slowed down, but for a shy girl Jan was surprisingly determined about her independence. I finally got her to accept some help - I held on to one end of a rod, she held the other with her left and best hand and typed with one finger. The resistance I provided slowed her down very substantially, and the quality of her output increased as her speed fell. I gave Jan a picture of a cow and asked her to write me a sentence about it. Instead she typed THIS TYPING IS HARD. I HAVE TO THINK. That was, of course, the aim of the exercise. Previously Jan had simply been repeating some overlearnt motor patterns, virtually without conscious thought.
Jan was one of those unlucky children in whom shyness and fear of failure combine to give the appearance of stubbornness and stupidity. She was so afraid of getting things wrong - afraid with good reason - that she preferred not to try them at all, so afraid of giving the wrong answer that she preferred not to speak at all. This got her in trouble constantly. Unfortunately, Jan had severe word- finding problems which limited her ability to get her meaning across and restricted her to very simple utterances.[...[

Yes. People who look stubborn and stupid are not stubborn and stupid. And Jan showed a lot of determination about her independence and autonomy. The rod might have been helpful. And what did she type about the cow?

"While I was talking to her mother Jan spontaneously and independently typed MUM DAD COW DAD IS COW. We both laughed, and I said "No, dad is a bull.", whereupon Jan spontaneously typed MUM IS COW. She then typed DAD IS and went for the B, stopped short and typed JAN, her most fluent word - the word that was most likely to come out in typing, though not in speech, any time her concentration lapsed or she hesitated. I held out the stick, she took it and typed DAD IS BOOL. It was almost like aphasia of the fingers. Gradually Jan relaxed and became more willing to work with me, and more willing to allow me to hold on to the end of the rod and slow her down.
Five months after her first visit Jan came in carrying a copy of Peacock Pie, a collection of Walter De la Mare's poetry. A number of the poems are old favorites of mine, so I read them aloud to her:
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor; ...
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,’ he said.

Jan's parents were limited in their ability to read to her because they were not native English speakers. Laura said Peacock Pie was Jan's favorite book, she'd bought it herself. Jan wanted to type out a poem from it, and while she was doing this I got some other anthologies out." 

I was discovering a lot of poetry anthologies myself, mostly gifted me from family members. The first one I sought out for myself was in 1990 during August of that year - Fairy tales and nursery crimes by Michael Rosen. Christmas 1991 I was reading The Penguin anthology of children's poems which I had bent the spine by that time.

I also was under the reputation as the form poet [and storyteller and playwright.

In the early 1990s I was the technology pioneer or one of them. With the IT facilitator's son and others.

"By now Jan no longer needed to hold on to the rod to slow down, and could type short messages with just my hand on her shoulder. When she finished copy-typing her favourite poem she typed I LIKE POETRY CAN I WRITE
"A poem?" I hazarded. Yes. And she typed
Better a mother who cannot love 
Better a car that cannot move
Better a boy who cannot walk
Than to have a voice that cannot talk.

Jan's parents were quite pleased with the poem, but I don't think they realized that Jan had written it. "

A voice that cannot talk? Yes, this is a central theme of Speechless, and of Jan's later poetry, as we will see in pages 136-139.

"Jan’s next visit was her last for the year. Again she brought in an anthology, this time one of her brother's old English textbooks, and again I went through several poems at her request. She had some poems she particularly wanted me to read aloud - she showed them to me in the index - and some difficult poems that she wanted me to explicate. One was The Ballad of Patrick Spens which has a lot of dialect words in it:

O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords To wet their cork-heel'd shoon; But lang or a' the play was play'd They wat their hats aboon.
And mony was the feather bed That flatter'd on the faem; And mony was the gude lord's son That never mair cam hame.

I could understand her wanting help!
By this stage Jan could type original sentences without physical contact, but that was sitting next to me with my reminders exerting a brake and Jan using one finger. When she typed by herself she liked to use two hands in imitation of regular typists, and as she found it difficult to control one hand it was impossible for her at this stage to control two.
She wanted to write another poem and again did so on the word processor, a machine which had plainly inspired her at her last visit.

Using a computer to write poetry is like using

Hand-made writing paper for the grocery list -

It is more sophisticated than the message.

SPEECHLESS

137

Whatever happened to pens? No-one will ever be sold a manuscript of my work. Can I ever go back to my first ideas?
Quality presentation may hide poor content. Does the software live up to the hardware In poet as in computer?

She tired quickly, and I held her sleeve for most of the poem.
One of the more creative explanations offered by my critics for the unexpected output of people who type with facilitation is automatic writing. It is suggested that people like Jan type one or two letters at random and then their partners ‘automatically’ make these letters into a word. Having got one or two words by this procedure, the partner then ‘automatically’ completes a sentence. It’s an interesting notion, and may even be correct in some cases, but among the questions it doesn’t answer is the question of individuality. Jan regularly wrote poetry. Of the hundreds of communication aid users I have partnered over the years, perhaps a dozen have written poems while I was their partner. These have all been of varying styles and standards. Anne, required to write a poem for an English assignment, found the task extremely difficult and struggled for days to produce some passable doggerel. (On the other hand, some reviewers of Annie’s Coming Out were unkind enough to point out that Anne’s sections were better written than mine.) Why do my automatic completions produce poetry when I sit next to Jan and not when I sit next to Anne?
Because her parents thought that Jan did not fall into the category of someone who needs to work with a communication aid this was the last time they brought her to DEAL. During the next year I visited Jan twice at her special school. In June she used a communicator well, joining in a discussion involving her teachers. What the teachers said, however, wasn't encouraging. Being her own worst enemy, Jan was said to have rejected any slowing of her typing (as she had initially with me) and because of this her production at special school had been little more than her usual stereotyped utterances. She was doing some original typing, but not very much. Jan just hadn't had enough practice at independent keyboard use, and the self-monitoring techniques that I'd been teaching her hadn't been practised enough to become ingrained. The only positive news was that Jan’s teacher reported that her speech was more fluent in everyday situations

SPEECHLESS

138 When I came back again in November I was shown into a meeting with Jan, her special
school teacher, and her parents. Her parents made it clear that they didn't think Jan should use any form of augmentation for her speech because "She can say everything that she needs to say." Her teacher went along with them. And Jan sat there mute throughout. She wouldn’t or couldn't speak, and we were sitting in such a position that I couldn't just bring out a Communicator and give it to her.
I argued as best I could. I told her parents truthfully that Jan was as talented with language as any child I'd ever taught. I told them that her poetry was exceptional for a student of her age, that she had a real talent that she could use only if we gave her the equipment and the skills she needed. Nobody (Jan aside) believed a word I was saying. Her father, her mother, and her teacher saw the person that they have always seen, the person that the textbooks told them that they should see. They saw a girl who was doing well for someone with Down syndrome. I was saying that Jan was not just doing well for someone with Down syndrome but that her writing was exceptional for any child, and that was not believable. Her parents thought I was sincere, but they didn't think that our "great work” could possibly extend to their own daughter. Their daughter has an extra chromosome.

I hope Jan's story has a 'to be continued', but at the moment there's no sign of it. I haven’t seen her for years. What has happened to her talent? Is her head full of poems that she can't tell anyone, that she can't type because the stereotyped words get in the way? "

Other people have developed their writing skills and identities as authors, like Peter Rowe and the Brotherhood of the Wordless in Queensland. One of their "sisters" is Lucy Blackman, whose Talking of Macbeth and Carrying autism feeling language I have enjoyed in the last five years - and in November 1997 - the correspondence with John Marsden.

 http://peter-rowe.info/content/poetry/

The Bush Christmas poem is wonderful.

And there is Nathan Basha too.

I have seen various works on Quora.com.

Wherever poetry is, people with Down syndrome are.

And I am really bad at dedications, because in 1992 I had written a story called Camping Out which I really did not want to write. I paid more attention to the publicity than the dedications. The story was about two Ladybird characters called Peter and Jane and it was written in four frames.

To Maureen and Danielle, who inspired me.

That word - in the past tense - is like a stopped breath.

The Words are Sticky …they stick to my tongue, they stick to my teeth,
they stick to my voice and it’s hard to speak;
they tangle me up and make me choke,
I so want to speak and that’s no joke.
I try and I try, I push and I push,
but the words come out all jumbled and rushed.
I choke on my tongue and sometimes I spit;
I’m trying a word, but that’s just not it.
They’re cheeky and sticky, they just won’t come out,
but they seem much easier to speak when I shout.
I’ll catch them one day, when they all run by,
and then on that day my speaking will fly.
I want you to know I think, just like you,
but my words are all stuck in my mouth, just like glue.
So where is the way to unstick all these thoughts?
I hope that it’s in the Speech Therapy I bought!

[Rowe 2003] accessed 5 October 2017

THINGS THAT HURT US
There are many things that hurt us,
but most of them come from ourselves
The things that hurt us the most,
usually come from fear.
We can work against the fear,
but most people choose not to.
Most people see it as their companion and they can’t let go.
Nevertheless, it is this idea that stops us from succeeding.
The idea that we have to hold onto stuff that hurts us is crazy.
Getting rid of it is hard, though,
and most people never do in their lives.
This is because most people are afraid of facing their fears:
afraid of life, without the fear.
This includes me.
I have trouble shaking things off too,
and this is because I need to hold on to something …
and I do not yet have a tight enough hold on hope.
Good things will come though.
I am waiting!
That day is coming soon
when I will run with hope
instead of shaking with fear!

[Rowe: http://peter-rowe.info/content/poetry/things-that-hurt-us/]

How A Bush Christmas Should Be
The sun is beating down on the hottest day of the year, the branches breaking and falling from the heat. The flies are buzzing and the dogs are panting in the shade: The Bush Christmas has come again.
We sit on the verandah, under the iron roof, and listen to the cracking and expanding of the roof in the heat. The dry ground is screaming for rain and the little lambs are bouncing around not knowing, and not caring, that it is too hot to play.
The old dog is sitting under the gum tree where he has been since last night, with his tongue hanging out and his breath hot and short. He flicks away the flies with his tail and goes about sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking all morning.
The cat has found a place under the roof and on top of the water tank at the side of the house. He is all curled up and completely unaware of things happening around him.
The children have been helping mum decorate the Christmas tree and get the house ready for the next couple of days. The uncle from out west and the auntie from down south are coming up for Christmas. The house has a bright and cheery feeling about it again.
Dad is sitting on the verandah and he is thinking how good it is to have family to share this day with him.
“I wonder if the rains will come soon?” he mutters, loud enough for mum to hear through the open windows.
“The report says it could be a couple of weeks yet, dear,” mum replies.
Dad mumbles something about the weatherman and pulls his hat down over his face. He rests his feet on the dog at the base of his chair.
A light has been making its way up the dusty road from the highway for about an hour or so. It is uncle with his wife coming to stay. He’s been singing to the country radio station the whole time – much to auntie’s dismay.
The girls have joined mum in the kitchen now and the eldest son has come out to dad on the veranda.
“Dad, do you think the lambs will be okay without water for the next couple of weeks?” the boy asks.
“Son, I think the ewes will drop their lambs under a tree and walk off if we don’t get rain soon,” he replies. “I think we need to pray a bit harder this year.” Together they ask God to send the rains soon.
Aunty has caught the train up to the nearest city and hired a car, with very cold air- conditioning, for the drive up this year. It is going to be the hottest place she’s been to for a while, that’s for sure. The flies at the train station stay well away from her because she smells like perfune and new clothes; a successful lawyer type.
The weatherman’s report didn’t count on the prayers of the bush folk this year. No weatherman could know just how many prayers have gone into this year’s rain.
Auntie’s car has pulled in just behind her brother’s Ute as they fly up the dusty road. Her city life forgotten for the moment, she drives like a real bush kid coming back to the family homestead.
They don’t see the clouds in the background through the haze that they are pushing in front of them. Dad hasn’t seen it from the verandah yet either.
The haze just looks like another heatwave haze. The clouds build and build with great speed and the cars race on toward the house, unaware of the growing shadow behind them.
Dad sees the lightning now and hears the thunder just as a cloud of dust comes up from the road and the bull bar from the Ute comes first around the corner.
“Mum, come quick and bring the girls. Look what uncle and aunty have brought with them.” Mum rushes to the front door just as the cars pull up and the clouds come over. The rain bursts out of them like stuffing from a pillow.
They all step down into the rain, not caring that their clothes are soaked just hugging their family and everyone is laughing and crying at the same time.
“This is the best Christmas present ever,” says Dad.
“Dad, I told God he could have my best slingshot if he brought the rain,” the boy says. “I guess I better go give it to him.”
They all stand there for the longest time laughing. This is how a bush Christmas should be.

[Rowe 2002] 

The Lifetime Work
The people I see are walking through life with eyes closed.
They want to make everything different,
but they do not know where to begin.
How can they change the world and make it a better place,
without changing themselves?
The things in my life are changing all the time:
I am not the same person I was a year ago.
The loves and hates I had a year ago are different to the ones I have now.
There is no other way to go without making changes,
because there have to be changes with everything
for life to get better.
I want to grow into something beautiful
and I have to change for this to happen.
It is the same for everyone:
There is not one person who does not have to change
in order to get stronger, better and smarter
than they already are.
Can we all give each other some patience while each one of us grows?
It is going to take each of us a lifetime to get where we need to go.
© Peter Rowe 2003
Written with Ryan O’Connor, August 2003

[Rowe/O'Connor 2003]

Back to Speechless and Bolt.

There is also Nigel Hunt and his diary. It would be a good one for a young Adrian Mole or Anne Frank fan to read. It is now about 50 years old as it was published first in 1967.

Hunt was 20 years old when The world of Nigel Hunt was published.

Amazon link to THE WORLD OF NIGEL HUNT from 1967

Of course you can read modern-day writings in blogs. Over the past 25 years there has been a lot of lifestory work - some of which I've recommended to Camille de Fleurville who writes at Sketches and vignettes from la Dordogne and Lights and shades.

Nigel Hunt is mentioned in "The Individual and Social Education".

This is chapter 5 of "Humanistic Perspective" by Shunit Raiter from 2008.

We meet Hunt again in Alison C. Carey's chapter in Disability Histories - a good quote from pages 53-57

Finally for #31for21 - in the last academic year [2016-17] Kayla released her poetry collection with her class:

Life Is A Mountain
Life is a mountain
high in the sky
It makes me tired
to climb up the mountain
The mountain is big
with pretty things to see

Haiku
In the sky birds fly
High above the waves they fly
the birds are seeing

A Happy Birthday
Lucas, Happy Birthday!
You're nine years old today
You are a nice brother
I don't want any other
You are sleepy today
But with you I love to play

The Dolphin
The dolphin is swimming in the sea
The dolphin likes singing and dancing in the sea
The dolphin is swimming in the sea
Just like me

This time last year Camille de Fleurville and the Elder Sister had strokes and epilepsy to contend with.

By the end of October 2016 the de Fleurvilles were "in need of a word of comfort".

 

Festschrift for Temple; respecting autistic elders; reappraising the Grandinator #temple@70

29 August 2017 is Dr Temple Grandin's birthday. She will be 70.

She is a professor at Colorado State University in Animal Science.

When professors reach a certain age or are known in their field, they receive a Festschrift from their colleagues and peers. It was 60 years for Uta Frith, the cognitive psychologist from University College London, who wrote about Grandin in the early 1990s.

I have thought a lot about what our autistic elders are due and how they contribute.

A few weeks ago I wrote to ScriptAutistic asking them questions about autistic elders.

https://scriptautistic.tumblr.com/post/164198855243/hello-scriptautistic-do-you-have-anything-on

It wasn't very easy for them for several reasons.

I also went to the #ActuallyAutisticBlogsList. This is by Judy, an Observer. At the end of July a young person had requested to sort the blogs there by age especially the teenagers.

https://anautismobserver.wordpress.com/autistic-blogs-by-age-of-blogger/

Found a few [4] 60-something-year-olds; the eldest is 68.

The elders issue became pressing to me last March when the Karolinska Institute study was released. Sweden is one of the more switched-on and well-researched nations, certainly over the past 30 years.

And the end of April 2017 when Polly Samuel - who so many of you know and knew as Donna Williams - died.

It was 20 years ago that I encountered Emergence labelled autistic. I was keen to read Thinking in pictures at the start of 1997, and I did eventually - the week before Christmas 1997.

The thing I remember about Thinking in pictures from this particular reading is looking out at a farm on a highway and reading the excerpt about homesickness as Hans Asperger had written it. It was a good stir.

***

In mid-September 1997 I read the first three chapters [and the introduction; the foreword; the preface - Rimland; Carlock; Grandin herself].

The part I remember from the introduction was "I live independently with no financial worries. Today I am in my late thirties" - this was 1986 and from my research I am thinking the collaboration with Scariano had happened in 1982-83. She talks about Lorna Jean King - who was a sensory integration therapist she had worked with in Arizona while she was at university there - and she seemed to be the nearest thing to a friend.

I read roughly the fourth chapter of Emergence - how very Trekkie I thought at that time - and I was pleased to see when I read Thinking in Pictures - the chapter on Dating Data which is a very funny pun. When I explored Star Trek Next Generation parodies in 1993 and 1999 from Usenet, they were great. I especially liked Deanna Troi and Wesley Crusher and even Picard and Chekov.

The fourth chapter is New Worries and I think that was planted in right before Forgettable Days at Junior High. My psychologue of the time said something to the effect that my days were very different. Then there was Boarding School where Temple went to Mountain County Day and went to church and learnt about the door to my heaven.

Francesca Happe writes very well about her own impressionistic account of the writings. Happe was approaching Grandin from a cognitive perspective - specifically Relevance theory. She made 6 testable predictions which you can read in the relevant chapter of Autism and Asperger syndrome which stood us well for 22 years [1991 - 2013].

However a lot of people objected to the way Grandin was written about in the newsgroups of that time and a few years after. It is a very well-known academic book and Grandin's initial impact was academic and in that market that impact was seismic.

In the world of popular literature in 1997 and 1998 we were reading Tony Attwood who was having an emergence of his own through that highly popular book on Jessica Kingsley Press. And in one hot November week Attwood was having his own Festschrift visiting the schools and universities and launching his book which finally was reviewed in May 1998.

I had something of my own to do in that month of 1998. I launched the Statistical Reading Objective Analysis System [SROSA] which I had based on my mathematics books and what I knew of other readability systems and worked on that for at least the next 18 months. I have only ever done it on my own books for testing - the ones I wrote in 1995. One of them is the book on which Halfway up Rysy Peak is based. Somehow by November 1998 - January 1999 I got tied up in the sequel and never assessed the book where the young woman becomes an ambassador when she is in her early thirties. I can say only that it had as many words as The Guernsey Collegiate which is coming up to its 22nd anniversary this September.

The Happe interest came when I saw the Bowler and Wolff [the latter of Loners: life path of unusual children fame which taps into Ludwig Wittgenstein and his language games and his youth covered so well in the Jarman movie]. It was a good paper about the words someone might use to describe their mother.

Happe had said "With these analytical and sophisticated writings a more sensitive approach should be used".

My own reaction was something like "This book is all Temple and no Margaret" and this before I had the chance to read My experiences from 1984 - which I only really did this year [2017] because of Dave Alteri who writes Reward and Consent.

And why the Grandinator? This is something like a theme park approach. I think it is something to do with the way she and her persona and the reception have become a thought-terminating cliche or just the Terminator movies. The way machine/information processing works. And this is the woman who went through a dip vat and it stopped her religious feelings.

That last chapter on the Meaning of Life in THINKING IN PICTURES is a good one. She talks about Charles Hart and the son of Hart who talks about "cannibals". Now in my youth I had a great deal of interest in cannibalism.

Thinking now about approach-avoidance as it was the first time I had seen this psychological concept at least by its name. She was rubbing her hands and fingers on a sock. And if you read Temple a little you will see she is a very tactile lady. Many of you will have heard or read about the squeeze machine, and that was my focus in writing a play about her - I am a door - for a youth theatre group in March 1998. Working through a powerful rejection and trying to be resilient.

The sock thing was in context of her mother and her packing for boarding school when she was 13 years old in 1960 after she had been expelled from a girls' school because one of her contemporaries called her the R-word and she hit this young woman with a book. It was apparently flying out of the air.

It was about this time her parents were divorcing. We learn a lot about how the sister closest to her, Jean, was affected. The other time that Jean is important is right at the beginning of the book when Temple shouts "Ice".

So many of Temple's words when she was younger and went to the speech therapist were stressed. The year before Emergence was published there was a development in the visual communication world. Picture Exchange Communication System. Andrew and Lori developed it in 1985 as part of applied behaviour analysis. The 1989 update of Emergence deals with that Lovaas paper and its fallout at the end of Working - Coping - Surviving and the epilogue Autistics and the real world which is a chapter of dot points and expansions.

And it was at that chapter that I started to think who Grandin was for and what she stood for. In the early 1990s Donna Williams had written for the Facilitated Communication Digest a paper about the "Real World" while she was still married to an Englishman who is told about at the end of Somebody Somewhere.

Grandin does talk about her sense-world a lot. She loved bright colours and flying things and was stimulated by a lot. This becomes important in The great continuum when we come to read that.

If you are not good at remembering texts Grandin uses a lot of set pieces. Happe noticed that too. A few weeks before I read Emergence - in early August 1997 - I read An insider's view on the Edelsten [yes, he is dead too - Rimland's assistant - biological psychiatrist and populariser more or less on his own account] website along with Doris Allen and Isabelle Rapin on semantics and pragmatics and Courtney Chadwick's Eagle poem and May's speech where she talked about idioms like she died laughing. [That idea terrified me especially as I breathe irregularly and might choke and that whole idea of losing control - also specific triggering experience].

I am trying to remember School days and how Grandin came to literacy. When she was about seven or eight her Mum Eustacia [Purves her birth name; Cutler when Grandin was 15 and at school and she met Ben Cutler - she gives speeches under the last and she wrote a firecracker of a piece about pornography which some four, five years later it is not easy to forgive for the Daily Beast] would read to her and she would read too. They drank tea together. And she describes trouble with a worksheet which was caused by her way of divergent thinking.

What a moment it was to encounter crystallised and fluid intelligence. Temple had said she had a high degree of fluid intelligence. I think in the physics and chemistry world fluid and dynamics run together. Crystallised intelligence = g. G is for General in that instance.

There were birds and cages and suitcases and things within things.

And I remember at the end of the third chapter - "not with grace but with gumption" and how she survived those first five years. She was identified in the first place because she was not like the little girls next door. And Eustacia herself was all of twenty-one. Until we read Thorn in my pocket I wondered a lot about what she knew about children and babies.

There is a point in one of Eustacia's letters about normal therapy and abnormal therapy. That was resolved for me when I was reading about English and Welsh nursing training in the 1960s - one year of the normal and two years of the abnormal. I still dare myself to read The backward child which would give a perspective of that time from Cyril Burt's observations about learning disability which was then used in the USian sense. And learning difficulties too.

At that time I thought normal = community and abnormal = institution. Like the two pieces from Cal Montgomery which were out last week.

https://montgomerycal.wordpress.com/2017/08/14/a-knife-wound-to-the-gut-vor-and-people-with-disabilities/ [lots of links and videos of advocates, activists and cool people].

https://montgomerycal.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/bygones/ [that was a great piece about Jerry Lewis].

And that was the whole St Luke's thing. Eustacia was very very grateful that they were supporting her point of view and intuition even though they were a long way from fully understanding it.

Now - not too much glory to mothers. As I have tried to indicate - Eustacia was a highly emotional and social woman who was an actress and an university student. And probably all the reflected glory which has been shone on this mother in particular.

Now I made myself - or was encouraged to stop - pause on the part about Dr Stein and M and Ms. It is good grounding for hard talk and not the way I usually would read through a thunderstorm.

I am remembering Temple and the tennis shoe incident which is the time where her father loses his temper in a big way. That is one characteristic that they share. I know also of the English distinction between a hot temper and a bad temper. A bad temper hurts someone - it is malicious. And of course temper and character/personality/tone.

And someone had said - it was Tony W - that they lived in a world of daydreaming and fear and were afraid of everything.

Grandin became that way after she suppressed her temper - or rather repressed it. I find the lack of repression as unbelievable as Sacks did - though for very different reasons. You can repress/suppress behaviour - something she admits at the end when she talks about her medication - "My behaviour and speech improved more slowly. It takes time to change patterns and habits".

And she talks about categories and generalisations which is a very behaviourist way to look at it. I tend to think abstractions move us further from reality - something that was reinforced in The world of the simple by Oliver Sacks in The man who mistook his wife for a hat. And she has a lot of cognitive ideas during the 1980s and 1990s.

A lot of the time the science caught up with Grandin - from a low base, as Michelle Dawson's The misbehaviour of behaviourists showed us in such a catalysmic way at the end of 2003-the beginning of 2004. It was a great day when I visited Ralph Smith's website. He has so many wonderful illustrations.

It would be good to have one of the "Crow's Nest" though I've not talked about it much or some of Grandin's buildings. Architectural drafting is something I was exposed to in my youth because of a maternal grandfather who died before I knew him. I did pick up the Institute of Engineers book and also the World Book Dictionary so I do know mechanical and engineering symbols and the architectural ones too for lights and doorways.

Symbolic logic. This is an important one. A key to Grandin's work is the visual symbol world she theorised and practised in the 1960s and 1970s and wrote in her diaries when she was at Franklin Pierce and the university she went to before that.

There is "Graduate School" and "The Sliding Glass Door" and that psychology department party. I do imagine the people gathering around and calling her "Buzzard Woman".

The work does come alive when Grandin is at work and working her dream job at Swift's in Arizona and writing for the Ranch Magazine.

Soon after comes the scary part of the book. Eustacia makes her write something personal and gives her the letters. Now this moment could have been handled very differently. I rejoice after all when the Stehlis threw everything before 1977 into the sea on a cruise to Switzerland and France. And there is such a thing as the thirty-year rule. Or even the ten-year rule.

And this is also the time of yoghurt and colitis of the ulcerative variety. That bit probably did inspire me in a dark way. It was a prelude to all the gluten and casein diets - she does mention Shattock and Reinheldt.

There is that picture of Grandin in a Senate hearing... She speaks for the animals.