aspie rhetor

As does any stressed out grad student, I’ve been questioning my decisions. Why am I an English major? How on earth did I come to enjoy rhetoric and composition in the first place? How can I stay up later without abusing caffeine?

This past fall, in a composition theory course, we were asked to compose our “entry tales” into the field. I decided to focus my narrative on the intersections I saw between my experiences as an Asperger’s autistic and my experiences as a compositionist wannabe. As I reread what I wrote nearly one year ago, I’m struck by how much I’ve learned since then — “then” being a moment when I thought I knew lots. And I realize that I’ve got lots more to learn… which makes me want to stick around in academia for another fifty years, even if it does mean that I have to socialize.

What I wrote, October 2007:

I have in my stockpile two narratives for describing my entry into composition studies. The first, and most often used, relies on metaphor and describes my aspirations to become a computer programmer when, lo and behold, I “saw the light” and realized, via divine inspiration, that English studies held my salvation. This first story often makes for wonderful application fodder: it lumps my previous computer science background and my newfound love of writing into a realization of spiritual proportions, thereby opening up the digital communication doorway in composition studies. Through this story, I have somehow become the mediator of two discourses, the champion of writing/communication and technology or writing/communication as technology—anything dealing with both words, as long as the emphasis remains on writing or communication.

My second narrative, however, does not meld the right-brain/left-brain worlds quite so fluently. In fact, of the few times I’ve dared to disclose it, my audience has probably doubted the existence of any “mediating” corpus callossum. Like many an interesting story, this one begins with the lost me seeking to be a saved me—a high school drop-out attempting a technical college. There’s a stock character, Professor Dan, the pony-tailed English teacher with a penchant for hacky sack and Donald Murray truisms. At one point, as with all stock conversations, an exchange occurs between the outside-the-box hipster and the conservative, inexperienced student, an exchange meant to spark conflict and radical new ideas, man, an exchange meant to so totally blow minds—except, this exchange results in all of the wrong things. After reading several of my essays, Professor Dan tells me that I’m in the wrong major and that I should switch to English. And I, horrified that I could be in the wrong major, visit the English department head and switch majors that day. Later, I learned from a mortified Professor Dan, after one of his close-your-eyes-while-freewriting techniques, that he was merely complimenting me, not really suggesting that I must go change my major that instant. He had wanted me to “think about it,” to muse and question, not to take immediate action. I recall thinking, in a bemused and irritated manner, Why didn’t he just say so?

Literally speaking, story number one occurs after story number two: after I’d already done the deed, I began to question being a student of English. There have been other notable misunderstandings on my part along my path toward grad-student-hood, but all theoretical perceptions of writing and communication began, for me, the moment I failed to understand the subtext of an important conversation: I could not register the simple genre of “the compliment,” and yet there I was, an English major. As a composition scholar wannabe, issues of understanding, of perception versus reception, strike me as most paramount. As a student-teacher with Asperger Syndrome, a mild variant of autistic disorder, I supposedly cannot communicate appropriately: I am what some (but not what I) might label as idiot savant, social retard, or male-brained. In everyday situations, I fail to meet the aims of the English 110 text, Writing Analytically, to make the implicit explicit, to root out the subtext from the apparently literal, or the literal from the apparently subtext. And somehow, I am a person with a communication disorder teaching first-year students how to communicate. This paradox used to trouble me, therefore keeping me closeted and guarded—until very recently.

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My jaw dropped when I read this article yesterday morning. Apparently, the guy who directed Hairspray is directing a new musical based on ELO songs. (The article deems ELO as an “iconic eighties band.” Incorrect. ELO’s only top U.S. hits in the 80s were Hold on Tight and the Xanadu soundtrack, which incidentally brought about their demise, seeing as most people don’t find movies about roller-skating Greek muses who save disco houses with a tap-dancing Gene Kelly to be, erm, enjoyable? The 70s were ELO’s heyday. 1978, specifically. Big spaceships and laser shows.)

Also from the article:

In a script written by newcomer Marvin Easter, the two socially-prominent Trump-Hilton sisters and their mildly autistic brother, a toy store proprietor, attempt to reinvent a centuries-old love potion and launch a designer clothing line based on insomnia and prescription pharmaceuticals to save their “Grey Gardens”-style penthouse from foreclosure.

I’m not sure how “true” this article is, but it’s been plastered on a lot of ELO sites and listservs. Apparently, they’re looking to cast Steve Carell, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Amy Sedaris as the lead roles. I take this to mean that, if Steve Carell were cast, he would play the “mildly autistic brother.” A mildly autistic guy who sings ELO songs? All I can think of is his performance in Bruce Almighty.

I hope that this musical doesn’t make ELO look ridiculous, and I’m also curious to see how autism will be performed. I keep imagining a faux-autistic Steve Carell trying to sing something like Evil Woman or Ticket to the Moon. And that kind of scares me.

As an example of ELO gone bad, take the recent Broadway remaking of Xanadu, the 1980 bomb starring Olivia Newton-John. The plot was pointless, but the soundtrack, half of it being written and performed by ELO, rocked. The 2007 remake of the music is quite horrific, and the singers have even added a couple ELO songs to their show that were not in the original movie.

Here is a comparison of the original “Do Ya” with its recent bastardization:

1. The original 1972 version of Do Ya by the Move (which was basically early ELO with a different name)
2. The sucky new version

Additionally, being that ELO has been my nearly lifelong perseveration of choice, I writhe over any cheesy commercialization of them that might occur. As an AS child of the eighties and nineties, I suffered for my love of ELO. Kids tortured me over my obsession with Jeff Lynne. And while one of my largest hopes in life is to talk intelligibly with people about ELO, I don’t think that this musical will accomplish that for me. Rather, I think that a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls will become engrossed with tin-can, screechy sounding ELO makeovers and the actors and actresses who sing them. They’d be clueless as to the context and history surrounding the real ELO. And I highly doubt that this wannabe musical would have cellists running around on stage with instruments over their heads, or dudes in sequins playing their violins with oranges. And the setting doesn’t sound amenable to giant spaceships either, unless the HFA toy-store guy happens to perseverate on them.

I always imagined that an ELO movie would revolve around time travel or outer space and aliens, something cultishly classic. Not this pop-culturish rich people stuff.

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There was a point in my life when I wanted to be like my mother. I remember the feeling clearly between the ages of five and ten, but not much beyond double digits. I had my mother’s eyes — chocolate brown, she’d say, as if she could reach out and eat them. I had her nose, the Langlois nose, long and narrow, distinct in my aunt and grandfather as well. I was also quiet like my mother, and my memere often commented on how she hardly knew the sound of my voice because she so rarely heard it.

There were things that differed, things that I couldn’t change. My mother was a brunette, and I was blonde, very blonde. At age five, while living in Florida, my hair bordered on white. I remember wishing for her hair, and her glasses, hoping that I’d become nearsighted, and soon. By age eight, I did receive my wish — not for brown hair, but for nearsightedness — unaware that big pink glasses would welcome taunts of “four eyes” and “Urkel” from my new classmates in New Hampshire. When I cried to my mother about these things, about how other kids didn’t like me, she told me that she never really had friends either, that kids always made fun of her for being skinny. We were alike.

Playground bullies grew old fast, and by fifth grade I’d somehow convinced my teacher to let me spend recess in the library so I could write a play about the Great Lakes region. I spent all my time writing about a robber named Sheila who stole sardines from convenience stores in Michigan (Lansing was the capital of Michigan) and who hopped on a train to Ohio (Columbus was the capital of Ohio). I wanted my mother to read my additions, but most nights she would fall asleep at the table each time I nudged the script under her Langlois-like nose. Mornings, she would drink coffee and flitter between pantry and table, too caffeinated to keep her eyes on my writing. I wanted to mimic her, to become a coffeeholic, and somehow my father convinced her to let me have my own cup of coffee, to let me be like her. He poured four parts milk and one part coffee, then dumped in what must have been half the sugar container. I gingerly took a sip.

I hated it. My dad told me to give it another taste, that I shouldn’t be wasteful. He was using the same sing-songy, mildly threatening voice he’d used the time he told me that our phone number was 9-1-1, or the time he convinced me to eat a raw potato, or the time he called me a mental midget, or the time he solemnly swore that there was a vortex over Detroit and people were time-traveling in Michigan. And every time, I believed him.

After drinking the whole glass, I realized that imitating my mother wasn’t worth the sensory overload, that glasses were horrible things, that having speech problems and writing plays about Lake Superior during recess and eating dark chocolate and having scoliosis were the end of the world. A few months later, my mother was bedridden with a herniated disc, and I remember my Langlois-nosed aunt, the one I hadn’t seen in several years, telling me that I was built just like my mother and I’d have to watch myself, spine-achingly friendless, a brunette stuck on her living-room cot.

Cross-posted. Was originally a practice assignment, but I thought it would fit well here.

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It’s hard to believe that August has begun. In many ways, I think that fall will be a vacation from summer.

Lately I’ve been pondering what I’ll be writing my dissertation on. I’m just entering my second year and still have at least three more classes to take, so I do have time to decide. I won’t be locked into anything for while, probably about a year. And yet, I see two very distinct possible threads that I might pursue, threads that may, indeed, be dissertation-worthy. My current scholarly obsession is Pentecostal rhetoric, and I’ve been sort of fixated on Aimee Semple McPherson, a preacher in the 20s and 30s and founder of the Foursquare church. I’m currently writing a book chapter (a draft of which is due in less than two weeks). My problem, as always, is that I feel like I can’t stop reading, I can’t stop collecting, I can’t stop taking notes.

And then there’s the other thread — the disability studies/autism/Asperger’s thread. I think that the recent proliferation of media-driven constructions of autism needs rhetorical scrutiny. And reading disability studies theory, from a humanities standpoint, allows me to talk about social constructivism until I’m blue in the face and have unknowingly bored everyone around me.

I have personal connections to each thread, obviously. My parents left the Catholic Church when I was in kindergarten and became born-again Christians. I was mostly raised in Pentecostal churches, and attending a Presbyterian college was an interesting transition (and resulted in another of my obsessions, John Calvin). I really enjoy dissecting these various theological frameworks and trying to understand what makes them tick, what makes their audiences tick.

There’s a lot of overlap between pentecostal/charismatic churches and faith-healing. That’s what led me to McPherson, especially, and I think she’d be interesting to examine from a dual feminist rhetorical/disability studies standpoint, especially since she was one of the first radio evangelists in the U.S. (second to Billy Sunday). But I’ve yet to find overlap between McPherson and autism… and I hate the idea of dumping one interest for the other. My only thought thus far is to explore faith-healing generally…but I hate “generally.” I’m more in favor of “super specific.”

In any event, it is August, and I’m writing a book chapter on McPherson, and I just submitted a webtext on autism and embodied authorship to an online publication. I’m tired and I can’t wait to go apple-picking next month.

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