[Kerry] Autism and the Ideal Student™ Construct
May 28th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
A lot of teachers, educational staff and university admissions officers have this image of what an ‘ideal student’ should be. I think you all know the type? Perfect or near-perfect GPAs, dozens of volunteer hours, masses of honours classes, usually socially well-adjusted, strong relationships with faculty, seem to seem absolutely perfect on paper. They’re a solid bet; they probably don’t present a nasty surprise or a potential risk. Unfortunately, this model is harmful to those of us who don’t fit it well, or only sort of fit it, rather than gliding into the role effortlessly. I’d say that we only sort of fit it, here.
Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with these people. I’m not saying that. It’s that there is more than one way to be a good student.
There are loads of people who, despite their talents and interests, end up struggling with some aspects of the traditional schooling process. This happens quite often for people on the spectrum, since some of them may not have problems with the academic material presented to them, but may struggle with overload, social interaction or racking up all the extracurricular activities that universities think that students need to put down on their applications in order to make them seem like more viable admissions candidates. Colleges may love students who play the violin, volunteer at the local hospital, tutor underprivileged primary-school children and go on holiday to build houses in Mexico—but someone who is more subject to overload may not have those same extracurricular experiences. But at the same time, they might have the potential to add to a learning community.
Interestingly—but not surprisingly—autistics raised as boys are more likely to succeed under this paradigm than autistics raised as girls, according to this article. Women in this study fared much worse than men—none of the women profiled had university degrees at all, and the majority of them were extremely isolated. Since the Rutter and Howlin study cited in the New York Times article didn’t look at transgender people, I’d be interested to know how trans and gender-variant youth end up, compared to their cis counterparts. I also have some ‘anecdata’ to add to this: of all the spectrum people we’ve known, the ones who fared better academically were those with supportive parents who made sure that the education they were getting was best suited for their children. People with parents who were either completely clueless or were flat-out abusive didn’t fare as well.
People who would actually perform well get shut out by the gatekeepers because they may look less impressive on paper than they do in real life. (And the converse happens—you get some real ‘winners’ getting admitted to top universities because they’re adept at bullshitting—or get someone else to bullshit for them.) For instance, someone with a more ‘lopsided’ ability profile may be passed over by some admissions committees because they don’t fulfil a particular image. An example of that might be a student who is great at every subject other than one. This student may be particularly gifted at learning languages, studying within a particular branch of science, or interpreting a certain type of mathematical idea, but they may struggle in other disciplines. Since some educational systems, like those of the US and Scotland, value ‘well-roundedness’ over specialisation when gatekeeping, students who have such ability profiles may struggle to gain admission to more competitive undergraduate programmes. Their grade-point average is lower, not because they’re incompetent, but because they tend to have strengths centred in one area, rather than strengths that are spread out more thinly across the disciplines.
This tends to feed into the idea that students who might not fit this particular ideal are ‘inferior’, which…is not the case. It also upholds the structural problems that prevent people on the spectrum from gaining access to good education and employment—if the universities with more resources are all turning them down and they’re stuck going to the large local state university (in the United States) or ending up in a vocational track and not getting any academic tertiary education at all (UK, Germany), that will make it more difficult for them to find jobs that would support them and would be less overloading to them.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop after a student graduates: once they get to the workplace, unfortunately, bosses are going to pick the person with the degree from Harvard over the one from Southern Tennessee Farming University. Not because the person from Harvard is necessarily smarter than the person from STFU, but the degree is ‘proof’ that the person is capable of playing the game in order to win a place at Harvard (or has rich ‘legacy’ parents)—whereas you only need to have a pulse to get admitted to STFU. And a lot of bright, skilled people end up at STFU and its real-life equivalents—not because they’re not talented enough to be at Harvard or places like that, but because the gatekeepers screen them out because of that ‘image’. (Or worse, they end up at for-profit ‘career colleges’, like the University of Phoenix or ITT Tech, that prey on low-income students, women and people of colour.)
The problem is that people are being drowned out before they have the chance to show that they are, in fact, capable. Do I have a perfect solution for this yet? No, I don’t; however, I do recognise that it’s a problem, and I feel it needs to be mentioned.
Does this mean that I’m against ‘achievement’ or ‘excellence’ or any other words that educationists use as mantras? Of course not; what I’m trying to do is expand the idea of what ‘excelling’ means, and how people of different neurotypes can achieve without fitting into this model.
[Noël] Curebies and Integration Evangelists
May 18th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I have noticed disturbing similarities between nonautistic people who are hellbent on finding a cure for autism, and nonplurals who evangelise integration as the universal treatment for all plurality, whether it falls under the classic definition of MPD/DID or not.
Both of them, I feel, seem deeply uncomfortable with the idea of neurological variation being something other than a dangerous pathology. When defending their pro-cure stance, they will invariably cite “their brother who smears faeces” or “their dysfunctional cousin whose ‘personalities’ have destroyed her life.” It is always the most extreme cases, nearly calculated to elicit disgust in the general population, that these people use in order to invalidate the idea that all neurological variance should be eliminated.
Empowerment is never an option; it is always cure. Because being neurotypical is the only acceptable state. There are no exceptions. I could draw further comparisons, to the anti-LGBT religious fundamentalists who advocate reparative therapy for queer people. Only straight sexuality and cisgender identity are acceptable. No deviation is permitted. You must be assimilated. They, too, trot out the worst examples of LGBT people in order to invalidate the entire movement.
This makes me feel deeply uncomfortable as a member of a plural system on the autistic spectrum, whose individual behaviour appears autistic. It does not seem like a considered evaluation of neurological difference; it feels like a visceral reaction to the idea that someone does vary from them, and that there is a challenge to the way in which they perceive personhood. Since humans are considered social animals, the idea that there is a subset of humans that does not derive the same experience from social interaction, and has different reactions to other environmental stimuli, makes them incredibly uncomfortable. What, then, does it mean to be human, if there is this group of people that “are human in a different way”? Plurality, too, challenges their notions of what the self means—if many selves within one brain can exist, is it possible that I, too, could be many? That I may have to share my thoughts, that the notion of privacy or identity could be more complicated than what it initially was on the surface?
The singular obsession with cure and healing also reminds me far too much of the eugenicist policies favoured in the United States and in Western Europe in the early twentieth century. Psychiatrists and academics relished drawing up hierarchical diagnostic schemas and creating Great Chains of Being, and consigning anyone who was considered “substandard” to abusive, soul-destroying institutions. The rise of Autism Speaks (and its predecessor, Cure Autism Now) in the past decade is simply repeating the sordid history of the suppression of disabled communities, and words cannot describe how much I loathe Autism Speaks and organisations that are philosophically akin to it.
It feels deeply adversarial. Us against them, combat neurodiversity, combat difference.
Combat me, combat Kerry, combat Hess, combat the majority of our closest friends. Crush the lives and ambitions of real, living, breathing people, because there is something that they perceive is challenging. Threatening.
My goal is to encourage people to accept complexity in identity, and to realise that variance, in and of itself, is not to simply be eliminated.
[Kerry] Ur Doin It Rite, or Imposter Syndrome Strikes Again
May 9th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
To add on to Em’s post about ‘invisible effort’, there’s also its converse, the dreaded ‘imposter syndrome‘. That is, when you find out that you did get a particular opportunity, you wonder if you don’t deserve it, if you somehow ‘fooled’ HR, or if the people on the admissions committee just feel bad for you and want to help, rather than respecting your abilities. And before you find out, there’s often this worry and catastrophising: for instance, thinking you failed a statistics test when you ended up getting an A. (True story! I literally thought we’d get a test returned to us with an F. Turns out it was a 96.)
It’s irrational, but when you’re used to situations more like what Em described, you have a hard time believing that people do want to give you—and your work—a fair chance, as opposed to immediately zeroing in on the stereotyped ‘perfect employee/student’ with untarnished grades or work histories.
Imposter syndrome tends to affect people who belong to a community that isn’t historically associated with culturally recognised achievement: that is, people of colour (except South and East Asians, who deal with a different set of stereotypes as the ‘model minority’), women and people with disabilities. Before our transition, we dealt with the triple threat of racism, ableism and misogyny, which all contributed to our own ‘imposter syndrome’ issues. Nowadays, ableism and racism are still factors, and while we don’t deal with direct misogyny any more, the memories are still there, and its effects still exist. (DISCLAIMER: I’m not trying to claim that trans men are ‘men lite’, but that cis men and trans men’s upbringings may be different because of the added stereotyping.)
But if you’re Black, for example, and go to a school where you experience stereotype threat (that is, teachers have a lower expectation of you because they think Black students are less academically capable), you may start internalising it and thinking that you are a poor student, even though you have the ability to excel beyond what anyone has ever predicted for you. The same applies to women, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers; girls are frequently steered towards the humanities and social sciences, because as Barbie said, ‘maths is too hard’. Many women feel that they shouldn’t get involved in STEM careers, and a lot of women who are in STEM disciplines feel that they’re not as competent as men—not because they are less competent, but because of the stereotypes they’ve heard from Day One about how boys grow up to be engineers, physicists and computer programmers, while girls grow up to become schoolteachers and social workers. (There’s nothing wrong with being a schoolteacher or a social worker, of course, but society places a high premium on being a STEM employee.) People with disabilities are often marginalised too, especially those of us who had the misfortune of having spent time in special-education classes as children. If you’re in a classroom where the teacher is telling you (whether implicitly or explicitly) that your disability will make it so that you’ll never amount to anything, you’re probably not going to have the best self-image. You’ve already been considered the ‘dregs’ of education; why the hell would you want to proceed further?
This is where imposter syndrome comes from: the idea that particular groups are less capable than others, and you start internalising it and start questioning when things go right. (And when things go wrong, you feel that it’s ‘proof’ that you suck.)
[Em] Invisible and Visible Effort
May 9th, 2012 § 1 Comment
Sorry we haven’t been blogging much; we’ve been incredibly busy with school-related stuff.
For a lot of autistic folks, their effort is “invisible”—that is, even though someone is trying their very hardest to do everything they possibly can, it still doesn’t look like enough.
And because it’s not physically visible, people may jump to the wrong conclusions at first. That we’re slacking off, that we don’t care, that we’re just “not putting in enough effort,” when that’s not the case—it’s more like, there’s a certain “module” in our head that’s failing, and it’s hard to keep everything else up, so things become harder and harder to make sure that everything looks as though it’s in its proper place. I’m not trying to make excuses, and I can understand where people’s disappointment comes from. But at the same time, it still sucks, because you feel guilty, and feel that you’ve let folks down.
People may see you coming in late for class (because it’s hard to get out of bed, much less trek the seven blocks or so to get to your bus stop just to find it pulling away from you, and the next one’s coming in 15 minutes), or turning in an assignment a few days late, and they may interpret it as your not being fully invested in what you’re doing. What they’re not seeing is the amount of effort you’re putting out for other tasks—for instance, day-to-day tasks may be harder for some people than academic work. It’s really hard for us to get the “spoons” together for cleaning, and we rarely cook these days, but we’ve been known to knock out nine- and ten-page papers within the course of about twelve hours (and that end up getting good grades). But people aren’t seeing the inertia that’s keeping you stuck in bed 30 minutes longer than you actually wanted to be; it just looks like “procrastination.”
This isn’t an excuse for unreliability; however, it’s placing certain things into perspective, so that people can find a situation that is more appropriate for their needs.
There are a few amazing articles that I think handle this issue well: Anonymous’ “And People Still Fail to Get It, Again and Again,” and Joel Smith’s “You Have It So Good.”
You might also get in an unhealthy habit of comparing yourself to nonautistic people who seem to effortlessly do things that you would never have the time or energy for. We struggled with this a lot at high school, for instance: there were these people who had perfect grades, were involved with a million extracurricular activities, and were able to hold down a job. Honors project here, tons of presentations there, 4.5 unweighted GPA, not a single C, D, or F, cozy with administration. For us, it never worked out that way: we could either study all the time, or we could do extracurricular activities, or we could work. We did have a bunch of extracurricular activities during the last two years of high school, but the price for that was burnout. Crashing in bed at odd times.
It usually leads to folks like that getting chosen for stuff (jobs, admissions at university), and our not being considered—not because we’re not intellectually capable of handling the work, but because there’s this stereotype that “good students” are supposed to expend inordinate amounts of time just to pad their freaking résumés, or that “good employees” need to have certain kinds of jobs with no gaps on their résumé (even during a recession!). Actually, that’s kind of snarky; I do think that most of these people are actually sincere about wanting to get involved with stuff. The playing field is levelled a bit if we’ve got a relationship with someone and they’re recommending us for something—then they’ve seen our work. We’ve gotten some awesome opportunities that way. We’ve seen proof of that over the past few weeks. (I don’t want to go into significant detail, because we prefer to keep our offline life and our blogging separate, but.) But if we don’t have folks vouching for us and we have to compete against Super Employee/Student™ with no blemishes on their record? We’re just not going to luck out, there.
And when you get turned down for that opportunity in favor of the person who seems to do everything “right,” you wonder what the hell is wrong with you, even if you’re not actually doing that badly, by most people’s standards. We tend to feel messy and broken when that happens, even though we know intellectually that we’re not “broken,” but that there are certain structures in place that make it harder for people in our situation to stand out among the people who seem to do everything right. You start feeling inferior even though your situation is just flat-out different, and your needs are different. But since nonautistic people are intrinsically “superior” to autistic people (note the dick quotes; I’m just talking about society’s fucked-up attitudes), if you end up getting the short end of the stick, it’s because YOU are flawed, wrong, and broken. But when you’re in the midst of that depression, you’re not seeing the structures; you’re seeing “oh god here we go again. I must SUCK. HR probably laughed at my cover letter!” You start feeling you’ll never measure up to people like that. It’s this constant feeling of starting from behind. It’s kind of obnoxious. It’s one of the reasons why job-hunting freaks us out unless we get it through someone we know. Yes, it’s easier for anyone to get a job through their friend or their old professor or their uncle or whoever. But for people who may not look as good on paper as the aforementioned Super Student™/Employee™, it’s even more vital.
And so you end up invisible again, even though you could do the work.
[Kerry] WTF is this shit. (warning: curebie ideology)
February 28th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
We don’t post here as often any more, mostly because offline stuff has kept us so busy. That doesn’t mean that we’ve abandoned the blog, though.
So, we found a website by an autistic man, Jonathan Mitchell, who is apparently in favour of curing autism, both his own and others’, and is vehemently opposed to the neurodiversity movement. He runs a blog, Autism’s Gadfly, which is devoted to this worldview. I’ll place a warning there, since readers may be upset by the content. I certainly was, but I did want to address it.
The problem with this worldview is that it upholds the idea that autistic people are inherently broken, rather than different. And by being an autistic person who advocates curing autism, his own claims seem to be that he is an inferior human being, with his own existence being worth less than others’ because of how he perceives the world and moves through it.
Mitchell also grossly misinterprets the neurodiversity community, claiming that we completely ignore the struggles and difficulties that autistics encounter. This is bullshit—there’s really no other way to put it. Has he ever read any pro-neurodiversity or anti-cure autistic blogs? The autistic people who write these accounts of their lives are incredibly frank about the difficulties they contend with, and don’t attempt to claim that their existence is all fairy cakes and sparkles. We haven’t made any claims on this blog, and none of the autistic bloggers we know personally or whose work we’ve followed for some time have made any such claims. This doesn’t sound like a rebuttal; this sounds like the straw man logical fallacy, in which someone attacks a made-up version of their opponents in order to ‘refute’ their points.
The problem with the ‘cure-it-all’ mindset for autism is that it creates a hierarchy of humanness. People who are not autistic are intrinsically better, and worth more, than those who are. Curing autistic people allows them to be brought into the class of ‘worthy people’; their worth is negligible before that. Autism isn’t like cancer or diabetes—it’s an inborn neurological variance that has both beneficial and negative aspects. Are there struggles? Yes. Are there parts of autism that can be seen as disabilities? Of course. Does that mean that the entire form of neurological variance needs to be wiped out ‘for the good of the species’? No. All this cure-mongering and pandering by people like Mitchell and the Autism Speaks/Defeat Autism Now!/Jenny McCarthy/ad nauseam crowd isn’t helping autistic people succeed. It’s promoting a eugenicist ideology that wishes to wipe out all neurological variance. It’s homogeneity for the sake of social cohesion. This is not helping autistic people. This is wishing them out of existence.
I find this view morally repugnant. Be honest about your struggles, yes. But don’t tell people they don’t deserve to exist. Don’t pander to eugenicist ideologues who would jump at the chance to exterminate people like you. You are claiming that an autistic life is a life unworthy of life.
Discriminatory philosophies like to create hierarchies in which some people’s lives are worth more than others: men’s lives are worth more than women’s; white people’s lives are worth more than the lives of people of colour; straight and cis people’s lives are worth more than LGBT people’s lives; westerners’ lives are worth more than non-westerners’ lives; abled people’s lives are worth more than disabled people’s lives. And guess who’d be gone first? People like us: queer, non-white-bodied, autistic, neurodivergent, disabled. The human race is not homogeneous. I am completely fed up with the idea that total homogeneity in society is desirable and any outliers should be eliminated. It’s been done to LGBT people; it’s been done to autistics. It’s this fucking obsession with having to be like the majority of people in order to be a valid human being. Being different to others isn’t a crime. It’s not something that needs to be wiped out just because it’s different. I know that a lot of people do have negative reactions to difference because they aren’t used to it, or don’t know how to deal with it at first, but that doesn’t mean that the difference in and of itself is bad.
You know what? I refuse to be an inferior human being. We, as a group, refuse to call ourselves broken and inherently flawed simply for existing. Are things often difficult because we’re autistic? Yes. Does that mean that we need to clamour for a cure, or say that we are unworthy of existence as we are? Fuck no; that’s unnecessary. I’m sorry, I am pretty well convinced that I have the right to exist. This is what neurodiversity advocates are asking for. Not to ignore the difficulties that autistic people can struggle with, but to recognise that our existence and personhood are valid, and that our sharing physical and philosophical space in this world with non-autistic people is not a crime.
Different, not broken. Worthy of life, self-determination and success. This is what I am, this is what we are, this is what our community is. And this is what we will fight for, as long as we draw breath.
[Kerry] Plurality and Scepticism
December 22nd, 2011 § 1 Comment
Philosophically, I’m a sceptic. I don’t believe in God (of any sort); I tend to believe in naturalistic explanations for both psychological and spiritual phenomena, and I critically evaluate people’s claims, especially if they can’t be empirically tested.
You may wonder, then, why we identify as plural, and why I have a strong attachment to my individual identity, even though I don’t have a visible physical manifestation.
I tend to have a philosophy of ‘materialist dualism’, in which nonspiritual philosophy is combined with the idea that there can be a distinction between someone’s external presentation and internal self-perception. I believe that the perception of that distinction occurs in the brain, at least for us. I don’t see there being a contradiction at all between being our identifying as separate people, and having many sceptics in the system, like Em, Yavari and me.
No, you can’t directly test our personhood in the same way that you can measure REM sleep or other brain phenomena that are less complicated. I think that the reason why the personhood of members of plural systems isn’t always recognised because we have differing operational definitions of personhood. People who don’t conceptualise identities as existing outside the body may see personhood as embodiment—and those people also tend to have gender-essentialist views as well, in which trans people are not ever ‘really’ the gender they identify as, or aren’t so until they’ve had The Surgery™. That philosophy leads to rigid definitions of selfhood, identity, gender and other cognitive constructs that are simple for some people, and complex for others. Those of us who have more fluid conceptualisations of identity allow for these differences, and can recognise that a mind-body problem may exist for many people.
The fact that operational definitions for personhood may vary across schools of thought doesn’t mean that being plural is inherently pathological. It means that some people tend to view identity in a rather simplified way that doesn’t account for the variations in self-perception that people actually experience. This occurs in behavioural science sometimes; there are some schools of thoughts that see people as complex, and there are others that simplify us into black boxes that are solely defined by our behaviours, and there are still others who believe that we are primarily driven by our biological urges. In general, though, the most effective psychological, sociological and anthropological approaches are those that look at people holistically, rather than turning them into DNA strands or black boxes.
Materialist dualism is a holistic philosophical approach to the mind-body problem: it recognises the difference between subjective and objective truth, does not make claims about the objective world that can’t be verified scientifically, and recognises the identity and personhood of those whose identities don’t have a one-to-one correspondence with their exterior physical manifestations. I know that my individual identity is subjective, and that when I move through the world and interact with people who don’t know we’re plural, they’ll see something different, and I’m fully aware of that. But at the same time, I have a strong sense of who I am, and that’s where my motivations, worldviews, likes and dislikes come from. It’s not a classic ‘delusion’ or ‘pathology’; as I said, I’m aware of its subjectivity, and our plurality doesn’t make us dysfunctional. Rather, we’re able to support each other emotionally and lead a halfway decent life, so no, it’s not dysfunctional. It’s a variation from the norm, but we view it as a positive adaptation that’s served us well, for the most part.
[Yavari] spoons? we’re totally out of them.
December 2nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
As we said in the ‘we aten’t dead’ entry, we’re pretty out of it, which is why nobody’s written a new entry since October. We had a lot more written over the summer, but when classes are in session, we sharply curtail most non-school-related activity. This isn’t because we don’t care about our blog or website, but because we have a limited amount of energy that we can apply to tasks that require the same level of analysis as a school project. Our ‘social spoons’ get used up pretty quickly at school—even though we like the folks we know at school and enjoy talking to them, that still takes up a tonne of energy—and we’ll often spend whole weekends uttering no more than a few sentences to people.
Same applies to writing and doing that sort of thing–we’ve got enough energy to write personal updates in our locked Dreamwidth journals, but writing public blog entries about political or social topics takes a lot more energy out of us, and we’ve been pouring that into all of the papers and tests and assignments we’re doing.
We’re also in a math class this semester, and that subject tends to be an energy sink for us, compared to English, ‘hard’ science classes that aren’t math-heavy, social sciences, foreign languages and…well, everything that’s not math. Last semester, we had more time to do things outside of school because we weren’t taking anything that would zap us too much, but it’s a lot different now. We spend most of our free time reading blogs and dicking around on the internet, because there’s not much time to do anything else.
One difference between how we handle our energy now and when we were younger is that we’re aware when we’re overloaded, and take the time out to take care of ourselves if needed. If we’re too overloaded to do something, we will reschedule something if possible, because we all know we’re just going to be cranky, irritable and unfocussed if we DON’T do it. In the past, we’d just overload the hell out of ourselves and we’d melt down and be unable to concentrate on things. We’ve got enough attention/concentration issues as it is; we don’t want to exacerbate it by overextending ourselves. (We very nearly did that this semester by signing up for 5 classes. We ended up dropping one, which was a good idea as we couldn’t have handled the workload of all of those classes, and something would have dropped off. It’s bad enough as it is.)
We’re looking forward to the end of the semester. It’s dragging on forever and we want these papers done and enough is enough.
we aten’t dead
December 1st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
No, we haven’t disappeared off the face of the internet; we’re just rather occupied with our offline life right now (exams, three final papers, various other things). There will probably be more updates after all of this stuff has passed.
~us
[Kerry and Hess] Disfigurative Language
October 20th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
There’s this misconception that autistic people necessarily struggle with complex or abstract thought.
That’s not completely true, at least not for us. It’s more complicated than that. Most of our seeming difficulties with ‘abstract thought’ aren’t related to ‘abstract thought’ at all, but communicating the relationship between certain figurative language devices and the concrete things they’re connected to, and a tendency to call up very literal visual images in certain situations.
We generally understand that figurative language isn’t to be interpreted literally, but there are still times when our minds call up literal mental images. For instance, there’s the phrase ‘hold a master’s degree’. Now, we know that it’s an expression, and not to be taken literally, but the first thing we (well, the two of us, anyway) think of is someone walking around with a degree certificate. That’s right—they ‘hold a degree’! The same applies to ‘hold down a job’; it’s as though a ‘job’ is a big fuzzy monster that needs to be held down, or it’ll get away from you. (And in this economy, it just might!) When our computer pops up a message asking to ‘send a report to Apple’, we’ll sometimes imagine a report being sent to an apple, even though we know full well that they’re talking about the techs at Apple Inc.
It’s difficult for us to pick out certain things when analysing literature, like identifying types of figurative language (other than the most obvious ones, like metaphors and similes), and even though we’re better at it than we were when we were younger, we still feel that we’re at a disadvantage compared to most people. Analysing nonfiction is much easier for us, even if the nonfiction deals primarily with abstract concepts. Although, as Noël said in an earlier entry, we have a hard time with books that express those ideas in impenetrable philosophical jargon, even if the ideas themselves are perfectly understandable to us. Read: Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and other postmodernist philosophers. Interesting ideas, obscurantist prose.
But if you ask us to identify the literary symbols in a particular work when we’re writing a paper, we might pick out the ones that are most obvious to readers, but the subtler symbols may be massively more difficult to articulate in writing, even if we fully understand the piece as a whole, and what it’s trying to communicate. It’s not that we misunderstand the symbolism, as such, but that it’s more difficult for us to name and discuss those symbols with the same fluency that people without our perceptual differences might.
Sometimes we’re self-conscious about it, and worry that we seem ‘less intelligent’, even though it’s a difference in processing—we tend to articulate ideas that we notice in writing that are less codified than a lot of literary tropes. Cultural studies and identity, for instance, are things we grasp well, but identifying specific symbols in a poem or short story is honestly more difficult. It interests us less, to be honest, and…it’s not because we’re ‘philistines’ who don’t appreciate ‘high’ literature as much as it is because we’re just going to have a more difficult go of parsing it in a systematic way. We can communicate it well enough not to get bad or mediocre grades any more on these sorts of assignments, but it’s still something that we don’t handle as well. (Another issue is that some of us, like Kerry, only become passionate about fiction if the work is particularly special in a…weird, almost mystical way, and to be frank, most fictional works don’t have that effect, especially not ‘realistic’ ones.)
[Kerry] this isn’t 1991.
October 10th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Type foundries, it is completely unreasonable for you to sell basic font licences without PDF permissions. This is 2011, and design hasn’t been print-only for quite some time. Technology has advanced to the point that people are embedding type into PDFs and MS Word documents, and are using web fonts on their sites. I’m of the belief that a single licence should cover all of those uses, and all of these additional licences are a form of price-gouging. If I’m going to pay $150 for a font family, I should be able to embed it in a PDF at the very least, without paying even more for the ‘privilege’. I can understand not using an OTF font file in a @font-face declaration (since the file would be hosted on the website), but disallowing people from using the typeface in PDF files is patently ridiculous and is honestly not in step with the times.
You’re already paying $150 for a licence, and you’re asking designers to pay even more just to simply use it in a fucking PDF? So much for using it in an online CV, then, or many other practical applications. As lovely as some of these fonts are, the restrictive licensing terms are a massive turn-off.
This is one of many reasons why people refuse to buy fonts from distributors. Honestly, I cannot blame them for going to BitTorrent and file-sharing forums and swapping font files for free. I’m not defending the behaviour, but I do think there’s a rationale for it. Are there sketchy people who try and extract fonts from PDFs? Yeah, but they’re in the minority, and the extracted fonts they come out with tend to be inferior quality to the original licensed ones. It’s 2011, not 1991, and your business model should reflect that.
