The Reason I Jump

It’s likely that you’ve never read anything by Naoki Higashida. His is a new voice, an entirely unique one, and I can say that without fear of reprisal. Higashida is a 13-year-old Japanese boy who suffers from autism.

This book has been translated by David Mitchell (remember Cloud Atlas?) and KA Yoshida, parents themselves of a child with autism.  Autism is a very personal and still very mysterious disorder that is growing in prevalence in our worldwide population. It does not present the same way in all its sufferers, in fact diagnosis and even the definition of this disorder is in constant flux. Wouldn’t it be more helpful to know what it is like from the inside? Especially for a child?

Higashida can tell us, from a literate child’s perspective. He lets us know that autism sufferers have a rich emotional life, but a tortuous physical existence. For him, this means that he constantly wrestles with his inability to comply with the social demands put on him. He confesses to despair over his situation: "It's as if my whole body, except for my soul, feels as if it belongs to somebody else and I have zero control over it. I don't think you could ever imagine what an agonizing sensation this is." And this is 100% of every waking moment for him.

The book is mostly set up into a series of questions and answers, posed by occasionally rude but unknown “normal” people, questions like “why don’t you do what you’re told right away” or “why do you speak in that peculiar way”. Higashida is patient and eloquent with each query, and often quite poetical in his responses.

My favourite response is to the question: “why do you ask the same questions over and over.” Higashida's reply is beautiful: "...I do understand things, but my way of remembering them works differently than everyone else's. I imagine a normal person's memory is arranged continuously, like a line. My memory, however, is more like a pool of dots. I'm always 'picking up' these dots--by asking my questions--so I can arrive back at the memory that the dots represent."

Higashida confirms that training and practice are essential to his success and repeatedly asks for patience and forbearance from those who care for him; "[w]hen we sense you've given up on us, it makes us feel miserable. So please keep helping us, through to the end."

Learning to communicate (painstakingly, with the help of his mother) via keyboard has been a godsend for Higashida. In his own words: "[o]ften, while I was learning this method, I'd feel utterly beaten...[w]hat kept me hammering away at it was the thought that to live my life as a human being, nothing is more important than being able to express myself." I agree. 

At only 135 pages, this is a book worth your time to read. Be enlightened and don't ask the rude questions!

Originally published on the Nonfiction Book Club Blog

Fuzzy World of Sick

Being sick has its own strange rewards. It removes you from the structure of life. You have permission to "be excused" even if it is only your own nod of assent.

I feel peaceable. Not just peaceful, but as if I am an emissary of peace; I bring it with me like a big hat. I'd probably cry if someone challenged my peace, but it's big and very present nonetheless.

I have slowed down. I need to be slow--something that usually drives me crazy--in all things. Walking, thinking. Typing. What was I saying? Yeah, thinking.

I wish I could say that it makes me sharper in other unexpected things, but instead it makes me feel fuzzy; in the head, in my ears, in my preferred clothing choices, in my wit. I giggle at silly things. Which makes me cough.  Often uncontrollably.

I know I'll get better soon. But for now, I'll try to enjoy the fluffy, peace-spouting effects along with the aches and fatigue. I'm off for a nap.

Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

For me, reading Anna Quindlen’s slender slip of a book was like meeting up with a like-minded friend in a pub on a foggy night. The farther I read, the more I kept thinking “I know! Me, too!”  I, too, grew up on a diet of English books (Edith Blyton’s Famous Five series and Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia come to mind) and often wished more people in my world exclaimed “I say!”  while drinking ginger beer.

Quindlen was an American anglophile long before she ventured to London in the flesh (like Henry James, like T. S. Eliot), waiting purposefully until she was in her forties. When I first traveled to England in my almost-thirties, I was also worried that the spell of all its fictions would be shattered once I walked the hallowed ground myself. Anyone who has been there can attest; England truly has the power of literary and historical magic still firmly in hand. I was not disappointed and neither was Quindlen.

Quindlen focuses on the grand city herself, and walks the streets and boroughs with her estimable ghost army of fictional tour guides: P. D. James’ Adam Dagliesh in Soho; A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin at Buckingham Palace; and John Galworthy’s  Forsythe family’s sooty assessments of  Green Street, Montpelier Square and Knightsbridge; to name but a few.

Charles Dickens also wandered with Quindlen and bemoaned many a street in London, but Quindlen quickly learned to take his wailings with a grain of salt: “[a] visitor can take the Tube to London’s most notorious neighborhoods, and not see anything that approaches the dingy squalor of Dickens’ London. This is either a tribute to urban renewal or literary overstatement.” She tends to believe the latter is the stronger case.

London also withholds some charm for what it can no longer reveal. On the south side of the Thames, across from the Tower, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, there is the South Bank and Southwark. Historically, this area was “a kind of London frontier”, where the smelly tanneries and soap factories were placed. This was where Chaucer's Canterburian-bound travelers begun their pilgrimage. Here were the original locations of Shakespeare's Globe Theatres, not too far from its rebuilt modern successor.  Now, “Southwark is new London with a vengeance” and you’d be hard pressed to imagine the stink and decline that once defined this part of town. But it is likely that most tourists, however interested they may be in finding the literary made manifest, appreciate breathing the improved air!

Quindlen admitted there were those occasions when London let her down. 221b Baker Street, home of detective Sherlock Holmes, was commemorated downwind of the address, between 237 and 241. Holmes himself, “who loathed sentiment, much less pretence,” would be beside himself if he saw the Sherlock Holmes food and beverage shop,  Sherlock memorabilia and souvenir shops, and the fake bobby at his wrongly addressed door! Even London can fall victim to kitsch, as much as any other beloved place.

  Originally posted on the Nonfiction Book Club Blog

Science of Kissing: What our Lips are Telling Us

Sheril Kirshenbaum, science journalist, asks a simple question: why do we kiss?  She finds lots of answers, and even more questions.

Did you know that the scientific word for smooching is osculation? It's derived from the Latin word osculum, defined as a "social or friendship kiss, or kiss out of respect."

Did you know that “kissing [i]s practiced by over 90 percent of cultures around the world”?

Did you realize that the chemical exchange of saliva and pheromones can help kissers subconsciously determine if this match is The One?

But why do we engage in this behaviour? There is no easy answer. Kissing is serious business. Okay, not too serious—Kirshenbaum’s truly scientific book is written with an abundantly affectionate humour.

To try to discern our reasons for kissing, Kirshenbaum looks at a variety of academic approaches; evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, classical history, and psychology. These approaches each have their turn, and some seem more plausible than others. Calling our lips a “genital echo” of the brightly coloured buttocks of the female bonobos, or defending Freud’s theory that kissing is a symptom of breast deprivation, both admittedly trip me up. But they are part of the fun to try to figure out our deep-lipped reasons for wanting to kiss each other.

It was Charles Darwin that brought it to our attention that not all cultures indulge in kissing. The “Malay-kiss” he described as follows:

“The women squatted with their faces upturned; my attendants stood leaning over them, laid the bridge of their noses at right angles over theirs and commenced rubbing. It lasted somewhat longer than a hearty handshake with us.”

Essentially, this exchange is in smelling instead of kissing. It’s very like the kunik, practiced by the Canadian Inuit and similar again to a custom practiced by the Maori, making an interesting Pacific triangle of sniffy influence.

For her neuroscience research, Kirshenbaum attempted to use magnetoencephalography (yes, really) or a MEG machine to scan the “brain on kissing”, but getting two people into said machine and having them kiss without moving proved to be an insurmountable challenge. Kirshenbaum then modified her approach but only to open new directions of questions that shift from the central “why?”

Kirshenbaum concedes that there’s more research to be done, and that for her, the fun in learning more has not diminished. Neither has it for the reader!  There’s a lot more to discover if you read the book, but I won't kiss ’n’ tell any more than I already have. Fewer vacillations and more osculation, I say!

Originally posted on the Nonfiction Book Club Blog