Helen
Implicitly explicit
With facilitated communication. Which is a scam. Watch the video in Gulliver Foyle's post: https://internationalskeptics.com/f...acilitated-communication.379736/post-14800972
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Autistic genius novelist woos the literary world with novel composed using "Facilitated Communication"
- Thread starter angrysoba
- Start date
With facilitated communication. Which is a scam. Watch the video in Gulliver Foyle's post: https://internationalskeptics.com/f...acilitated-communication.379736/post-14800972
I wouldn't call it a scam, like many others she has fooled herself.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Just as blindness and mutism are not absolutes - many registered blind people can see various degrees of light and shade - autism is one of those terms, which, like 'schizophrenia' is a loose label that can mean all different things to different people. Kerouac was widely believed to be schizophrenic but is still considered to be one of America's great writers, for example.
Helen
Implicitly explicit
I call it a scam, when the facilitated communication produces a book and a masters, she knew what she was doing.
Vixen, Stephen Hawking was not born non-speaking, and severely autistic. That is a ludicrous comparison. But Woody Brown doesn't have to be a Stephen Hawking, he can be Woody Brown, non-author, and be fine.
I have seen lots of facilitated communication in person, and I understand the desperate need to communicate with their children parents feel. Not to be able to do so is tragic and frustrating beyond belief. Simple signs and/or images often work to alleviate the situation, but facilitated communication does not. The whole thing just makes me want to cry - there are ways to make it easier, this is not it.
Vixen, Stephen Hawking was not born non-speaking, and severely autistic. That is a ludicrous comparison. But Woody Brown doesn't have to be a Stephen Hawking, he can be Woody Brown, non-author, and be fine.
I have seen lots of facilitated communication in person, and I understand the desperate need to communicate with their children parents feel. Not to be able to do so is tragic and frustrating beyond belief. Simple signs and/or images often work to alleviate the situation, but facilitated communication does not. The whole thing just makes me want to cry - there are ways to make it easier, this is not it.
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Helen
Implicitly explicit
Which has absolutely nothing to do with facilitated communication.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I wonder if mom ever facilitated the communication of her son disagreeing with something she had her heart set on.
I wonder if there were times when she showed up to facilitate communication, and the first thing her son indicated was that he wasn't in the mood and didn't want to do this today.
I wonder if there were times when she had arranged an audience for a facilitated communication session, and her son let her know that he didn't want to participate, but she manufactured a conversation anyway, for the audience.
I wonder if there were times when she showed up to facilitate communication, and the first thing her son indicated was that he wasn't in the mood and didn't want to do this today.
I wonder if there were times when she had arranged an audience for a facilitated communication session, and her son let her know that he didn't want to participate, but she manufactured a conversation anyway, for the audience.
angrysoba
Philosophile
You cannot possibly believe this!
Stephen Hawking was at Cambridge before he was afflicted with ALS. His machines were keeping him alive, they weren’t broadcasting children’s entertainment while he was in lectures.
He was not intellectually disabled and had already demonstrated that he understood theoretical physics so there are no grounds for questioning his abilities.
On the other hand, here is a man who was born with severe intellectual impediments, who no independent observers have ever known to have literary interests or ability to understand literature, who all independent observers have only known to yell out short repetitive bursts of language derived from the cartoons he watches.
Moreover, all his supposed literary interests and abilities line up with his mother who is glazed throughout his novel and interviews, who apparently interprets his tapping on the letter board.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what’s going on here.
Gord_in_Toronto
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2006
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And I just wonder if he could identify the object in a picture that he could see but his mother could not.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
That's a good one!
angrysoba
Philosophile
“I will not have my mother subjected to this kind of hostile interrogation and suspicion. She is my rock, my guiding light, my north, south, east and west, my Norwegian Wood!”
Guybrush Threepwood
Trainee Pirate
I didn't think the forum let you put Darat on ignore?
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
The 'pushy Mom' -type has always been a mystery to me. But I guess there are plenty of parents who live through their kids. One of my favouritie stand-up comedians is Asian-American (for Brits: read, Hong Kong-American') Jimmy O Yang. One of his most viewed clips is one in which he relates how someone asks him what was his family's love language. He laughs loudly in his characteristically gruff throaty way, "Love language? My parents are Asian!!!' Audience kills themself laughing. And I thought, yeah!
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Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
I have now read the next bit of the book Upward Bound; this concerns a character named Tom, who is severely disabled by cerebral palsy and needs care 24/7. It is rather touching and as seen from Tom's POV, as for the first time in his life a carer at the day care centre seems to see him as a real person.
The quibble I have from a literary POV is that the book is from the viewpoint of the narrator, Woody, i.e., first person, yet he seems to know exactly what his mother is thinking or feeling (for example, rage towards the head of the day care centre and wanting to yell at him, Woody, but refraining), so yeah it does seem written from Mom's POV. His creative writing tutor should have told him you can only infer what others think or feel from what they say or do if you are writing in the first person. I think the book might work for young adults or those who just enjoy a sentimental 'good read', and hurrah for Mom championing the rights and feelings of the disabled.
Speaking of which, re my friend's PhD creative writing tutor bullying her into writing 'more authentically', see earlier post - I note that today he has a piece in the GUARDIAN* complaining - ironically - that people are now 'over-sharing'. Make up your mind, Blake Morrison! (For it is he.)
*‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing ~ https://www.theguardian.com/books/n...-morrison-on-memoir-in-the-age-of-oversharing
The quibble I have from a literary POV is that the book is from the viewpoint of the narrator, Woody, i.e., first person, yet he seems to know exactly what his mother is thinking or feeling (for example, rage towards the head of the day care centre and wanting to yell at him, Woody, but refraining), so yeah it does seem written from Mom's POV. His creative writing tutor should have told him you can only infer what others think or feel from what they say or do if you are writing in the first person. I think the book might work for young adults or those who just enjoy a sentimental 'good read', and hurrah for Mom championing the rights and feelings of the disabled.
Speaking of which, re my friend's PhD creative writing tutor bullying her into writing 'more authentically', see earlier post - I note that today he has a piece in the GUARDIAN* complaining - ironically - that people are now 'over-sharing'. Make up your mind, Blake Morrison! (For it is he.)
*‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing ~ https://www.theguardian.com/books/n...-morrison-on-memoir-in-the-age-of-oversharing
Missing the point, to some extent. It's not about the quality, or otherwise, of the book, but about the putative authorship, though the point you make about POV tends to work against rather than for the claim.
Gord_in_Toronto
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
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He's tapping at random. She's making it up.
The definitive test is to simultaneously show the boy one picture which his mother cannot see and a second picture she can see but he cannot while they both think they are seeing the same picture. What does the boy "say" it is?
Wikipedia has a good summary of the "field".
Facilitated communication - Wikipedia
angrysoba
Philosophile
I can't understand if this is performance art by you here.
It does not MATTER what "his creative writing tutor" says. Because Woody is not writing the book. At all!!!
The entire thing was written by the mother who is either a fraud or someone who managed to delude herself into believing that Woody was some novelist in the body of an autistic man.
We know his interests and they have nothing to do with literature.
And given that he is seriously mentally handicapped, he almost certainly does not have a developed theory of mind in which he studious crafts the inner life of other people.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
I am trying to understand how he got accepted by Columbia.
His mother filled in all the paper work.