Perfect, just fine

Perfection is a relative thing. For instance, one can have a hammer that works as perfectly as any hammer ever could, it could be perfectly balanced and the perfect weight for the person using it, the perfect shape for the task, but that perfect hammer wouldn't be a perfect tool to tighten a bolt. A typical ball peen hammer wouldn't do if you wanted to pull a nail from a piece of wood. For that you'd want a claw hammer. And a typical wrench wouldn't be a good tool at all for driving a nail into a piece of wood, or for making a steel drum for that matter.

So perfection, as far as we can reproduce something coming close to it, is in the eye of the beholder.



Perfect World is a book written by David Cohen about his imperfect experience being the father of a young autistic boy. Cohen is a writer by profession and lives in New Zealand. He specializes in writing interviews, and he has written a lot about music.

Here's one review of his book on a New Zealand website.

David Cohen, very kindly sent a copy of the book to Autism Diva by way of Random House, the publisher, in New Zealand. Autism Diva enjoyed the book, but mostly enjoyed the last 3/4 or so of it. The book isn't the perfect book about autism, there's too much emphasis on the benefits of expensive ABA therapy and some of the statements are too broad, like autistic people don't feel the emotions of others.

On the other hand, there are a lot of positive statements about autism and the value of autistic people. There's no sympathy for the autism epidemic hype or the anti-vaccine hysteria. There are some interesting interviews with Dr. Roy Richard Grinker and Simon Baron-Cohen, and some really fabulous stuff about Leo Kanner and a discussion of the whole refrigerator mother thing that sometimes is attributed to Kanner as much as to Bettleheim. There are some really great quotes from people who are opposed to ridding the world of autism, and who really appreciate their autistic family members. The book was meant to seem quirky. It was sometimes a little hard to follow because of the quirkiness, and the seeming randomness of some of the thoughts presented, but this is something that readers of Autism Diva blog have to deal with, so she can't really complain too much about that seeming non sequiturs and what looks like inconsequential filler.

Autism Diva kept wondering how autistic David Cohen is himself, so she asked him (by e-mail). After some prodding, and sticking a metaphorical psychogenic tongue depressor into his mouth and asking him to say, "Aaaaaaahhh-gk-k", giving Autism Diva a chance to peer at his cerebellar tonsils, so to speak... Autism Diva decided that Mr. Cohen is probably BAP (Broader Autism Phenotype, or not quite autistic but approaching being so), or he might be BAPP (Broader Autism Phenotype Prince.) Mr. Cohen didn't seem to mind being examined this way or of being given an amateur, long-distance, quasi diagnosis. He was a good sport through hearing Autism Diva's opinions (very negative) of Ivar Lovaas and Applied Behavioral Analysis.

You can see an interview with David Cohen (there's a list of interviews in the center of the page click on "Breakfast: Henry talks to the father of an autistic child who wrote a book ....") on a NZ television station. Autism Diva asked Mr. Cohen if what she saw in the interview was caused by the famed autistic (in)ability to make eye-contact, but he replied that he had to keep looking off to the side to see a tiny monitor. The interviewer was in another studio and was only visible to Cohen on the monitor.

Estee Klaar-Wolfond, mother, writer, art curator and conference organizer, writes interesting things about the unreasonable kind of search for perfection (to seek to have the perfect child, for instance) on her blog. She says in her TAAP video, "We are all imperfect despite our perfection."


Kevin Leitch has an interesting commentary on the elastic and entirely relative meanings of "recovery" and "cure" in the minds of the biomed (DAN! protocol following, mercury phobic, etc.) parents. Sometimes parents in search for a magic bullet that will cure their child of all or most of the child's autistic traits seem to be seeking an imaginary perfect child that they had been expecting. Some parents now seem to be seeking ways to purify a woman planning to conceive a child so that she will be unlikely to conceive an autistic child (caution: article may not be suitable for children due to use of some coarse language).

In other news, there's an interesting discussion of the Autism Phenome Project out of the UC Davis MIND Institute. Quicktime video here. In the video of a presentation given by some of the researchers at the MIND Institute there is a clip that shows one of the things they are doing in the phenome project: taking photos of the study participants and digitizing the faces looking for and recording dysmorphology. This was great news to Autism Diva who is a big fan of dysmorphology. The little clip from the MIND docs seems to show that they are using the program discussed in this article, or one very much like it: 3D face scans spot genetic syndromes. The scientist who developed the 3D scan discussed in that BBC article is also discussed in this one.


Good blogging, elsewhere: Dr. Andrew Wakefield tried to pin the cause of a somewhat common disease on a vaccine in 1998, what was the vaccine and what was the disease? See Not Mercury's blog entry. "Epidemic" and The emperor's new pathology by Joseph. Steve D gives one dad's opinion on Recovery.



Autism Diva
unvarnished