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maria_s's review against another edition
adventurous
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism
Minor: Confinement
suddenflamingword's review against another edition
3.0
As an outsider-on-the-inside story making overt assumptions implicit in neurotypical societies, it's a grab bag. Arguing, essentially, that neurotypicals - as instantiated in special ed programs - systematically dehumanize those with autism. Stylistically it reflects this through the redirecting of consciousness (he "becomes" a branch & an egg) and a trickster persona that Ralph James Savarese refers to in the afterword as "the special ed student as literary troublemaker." Mixed in with this puckishness are moments where Mukhopadyay continuously and without warning sniffs people's hair and rifles through people's belongings in an attempt to turn the scientization of autistic identities back on those who dehumanize him.
Outside of thinking of Joe Biden vis-a-vis hair sniffing, this struck me as basking in misdirected cruelty. Probably it's my own neuroprivilege. I'm not sure the bus driver participated meaningfully enough in the cruelty of the special ed system to remove her baseball cap and sniff her hair (become her "hat") on the way off the bus. That he dismisses concerns about this by saying "I feel no obligation to be conventionally social" doesn't make it easier for me to dismiss my own concerns, even if it's very minor in the scale of things.
My primary concern is that Tito's success is used to defend the validity of the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) - the method his mother, Soma Mukhopadhyay, used to teach him (and later copyrighted) - which is only supported by a single study that is flawed and which defends a method that doesn't seem to work. Which is to say we don't have a lot of evidence, but what evidence we do have links it methodologically to the thoroughly discredited Facilitated Communications (FC) method. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of RPM's success, but anecdotal evidence can't be verified.
That's not to take away from Plankton Dreams, obviously. Plankton Dreams is a good read if you want to complicate - and therefore humanize - autism. It has a magical realist feeling that comes from a sincerely unique way of thinking and living. It makes me think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's constant reminders that the eurocentric idea of realism is only one of many realisms: "In Mexico," he says, "surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America."
Outside of thinking of Joe Biden vis-a-vis hair sniffing, this struck me as basking in misdirected cruelty. Probably it's my own neuroprivilege. I'm not sure the bus driver participated meaningfully enough in the cruelty of the special ed system to remove her baseball cap and sniff her hair (become her "hat") on the way off the bus. That he dismisses concerns about this by saying "I feel no obligation to be conventionally social" doesn't make it easier for me to dismiss my own concerns, even if it's very minor in the scale of things.
My primary concern is that Tito's success is used to defend the validity of the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) - the method his mother, Soma Mukhopadhyay, used to teach him (and later copyrighted) - which is only supported by a single study that is flawed and which defends a method that doesn't seem to work. Which is to say we don't have a lot of evidence, but what evidence we do have links it methodologically to the thoroughly discredited Facilitated Communications (FC) method. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence of RPM's success, but anecdotal evidence can't be verified.
That's not to take away from Plankton Dreams, obviously. Plankton Dreams is a good read if you want to complicate - and therefore humanize - autism. It has a magical realist feeling that comes from a sincerely unique way of thinking and living. It makes me think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's constant reminders that the eurocentric idea of realism is only one of many realisms: "In Mexico," he says, "surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America."
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