Very interesting on Murray, Max. And perhaps his so solid 'belief' in
God is a necessary 'wall' to lean on?
Doug
On 18-Sep-08, at 6:25 PM, Max Richards wrote:
> Quoting andrew burke <[log in to unmask]>:
>
>> Les Murray has publicly stated he is aspergic. Andrew
>>
> Indeed he has.
> Here are some draft sentences from my inchoate piece on the general
> subject...
> Les Murray’s ‘Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver’, from
> his fourth
> collection, Lunch & Counter Lunch (1974). I confess that when I
> first read it
> the word autist meant only to me something about autos. Since then
> Murray has
> written about his autistic son and in interviews and the Alexander
> biography,
> both depression and autism have been discussed.
>
> A car is also
> a high-speed hermitage. Here
> only the souls of policemen can get at you.
>
> Murray is registering the characteristically autism-spectrum feel of
> protected
> seclusion inside a car even at speed.
> (The world’s most famous autist, Temple Grandin, author of Thinking
> in Pictures,
> etc., has shown on tv her home-made hugging machine, and her
> expertise in
> designing calming enclosures for cattle.[Claire Danes is to play
> Grandin in some
> planned biopic!])
> Murray reveals his awareness of the personality category he and
> other artists
> belongs to, not just childlike but like an only child:
>
> among the self-taught
> the loners, chart-freaks, bush encyclopedists
> there are protocols, too: we meet
> gravely as stiff princes, and swap fact:
> did you know some bats can climb side on?
>
> Murray, from early on, has recognized his peculiarity, built on it,
> and of
> course has always also had what the blurb of his book claims, ‘a
> many-toned
> voice’, presenting ‘a tolerant, multifarious order’. Things and
> their thinginess
> do bulk larger in his work than human relationships, it seems to me.
>
> Max
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au
>
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
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Language is sound as sense.
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R. Murray Schafer
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