I return!

Hello! I'm back! Yes me! Long time, no post. I do humbly apologise to anyone who made a comment on a post here that has sat unmoderated and unpublished for years. I have been busy doing other things: work, hobbies, volunteering and unsuccessfully trying to keep our family "on track", out of trouble and quiet enough to not alarm the neighbours. I have at times thought I should again write my autobiography and again offer it to a real publisher (I chickened-out many years ago), but my life is so full of ridiculous situations that no one would believe half of it, so I haven't bothered. It's not as though I've done anything hugely momentous in life, but in the things I do I have always pursued originality, and the few people I have in my life are mostly intrinsically unusual and interesting in some way. 

Even though over the years this blog as attracted OVER TWO MILLION VIEWS and 1.84 thousand comments (some spam I admit), the people who run Blogger keep making it a hassle to even try to monetise it, claiming the content is insufficient or something. If that is true, I've got to wonder why millions of readers have paid this blog a visit, and still do regularly even though I have abandoned my blogs for many years. Very few people make money out of writing, and I sadly am not a member of that elite group. 

Theoretically, I could make some money out of selling my ebooks, which are still available from a range of ebook vendors under my pen name Lili Marlene. If you have enjoyed ANY of my writing over the years, PLEASE do show your appreciation by buying some of my stuff. My most substantial ebook is Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story originally published through Smashwords. It's an unauthorised biography of an ambitious British man who made a (new) name for himself and carved out a career as an author in the highly questionable easy-reading genre of non-fiction that combines autobiography with "neurodiversity" pop psychology. Tammet raised himself out of a humble and ordinary background, studied languages and memory techniques, and last time I checked, was living in France. He made his own good luck. Even though his rise to minor fame appears to have involved a lot of hype and not telling the full autobiographical story, he is not the villain of my book. The villains of the story are all the scientists, journalists, publishers and other people with authority who failed to do their job and created or failed to vet misleading science journal papers, books, news articles, interviews and documentaries. Long before covid divided society into people who have or have not lost all faith in experts, mainstream media, psychology researchers, scientists, journalists, science journal peer-review and the university-educated class, I wrote a book that exposed how one quietly-spoken, gentle man with a very effective PR company made fools of them all. And Tammet is by not by any means the only person who has become famous as a man of science through the work of a very effective public relations campaign rather than good science. Lots of scientists and university academics make most of their money as minor celebrities flogging pop science books directly to the public. I guess this happens because the economics of science does not reward excellence in actual science, which opens it up to distracting and corrupting influences.

Even though the story of Daniel Tammet (born Daniel Corney) shows how lots of well-paid respected members of the elite knowledge-working class (our superiors!) went along with hype and failed to do their jobs properly, some particular aspects of this story make me particularly angry. Tammet identified himself as being on the autism spectrum, a claim that's almost meaningless because the concept of autism is so ill-defined, but in doing this Tammet set himself up as a role model for seriously disabled or disturbed children and young people. It is simply unforgivable to market any misleading book to such a vulnerable readership. A copy of one of Tammet's books was reportedly found among the belongings of the disturbed pale young man responsible for the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. F*** that. 

The other aspect of the story that still makes me angry is the fact that intelligent, high-achieving people in the memory sport community knew the full story of Daniel Tammet/Corney which subverted claims about him in the "scientific literature", and I believe some were interviewed for a documentary, but those interviews were not used and their input apparently deliberately suppressed. Never let the truth get in the way of a great story! 

The thing that really grinds my guts is the calibre of science in which Tammet was written up as a case study, at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience where junk accumulates, an area of research known as "neurobollocks". The "research laboratories" that do this work have been awarded countless millions of pounds and dollars over decades to help disabled children, but the more you look at the science the uglier the sight. I found researchers as editors and authors in the same journals, obviously wrong theories published in peer reviewed science journals debunked by real experts in letters to the editor in the next issue, and a general lack of progress in understanding or fixing conditions such as autism and ADHD. And all the while, kids are still growing up disabled, adults with "autism" are exploited as as entertaining freaks in reality TV series', and some genuinely fascinating areas of neuroscience lose credibility from sharing the atmosphere with so much nonsense. 

Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story at Smashwords

Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story at Rautken Kobo

Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story at Barnes and Noble

Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story at Apple Books

Daniel Tammet: the Boy with the Incredible Story at Everand

Also available through cloudLibrary, OverDrive, Gardners and coming to Bookshop.org