John McCoy

American Gothic, et al.

Content warning: this post contains nothing but digressions.

Typography is a mess. Or at least, its argot is a mess. In an earlier post I discussed the various meanings of the word font. An even more schizophrenic typographical term is Gothic, which is most often used to refer to typefaces that imitate Medieval Blackletter hands. Blackletter itself isn’t a specific typeface—the term predates typefaces—it’s a family of associated hands, and a hand is a standardized manner of forming letters by writing. As opposed to inscription, which is the primary way we know the original Latin alphabet (which is also variously called a Roman or Antique alphabet, depending on where you’re from).

A contemporary interpretation of Blackletter, Carol Gothic.

Blackletter was used in Western European scriptoriums starting in the 12th century, and was designed as a decorative style that could be uniformly employed by trained scribes; it is characterized by extremes of thick and thin lines and letterforms that show the individual strokes by which they are made using broad pen nibs. This broken, fractured quality of Blackletter is reflected in the name of a German subset of styles: Fraktur, which was used in Germany and the Baltic states from the 16th Century on up to the 1930s. As they rose to power, National Socialists used Fraktur in printing as a marker of German identity, which is why Blackletter has a contemporary association with Nazism—even though Hitler himself hated the form and outlawed its use in 1941.

Schriftzug Fraktur — All Fraktur is Blackletter but not all Blackletter is Fraktur.
Graphic by Manuel Strehl CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12778207

But to return to the word Gothic: in the United States, this word has, since the 19th Century, been used typographically to describe geometric, unilinear, sans-serif typefaces. It’s unclear why this usage was chosen, although it is likely related to the European term for this style, Grotesque. While today the word grotesque is synonymous with deformed, repulsive, or bizarre, the word literally means “coming from the cave,” and referred to designs found in underground Roman ruins from the time of Nero. When discovered in the 1500s, these ruins were called le Grotto, in spite of not being a cave at all, but the basement to an unfinished palace complex. But in the Rococo period, artists and architects went crazy for these roman wall decorations and adapted them into increasingly complex and ostentatious patterns of their own, which they called Grotesques. In the 17th century, these extravagant and fantastical motifs were criticized as distorted caricature, leading to the modern, disparaging use of the word, which is an unusual transformation in art history, where for the most part terms coined as ridicule eventually lost their negativity: Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism—or even, Gothic.

Italian. Grotesque ornament, 16th century.
Victoria and Albert Museum.

But to return to typography—which is the ostensible subject of this essay—the typographic term Grotesque (or its German form still seen in many typeface name, Grotesk) was likely used to mean “unorthodox,” or “brutal.” In this manner it is like the original architectural term Gothic, coined in 1550 by Giorgio Vasari, meaning “of the Goths.” This, as mentioned above, was not a compliment—Vasari was comparing the new style’s displacement of Italianate forms to the conquest of Rome by barbarians. (Which is another pejorative word meaning “bearded,” because beards were considered uncultured.) It may be that this usage of Grotesque informed the American term Gothic, similarly used to refer to typefaces that were stark, Spartan, dispensing with cultural niceties like serifs, which were, after all, vestiges of writing text by hand. Or maybe not! Who knows! All that is certain is the term was first used in the 1830’s by the Boston Type Foundry to describe its line of geometric, mono-line, sans serif typefaces.

"Gothic" typefaces — “Gothic” typefaces in the 1860 Boston Type Foundry *Specimen Book*.

Oddly enough, at about the same time, American typographers began to use the term Egyptian to refer to mono-line slab-serif typefaces. This may have been because they recalled hieroglyphs—Ancient Egypt was something of a fad, owing to the era of modern archeological excavations as carried out by Napoleonic surveyors in the early 1800s.

Or maybe not. As I said, typography is a mess.

The Radical Left City Mouse & the Very Good Country Mouse

A City Mouse once visited a relative who lived in the country. For lunch the Country Mouse took his elite East Coast cousin to the local Cracker Barrel for Country Fried Steak with a side of Onion Petals. The City Mouse ate very sparingly, nibbling at a plate of Impossible Sausage, and drinking her coffee black—even though, as the waitress noted, there was plenty of sugar and creamer right there on the table.

After the meal the two had a long talk, or rather the Country Mouse talked about how much of a hellscape the City in which his cousin lived was. They then went to bed in a nest in an abandoned building in the nearby town’s main street, which had fallen on hard times since the steel wool factory closed.

The next day the City Mouse asked the Country Mouse where he was getting his information about the City. She said that in the 20 years she’d lived there, she had never experienced any of the things the Country Mouse had so vividly described. “Sure, there are rats there, but there are rats here, too—we spent last night running away from them when they wanted our nest.”

“There is so much hate in your heart,” said the Country Mouse. “Even so, I will come to your City to see the desolation first hand.”

They hopped aboard a commuter train and soon found themselves on the street where the City Mouse lived. Strolling through the bright lights, they passed a bodega where there were many foods that maybe a Marxist would like, such as felafel and French salad dressing. The Country Mouse noticed that many of the people shopping there were not the right color for people to be. “This whole place is on fire,” he said. The City Mouse looked around, confused.

“I don’t understand, are we looking at the same—”

“COMMUNISTS!” yelled the Country Mouse, pointing at a pair of hipsters riding fixie bikes. “Sodom and Gomorrah!” he added, as a couple of male mice scampered by—they weren’t holding hands or anything, but he could tell. Just then a chonky cat exited the bodega and waddled up to the mice. “Hey guys—” the cat began, and the Country Mouse pulled out his firearm, an XLV (45) derringer.

“Whoa, whoa, take it easy!” said the City Mouse. “I know this cat, he’s my neighbor.”

“Pervert!” said the Country Mouse. “This is why we need to bring in the National Mouse Guard, to teach you a less—I mean, to stop all the crime!”

“What crime?” his cousin asked, but the Country Mouse was already scampering away.

He avoided the train because honestly, what sort of reasonable mice would ever put themselves through that horror. It took him weeks, but finally, with aching paws, he arrived back in the Country, where he was immediately eaten by a stray dog.

Moral: They’re not sending their best mice.

Yeah, it’s called a disability

I got my autism diagnosis at a weird time: about a month and a half before the Global Pandemic. One day I was learning why I isolate myself, the next day the whole world was isolating right along with me. During the following year of lockdown and social distancing, many housebound folks, mostly young adults, turned to inward reflection, mostly in the form of obsessively Googling psychological disorders (perhaps at the behest of whomever was trapped in the same apartment with them). This in turn resulted in a wave of self-diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder, and of online communities promoting awareness and proclaiming the legitimacy and strength of autistic minds.

Around the same time there was a host of television shows starring autistic people: Love on the Spectrum, As We See It, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Patience. There have been novels like Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which doesn’t explicitly say that its protagonist is on the spectrum, but it’s pretty obvious. Autistic creators exploded on YouTube. The sheer variety of new representation stood in contrast to the dominant stereotypes of Rain Man and The Big Bang Theory.

Like I said, it was a weird time to get a diagnosis. I found it strangely comforting that my disorder landed me at the cool kids’ table. I’m not really a joiner, and I had never been part of a zeitgeist before. But with the movement came a backlash from skeptics who questioned whether all this generational tism was real, or just a validating bandwagon for the chronically “quirky.” This was mixed in with class and race issues, as many saw the trend as a white, middle-class thing. A whole genre of you’re-not-really-autistic videos emerged on TikTok, and there’s even a SubReddit called FakeDisorderCringe in which users accuse and mock people allegedly feigning neurodivergence to get attention.

Along with all criticism from outside the autistic community there has been a major divide within. On one side there exists an autistic cohort believes that their neurology should be recognized by society-at-large as legitimate and even beneficial. These have maxims like “autism is a super power.” On the other side, caregivers for those whose autistic presentation that renders them non-verbal, shut off, and otherwise incapable of self-support feel that “autism chic” belittles their painful experience. The discourse can get pretty heavy, and communities who would seem like natural allies are instead entrenched combatants.

I have some sympathy for both groups. For those us with “high-functioning” ASD (like me), we may be happy with ourselves as we are, we also deal daily with the stress of a world not made for us. It makes sense to look for not only accommodation but also for appreciation. It’s only been very recently that the clinical definition of autism has been broadly enough applied that most of us could even understand who we are. And that’s liberating, and worth celebrating. But when autism comes with extreme care needs—what many people still label as “real” autism—that is a real burden and a real loss, and beyond deserving empathy and systemic support, caregivers should not be faulted for mourning. (This doesn’t excuse those who credulously believe pseudoscientific claims about vaccines or Tylenol.)

As for me, I was labeled a “gifted” child in grade school and got put ahead in math and art. Also teachers let me get away with a lot of nonsense. I have had more intense and rewarding interests than would fill many lifetimes. I am a quick learner and eager to learn. I notice small things that others miss or making connections that others find insightful. But also: I have trouble staying close to friends and even to family. I can be oblivious to the most obvious social cues. If something doesn’t interest me, I can’t make myself remember it. And I can be rude or hurtful to people and only realize later. So is autism on the whole a plus or a minus? Is it an alternative way of thinking, or is it a disorder, like the DSM-5 names it?

Since my diagnosis I’ve read quite a few books on autism and they can be broken down into three categories: memoirs of autistic people, particularly those who got a surprise diagnosis (you’re reading one of these right now); therapeutic or self-help guides, some written by psychologists and some not (these can be full of dicey advice); and the rare book that examines what Autism with a capital A means, socially, aesthetically, or even teleologically.

One book I found engaging, but also frustrating, is the academic monograph Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, by M. Remi Yergeau, who teaches at Carleton University. This is a dense book, not for the fainthearted. Yergeau’s subject, as given in the title, is what they call the “rhetoric” of autism. And here I have to be very careful in what I write, because “rhetoric” is a complex subject with specific and varied meanings in philosophy and linguistics, and because my wife literally wrote a book on the subject. (I myself am not a philosopher and have a tendency to use a word to mean “just what I choose it to mean.“)

Yergeau uses “rhetoric” in the sense of “the manners of communication used by a cultural group,” and their contention is that while autism has traditionally been seen as a barrier to interpersonal connection, autistic behavior (even when non-intentional) is in fact its own set of social rules that challenge assumptions of what is effective, or even permissible, expression. This makes autism analogous to queerness, which likewise stands as a counter to mainstream assumptions of the borders of gender and sexuality. And if this paragraph makes your head hurt, then I’ve successfully duplicated the experience of reading Yergeau.

This book is helpful to me, if only for a feeling of validation. I have often felt that my inability often to convey the state of my head or my heart was more a matter of a lack of understanding on the part of whomever I’m talking to than a defect on my part. There are times when there is no good way to describe the feelings I’m having because allistic society never made the right words. But I don’t know that I’m fully on board with Yergeau. I remain unconvinced that my stims are an expression of my culture, or that my inability to look someone in the eye is simply an alternative mode of discourse. Some things are simply flaws.

Everything is relative. From an autistic standpoint, “normal” comes with its own pathologies. To play autistic devil’s advocate: normies don’t know how to plainly say what they mean, but they get offended when you don’t take their opaque hints. They lack the ability to passionately engage with an interest and instead of being authentic they follow trends. They are needy and their feelings are easily hurt. They can’t handle being alone for long. I could go on.

Would I change myself to be not autistic if I could? No, of course not. It’s built so deeply into how my mind works that in its absence I would be a completely different person. I like many things about being autistic. But autism’s not all trains and dinosaurs. It’s also anxiety, and isolation, and an inability to choose what to watch next on Netflix.

Speaking of which: the original Love on the Spectrum was an Australian production and was only later given a U.S. version. (Netflix retroactively calls the original series Love on the Spectrum: Australia, which, first of all, rude.) While I have mixed emotions about the show, there is one scene from the Australian version that has been stuck in my mind since I first saw it. There was a participant, Olivia, who was a member of a theatrical company for people with disabilities. During one break in a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream her director called her out for joyfully jumping around on stage, and she defensively replied “Yeah, it’s called a disability.”

And that’s the thing. ASD brings joy and shame, jumping and hiding. It’s a blessing and a curse. In that way, it’s just like being human.