Michael Erard - Blog

« No Excuse Not To Practice Spanish | Main | Social Connections & the New York Times »

I Was Dead, and I Was Resurrected

The Guardian has an interview with an 1980s rock star, Edwyn Collins, who suffered a stroke two years ago and had to relearn how to walk, eat, play music, and talk:

Weeks after our chance encounter in Inverness, I'm sitting with Collins in his spacious living room, the few stuffed birds in glass cases, a couple of stray guitars and a Bob Dylan Bootleg Series boxset suggesting a bohemian eccentricity. This is his first official interview since his haemorrhage. In that time, he's undergone intensive speech therapy to combat dysphasia - a neurological side-effect hindering his ability to communicate. The Collins of old was a fantastic orator, one of those rare interviewees who spoke in eloquent sentences and whose mastery of language was a dream to transcribe. Cruelly, his dysphasia means he now speaks in fractured bursts, pausing between individual words, sometimes fighting to remember a phrase that's eluding him.

The interview is a sympathetic portrait of the musician and a rare portrayal of the inside of dysphasia.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on August 17, 2007 7:52 AM.

The previous post in this blog was No Excuse Not To Practice Spanish.

The next post in this blog is Social Connections & the New York Times.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Powered by
Movable Type 3.31