The poem: https://poets.org/poem/singularity
Tag: education
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One of my very realest things: my 1964 Hermes Rocket, acquired from the granddaughter of a mechanical engineer in Asheville. In my experience, engineers take very good care of their typewriters. -
Here are three reality-adjacent (and typewriter-enabled!) flashes of hope: two from this week, and one from way back that’s finally finished its lesson.
- An error in the New York Times.
September 23rd’s web page featured this headline for a story in The Athletic:
Tragic news, marred by what we still call a “typo.” (You might need to look for it again, unless you are a former English teacher proofreader-type too.)
Frequent and discerning readers of The Gray Lady know that repeated words, misspellings, and false start sentences are not uncommon, even in 2026. They are invariably corrected the next time you think to refresh the page–but they still happen (and some make a cottage industry of noting them).
Whenever I encounter one I treasure it. Because it means there is a real person on the other side of my screen, in Times Square or L.A. or Paris or Baghdad, going hell-for-leather to make deadline. Not an A.I. agent. (Well, not until AI starts putting the right titration of typos into its prose to meet its ends.)
I have held for a few years now that soon actual “typos” will be precious, almost-boutique experiences, like face-to-face schooling. Because they will mean a real person is passing through an experience alongside you, sharing your time and space and making sense of the world too. I think that time is already now.
(And as a waggish friend noted: “I also love that the NYT could misspell ‘analyst’ but spell ‘Krzyzewski’ correctly.”)
2. The Kids Are Alright, and Angry.
I brought Stanford’s AI howler to both my undergrad sections of preservice teachers this week.
We use my collection of manual typewriters for reflective writing, to find the contemporary themes of historical reading and make connections to experience that transform ideas into learning. Inevitably, work with these beautiful hands-on machines invites excursions into what technology does, can’t do, and might do to and for the yet-hypothetical classroom of their subject and level.
As I never tire of reminding them: my phone distraction / using AI “for brainstorming”/ reality bending teaching problem today is their problem in @ 3 years. What are they going to do about it?
I have to screenshot the image from the NYT story, in case you have somehow missed it. You need to have the same chance to react that they did.
The first photo was snapped of three undergrads at a “Lunar New Year Party in 2024.” I imagine this was a late night dining promotion, like midnight breakfast during exams. The second appeared in online university promotional materials last week.
The student on the right in the original photo, Billy Ramirez, seems remarkably good-humored about the revision, though also unsparing. After all, university students, staff, and faculty of color are used to having their images centered, altered, or removed, as suits the branding need of the moment.
“To see me erased like that so easily was kind of very upsetting,” Mr. Ramirez, who is Hispanic, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Mr. Ramirez, a senior who is majoring in human biology, said there was “a comedic element” to the matter. Nevertheless, he said that he was frustrated by Stanford’s move, which he learned about from a friend.
The other students in the original photo “did not respond to emails on Tuesday.” The student on the right in the altered photo could not be reached for comment, obviously, because she does not exist. (Her AI sister Tilly might be game to offer some word salad, in a language or two, maybe.)
My own undergrads’ response didn’t start with racial / ethnic erasure, though. Instead they zeroed in on the revisions to make the other two students more conventionally attractive.
“They made them hotter,” was the first, dismayed comment in one class. “It’s the dining hall late at night. No one is camera-ready. People are just wearing whatever and trying to get something to eat.”
We went on to talk about that mix of aspiration and self-loathing that powerful advertising sparks inside us. Obvs, they agreed.
But then a student said, “If I see the second photo in an ad, it makes me not want to go to Stanford. No one really looks like that. Where would I fit in?”
In one acid take that student undid a century of marketing campaigns, and decided to let be be finale of seem.
I tried the counterpunch: “But what if you are the UComm employee who has to finish this web page and two more before midnight. You do not have the actual image you think you need! Can you see why maybe, just this once, you could fudge it with AI, and make up people who don’t exist?”
Absolutely not, both groups roared back at me. Not even worthy of response. Authenticity above all. Reality above all, said the room.
“Besides,” came the coup-de-grace: “This same university will bust you for using AI to write a paper.
“How can they turn around and use it themselves?”
3. The Canoe
Twenty years ago I helped start a microschool in the North Carolina piedmont. It did not survive past its first year. The experience taught me gratitude for institutions, for existing infrastructure that doesn’t need to invent a way to get attendance to the front office by 9 AM every day, etc.
But in class this week, another lesson from that time came back to me. One of our organizing team was tech-savvy, and used PhotoShop (oh innocence) to place the name of the school in many becoming photographs that supported its vibe. Our building backed on a lovely river; one photo depicted a Coleman canoe nosing into a sun-dappled autumn stream, with the school name now proudly lettered in gold on the transom.
We are all dazzled, excited by how our nascent website would be zhuzhed up by these gorgeous images. We will have so many prospective students applying!
But one of the teachers contemplated the pictures silently for several moments. Then she asked,
“What do we tell the student who shows up on the first day and says, ‘I want to see the canoe’?”
She was right.
The trust of a young person in the intentions and credibility of a new school comes down to whether or not it is what it says it is.
How can a student know they are safe–know they can relax and trust–know they are free to do the work they are here to do–without that rock-solid confidence?
The photos were forgotten.
The young people are done with appearances and promises.
They just want to see the canoe.
Lead image borrowed from The Happy Adventure, with thanks.
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“Of all the vices, I find books to be the least dangerous…I think it’s possible his landlord might have their priorities misplaced, or might not understand him. If you’re not steeped in his culture, maybe his library does look chaotic. But I’d argue it only looks like a mess. I’ll bet he can tell you where every single book is in his apartment.”
That’s bookseller Israel Mizrahi on Mendel Uminer’s collection of thousands of books, and his resultant eviction from his Upper East Side apartment. Here’s a picture of only some of them.
According to yesterday’s NYT piece, the stated grounds are fire hazard–but, as becomes clear in the article, his true infraction is unseemly eccentricity. Too many books!
We have a word for people whose relationship with their stuff doesn’t track with the sleek, beige, gentrified, laptop-and-tablet-and-phone lifestyle promoted on the socials: “hoarder.”
Like so many words borrowed from clinical psychology, its casual use dishonors the suffering caused by its authentic manifestation. It feels edgy, using words about real pathology to describe behaviors that are a little outside the norm–feels knowing and hip. It’s also kind of stupid, since it blunts an edge that can be so helpful to so many. We should do it less.
But in this case it mostly serves to reveal a high cultural antibody titer…against stuff. The manufactured challenge that so many of us feel: too much stuff in our lives, and not enough room for it.
Why can’t our spaces look as curated and spare as the ones we see in the media, in the ads that sells us the storage and cleaning technologies we “need” to so appear? Uncluttered space=clear mind, we are told to believe, and so we are supposed to discard what doesn’t spark joy. Or, if our nerves fail us, hide it in the garage.
I am maybe a little sensitive about my stuff right now! I am in the middle of an office move, from one end of my College’s massive building to the other. And while it will not involve an elevator or staircase, it is still a physical and emotional heavy lift.
I have been in my present space for eight years. And the vagaries of summer schedules mean I am moved “out” of my present space as of three days ago–but will not be “in” my next space for a couple of weeks, after its present occupant has time to clear it.
This means that all of my stuff, at present, is stashed in two corners of the big seminar room of the Program I have helped run for eight years. It is out of the way, functionally; the truth is we rarely use the space for student events anymore anyway, since the entire Program moved online in 2019.
One wall is stacked with liquor boxes of books and files and papers and pictures and lamps and all the crockery and trophies and such that didn’t fit at home, and so found their way to work.
Why yes, that is an autographed photo me with George Clinton at the Atlanta airport in 1995, thanks for noticing! And the opposite corner is stuffed with my working collection of 40 +/- typewriters, and the shelves that have archived them and will again in a couple of weeks.
Typewriter collection, in exile It’s a jumble, it’s a mess. And it invites inevitable feelings of reproach.
Why do I have so much stuff, when of course I can run 95% of my professional life off this laptop?
Why do I have so many books, when so much of their contents is available digitally via the University library?
And dear heavens: what of the typewriters?
Constant readers of this blog will know that my typewriters are in heavy service during the school year. (I wrote a book about it!)
They are the core of my undergraduate teaching, which asks students to retrieve a machine from my office at the start of one class session a week and use it to create a few pages of “human words” in response to a few prompts I provide. The prompts ask for reflection and consolidation of the themes in the readings we are handling that week–but also provoke about medium and technology, about attention and memory. About how the stubborn reality of the anachronistic tech in front of them refuses to let things feel normal, and what that discomfort could allow to happen next for them.
The majority of the machines I use for this teaching are “portable,” in the way that word in the 50s and 60s conveyed a machine with a case and a handle that conceivably could be carried from one writing site to the next.
But “portable,” in 2026, means something a lot lighter than the 20+ lbs of each of these machines. So their weight is a constant topic with my Gen Z students at the start of the semester: how schlepping a typewriter from my office to the classroom and back again isn’t effortless.
And of course, the new office location will require baroque calculations on my part about classroom location, changing floors, timing, frustration tolerance…learning spent with reality is rarely convenient, but the inconvenience is often the point.
Portable-but-heavy, it turns out, is an auspicious combination, if your goal is to invite students to notice stuff they haven’t before. It’s all curriculum.
And it is a nice characterization of the books in the article. Look at them! No one book is too much to manage, but taken together they are quite a phenomenon. There they sit, spines toward you for easy selection and delectation, tumble-bumble on shelves and tables and stacked along walls. Redeemed, somehow, in the opening quote, by the insistence that there is an organization to their stacking: you just don’t understand it. (If there’s a method, it’s not a mess.)
But also behold the boxes of books, so like mine. See their progress as the article unfolds: loaded up, with friends’ help, into almost-carryable batches. Hauled down beautiful but tortuous old stairways. Bunged into open minivans, in the rain of course–and finally stacked ignominiously in his parents’ apartment, in the middle of the floor, awaiting whatever is next, whatever can be allowed.
Somewhere along the line I learned, from a striving realtor probably, that the risk of many books in a home is not primarily fire: it is weight. Books are usually stacked in shelves along the edges of rooms. That concentrated weight at the borders, vs. the much-lighter foot traffic through the middle, over decades will lead to warped floorboards, settling, even foundation issues. Get rid of your books, I remember one realtor telling me. They will hurt your home’s value. Shed the weight.
But books as weighty signifiers of value, of seriousness and taste on the part of those who display them, is also nothing new.
Your books “say something” about you, we are told! You can curate them by the yard, “by color, theme, or size,” for your study decor.
You can place them strategically (or images of them) for your Zoom flex.
You can even dial them up on AI for unfathomable reasons. (No, wait–they’re real. Real fakes. Try to keep up.)
Have books, the big world seems to say, or simulacra of books: just make them tidy and hep. And for heaven’s sake, don’t make them towering ziggurats of Strand cutouts. That is not cute.
What does a wall of typewriters in a faculty office “say”?
Wall of teaching typewriters in full bloom, spring 2026. New home forthcoming! Watch this space! Other than giving one less floor space to maneuver through, and the comforting eau-de-typewriter-ribbon and whiff-of-mold that greets me every morning?
Well, I suppose it also communicates an eccentricity. a willingness to commit to something unusual and unwieldy, for reasons that will soon become clear if you can stay with me long enough to find out what it is.
I think teaching with typewriters is just a physical manifestation of an emotional dynamic that pervades every classroom:
-the teacher is convinced that something new should be attended to;
-the students are not so sure;
-the teacher’s first job is to make the case that a new enthusiasm is warranted;
-the teacher lends their own enthusiasm, generously, until the students’ own can be unearthed and engaged.
And a reliable way to concentrate that enthusiasm and pique that interest is to present a puzzle, an artifact, a curiosity, a weirdness. Any provocation that heightens engagement, and therefore attention, just enough for what students actually care about to run parallel to what the curriculum hopes they will start to care about. Just long enough to catch fire, like a fresh match set alongside a lit one.
Typewriters are great for that, whatever else they become over fifteen weeks of living with one.
And my wall of typewriters also gives a sense of history: a heightened sense of being in this moment by acknowledging that other moments have happened too.
This is surely a core reason why I am comforted by antique stores, especially the ones that are more rummage sale than curated display. These things all mattered once, those places say, for people who are not here anymore but were, just as you and I are here. We will eventually matter probably no more than they did, but certainly no less. Our now can be imbued with meaning by the artifacts of their now. Whether or not we take any of their stuff home, hanging out for a spell with their stuff makes our stuff–and our lives–more real.
I cannot tell you where every single book is in my boxes right now. (I also doubt Mendel can, and don’t need him to in order to have them.) I will not pretend otherwise.
But: I am definitely keeping it all. All the books, all the files, and definitely all the typewriters. (Most of the crockery.) It is all going into the new room at such time that the new room is available. I will not be culling the stacks much more than I already have, though I will probably continue to insist I intend to.
Because here’s the thing: an empty room is exciting, inspiring, bracing in its possibility. Isn’t it?
Office of howling emptiness As I have worked in my now-empty office for the last couple of days, I have wondered: why do I not keep my office this empty all the time? So much space and aether; so little to hook onto from the past when I cast my eyes around it looking for the next sentence to write.
But empty rooms aren’t the ones we live in.
And they sure aren’t the ones we learn in.
And they aren’t the ones we stash the tokens and memories of the things we do that matter to us in.
You know, surgical suites are nearly-empty rooms. So are those interfaith chapels you can still find in airports. No specific tokens there to comfort or enrage; bring your own, or do without, for your devotions. Passing-through places are usually empty places.
But empty is not good for dwelling–except in someone else’s Instagram pic of how you should dwell.
Empty is not good for living–except according to someone else’s rules about how you should live.
We real humans live with our stuff: with our books, with our stacks, with our typewriters, with our ephemera that becomes less ephemeral the longer we keep it around. And sure, we can become prisoners of our stuff–but before things go that far, consider who we become when we let ourselves be owned by our stuff.
“It makes sense to me that Mendel, a Brooklyn yeshiva kid, would come to the Upper East Side and make this world for himself here, only to get rejected from it…There’s a New York now, keyed into professionalism and uniformity, that sees a guy like him and thinks something must be wrong. There’s an element to the city now that’s hostile to the life of the mind, to the eccentricity that might produce it.”
I hope you can find your own personal way to push back today against the forces of uniformity. The hostility to living one’s own life that is sure to come at you, in ways great and small, every time you ask the monoculture for input on how you should live.
After all, we are way harder to market to when we don’t like the things we are supposed to.
We are way harder to control when we don’t share our every word and image with the algorithms.
We are way harder to pathologize and shame into buying stuff we don’t need if we won’t be who we are told to be.
So blow up your TV, like John Prine told us fifty-five years ago. Delete your account, we would say now.
And go buy a used book, or an antique typewriter, and put it right in the middle of the table, right where it doesn’t belong.
Then get another one. And another.
Top image by James Estrin, from Alex Vadukul’s linked NYT story and reproduced here with thanks. All other images my own.
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I don’t speak Latin. I am putting on airs. But this phrase has been rattling in my mind since I first read it.
Not in its original source, Rudolf Otto apparently–but in Parker Palmer’s sublime Let Your Life Speak, a little book on finding your purpose in life and letting yourself be exactly who you are on the journey. And also 20 years ago, when I was a goat among sheep at a school of medicine, when Rachel Naomi Remen checked it in an essay about what might lie beyond the edge of our understanding of healing.
Funny how I am doing the defensive academic flex: citing how other people have already thought about this thing so I get to think about it too. It is the simplest idea in the world, really, and it doesn’t need a pedigree.
It is just acknowledging the “awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery” that lies around and within the stuff that matters most to us.
I have long been drawn to thinkers and writers and teachers who work to make the case for the irreducible reality and precious value of mystery. Especially in a world that only values certainty and deductive proof more each day. I collect them–these fellow travelers–like marbles in my pocket. Look, here’s someone who thinks so too. Here’s someone else.
We who love the mystery need a posse. We do! It’s a lonely place to live, in the mystery. Lonelier and lonelier.
Lonely–because of the rampant conviction that competent people doing life-impacting work like education and healing need to eliminate the mystery. Need to get down to what is always true. What always happens when you do this or that.
Because it’s important work, right? Being rigorous about finding out and tracking what always works is how we get “best practices,” and we love to be told by scientific types what the right answer is. It makes us feel like serious people.
Not goofing around anymore, not us. “Best practices” tell us THAT our work can be serious–because “best practices” say, “this can be science,” and the people with the science are the most serious people. Serious people do the “best” things, the most important things. (They are the sheep, not the goats…)
God, I love it when someone refers to “serious people.” I love how immediately everyone at the table sits up a little straighter. Whatever else happens, let’s NOT be mistaken for unserious people. I sit up straighter too.
But I also suddenly want to spill Kool-Aid on everyone’s papers. Serious people? LOL.
Because what if the most serious people working on important stuff like education and healing were also brave enough to acknowledge that they DON’T know everything?
That they don’t know what will happen THIS time when they try something out?
Would your doctor, or your teacher, admitting that they don’t know the best answer to a mystery yet–but they want to keep finding out, so much–make you feel more secure with them, or less?
More secure, for me, by a country mile.
One of the most impactful ideas I learned in education school was that most of the stuff we most care about in life is more like art than like science. Not because it is beautiful, or gives us pleasure, though it sometimes does.
But because most of what we care most about doing is a mystery while we are doing it. And surprises us with what it ends up being, when we decide it is done.
You can do a paint-by-numbers painting, or a jigsaw puzzle, or make a cake from a box for that matter. Those endeavors are entertaining, and they are great for relaxing and passing the time (or getting a task done quick, with the cake mix).
But no one would say jigsaw-puzzle-assembling is the same as artmaking…because you have the picture it will end up looking like right there, on the box.
Real artmaking is real because you never know exactly what you will end up with when you start. You might have an idea, a destination–or even better, an intention. “I want to paint this day lily.” And it helps to have an intention when you get started, sometimes. It gets you to put brush to paint to canvas. To do it instead of merely intending it.
But the painting will unfold before you, brushstroke by brushstroke. And–unless you are completing an art class assignment to “paint a day lily”–if your accumulating brushstrokes end up looking more like a Studebaker than a day lily, maybe you decide mid-course that you are actually painting a Studebaker.
You discover what you are painting WHILE you are painting it. And BECAUSE you are painting at all.
Have you ever heard the idea that a sculptor’s task is simply to take away everything that is NOT the statue? That the work is already in there, and they just need to let it out?
Maybe! That’s a kind of mystery to consider too. What if what you find in that block of clay isn’t what you thought it would be? Wouldn’t it be great if blocks of clay came labelled with what was inside them?
No, that would be a nightmare. That would take all the fun out of it. That would eliminate the mystery.
Here’s a humdinger: Where’s the mystery in the thing you care about most? In the thing you have spent the longest time doing? Painting, or running, or gardening…or teaching?
Does the mystery get solved, the longer you spend caring about it and doing it?
Or does the mystery change and shift? If you are doing the same thing now that you did at the beginning of your career, are you trying to understand the same mysteries, or different ones?
Or is it a combination of solved and not-so-solved–always depending on the day, the light, what you had for breakfast, what was in the paper this morning?
These are the questions of serious people! Of people who love the world and the magnificent mysteries in it, exactly on their own terms and exactly as they present themselves to those of us who try to pay attention.
I have been serious about playing drums longer than I have been serious about nearly anything. It’s true! Longer than I have been a father or a husband, longer than I have been a teacher…even longer than I have owned a drum set.
I listened this morning on the way in to work to one of the first records that made me fall in love with playing drums. One of the first records that told me, you have to do this in your life, with your life. This is for you.
How differently I hear that record than I did when I was thirteen! I am working on different mysteries now than I was forty-plus years ago.
And how completely the same mystery of that drummer’s feel and time, that drummer’s sense of what could be in this song, in this take, is waiting there as well.
Some mysteries solved and transcended on the way to others: I know full well what to do with this foot and hand, this stick and this cymbal.
And some: as mysterious as ever. Even more so, knowing what I know now.
I almost had to pull over to collect myself, meeting that mystery again today. To reintroduce myself to an old, astonishing, tantalizing friend, and wipe my eyes, and listen again, and then again, and again. As seriously as I can.
God save us from a world where the serious people know everything they know for sure, and are no longer baffled, mesmerized, by what is bigger and older and wiser than they are.
Long live the awe-inspiring and fascinating mysteries–in our eyes and ears, in our work, in our hearts. In our classrooms. What a privilege to spend our lives with them.
However serious we may become: may we never pretend to have them solved.
Image borrowed gratefully from this retrospective on the album art of Hugh Syme, and if you know you know. Retconned to represent confrontation with awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery! We have assumed control!
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Today is the day! My book is published!
Human Teaching: How Recentering What’s Real Sustains Your Practice is now available, in paperback only (no digital download!) at this link.
I am pricing it at near-cost through the end of February–because I am so excited to get these ideas out into the world, and continue the conversation that started in these pages. I hope you’ll order yours today!
In Human Teaching, I use a combination of word-processed, typewritten, and hybrid pages to explore the relationship between seeking out unmediated reality and thriving in your teaching practice.
As our lives become more and more virtual–more and more invaded by screens and algorithms, and the billion-dollar efforts behind them that compete to extract our attention–I am more and more convinced that the way forward has always been beneath our feet, before our eyes, and right under our fingertips.
Maybe this moment, despite it all, is the first moment in which we can truly see reality for the endless source of sustaining power that it has always been. If we choose to stop fleeing from it in the name of speed, convenience, and ease, we may find that friction is our friend.
We may regain our living, breathing teaching selves by losing the stories we’ve been told we have to believe.
The core of the book is the “Five Spot”: a scheme for understanding the research-based principles of sustainable teaching practice that have infused my burnout prevention work with preservice and practicing educators for years.
What’s the “Five Spot”? Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
- While the themes that underlie educator burnout are complex and interwoven, I think we can engage the most urgent ones in five moves. Five is a manageable number! It is counting on your fingers; it is the days in a school week. It is how many periods I taught each day, when I was a middle and high school teacher from 1993 to 1999. It’s a handful—and it’s just enough.
- At the school where I began my career, a “five spot” was what they paid you to sub for an absent colleague’s class. If someone called out sick, and you had planning period during one of their classes, you could volunteer in morning meeting to cover for them. Sometimes they would leave a plan; usually it was study hall. But when you were done, you would go to student accounts, and the woman who ran the shop would hand you a five-dollar bill out of the cash box. And now you had money for an extra value meal at McDonald’s up the road (at 90s prices), which you could just make in a lunch period if you really boogied. Maybe these moves are like that “five spot”: do a little extra, extend yourself a bit—and immediately start to see something better in your day, something sustaining and lovely, that wasn’t there when you got up that morning.
- Jazz fans will have thought of the third thing first. The Five Spot Café was a storied club in Greenwich Village from 1956-1967, where some of the most innovative musicians of the period played residencies, sat in, and cut records. Thelonious Monk had two long stands there; Ornette Coleman made his east coast debut there with his avant-garde improvisations. It was an unpretentious, inclusive, and adventurous place, where food and drinks were cheap and all were welcome. Being part of the new thing was everybody’s business, not just a select few. I hope the same sense of freedom, openness, and possibility comes through in these pages.
I will blog a bit about each of the elements of the “Five Spot” in the coming weeks, so keep reading to find out more!
My sincere thanks to Dr Richard Polt, curator of The Classic Typewriter Page and editor of Loose Dog Press, for his unflagging enthusiasm for this project since I proposed it to him eleven months ago.
When I began this journey with real-world words in the depths of covid-dark December 2021, his was the first page of the “Typosphere” I found. His terrific book The Typewriter Revolution is required reading for anyone who wants to make manual typewriters part of their lives in a digital world.
I wanted so badly to publish this work with someone for whom the typewritten bits were a feature, not a bug. And boy howdy: did I ever choose wisely!
So get the book, and let me know what you think! And thanks so much for reading.
Here we go!
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Being some half-baked thoughts on Dana Goldstein’s December 12th article, “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.”
Excited to try a new scanning process to make my typed human words more legible and accessible! I am still with the charming ’63 Hermes 3000. We’re developing a serious long-term relationship. It really gets me…
I have no rights to the B&B image, which is the cover of an out-of-print anthology, but hope Mike Judge would consider it fair use. FWIW, you can buy it here.
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First I have to share a note the great jazz pianist Bill Evans wrote to his composition teacher, Gretchen Magee, at Southeastern Louisiana University.
I have always admired your teaching as that rare and amazing combination – exceptional knowledge combined with the ability to bring that same knowledge, that lies deep within the student, to life. You were certainly my biggest inspiration in college, and the seeds of the insights that you have sown, have in practice borne fruit many times over.
Teachers change the world!
Now, on to the fresh typed content you crave. The article referenced is I’m a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not For the Worst. New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2025.
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Post title from this delightful image by our friend Jo Musser at AbacusCorvus. Buy their gorgeous art! Resist legibility!
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Ah, les plaisirs du les machines à écrire!
That is probably the only French I will attempt here—though it is hard to resist, mais oui.
Because for the last two nights I have been submerged in Richard Linklater’s new film Nouvelle Vague, which tells a story about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 French New Wave classic Breathless. I want to think about their typewriters, and the texts they purportedly yield.
I have watched / rewatched them both, Kanopy open in one tab and Netflix in the other. Fighting Richard Brody’s urge to make of the latter film “a nitpicker’s delight…any viewer who knows anything about Godard’s story can find contrivances, departures from the historical record. I won’t bother; if I want the details, I’ll read a book” (perhaps his).
I won’t say I really know anything about the “historical record” of Breathless. I shotgunned it only once a couple of years ago–in the name of cultural literacy, really, when my son came home from college raving about it. He was gobsmacked by his distinguished professor’s thoughts on Bicycle Thieves, and The 400 Blows, and this film, so I tried to catch up. A film autodidact at best, I do know what I like. And I liked these pictures.
In the 1959 milieu of Nouvelle Vague, typewriters are ubiquitous and unremarked. After all, Godard and his partners are the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma before they become filmmakers, so there is (supposedly) a lot of writing happening.
The offices of that magazine are imagined here as a large dining table with three high-end standard machines atop it on three sides. Two are easily identifiable as Olympia SG-1s, apparently brand new and perhaps purchased together for office use. The studio standard machine for people who write for a living, they are completely plausible presences here. First manufactured in 1953, they dominated the European and American markets. Mine is from 1960 and hulks on the table behind me right now.
The third is harder for me to make; it looks plastic and sloping, not exactly the Olivetti 82 but pretty close. We barely see it in the establishing shot of Godard, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette typing, and in a later shot of a brief speech by Roberto Rossellini to his assembled acolytes it is missing altogether. Perhaps it belonged to Rivette and he took it home? Pretty big machine–not for commuting! But it would make sense: another serious machine for forging a new age of film.
There’s also a lovely Olivetti Studio 44 in the presumed offices of the Breathless shoot itself, tucked into a corner behind Godard’s desk. I have one too, from 1961–though it began production in 1952.
He never touches it, or even acknowledges it is there; the light looks bad for serious typing on it, to me. The machine was style-forward in every conceivable way. Entirely reasonable that it would be the choice of one as presentation-conscious as Godard, so eager to make his mark in the vanguard.
Marcello Nizzoli’s sketches for the Studio 44. Cribbed gratefully from Oz Typewriter. Whether he ever types anything on it is unclear–and improbable, as we shall see.
But the third typewriter scene is the most interesting to me. In Breathless‘s extended afternoon almost-tryst that Patricia and Michel enjoy in the tiniest hotel room in Paris, we glimpse a portable typewriter on a cluttered desk by the bed. It is Patricia’s, because this is her hotel room. We know she is aspires to be a journalist, despite mostly just selling the Herald-Tribune rather than writing for it, and she also notes that she will have to enroll at the Sorbonne in order to keep her financial support flowing from home in the United States. (From where in the US is unclear to me–though Jean Seberg was born in Iowa, as her flatly-accented French reveals whenever she opens her mouth.) These are all good reasons to have a neglected typewriter on your premises.
And the typewriter is the least interesting thing on that desk in the original film. There is paper in it, but it mostly serves as a flat surface for a hat to rest upon. Later it supports a radio that plays “music to work to”–and is promptly switched off, since its strident tones interrupt the afternoon-delight reverie each is enjoying on different terms.
I would guess it is a Remington, by its round keys and distinctively-hooked carriage return lever. It could be an Envoy Type 2 like the beautiful one I own. Manufactured in 1941-42, and indestructible as a cockroach, it is a sensible machine for a budget-conscious gamine to be carting to Paris seventeen years later. So far so good.
BUT: in the otherwise-fastidious recreation of that hotel room in Nouvelle Vague, the probably-Remington has unmistakably become…an Olivetti-Underwood Lettera 32. An anachronism, since Olivetti first made this machine in 1963—and the distinctive faceplate identifies it furthermore as a later iteration, probably from the late 60s. Catastrophe!
This machine is coded completely differently! Italian vs. American, stylish and sexy vs. boring and reliable. She might have even bought it in Paris.
Who even is Patricia, if this is her typewriter? Other than a time traveler?
Pour quoi?
In a lovingly-detailed recreation and invocation of a very specific time and place…why would Linklater get the typewriter wrong?
Well, maybe he missed it. As a cineaste friend of mine noted, “if I found out you knew more about mid-century typewriter manufacturing than Linklater’s production design team, I wouldn’t be shocked, exactly.”
But isn’t it more interesting if he didn’t? If it is on purpose? Consider.
Nouvelle Vague presents Godard as someone with a complicated relationship to writing. At best. A running theme of the story is that Breathless has no script. In pursuit of a purity of experience, a spontaneity, never before seen, he shot without one. The film used a camera that was too loud to allow synchronized sound, but did permit unique still-camera film that, spliced into long rolls, could capture natural light in extraordinary ways. That meant all the audio was dubbed later, and Godard could and did feed lines to the cast while filming…lines that he would read from scribbles in a series of Moleskin notebooks where he claimed to have the whole film plotted.
Which does not mean the Godard of Nouvelle Vague fears text: he begins each day at a cafe with a pile of paper upon which he makes notes in what Seberg calls “beautiful handwriting,” and sometimes communicates important info by passing those notes to those they concern.
What this Godard fears is committing to a text: to typing it up and saying, this is what it will be. The script manager helplessly flips a single page back and forth on her clipboard. The producer fumes at how this same spontaneous relationship to text extends to the relationship with time and budget: Godard won’t shoot if he is uninspired. Nothing on any of his private pages dictates how and when to make the film: they are just gaps of indeterminacy, as Wolfgang Iser says, that will lead to new possibilities yet unimagined.
The fungibility of printed text in the film also boggles the digital-era, backup-savvy viewer. Presumably, the treatments we do see bandied about are bare stacks of paper, without bindings or apparent copies. (Le mimeo is glimpsed once in the background of the office: it sits silent.) A single copy of the story itself is handed back and forth between Truffaut and Godard on a metro bench; the first assistant director carries a fistful of paper through a bar, responding to Godard’s insistence that he “show it to no one” by shoving the pages briefly into the face of an innocent customer with a smirk.
Where is the text? It is scribbled here, it is handed around there…it is none of these places.
There is no text for Breathless: the film is the text, and the film only seeks to capture the untrained and unplanned interactions that result from Godard’s willingness to commit fully to their pursuit.
At one point, Godard is frustrated with his two leads planning what they are about to do when camera rolls (Allez!)
“What are you filming?” asks a passer-by. (He is shooting on the street, with real people unknowingly serving as extras.)
In frustration, he snaps back, “A documentary about Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg acting out a fiction.”
Everything he didn’t want: people planning to do things, which means they will not actually be doing things. (“Though a documentary would have sync sound,” Seberg grumbles.)
That is what Godard wanted, and got. Live action!
And that is what he inspired in those who followed, including Linklater: to seek out reality as best they can contrive to. Linklater, who played with time itself in Boyhood and the Before trilogy–synchronically daring, insisting on time shaping what appeared and what went on the film.
Because the text isn’t in the script, and it isn’t in the typewriter.
And if it isn’t in the typewriter…maybe it isn’t in the choice of typewriters, either.
Typewriters make dead fictions to be acted out, this out-of-time machine seems to say.
This is alive.
Even in this recreation, homage, impression, of what might have happened seventy-six years ago in the process of committing life to film…the choice seems to say: this is alive, too.
Allez!
*I wish I could figure out how to share screenshots from Kanopy and Netflix, but that stuff is locked down. Check out the films themselves! Get Kanopy from your library!
**I had pretensions of using some Roland Barthes in here somewhere but it’s probably in everybody’s best interest that I didn’t.
***The Olivetti Studio 44, by the way, also graces Susie Myerson’s office desk in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel–which is incongruous, being way more of a home machine. Until you consider that the office is being operated on a shoestring mainly to book Midge: she must have loaned it from home.
Lead image from NYT.
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“We can’t stand a work of architecture until we go the mat not to lose it.”
That’s the last line of the admiring account in the NYT today of the restoration of a 1966 “Brutalist behemoth“: the former Whitney Museum, designed by Marcel Breuer. It looks like a humdinger! Regarded as unpleasant when it was first presented; with time, its virtues became apparent; now, it is precious.
Images of Whitney Building, from NYT article I don’t know from architecture. But I do know how it feels to be inside a building that makes its presence known, and I have a special feeling for Brutalist spaces. Buildings that are not pretending they are not buildings. Buildings that show you what they are made of, and that they intend to do something to you.
I think I learned to love this aesthetic in my first year of college. Late in that first fall I auditioned for the annual musical review, which was staged inside the campus’s concert hall. The fine arts complex at Wesleyan was appended to the original brownstone row in the early 70s, a deliberate interruption of the “ived walls and storied halls” feel of the place before then. It was a bold flex of the university’s standing as an incubator for innovators and wayfinders.
It still makes an impact now. Crossing Wyllys Avenue is jumping a century into a recent past, an incongruity so intentional it makes you stop and wonder what it is trying to teach you.
I spent more time inside that limestone and poured cement pile than I did just about anywhere else that first semester, besides the then-reviled, now-mourned flying saucer dining hall. (I did not see Joni Mitchell there, but I did perform on that stage!)
I can see now what I couldn’t then: this was a place for students to get used to working, exhibiting, and thriving in galleries. To get used to being seen and heard. To understand that they had something to make and share, and in order for them to make it, spaces like these were going to be theirs. They should get comfy in them.
But I was not comfy back then in spaces like these. Then, they were just weird. “Modeled on Lenin’s tomb,” a smartass friend of mine would joke. “Will make great ruins someday.”
But when I re-entered that building at my son’s frosh orientation, it didn’t feel like a tomb. It felt alive. Because cement and limestone buildings breathe, is the thing. You smell the stone and feel the damp coming off all that exposed expanse. It is like a greenhouse, but for rock, not dirt. (And for people, maybe.) Brutalist buildings are elemental places where things get broken down and maybe regrow into other things.
The sensory charge took me right back to those first weeks, like smell and damp will. The weeks when college was in the process of blowing my damn mind. That was where I became convinced that college should smart a bit. You should wonder if you are in the right place, then find a way through to make it the right place for you.
Wesleyan was the first place this highly-desirable discomfort was committed against me. The first place I had to realize that there were a lot more kinds of people in the world than the ones I had met so far in Mormon churches and Air Force base towns and southern suburbs.
This is where I met real “city kids.” Kids who played speed chess and lacrosse and ultimate Frisbee very seriously; kids who were used to taking charge of what was going to happen when they walked into a room. Kids from places like Stuyvesant and Spence, where leadership was a birthright conveyed as comfortably as a pair of L.L. Bean boots. When I came to the first rehearsal of that show I looked around for the director–the grown-up that was going to validate this thing and make it good. There was none. Like so much that happens at Wes, the students were the directors, designers, and choreographers, as well as the actors. This is what we were here to do, after all. Let’s do it.
I continue to think that college should be hard: that you should be properly dumbfounded and discomfited at first by at least some of what you find there. Not abused, of course; always respected, always seen and honored. But I still believe that student evaluations of instructors are foolish for many reasons–and not only for their well-documented bias in support of white, male, cis, people like me and against women, queer folks, and people of color.
The first reason is that students, by their very nature, do not know what they are there to learn. They do not know what experience is the one they need. Why would we ask them if they think they got what they should have?
I learned that at Wesleyan. My professors would sometimes really step us through a passage, or explain in those pre-Wikipedia days where a text or a painting fit into the historical sweep I barely understood. Sometimes they would slow down and make it easy. Thank God for those folks. But a lot of the time, that amazing faculty just gave us the full blast of their erudition, and it was on us to keep up. (Maybe Stuyvesant and Spence were keeping up better than me. I don’t know.)
A lot of the time, I believe now, the overwhelm was the point. Exactly: you are uncomfortable. Exactly: who you were when you came in is not up to the demands being made upon you. So grow and change. Let it smart a little along the way.
I couldn’t handle some of how my mind was being blown at Wesleyan that first year. Several tearful calls back home from the payphone at the end of the hall in Foss 7. (Oh the payphone call home!) Several intense moments of wondering if this had been a terrible mistake.
In those first weeks I stepped on a rusty pipe in front of the decommissioned frat house that held the Romance Languages department. It gave me a gash in the bare top of my foot (yes, I was wearing Top-Siders without socks) that hurt and bled, and left a scar I still can still see.
A little on the nose, but I need it simple sometimes. School can mark us. Sometimes, it should.
I am so grateful for how Wesleyan marked me. So grateful for how it blew my mind, and how it didn’t slow down for me. Grateful that the point was for me to find a way to keep up.
Like a bold building that once made us uncomfortable, but now we revere, maybe. At the time, maybe we couldn’t see what it was trying to do to us and for us, and we sure weren’t grateful enough for it. And now we are.
Thanks alma mater, for the sometimes brutal love I actually needed.
Class starts in thirty minutes. Time to pay it forward.
(No typewriters in this post! Apologies / you’re welcome. I will note that in 1987 I brought a Brother electric typewriter along with me for my frosh year. It could remember a whole paragraph, and let you proofread it excruciatingly on a tiny LCD screen above the keyboard. Then you hit “Enter” and the whole thing clattered out on the page at once, like ChatGPT if it ran on acorns and elves. I took a long leave after that year; when I returned in Jan 1991, everyone had little beige Macintoshes.)
Two images from Wesleyan’s Crowell Concert Hall page.; one from the Zilkha Gallery page.
