1977: I learn we are moving to upstate New York from our rented home in Clinton, Maryland. Dad will be stationed at Griffiss AFB, and I will come to learn about B-52 bombers. Once when I am mowing the lawn a B-52 comes in so low over our house, blotting out the sun for an instant. You mean New York City, I remember asking? Images of Welcome Back Kotter in my mind, maybe West Side Story; terrifying, filthy, loud. Oh no, Mom assures me: that is hours and hours away. Nothing like that.
1982: We get basic cable, MTV. Life changes immediately for the better as I first see drums being played, and a whole lot more. Package includes WOR-TV; in-between Tom and Jerry episodes I learn of another universe. Carvel ice cream, Crazy Eddie‘s where the prices are in-saaane, something astonishing called Rockaway Beach. Can we go, I wonder. No, we cannot.
1983: Junior high theatre club trip down from Rome to see Cats on Broadway. So much Thruway, gray skies and bouncing in a school bus (no, even better: a charter). We are told to avert our eyes through Times Square, which isn’t Disneyfied yet. We do not. Rum Tum Tugger, flashing eyes on actors running through the aisles in the dark, a proscenium of artful garbage buffed to a high polyurethane sheen, a beautiful Siamese cat dancer languid upstage. Meet and greet with Terrence V. Mann at the stage door; a Red Lobster? I get a burger. Long trip home through cold and dark treasuring up what I had seen, a world so strange, so magical, just over there.
1988: weekend in the big city from college in Connecticut with two dear frosh friends. One’s cousin is a high-roller bridge champion and has an apartment in Battery Park; he’s out of the country at a tournament and we will have the place to ourselves. Innocents abroad–I am, at least; half my friends it seems come from Stuyvesant or somewhere in New Jersey. I am too dazzled by their brilliance to be scared, I just laugh and laugh and try to keep up. Ordering a pizza from way too far away, it arrives cold with a $30 delivery charge. Strolling through SoHo, galleries and street art on a perfect blue spring morning. Eating the peppers you are not supposed to eat in Chinatown, wondering for a few minutes if I will need medical help. Up to the observation deck in the South Tower, maybe a glass floor? But so high, so impossibly and improbably high. I look down because when will I be here ever again, but it feels wrong to be this high. Back to campus in Connecticut weary, thrilled, scared. The world is so, so big.
1995: Visiting my sister and her husband on Long Island, he’s got a gig at SUNY Stonybrook. LIRR all the way into the city, so cold. Letterman theatre, Statue of Liberty I think? I have been inside the crown but cannot remember when or how…or maybe I am confusing it with the Arch in St. Louis. It takes a long time to get places when everybody lives in the same place.
1999: Fellowship interview at Teachers College Columbia University. I am heading to grad school: will it be here? Crashing with another dear college friend, bagels and coffee in the blue cups, you know the ones. TC like a Habitrail for people, all hidden corridors and improbable staircases. I tank the interview–not meant to be. Can’t figure out the mix of swagger and humility that counts around here. Also, where would we live with two dogs?
2003-2005: Two or three trips with my curriculum job to NYC. We collaborate with folks at Bank Street and have a contract with city schools. I am so out of my depth but am paddling as fast as I can. I ride the subway and try to play it off cool but am tense and scared. My professor friend takes it all in stride: it’s just her commute. I attend an early AM professional development session in a basement classroom with a set of folks I will always picture, for good or ill, when I hear the neolib argument about unions making dead weight teachers that get pushed around from school to school but never get better. The hotel has free coffee; I drink it until I am glowing. This is the height of sophistication. I take a town car from LaGuardia instead of a cab and get chewed out when I submit my expense report. I go to the Village Vanguard twice, because I know where it is and it makes me feel almost like a local.
2008: Back to NYC for a grant meeting with the School of Medicine. My PI and I meet with another researcher for drinks at The Yale Club. I start to learn what “flex” means. I say something foolish in a big room full of people and feel foolish. If you can make it there…I realize maybe I can’t, and wonder if that’s okay. (It is.)
2017: Two nights in the city with my eldest son on college tour; he is checking out Hamilton and NYU, where he has a friend. Crashing with yet another old college buddy; wow, am I well-friended. The trash trucks run all night. Is it ever quiet here? Another Chinatown dinner, dumplings for days. After, we stumble into a Little Italy street fair, sausage and cannoli, why not, elbow to elbow with a thousand strangers, carried along in a gorgeous daze beneath a thousand twinkling lights. The next day I stomp around the Strand while he interviews. The city continues. The city will always continue.
I wonder at other timelines that might have placed us here. I know that I will never live here, but that it will always also be mine.
I learned of Wendell Berry’s passing last night, from the New York Times. They had an “advance obituary” on file, “which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.” It is lovely, and benefits from the time taken.
Though I personally think he might have been a bit embarrassed by its excesses. Its opening paragraph noting that he wrote “mostly in pencil and without electric light,” as if that were the most relevant aspect of his work. His description as “lanky and rawboned in middle age, with melancholy eyes, a jutting chin and a widow’s peak reminiscent of Lincoln’s.” A little purple for his taste.
These all might be true statements–but somehow his own capacity for evocation seems misplaced when applied to him. The media takes liberties, of course. It chooses words and images for impact in the moment, whether or not those words and images have integrity, or are contiguous with what is real. They are chosen to sell papers, in his time; to drive clicks and shares and likes, in ours.
This is precisely the problem, I imagine him saying, though better than I just did. How we are harmed, and do harm, through our shortsightedness. Our willingness to go for the quick satisfaction at the cost of truer things. He talked like that.
I do not share the NYT’s foresight, or perspicacity. (Berry loved the perfect word carefully chosen, and here is one to hand.) I do not have any thoughts ready that can squeeze Berry’s impact upon me into a ball and roll it toward you with piercing insight. I can share my gratitude that I found his work when I did, and have lived with it so close to my own mind and heart and teaching for a long time.
And I am no Berry scholar. I have read comparatively little of his extensive output. But what I read, I kept–and more importantly, taught.
Here’s the five-inch shelf of Wendell Berry that has got me this far, and that my students have likewise thanked me for keeping on the syllabus. Especially in the courses I have taught on burnout prevention and sustainable practice, where he’s fundamental to many disciplines’ efforts.
Solving for Pattern (1981). (Opens in PDF.) The first thing of his I encountered, and I cannot remember how or why it came to me. Grad school I hope. An early essay, more about farming methods than deeper theory, though the wisdom is not hard to find. How many times have I read with students about “the solution that causes a ramifying series of new problems”–and stood before them with my arms branching wildly above my head to drive home how things branch out, how unintended consequences overtake one’s plans?
Restraint – for us, now – above all: the ability to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to “solve” problems by ignoring them, accepting them as “trade-offs,” or bequeathing them to posterity. A good solution, then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.
The Hurt Man (2003). (Opens in PDF.) A short story that has been the glowing jewel at the core of any class on the mystery that permeates healing practice. Everything is here: how compassion may bloom from our own suffering, can turn either to empathy or rot. How the need transcends the judgment of who deserves to be needy. And above all, in the breathtaking final paragraph, how love is deeper and older than any of our days’ concerns or preferences or fears. How we who wish to be of use to other peoples’ children are invited to connect to something wise that we can trust, that will last–and can.
It All Turns on Affection (2012). His victory lap, arguably: his center-court NEH Jefferson Lecture. He could have retread what he had already explored. Who would fault him? But instead, his erudition and compassion combined into an accessible and moving treatise on how what we love, we imagine–and how what we imagine, lives.
This teaches so great! With some useful swipes at big data too, for those who persevere.
I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.
Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987). (This appreciative essay links to it in the first sentence.) A minor piece in the big picture, that nonetheless presages our current tech mania by asking what tech improves that isn’t already working fine, and at what cost.
He got heat for acknowledging that his handwritten manuscripts had been prepared for editing and publication on a manual typewriter by his wife for decades, which smacked of exploitation to many. Typical comment: “Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife – a low-tech energy-saving device.”
Berry does not back down. Let’s savor his prose. I’d hate to have him disappointed in me.
I understand that it is impossible to make an adequate public defense of one’s private life, and so I will only point out that there are a number of kinder possibilities that my critics have disdained to imagine: that my wife may do this work because she wants to and likes to; that she may find some use and some meaning in it; that she may not work for nothing. These gentlemen obviously think themselves feminists of the most correct and principled sort, and yet they do not hesitate to stereotype and insult, on the basis of one fact, a woman they do not know. They are audacious and irresponsible gossips.
My own specimen of the unassuming “Royal standard” Tanya Berry used. It ain’t much! But it works!
Like so many writers and thinkers I love, Berry defies litmus tests and troubles pieties. He won’t be who you think he is: he’ll be himself, and you can do what you wish with that.
A Poem on Hope (I do not know when he wrote it, but you can find it in Collected Poems 1957-1982). Frequent readers of this blog have seen this one before. I think of it every time I glimpse one of the great blue herons in the New River on my morning run, and wonder at how nature shows us every day how many ways there are for things to be, and still be perfect. I end nearly every class I teach with it, and will give you a bit at the end of this post. You’re welcome.
I am not a perfect acolyte of Mr Berry. Which of us could really walk a path as strait as his? Leave a rising career path to return to one’s home place, and assiduously learn its lessons by farming the same patch of dirt all your life. Maintain your principles utterly, in your work and your daily choices. That path would mean no burgers handed to me through drive-through windows, and no Diet Pepsi, that’s for sure. It’s too much.
But we probably do him, and ourselves, a disservice when we make him so singular. Like most paragons, he has served me more as a source of calming truth than a blueprint for daily living. When my own rhythm gets too chaotic, and I lose the pattern, his work is a source that remains deep and nourishing. It is good-enough, and so am I–and getting better all the time. Enough purity tests: listen harder to what is older and wiser than you today, and do what comes next. That is all.
And my students are emailing me as they see the news. Their own brush with his thought in the classes that we have shared left a mark, they tell me: gave them something to also hold onto when they need it most. This makes me so happy, and hopeful.
It wasn’t until last semester’s class that I realized most of my idols share an ambivalence toward the path that was laid out for them. Most are reluctant members of the higher education culture–or fled it outright, due to that combination of arrogance and insecurity that if you spot it, you got it. (I got it.)
W. Berry. M.C. Richards. Parker Palmer. And my cousin Ed Abbey, who took the same Stegner Fellowship Berry did the following year, and with whom apparently he enjoyed a collegiality of ends if not means. Berry was no monkeywrencher. (Thank heavens for that, probably–we only need a little leaven in the loaf.)
So personally, I thank him for the path he showed that helps me find my own. I’ll read him again this semester with those whose attention I am entrusted to focus profitably. I hope they find what they need in him, or file it away until the need can be felt.
He is gone, but his work remains–as long as we enliven it with our own affection, and gratitude.
Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor, who comes like a heron to fish in the creek, and the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing in the trees in the silence of the fisherman and the heron, and the trees that keep the land they stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.
This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land and your work. Answer with knowledge of the others who are here and of how to be here with them. By this knowledge make the sense you need to make. By it stand in the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.
Image of young Berry in his writing cabin, looking especially lanky, rawboned, and Lincoln-like, borrowed with thanks from The Guardian.
“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.
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 storyand reproduced here with thanks.All other images my own.
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?
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!
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.
I am thinking a lot lately about places. What being in a place, or being of a place, gives us. What we need from our places that we don’t even realize we need–until we don’t have it anymore.
For example: as education becomes more virtual each year, “where you went to school” becomes almost meaningless.
Last Friday I met a doctoral student of mine face-to-face for the first time, when she came to campus to attend commencement and receive her degree. Zoom meetings are such an unremarkable part of our work now that I had not realized we had never met in the flesh.
After commencement, I walked with her family up through campus to the bookstore and gave them a little tour of “her” school–where she had never set foot in her life. She didn’t know where the bookstore was. Why would she?
What do we lose from being placeless when we learn and teach?
I used to think typewriting in the 21st century was about being “distraction-free.” But for me, it increasingly is more about being “place-full.”
Every day I type with a particular machine, on a particular sheet of paper, atop a particular desk. When I do that, my writing is happening both in a place (this room, this desk, this machine) and upon a place (this page). My utter control over what I write stems from its place-ness.
Do I mail this page to one other person, and make its words happen in one other place too?
Do I scan it and put it on my blog, instantly making it happen in countless places everywhere? (Though possibly less seen than the page I mailed to one reader.)
Do I send the manuscript to an editor and get it published? Or do I rip it up and burn it, and make it no longer exist in any place?
I have total control over what happens next—but only because I am here in this place with these words on this page. If I had written it in Google Docs instead, the words would be every place there is a computer…and also no place.
And they would belong to…well, to Google, as these words belong to WordPress. And by courtesy, to me and to you…for now…
(Stephen King’s wife famously fished the first typed pages of Carrieout of the wastebasket and suggested to him that he keep telling that story. “‘You’ve got something here,’ she said. ‘I really think you do.’” How many drafts abandoned on hard drives will never see other eyes beyond their frustrated authors?)
It turns out that the constraints we wanted so badly to slip out of when we first met our word processors are now actually freedoms.
In the 80s, when my family acquired our first home computer, I longed to be free from typos, from spelling errors, from typing clean versions of rough drafts. I longed to be able to change and change and change what I was saying and how I was saying it with no resistance whatsoever.
Now, with all my computer writing being ephemeral and inscrutable (“where” really “is” my document, on my hard drive or in the cloud?), my typewriter gives me back the freedom to do with my words exactly what I will. Nothing, or everything. My words are now truly free in the world, exactly to the degree I wish them to be, intelligible and malleable and fungible. Or not.
Typewriters have always happened in places. They came from places, first of all: factories in Connecticut or New York, in Ivrea, Italy or Wilhelmshaven, West Germany, or Yverdon, Switzerland.
They came in crates, they came from the office supply store downtown. For a little while, they were dropped from planes.
And once purchased, they got set up on desks in offices and bedrooms and studies–and many times they stayed there for decades.
The Digital Watauga project features 53 images tagged as having typewriters in them. Their spaces are filled with ephemera and helpfully-dated calendars. There are pages in many of the typewriters, and the trash cans are often full. Their users are sometimes named and sometimes not; the photographer’s jokes they are often smiling at are gone, but their typewriters remain.
So do many of the buildings where these offices were, in my historic town where some buildings are historic and some are just old, and most of both are still around.
What does it mean to walk into the Antique Mall that now occupies the old Belk department store building, and look up at the balcony where the manager leaned back in his office chair in 1952 and glanced at the photographer interrupting his afternoon?
(NB: His typewriter is barely visible in the back left corner; the desk holds an adding machine, which is not yet an obsession of mine.)
I own most of the typewriter models in these photos. They weren’t rare then, and they aren’t now, if you are looking for one.
But seeing the actual machine on your desk, next to a photo of a different machine on a different desk from 75 years ago that sat less than a mile from where you do, imbues it with a different power.
You look at the real typewriter, and you look at the photo. You are here, they both say to you, with your machine. And also, this person was here, with their machine…that was their turn to have their say, and now it is your turn.
You are different, and your life is different, than theirs. And it is not.
You labor differently today, over different tasks, than they did. You fret over different news that you receive differently.
But when you are done you will also get up and leave and go home to your family and your dinner, and your Christmas in a week, just like they did.
Those moments are yours…and they are theirs too. They are all of ours.
A typewriter is a token of the freedom to be oneself and to have one’s say…and the freedom to know you are one of the crowd too.
That was then, and then, a thousand million thens.
But you are here, and so is your typewriter. You are alone together in the world, right now.
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.
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.
“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.
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.)
Chris Osmond PhD 