Post title from this delightful image by our friend Jo Musser at AbacusCorvus. Buy their gorgeous art! Resist legibility!
Tag: teaching
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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.
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I am just back from the annual professional meeting of folks around the country who run programs like mine.
Like nearly all academic meetings, it took place in a big city, in a hotel that is also a conference center. The action went down in one big ballroom and an assortment of smaller meeting rooms spread around wide central spaces, where coffee and food intermittently appeared and then was cleared away.
It was furnished to be “nice” twenty years ago but, like all such spaces, showed the constant wear and tear of hosting one such event after another. A spot of ripped upholstery here, a missing light switch fixture there, the scuffs on the walls that inscribe a story of people constantly coming and going, presenters moving chairs and tables in an effort to make their session more collaborative, or less.
I brought a typewriter with me, as above: my bulletproof 1965 Hermes Rocket, which has traveled with me to Hawaii and Ireland and many places in-between. My session was on manual typewriters in 2025 as an interpretive lens to understand the nature of educator burnout and find new ways through it. (Also the topic of the book I have coming out very soon with Loose Dog Press: watch this space!)
So I got to bring the Rocket with me, and invite participants to take it for a spin. Maybe one of the latent powers of a manual typewriter in 2025 is that it is always exactly what it is, where it is. After all, it is the only object in this photo of my session that is really its own, singular thing: the tables and chairs are anonymous, and even the “slides” aren’t real.
In every session we found ourselves sitting with strangers at a round wedding-reception-type table covered by two massive industrial tablecloths and were asked to interact, to break ice, to discuss, to synthesize, to report out, above all to network. The incongruity of the importance of the work we are striving to do at these meetings, juxtaposed with its trade show surroundings, always jars me and creates an anomie in my soul so consistent I have learned to brace for it.
I remember attending my industry’s biggest meeting twenty years ago in San Francisco and standing on one of those terrible banquet chairs to see one of my mentors receive the organization’s highest honor, a lifetime achievement award. A deeply moving moment, thousands of lives changed for the better, world-shifting impact on education—taking place in a corner of the Moscone Center that would probably feature a refrigerator display in two days.
My local district in opening a new elementary school on Monday, years after accepting the fact that the historic WPA-constructed building was too close to a flood-prone river to possibly be reclaimed, Hurricane Helene displaced the kids from it anyway; they have been meeting for a year in donated halls, and so having a home at last is a major achievement. But of course, as one of my sons (a former student of the school) commented upon viewing an online video tour, it looks like a Hampton Inn inside.
I have not seen the video but do not need to. I know what educational “nice” looks like. I know exactly what he means. Indestructible carpet with fierce patterns overlaying neutral texture that will hide stains and wear for two decades. Ranks of plastic tables and chairs that can be rolled around and reconfigured, but never really fit together. Indirect lighting that will still make everything cold and sallow.
(I also read that the university building where I was so splendidly taught by that grad school mentor just re-opened after a comprehensive refresh. In the photos, I see the Hampton Inn aesthetic, filtered through a lot more money.)
I am grateful to the designers and the builders and everyone for a new building, don’t get me wrong. I just want to note that any public institutional space has to meet its contemporary demands to look “nice,” to accommodate hundreds, and to last for fifty years.
Spaces that tick all those boxes will never be humane spaces. They will never build in the evidence of human existence that so many of us find comforting in older, lived-in educational spaces. Worn spots on terrazzo floors where three generations of chairs have been scraped. Formica tabletops with the edges worn from students leaning over books, then laptops, late into the night. Chalkboards from the 60s peeking out around the edges of whiteboards from the 90s that were mounted right on top of them, to not leave divots in the drywall.
My favorite educational meeting has always happened in the same physical place, and has since the late 70s. It’s a Catholic retreat center near Dayton. I am not Catholic, but I read in its low-slung brick and monastic rooms and stained-glass chapel a strong presence of the liberation theology of fifty years ago. Ecumenical, peacenik, a little woozy, earth-tone woodcuts of venerated elders and saints painted on burlap. The rooms redolent of thousands of urns of coffee and the adequate but unpretentious on-site dining service. Brick and coffee and just a little warm damp: a terrarium, nearly, for people who seek to care for other people.
Overwhelmingly human and cozy, Feels like home to me, anyway, who is old enough to remember Air Force Base chapels built in the same vibe. Feels like room to sit and rest, room to hole up and read, room to make a new friend. The meeting itself the historic home of the last educational moment, IMHO, when we took seriously the interpersonal, the autobiographical, the human becoming of our work. The last moments before Reagan and measure-to-manage became commonsensical, before the ground opened and swallowed it all up in a conflagration of accountability that now feels like the only way to do school. (But isn’t.)
Of course, the real kicker is that every educational space that feels humane now was just “nice” when it opened, according to whatever “nice” meant at the time. The modernist / Brutalist cement and chrome piles I remember fondly from undergrad were built in the 60s as interruptions of the previous century’s brownstones. They only feel human to me because I was a human in them. (Oh look, one of those just got torn down and replaced too.)
Maybe the real point of this reverie on human living in inhumane spaces is that only by living in them do cold spaces warm up. Places where we do sacred work become sanctified. Churches and schools. Why does an empty classroom feel different than an empty hospital ward, than an empty prison cell? Exactly.
Maybe one of my deepest disquiets about online Zoom classes is that Zoom will never feel lived-in. A Zoom meeting is always the same, because a Zoom meeting is not a place. Evening class in Zoom can never feel different than every other meeting you have had in Zoom that day. It is the same not-space, and unless we who teach there make a real effort to make it otherwise, what is conveyed therein will just be more content to be consumed and optimized and turned into deliverables and accountabilities.
(And easily 1/3 of the sessions at my meeting were about incorporating AI into the teaching, writing, and mentoring work we do: another irreality that is changing the scope of what we can imagine doing with our students. For another day.)
We need real places to feel ourselves as real people undertaking real experiences. A sentence even John Dewey, that Lorax of experience, could not have imagined uttering in his day.
Don’t know how to end this. Maybe with the suggestion that we all notice and value what the real spaces we live in do for us. Whether welcoming and accommodating or brutal and indifferent, we make ourselves and each other as we share those spaces and work toward our shared intentions.
What do we want them to feel like? What can we do to make them more so?
Whatever they start out as, they end up…ours.
This whole blog SHOULD be about my amazing encounter this week with Bryan Kravitz of Philly Typewriter. What a shop, what a project! Typewriter Valhalla! More to come!
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I really have no time for blogging today, but I have to share Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI Writing” advice page that I stumbled across while not sleeping last night. It is sort of an internal white paper for those who edit that remarkable resource: not definitive, but trying really hard to be helpful.
I had no idea this existed. But it turns out to be the most explicit list of tells, bugaboos, and quirks of LLM output in fall 2025 I that have ever seen.
Last week I taught my doc seminar on scholarly writing, and was informed by my doc students that “em dashes mean AI wrote it.” A quick web search shows I am a few months behind this supposed wisdom, and it is included.
(Though sadly, the only essential thinkpiece on the issue is not.)
The first takeaways are pretty breathtaking. I will quote widely from the page (linked above) because no time to paraphrase.
[snip]
LLM writing often puffs up the importance of the subject matter by adding statements about how arbitrary aspects of the topic represent or contribute to a broader topic…Words to watch: stands as / serves as / is a testament/reminder, plays a vital/significant/crucial role, underscores/highlights its importance/significance, reflects broader, symbolizing its ongoing, contributing to, enduring/lasting impact, watershed moment, key turning point, deeply rooted, profound heritage, steadfast dedication, indelible mark, solidifies …
AI chatbots tend to insert superficial analysis of information, often in relation to its significance, recognition, or impact. This is often done by attaching a present participle (“-ing”) phrase at the end of sentences, sometimes with vague attributions to third parties…Words to watch: ensuring …, highlighting …, emphasizing …, reflecting …, underscoring …, showcasing …, aligns with…
LLMs have serious problems keeping a neutral tone, especially when writing about something that could be considered “cultural heritage”—in which case they will constantly remind the reader that it is cultural heritage…Words to watch: rich/vibrant cultural heritage/tapestry, boasts a, continues to captivate, groundbreaking, intricate, stunning natural beauty, enduring/lasting legacy, nestled, in the heart of …
LLMs often introduce their own interpretation, analysis, and opinions in their writing, even when they are asked to write neutrally, violating the policy No original research. Editorializing can appear through specific words or phrases or within broader sentence structures. This indicator often overlaps with other language and tone indicators in this list. Note that humans and especially new editors often make this mistake as well…Words to watch: it’s important to note/remember/consider, is worth mentioning …
[/snip]
It goes on and on; you should check it out.
We are of course beyond “gotcha” AI moments, at least in my institution. We are encouraged to “teach the controversy,” surely, and encourage students to begin to use these tools critically because job skills.
But if you are someone who cares about words, or was taught to, or make at least part of your life with words, I ask you: what do you notice about these “tells”?
That they are, and have always been, the hallmark of inexperienced writers trying to find their way into what they have to say.
When we who care about words say that AI output is “bad” I can begin to see now what we mean. It is vague; it pretends to perspective it does not have; it leans into gravity while being featherweight.
In other words: it is a lot like the papers many of our students would be writing on their own–if they were actually writing their papers.
So where’s the problem?
The problem is: until you write like this on your own, and get told you are writing like this and shown how to do better…you will continue to write like this.
Worse, you will be satisfied with this writing as “enough.” It looks “smart” and “authoritative,” so it must be.
And this is only the writing-skill part of the deeper issue, described in the lengthy quote from an associated page:
[snip]
LLMs are pattern completion programs: They generate text by outputting the words most likely to come after the previous ones. They learn these patterns from their training data, which includes a wide variety of content from the Internet and elsewhere, including works of fiction, low-effort forum posts, unstructured and low-quality content for search engine optimization (SEO), and so on. Because of this, LLMs will sometimes “draw conclusions” which, even if they seem superficially familiar, are not present in any single reliable source. They can also comply with prompts with absurd premises, like “The following is an article about the benefits of eating crushed glass”. Finally, LLMs can make things up, which is a statistically inevitable byproduct of their design, called “hallucination“…
As LLMs often output accurate statements, and since their outputs are typically plausible-sounding and given with an air of confidence, any time that they deliver a useful-seeming result, people may have difficulty detecting the above problems. An average user who believes that they are in possession of a useful tool, who maybe did a spot check for accuracy and “didn’t see any problems”, is biased to accept the output as provided; but it is highly likely that there are problems.
[/snip]
If you care about writing–or if you don’t care about writing, but do care about critical thinking, bias, or plausible-sounding and confidently-expressed things being accepted as true–well then, there is much to fear here.
Thoughts?
My typewriter sits in the corner and shakes its shaggy head at me…
Image borrowed from this Axios story on the apparent currency of the term “clanker” for undesired and ineffective AI. Image possibly AI generated, who can know anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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Happy National Coming Out Day! It was yesterday, Oct 11. But I will be observing today: by coming out as a heterosexual and cisgendered ally of my LGBTQ+ students, colleagues, friends, family, and readers.
I do not mean to make light of the occasion by shifting its meaning like this. I understand its gravity, and honor its creation in the dark days of the AIDS epidemic.
But at least around here, people like me seem to have backed away from using the unique protections that our positionality provides us to work for our more vulnerable fellow citizens.
And I want to say to my straight brothers and sisters: where the hell did you go?
My fellow educators, five minutes with the appalling data on the increased risks of suicide, self-harm, and interpersonal violence for LBGTQ+ young people should make up your mind that creating actively inclusive spaces is part of your responsibility.
Like I tell my students: the first job of an educator is to affirm the safety of those in their charge. This is 101-level Maslow: No safety, no learning.
If you are not actively interrupting the homophobic and transphobic culture of school—the hallway and locker room talk, not just the classroom talk—you are part of the problem.
This truth does not not have to change your faith, your heritage, or your heart. It DOES have to change your practice to an active, change-making daily approach, not a ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and pretend-not-to-hear approach.
How will you know what to do? Especially if you live in a purple-to-red state like mine?
Well, from one straight person (teacher) to another, this is what I do, and what I humbly suggest.
First: think on the LGBTQ+ people you have taught, known, and loved in your life, and presently do. There have been hundreds, both those who told you about this part of themselves and those who didn’t.
Second: make the list, maybe actually write it down. See their faces in your mind.
Third: thank them, in your heart (or maybe even IRL, if you never have). Thank them for trusting you with their truth–especially if their truth proceeded to ruin your capacity to pretend that their issues are not yours.
And once you have done that—well, act accordingly, on both their behalf and the behalf of those additional hundreds you have not yet met, nor yet had the responsibility to serve.
And what does THAT mean? “Act accordingly?” Well, I can’t know for sure. But you can figure it out!
Here’s a thought: maybe go to the Pride March next June! A friend thanked me at ours for marching, “especially as a straight person.” Why? It is literally the least I can do, and you too. To stand with and for.
You don’t have to carry a flag or holler alternate lyrics to “Hot to Go” (though that was super fun).
You do have to stand up and be counted, and swell the numbers, and put your safe and nearly-invisible body between those whose bodies aren’t and those who might do them harm.
Mark it, show it, name it! And I am not perfect at this. This week I finally took the unity flag out of my work email signature. Maybe I am a coward. But we got another email from legal reminding us of the old-and-new rules governing “political activities and employees,” and for the first time it linked to the “email signature guidelines” provided by our ever-vigilant Comms team, which I quote in full:
Don’t promote a personal agenda, including politcal [SIC—nice] messages. If it isn’t connected to your professional life, it doesn’t fit in your signature.
This is loathsome, as I argue to my students: identity is not a political message. Solidarity and safety and peace and love are not political messages. These are humane messages. These are “the world I want to live in ” messages. Aren’t they? As we let identity become politicized—as we let what we know so clearly about bias and its deadly impact become politicized—we diminish in our humanity.
But in this moment, in a system that claims “institutional neutrality” and a news cycle that is keeping the body count of fired professors, a message from legal carries different weight, and I intend to keep this job. So I made the change. I kept my pronouns in there; they are not illegal yet. And I still wear the unity button I have every day since the election. We will see what’s next.
Is this the right thing to do? Is this the best thing to do? I don’t know. I am figuring this out as I go.
But I am still working on it.
And my dear fellow straight folks, hey:
Are you working on it? If not–where have you gone?
Yes, you might think I am virtue signaling. Whatever. (Kind of a charming throwback, that, in 2025.)
And yes, there are multiple identities being punished and erased and traumatized right now, and they all matter. Black Lives Matter. Immigrant lives matter. Womens’ lives matter, as we lose generations of change in their self-determination and autonomy and safety. I admit the zone is flooded, and I am not working for it all the same way. (This week I did get added to the translator list for the Immigrant Justice Coalition, so maybe that can change too.)
But this corner of the vineyard feels like mine—and I see a way through to do something about it—and I am going to keep working on it.
Het/cis friends: Will you?
If not, why not? What changed?
The times, yes; the climate, the laws, the workplace feel, yes, they have all changed.
But has what is right changed? No. Has your love for those friends you conjured up a minute ago changed? No.
Have YOU changed, fellow person who could just keep your head down and ride this out in your ill-fitting khakis, and who could blame you? Maybe?
Well, don’t! We can’t change. Please don’t change.
Our LGBTQ+ dear ones need us not to. Our nation needs us not to.
And down deep: you need yourself not to.
Straight talk!
Happy National Coming Out Day!
Image from Wikipedia. The logo is from the following website: https://www.hrc.org/ https://www.elm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/NatnlComingOutDay.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20687252
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My view this morning. How’s yours? 
Works cited:
NYT—Open AI’s New Video App is Jaw-Dropping (For Better or Worse): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/technology/openai-sora-video-app.html?unlocked_article_code=1.q08.UUYt.5QX7omLx3jYN&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
*I am not really a Pavement fan, though “Slanted and and Enchanted” was pressed upon me by the hippest guy I know. See? I have no strong feelings about Nickelback, but I wish them well.
**That whole last bit is Wendell Berry—sure ain’t me, but I love it. See the page “Typewriter Agonistes” for link.
***Elliot Eisner taught me the next, done, good stuff; can’t cite it on my little phone but you should read him, a lot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Eisner
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Why yes, that IS the original paper support, thanks for noticing! 
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Here he is! You probably didn’t even know he existed.1 He messes up what you are trying to write. He introduced the errors that have grown like mushrooms in your draft since you last looked at it. His industry is your weakness. It’s not you–it’s him! The lord of all typos, the demon of scribes: meet Titivullus!2
I understand he was originally two demons! One who gathered up all the poorly-spoken and mumbled sermons of the preachers and prayers of the laity in a big sack–the image above has him in this form, toiling toward his quota of a thousand per day (!). And a second who compiled and tallied them, to be held against the poor mumbler and lazy parishioner on the judgment day.
Most images from a terrific blog at Lost Art Press. You should just go read it! Thus the medieval church installed a panoptic anxiety among the faithful.
In Margaret Jennings study of Titivillus she wrote the point of this Medieval demon was to remind clergy and laity of the danger of “spiritual sloth.” The litany of the service, each prayer and each song were to be unhurried, expressed clearly and with fervor.
To say or sing by rote and without care, to attend church, but not participate wholly was to open oneself to sin. Hence, visual reminders of a recording demon, as well as other devilish minions, were found on wood, walls and paper. In the hand-colored woodblock above three women gossip, one demon scribbles away and the second demon stretches a scroll with his teeth because they need more paper!
He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake…and he knows if you have been phoning in your devotions, too. So look sharp, lest your imperfect words be held against you in the final tally and toss you into the jaws of hell (below, right).
Fate of a “dishonest alewife,” also given to loose talk. As above. From the demon monitoring and keeping track of our language shortcomings, it was a small step to the demon actually interpolating such errors. Mischief not just recorded, but instigated. And thus T became the active cause of our imperfections, not just their registrar.
By Unknown author – https://www.flickr.com/photos/28433765@N07/6779860130, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25737553 Titivullus’s relation to Ceiling Cat’s many forms is as yet undocumented, and awaits future research.
Fun fact: he is apparently the source of the “printer’s devil,” the name given to apprenticed boys who scurried around eighteenth- and nineteenth-century printshops pulling fresh pages out of the press and collecting errant type to melt down. Because their hands were blackened by ink; because they were underfoot; because they made mischief!
By Tim Green from Bradford – The Devil is in the Detail, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52128604 Holy cow! No wonder we are so averse to typos and other false steps in our writing. We liberal arts undergrads who sort-of remember our sort-of reading of Max Weber shake our woolly (or bald) heads and think, yes: sloth in all its forms does not compute with the rational pursuit of economic gain. So mis-writing is a crime against God, and also profit.
Are we still in thrall to Titivullus? Well…does this track?
Typos are sin! And must be stamped out, even (especially?) if doing so requires an internalized self-loathing that is activated whenever we make a mistake.
Whenever we read back what we just wrote and think, that is not what I meant at all. That sounds stupid, and I misspelled “stupud” too…that voice is the spirit of Titivullus, living for free in our heads!
And loading up the very fallible (but passionate) humanity that led us to write anything at all with…well, wow, with what?
Guilt?
Nagging sense of inadequacy?
Embarrassment at having thought we had anything to say in the first place?
Much safer to not write anything at all…
And If we are already primed to feel bad about our writing’s syntax inconsistencies, then the prevalence of effortless “typesetting” technologies will make us feel even worse.
We all know two spaces after a period in word processing is a tell that your author is a recalcitrant from the age of typewriters. Word processing automates the monospace of typewriting: just put in one space and let the rock that thinks figure it out.
And everything written should look perfect now, whether or not it is actually flawless. Canva is the tip of the spear, here; a friction-free tool that raises all our expectations that whatever we dare to inscribe should be Instagram-ready, should look cute on a Stanley cup or an Etsy t-shirt.
When you know about Titivullus, you see his minions everywhere. Making you feel bad about all the ways real human words are imperfect when they first come out of us.
And making you think that until they are perfect, they are wrong and unworthy. And maybe even evil: maybe even will be held against us in some final accounting that awaits us, and our wordmaking.
What bunk, friends!
Let’s embrace an enlightened perspective that we all make and consume our words exactly the best way we can and should, exactly as we are!
Especially when the demon’s AI great-great-great grandchildren are offering us the false promise that we need never feel bad about our words again–as long as we just let them write for us. (“It’s cheating, but I don’t think it’s, like, cheating.”)
Subtle temptor indeed.
Long live typos–because they affirm the real-world and real-person provenance of what you are reading!
Go to hell, Titivullus! Let us type in peace!
I want to meet this Suzanne Ellison! https://blog.lostartpress.com/2021/01/17/my-old-nemesis-titivillus/ - Unless you played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons growing up. ↩︎
- Or “Tutivillus, Tytivillum, Tintillus, Tantillus, Tintinillus, Titivitilarius, Titivilitarius.” He is a demon of many names–perhaps more evidence of his craftiness. To believe Wikipedia, “for the past half-century every edition of The Oxford English Dictionary has listed an incorrect page reference for, of all things, a footnote on the earliest mention of Titivillus.” ↩︎
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I learned tonight (Jan. 10, 2014) the sad news that Elliot Eisner has passed away. Elliot was my masters advisor at Stanford, and I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his wisdom, his support, and his care.I remember talking to him on the phone from my little office in the Carriage House at The Field School in 1998. I wanted to go to grad school to understand why my students were having transformative experiences in my theater classes. US News and World Report said Stanford was a great place to do that, and their web site said he was the guy to talk to about it, so I called him after school one afternoon. He answered, and we talked about it for a few minutes.
In hindsight, I imagine that conversation was what got me in. If I had known his stature in the field – been smart enough to be intimidated – I never would have called. But I didn’t, and he picked up, and I guess my ignorance passed for gumption and self-confidence. Lives have been changed by dumber lucky breaks.
He was a wonderful professor, a fabulous teacher. He had a way of slowing down the room to track the deliberate speed with which he was working something out. He would speak slowly, usually in full paragraphs, his hands silently rising to gesture gracefully in the air as he made his points. I could listen to him all day, and did. He defied my best wisdom up until then about great teaching: that it was about being the loudest and most interesting thing in the room. He was quiet, barely moving sometimes, but his erudition and the architecture of his thought did the work.
He also showed me the power of thinking hard about something for a long time. If it was the right thing, you could ride it all the way to the beach, over and over. For him, the question was, “what do the arts have to teach us about education”- and he rode that wave as far as it would go, in every area, for forty years. Curriculum, assessment, evaluation, design, pedagogy, artistic experience itself: each path leading to its own more-or-less discrete book, transforming and, in some areas, re-inventing each field he explored. I read him so closely that I don’t even recognize how deeply his thought has sunk into me sometimes – I know it so well that I don’t think to footnote it. For me, its explanatory power has become common sense.
He taught me the lovely, goofy word “adumbrate,” and was so fond of it he couldn’t write five pages without using it. I drop it somewhere in most of my papers now, my little private tribute.
He dug my ideas. In my experience, we find our legs as thinkers in part because of the support offered early on by those who care about us, and he cared about me. I remember the surge I felt when he discussed my project on the use of scat language in jazz to connote what couldn’t be denoted, because it represented a relation in sound, not words. What a thrill when he got what I was driving toward, and celebrated its insights. What an affirmation.
I read Dewey’s Art as Experience in his gorgeous NoCal-funky living room, every corner crammed with statues and paintings from around the world. We ate little snacks Ellie prepared for us and tried to parse that crazy, dense book. I’ve never thought harder.
He asked my help once hauling a few huge computer monitors from his campus office to his home, back when they were like slabs of beef to lift. He drove a burgundy (I think) Porsche 911 with a vanity plate that read, “PORSCHT” (ha ha, oy gevalt). Cruising around Palo Alto in Elliot’s zip car, top down, a heavy monitor putting my legs to sleep: that’s a grand Stanford memory.
He invited me to stay and do the doctorate with him, and I turned him down, clumsily. We were expecting our first son, and I was scared about being so far from our families on the other coast. I remember a passionate talk with the head of the teacher ed program about whether or not to leave Stanford. “A degree from Stanford carries a certain…cache,” she warned. Unimaginable, to pass on such an opportunity. (“He’s already got a degree from Stanford,” murmured a smartass friend, in my defense.)
And I left badly, deciding too late for another guy to take my place – silly and immature. Still a regret of mine, but one I worked out, both with the other guy at AERA a few years later, and with Elliot when my job in Chapel Hill took me back out there for a week in 2005. He was already sick, then, but gracious: happy to have me back in his home, talk about what we did and what I was doing. Unfailingly interested, and always supportive.
In hindsight, I am very glad I left when I did. I moved on to other terrific mentors, and a life far from Palo Alto. Leaving Stanford was an early step in my ongoing effort to grow in my own self-confidence and self-worth beyond the meritocratic rat race that the academic life can cultivate in us. We can be driven by who we know, who we publish with – all the shibboleths and status signifiers that make an academic conference like the Oscars, sometimes, showbiz kids making movies of themselves. I was quite susceptible to that grift, and was well-served to get clear of much of it. There are firmer grounds upon which to build a life, for me.
But none of what I have been able to do would have been possible were it not for Elliot’s first interest in – and care of – me. I honor tonight his willingness to attend to a student, really attend; to take a call from a stranger, and to support someone’s best efforts to grow and change, to be someone else, however tentative.
There will be better tributes to the man, but this one is mine. As my semester starts, I recommit to emulating that energy and interest in my work with the students I am honored to work with now, today, tomorrow. Thank you, Elliot, for everything.
Image from Stanford’s web site.
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Written and not sent; that’s what a blog is for, right? Still deeply felt. Event is tonight: App folks who read this, I’ll see you there!
– c
I was raised in a conservative religious household, and recall the concern I inherited – absorbed through my skin, like oxygen – about the depravity of some art, literature, movies, and music. I remember how I felt in my deepest heart when reading something that seemed offensive to my values, a wounding that felt like I had betrayed my God and my people by even casting my eyes, let alone my mind, on such stuff. I remember that arguments for the literary, artistic, cultural value of a such a document were unconvincing to me. If anything, they affirmed that I was “in the world, but not of it;” that, as Matthew taught me, “ye cannot serve God and Mammon,” and any rationale that Mammon offered only deepened my resistance and my greater turning toward God.
I remember these powerful experiences of wounding and healing, acceptance and rejection, as I witness our community’s controversy about the teaching of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits to tenth graders at Watauga High. Arguments against the book have turned on the unsuitability of its sexually explicit and violent passages for inclusion in curriculum. Defenses have included appeals to the work’s universally-recognized literary merit (even, in a letter to the county school board, by the author herself), character references of the teacher involved, and insistence that the book is approved for inclusion in the tenth grade curriculum and that an alternate was offered (so, really, why should anyone be upset)?
I am torn up about how this dialogue is unfolding: how closely it follows the narrative of so many controversies about curriculum. It seems initially to be about legality and literary quality, each side trying to educate the other about risks and benefits it apparently cannot conceive. But I am beginning to see that the core issue is actually the authority we give or withhold from the school to speak into deeply-held differences of our society. The Reagan-era school prayer flap was the first time I noticed the conflict. In our times it includes evolution/creationist science curricula, sex ed, political advocacy, The Pledge of Allegiance, Scouts in the cafeteria in the afternoon, and on and on. We are a deeply divided nation on many fronts, and the school is the brightest flashpoint as we work out our own anxieties through the presumably more manageable lives of our children. We don’t know what we want our schools to do for them (us), how uncomfortable we are willing to let school make them (us). So we fume and fret and grumble to those who agree with us about what the world is coming to as the other side drives us into the ditch.
My best response to this tension comes out of what happened to me after I left home. I attended a university with an unfailing commitment to supporting exploration of every controversy, and trusting that that the community, through respectful dialogue, would find its way. I encountered attitudes and values at school that were deeply different than mine, and as a result found my own changing: about culture, politics, gender, sexuality, and ultimately the nature of my faith. Through respectful – though sometimes heated – discussion and argument, and open-hearted listening to those who were not me (i.e., everyone), I came to understand just how different others were than me. And that my own values, however deeply held, simply could not serve as an index of what someone else knew and felt about the world.
This is perhaps the greatest possibility offered by public school, greater than basic skills training, job readiness, even Friday night football: the possibility to allow all who make up this community to see deeply into each other’s otherness – perhaps to realize, at core, that we are exactly the same in our passionate need to have our otherness understood and respected.
That’s why I support the teaching of The House of the Spirits, unequivocally, and the teacher who chooses to teach it. The book is an opportunity to have that kind of discussion, that kind of listening and understanding of each other. But I refuse to support teaching the book by making those who oppose it into cartoons of intransigence and closed-mindedness. (After all, it’s only a matter of time before this controversy makes national news, and the rest of the country remains completely willing to retell that story about who we are in the High Country. Can’t we be better to each other?) I believe that school is where our students should – must – respectfully encounter, engage with, and come to understand points of view that differ profoundly from their own. And our larger community must be a place where we can do the same with each other. If I presume to have the only clear vision of what is valuable, I am as blind as my worst caricature of those who disagree with me.
I plan to attend the community-wide read-in and teach-in of The House of the Spirits ( 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Dec. 3 in Belk Library, Room 114, on ASU’s campus), and I hope you will too. I would be happy to organize another one in the common room of our excellent Public Library. I hope these events will be a chance for all of us to share the book and make our own judgment; share our own experience of reading and encounter of ourselves and each other. May we all go back to school, as we focus the energy this controversy has ignited. Focus it toward hearing, seeing, reading each other fully, perhaps for the first time.
