The poem: https://poets.org/poem/singularity
Tag: typewriters
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One of my very realest things: my 1964 Hermes Rocket, acquired from the granddaughter of a mechanical engineer in Asheville. In my experience, engineers take very good care of their typewriters. -
My SG-1, with Howard Knob in early fall 2026. Buy the book! Eddie Huffman, Doc Watson: https://uncpress.org/9781469680354/doc-watson/
Pilgrimage stories, from people of various famousness:
https://www.fretboardjournal.com/features/imposing-doc-watson-hitchhikers-musical-memoir/
https://gardenandgun.com/remembering-doc-watson
The soundtrack: https://docwatson.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-club-47-2
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Here are three reality-adjacent (and typewriter-enabled!) flashes of hope: two from this week, and one from way back that’s finally finished its lesson.
- An error in the New York Times.
September 23rd’s web page featured this headline for a story in The Athletic:
Tragic news, marred by what we still call a “typo.” (You might need to look for it again, unless you are a former English teacher proofreader-type too.)
Frequent and discerning readers of The Gray Lady know that repeated words, misspellings, and false start sentences are not uncommon, even in 2026. They are invariably corrected the next time you think to refresh the page–but they still happen (and some make a cottage industry of noting them).
Whenever I encounter one I treasure it. Because it means there is a real person on the other side of my screen, in Times Square or L.A. or Paris or Baghdad, going hell-for-leather to make deadline. Not an A.I. agent. (Well, not until AI starts putting the right titration of typos into its prose to meet its ends.)
I have held for a few years now that soon actual “typos” will be precious, almost-boutique experiences, like face-to-face schooling. Because they will mean a real person is passing through an experience alongside you, sharing your time and space and making sense of the world too. I think that time is already now.
(And as a waggish friend noted: “I also love that the NYT could misspell ‘analyst’ but spell ‘Krzyzewski’ correctly.”)
2. The Kids Are Alright, and Angry.
I brought Stanford’s AI howler to both my undergrad sections of preservice teachers this week.
We use my collection of manual typewriters for reflective writing, to find the contemporary themes of historical reading and make connections to experience that transform ideas into learning. Inevitably, work with these beautiful hands-on machines invites excursions into what technology does, can’t do, and might do to and for the yet-hypothetical classroom of their subject and level.
As I never tire of reminding them: my phone distraction / using AI “for brainstorming”/ reality bending teaching problem today is their problem in @ 3 years. What are they going to do about it?
I have to screenshot the image from the NYT story, in case you have somehow missed it. You need to have the same chance to react that they did.
The first photo was snapped of three undergrads at a “Lunar New Year Party in 2024.” I imagine this was a late night dining promotion, like midnight breakfast during exams. The second appeared in online university promotional materials last week.
The student on the right in the original photo, Billy Ramirez, seems remarkably good-humored about the revision, though also unsparing. After all, university students, staff, and faculty of color are used to having their images centered, altered, or removed, as suits the branding need of the moment.
“To see me erased like that so easily was kind of very upsetting,” Mr. Ramirez, who is Hispanic, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Mr. Ramirez, a senior who is majoring in human biology, said there was “a comedic element” to the matter. Nevertheless, he said that he was frustrated by Stanford’s move, which he learned about from a friend.
The other students in the original photo “did not respond to emails on Tuesday.” The student on the right in the altered photo could not be reached for comment, obviously, because she does not exist. (Her AI sister Tilly might be game to offer some word salad, in a language or two, maybe.)
My own undergrads’ response didn’t start with racial / ethnic erasure, though. Instead they zeroed in on the revisions to make the other two students more conventionally attractive.
“They made them hotter,” was the first, dismayed comment in one class. “It’s the dining hall late at night. No one is camera-ready. People are just wearing whatever and trying to get something to eat.”
We went on to talk about that mix of aspiration and self-loathing that powerful advertising sparks inside us. Obvs, they agreed.
But then a student said, “If I see the second photo in an ad, it makes me not want to go to Stanford. No one really looks like that. Where would I fit in?”
In one acid take that student undid a century of marketing campaigns, and decided to let be be finale of seem.
I tried the counterpunch: “But what if you are the UComm employee who has to finish this web page and two more before midnight. You do not have the actual image you think you need! Can you see why maybe, just this once, you could fudge it with AI, and make up people who don’t exist?”
Absolutely not, both groups roared back at me. Not even worthy of response. Authenticity above all. Reality above all, said the room.
“Besides,” came the coup-de-grace: “This same university will bust you for using AI to write a paper.
“How can they turn around and use it themselves?”
3. The Canoe
Twenty years ago I helped start a microschool in the North Carolina piedmont. It did not survive past its first year. The experience taught me gratitude for institutions, for existing infrastructure that doesn’t need to invent a way to get attendance to the front office by 9 AM every day, etc.
But in class this week, another lesson from that time came back to me. One of our organizing team was tech-savvy, and used PhotoShop (oh innocence) to place the name of the school in many becoming photographs that supported its vibe. Our building backed on a lovely river; one photo depicted a Coleman canoe nosing into a sun-dappled autumn stream, with the school name now proudly lettered in gold on the transom.
We are all dazzled, excited by how our nascent website would be zhuzhed up by these gorgeous images. We will have so many prospective students applying!
But one of the teachers contemplated the pictures silently for several moments. Then she asked,
“What do we tell the student who shows up on the first day and says, ‘I want to see the canoe’?”
She was right.
The trust of a young person in the intentions and credibility of a new school comes down to whether or not it is what it says it is.
How can a student know they are safe–know they can relax and trust–know they are free to do the work they are here to do–without that rock-solid confidence?
The photos were forgotten.
The young people are done with appearances and promises.
They just want to see the canoe.
Lead image borrowed from The Happy Adventure, with thanks.
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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.
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“Of all the vices, I find books to be the least dangerous…I think it’s possible his landlord might have their priorities misplaced, or might not understand him. If you’re not steeped in his culture, maybe his library does look chaotic. But I’d argue it only looks like a mess. I’ll bet he can tell you where every single book is in his apartment.”
That’s bookseller Israel Mizrahi on Mendel Uminer’s collection of thousands of books, and his resultant eviction from his Upper East Side apartment. Here’s a picture of only some of them.
According to yesterday’s NYT piece, the stated grounds are fire hazard–but, as becomes clear in the article, his true infraction is unseemly eccentricity. Too many books!
We have a word for people whose relationship with their stuff doesn’t track with the sleek, beige, gentrified, laptop-and-tablet-and-phone lifestyle promoted on the socials: “hoarder.”
Like so many words borrowed from clinical psychology, its casual use dishonors the suffering caused by its authentic manifestation. It feels edgy, using words about real pathology to describe behaviors that are a little outside the norm–feels knowing and hip. It’s also kind of stupid, since it blunts an edge that can be so helpful to so many. We should do it less.
But in this case it mostly serves to reveal a high cultural antibody titer…against stuff. The manufactured challenge that so many of us feel: too much stuff in our lives, and not enough room for it.
Why can’t our spaces look as curated and spare as the ones we see in the media, in the ads that sells us the storage and cleaning technologies we “need” to so appear? Uncluttered space=clear mind, we are told to believe, and so we are supposed to discard what doesn’t spark joy. Or, if our nerves fail us, hide it in the garage.
I am maybe a little sensitive about my stuff right now! I am in the middle of an office move, from one end of my College’s massive building to the other. And while it will not involve an elevator or staircase, it is still a physical and emotional heavy lift.
I have been in my present space for eight years. And the vagaries of summer schedules mean I am moved “out” of my present space as of three days ago–but will not be “in” my next space for a couple of weeks, after its present occupant has time to clear it.
This means that all of my stuff, at present, is stashed in two corners of the big seminar room of the Program I have helped run for eight years. It is out of the way, functionally; the truth is we rarely use the space for student events anymore anyway, since the entire Program moved online in 2019.
One wall is stacked with liquor boxes of books and files and papers and pictures and lamps and all the crockery and trophies and such that didn’t fit at home, and so found their way to work.
Why yes, that is an autographed photo me with George Clinton at the Atlanta airport in 1995, thanks for noticing! And the opposite corner is stuffed with my working collection of 40 +/- typewriters, and the shelves that have archived them and will again in a couple of weeks.
Typewriter collection, in exile It’s a jumble, it’s a mess. And it invites inevitable feelings of reproach.
Why do I have so much stuff, when of course I can run 95% of my professional life off this laptop?
Why do I have so many books, when so much of their contents is available digitally via the University library?
And dear heavens: what of the typewriters?
Constant readers of this blog will know that my typewriters are in heavy service during the school year. (I wrote a book about it!)
They are the core of my undergraduate teaching, which asks students to retrieve a machine from my office at the start of one class session a week and use it to create a few pages of “human words” in response to a few prompts I provide. The prompts ask for reflection and consolidation of the themes in the readings we are handling that week–but also provoke about medium and technology, about attention and memory. About how the stubborn reality of the anachronistic tech in front of them refuses to let things feel normal, and what that discomfort could allow to happen next for them.
The majority of the machines I use for this teaching are “portable,” in the way that word in the 50s and 60s conveyed a machine with a case and a handle that conceivably could be carried from one writing site to the next.
But “portable,” in 2026, means something a lot lighter than the 20+ lbs of each of these machines. So their weight is a constant topic with my Gen Z students at the start of the semester: how schlepping a typewriter from my office to the classroom and back again isn’t effortless.
And of course, the new office location will require baroque calculations on my part about classroom location, changing floors, timing, frustration tolerance…learning spent with reality is rarely convenient, but the inconvenience is often the point.
Portable-but-heavy, it turns out, is an auspicious combination, if your goal is to invite students to notice stuff they haven’t before. It’s all curriculum.
And it is a nice characterization of the books in the article. Look at them! No one book is too much to manage, but taken together they are quite a phenomenon. There they sit, spines toward you for easy selection and delectation, tumble-bumble on shelves and tables and stacked along walls. Redeemed, somehow, in the opening quote, by the insistence that there is an organization to their stacking: you just don’t understand it. (If there’s a method, it’s not a mess.)
But also behold the boxes of books, so like mine. See their progress as the article unfolds: loaded up, with friends’ help, into almost-carryable batches. Hauled down beautiful but tortuous old stairways. Bunged into open minivans, in the rain of course–and finally stacked ignominiously in his parents’ apartment, in the middle of the floor, awaiting whatever is next, whatever can be allowed.
Somewhere along the line I learned, from a striving realtor probably, that the risk of many books in a home is not primarily fire: it is weight. Books are usually stacked in shelves along the edges of rooms. That concentrated weight at the borders, vs. the much-lighter foot traffic through the middle, over decades will lead to warped floorboards, settling, even foundation issues. Get rid of your books, I remember one realtor telling me. They will hurt your home’s value. Shed the weight.
But books as weighty signifiers of value, of seriousness and taste on the part of those who display them, is also nothing new.
Your books “say something” about you, we are told! You can curate them by the yard, “by color, theme, or size,” for your study decor.
You can place them strategically (or images of them) for your Zoom flex.
You can even dial them up on AI for unfathomable reasons. (No, wait–they’re real. Real fakes. Try to keep up.)
Have books, the big world seems to say, or simulacra of books: just make them tidy and hep. And for heaven’s sake, don’t make them towering ziggurats of Strand cutouts. That is not cute.
What does a wall of typewriters in a faculty office “say”?
Wall of teaching typewriters in full bloom, spring 2026. New home forthcoming! Watch this space! Other than giving one less floor space to maneuver through, and the comforting eau-de-typewriter-ribbon and whiff-of-mold that greets me every morning?
Well, I suppose it also communicates an eccentricity. a willingness to commit to something unusual and unwieldy, for reasons that will soon become clear if you can stay with me long enough to find out what it is.
I think teaching with typewriters is just a physical manifestation of an emotional dynamic that pervades every classroom:
-the teacher is convinced that something new should be attended to;
-the students are not so sure;
-the teacher’s first job is to make the case that a new enthusiasm is warranted;
-the teacher lends their own enthusiasm, generously, until the students’ own can be unearthed and engaged.
And a reliable way to concentrate that enthusiasm and pique that interest is to present a puzzle, an artifact, a curiosity, a weirdness. Any provocation that heightens engagement, and therefore attention, just enough for what students actually care about to run parallel to what the curriculum hopes they will start to care about. Just long enough to catch fire, like a fresh match set alongside a lit one.
Typewriters are great for that, whatever else they become over fifteen weeks of living with one.
And my wall of typewriters also gives a sense of history: a heightened sense of being in this moment by acknowledging that other moments have happened too.
This is surely a core reason why I am comforted by antique stores, especially the ones that are more rummage sale than curated display. These things all mattered once, those places say, for people who are not here anymore but were, just as you and I are here. We will eventually matter probably no more than they did, but certainly no less. Our now can be imbued with meaning by the artifacts of their now. Whether or not we take any of their stuff home, hanging out for a spell with their stuff makes our stuff–and our lives–more real.
I cannot tell you where every single book is in my boxes right now. (I also doubt Mendel can, and don’t need him to in order to have them.) I will not pretend otherwise.
But: I am definitely keeping it all. All the books, all the files, and definitely all the typewriters. (Most of the crockery.) It is all going into the new room at such time that the new room is available. I will not be culling the stacks much more than I already have, though I will probably continue to insist I intend to.
Because here’s the thing: an empty room is exciting, inspiring, bracing in its possibility. Isn’t it?
Office of howling emptiness As I have worked in my now-empty office for the last couple of days, I have wondered: why do I not keep my office this empty all the time? So much space and aether; so little to hook onto from the past when I cast my eyes around it looking for the next sentence to write.
But empty rooms aren’t the ones we live in.
And they sure aren’t the ones we learn in.
And they aren’t the ones we stash the tokens and memories of the things we do that matter to us in.
You know, surgical suites are nearly-empty rooms. So are those interfaith chapels you can still find in airports. No specific tokens there to comfort or enrage; bring your own, or do without, for your devotions. Passing-through places are usually empty places.
But empty is not good for dwelling–except in someone else’s Instagram pic of how you should dwell.
Empty is not good for living–except according to someone else’s rules about how you should live.
We real humans live with our stuff: with our books, with our stacks, with our typewriters, with our ephemera that becomes less ephemeral the longer we keep it around. And sure, we can become prisoners of our stuff–but before things go that far, consider who we become when we let ourselves be owned by our stuff.
“It makes sense to me that Mendel, a Brooklyn yeshiva kid, would come to the Upper East Side and make this world for himself here, only to get rejected from it…There’s a New York now, keyed into professionalism and uniformity, that sees a guy like him and thinks something must be wrong. There’s an element to the city now that’s hostile to the life of the mind, to the eccentricity that might produce it.”
I hope you can find your own personal way to push back today against the forces of uniformity. The hostility to living one’s own life that is sure to come at you, in ways great and small, every time you ask the monoculture for input on how you should live.
After all, we are way harder to market to when we don’t like the things we are supposed to.
We are way harder to control when we don’t share our every word and image with the algorithms.
We are way harder to pathologize and shame into buying stuff we don’t need if we won’t be who we are told to be.
So blow up your TV, like John Prine told us fifty-five years ago. Delete your account, we would say now.
And go buy a used book, or an antique typewriter, and put it right in the middle of the table, right where it doesn’t belong.
Then get another one. And another.
Top image by James Estrin, from Alex Vadukul’s linked NYT story and reproduced here with thanks. All other images my own.
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Here’s an image of the bicentennial Freedom Train at a stop in Georgia, 1976.
What a happening the Freedom Train was! An eighteen-month tour of the rails across the contiguous 48 states. A rolling collection of +/- 500 artifacts that represented America in all its post-Watergate malaise.
Touted by pardoner-in-chief Gerald Ford as exemplifying “the spirit of free enterprise at its best.”
Not sure if he ever actually said this; it’s a screenshot from the promotional press pack archived at Ford’s Presidential Library, designed to get big donors on board and manufacture hype and pep. My passion for all things physical, objects in the real world, is piqued upon remembering this rolling exhibition! There’s abundance of online records about the train itself and its itinerary (train people being even more obsessive than typewriter people)–but an exhaustive catalog of exactly which artifacts made the cut was tough to find.
This Troy University page is the best I came up with, which takes us to BhamWiki (“an ever-growing encyclopedic resource for anyone curious about Birmingham, Alabama and the region around it“). And we are happy to find a Remington No. 1 typewriter on the roster, as part of the “Innovations” car, in august company. ‘Merican ingenuity FTW!
(NB: This is not a Remington No. 1, but IS an image of the 14-ton Underwood No. 5 typewriter created for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, then refurbished for the 1939 NYC World’s Fair, and I will take any opportunity to post it. Check out Mary Ech’s terrific post for more about it. Can such things be?)
I have a gauzy, madeleine-like association cascade of the Freedom Train steaming across my seven year-old consciousness. How did seven year-olds come to know such things were happening, in the mid-70s? How did anyone?
I suspect it was featured in the Weekly Reader that year, which I probably had access to in 1975-1976 in my super-groovy, open floor plan, carpet-squares-and filmstrip-viewer, mixed first-and-second grade classroom at Cunningham year-round Elementary School, Aurora, Colorado.
The Internet Archive shows Weekly Reader coverage of the 1947-1949 Freedom Train (which was its whole own huggermugger, full of citizenship paeans and racial tension):
…but it is silent on the ’76 one. And I didn’t have a National Geographic World subscription yet either…so how did I know about it? Dad was still active-duty Air Force, so maybe he brought home news of it.
I did not finally see the train, in the actual event, that I can remember. But I wanted to!
I remember the longing to see it. The promised thrill of Important Things being brought to us, in all their irreducible actuality, all the way out here in the provinces. Left over from the previous era of whistlestop tours and medicine shows and itinerant entertainers, maybe, when the only way to experience something was in the flesh and folks would pay what they could to have it.
(I did see the King Tut exhibit later that year at the National Gallery, though! That deserves its own post, someday.)
It is no surprise that early efforts to revive the Freedom Train for the 250th came to naught, or at least much-reduced form: “on April 15, 2026, Reading No. 2100’s excursion as the 2026 Freedom Train was canceled, citing “a lack of financial backing from corporate sponsors, difficulty negotiating access with major freight railroads, and tight timelines leading up to the 2026 semiquincentennial celebration.” Trains are on the outs. And it’s a big loss.
Trains aside, there is not much real stuff to touch this July 4th, especially in DC. The State-Fair atrocity on the Mall is full of VR and other simulacra. The permanent built environment of the nation’s capital city is fenced off in the name of security, but also to hide the shame of a monstrous fixer at being unable to fix everything.
I lived in DC twice, once for a year between the summer of ’76 and ’77, and again for six years after college. I still consider it “my city,” though of course I know it has been changed and Chipotle-homogenized like everywhere. (What did Joan Didion say about knowing even in the moment that it would never be quite the same again? Like that.)
(And can you believe they closed The Biograph? It’s a CVS now.)
I remember how frustrated little me was that we got to DC in summer of ’76 after the Bicentennial fireworks. Though I still remember seeing them splendid in ’77 over the Washington Monument, from a distance and a rise somehow.
And both that year, and when I returned as an adult, I gloried in how accessible everything was. In ’77, Dad would circle the National Mall on Saturdays until street parking opened up on Constitution Ave. and we could walk over and see the Wright brothers plane, the moon landing capsule, the Spirit of St. Louis. (When I grew up I discovered there were also other museums in the SI–but to this seven year-old, it was Air and Space, ride or die.)
And during my 90s term in office, I helped coach my first school’s cross-country team. The Dupont Circle location of its first campus precluded any actual sports facilities, so we ran and ran. We had several loops mapped through the city and Rock Creek Park. We would fly down Connecticut Ave, somehow get over along the Potomac, and run under the overhang of the Kennedy Center.
I lived in Arlington, in a crummy group house at Court House metro. You could park at the Iwo Jima memorial and run across Memorial Bridge and back, waving to Lincoln at the turnaround. Or even blast up the steps Rocky-style and salute him personally, if it was early on a weekend AM and you could juke across the traffic. Turn around and stand where MLK did and behold the reflecting pool, not caring what color it was.
The country I love is a place of unlimited access and invisible barriers, both. As today’s gorgeous NYT piece on the colossus in New York Harbor asks, “Is Liberty peaceable or vengeful? A nurturing presence, greeting all who come, or an unstoppable revolutionary?” I have found it to be all of these things–but most of all, when it is at its best, it is real, not pretend.
No Freedom Train for you to go see today, probably. And if you are in DC, I hope you don’t endure the metal detectors and military presence to see the definitely-not-for-kids late-night fireworks.
I hope instead you spend some quality time with something real that means liberty and possibility to you, and maybe take a moment to consider what this place has opened in your own reality. (A manual typewriter is a promising option, supra.)
And, of course, how to pay it forward and make opportunities for others. The most American of values, as Learned Hand reminded us in 1944. Here’s Bret Stephens’ masterful reflection on his address last week:
…the judge said, the spirit of liberty lay in a combination of humility, curiosity, generosity and restraint. It was “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,” the one that “seeks to understand the mind of other men and women” and “weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.” It was an elusive spirit, one that could exist only “as the conscience and courage of Americans create it.”
Fugitive virtues this year–but still ones we can each seek in our own hearts and choices. Which also burn in Woody Guthrie’s last verses of his unofficial national anthem–the ones we never get around to singing–
As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me. -
Today is the day! My book is published!
Human Teaching: How Recentering What’s Real Sustains Your Practice is now available, in paperback only (no digital download!) at this link.
I am pricing it at near-cost through the end of February–because I am so excited to get these ideas out into the world, and continue the conversation that started in these pages. I hope you’ll order yours today!
In Human Teaching, I use a combination of word-processed, typewritten, and hybrid pages to explore the relationship between seeking out unmediated reality and thriving in your teaching practice.
As our lives become more and more virtual–more and more invaded by screens and algorithms, and the billion-dollar efforts behind them that compete to extract our attention–I am more and more convinced that the way forward has always been beneath our feet, before our eyes, and right under our fingertips.
Maybe this moment, despite it all, is the first moment in which we can truly see reality for the endless source of sustaining power that it has always been. If we choose to stop fleeing from it in the name of speed, convenience, and ease, we may find that friction is our friend.
We may regain our living, breathing teaching selves by losing the stories we’ve been told we have to believe.
The core of the book is the “Five Spot”: a scheme for understanding the research-based principles of sustainable teaching practice that have infused my burnout prevention work with preservice and practicing educators for years.
What’s the “Five Spot”? Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
- While the themes that underlie educator burnout are complex and interwoven, I think we can engage the most urgent ones in five moves. Five is a manageable number! It is counting on your fingers; it is the days in a school week. It is how many periods I taught each day, when I was a middle and high school teacher from 1993 to 1999. It’s a handful—and it’s just enough.
- At the school where I began my career, a “five spot” was what they paid you to sub for an absent colleague’s class. If someone called out sick, and you had planning period during one of their classes, you could volunteer in morning meeting to cover for them. Sometimes they would leave a plan; usually it was study hall. But when you were done, you would go to student accounts, and the woman who ran the shop would hand you a five-dollar bill out of the cash box. And now you had money for an extra value meal at McDonald’s up the road (at 90s prices), which you could just make in a lunch period if you really boogied. Maybe these moves are like that “five spot”: do a little extra, extend yourself a bit—and immediately start to see something better in your day, something sustaining and lovely, that wasn’t there when you got up that morning.
- Jazz fans will have thought of the third thing first. The Five Spot Café was a storied club in Greenwich Village from 1956-1967, where some of the most innovative musicians of the period played residencies, sat in, and cut records. Thelonious Monk had two long stands there; Ornette Coleman made his east coast debut there with his avant-garde improvisations. It was an unpretentious, inclusive, and adventurous place, where food and drinks were cheap and all were welcome. Being part of the new thing was everybody’s business, not just a select few. I hope the same sense of freedom, openness, and possibility comes through in these pages.
I will blog a bit about each of the elements of the “Five Spot” in the coming weeks, so keep reading to find out more!
My sincere thanks to Dr Richard Polt, curator of The Classic Typewriter Page and editor of Loose Dog Press, for his unflagging enthusiasm for this project since I proposed it to him eleven months ago.
When I began this journey with real-world words in the depths of covid-dark December 2021, his was the first page of the “Typosphere” I found. His terrific book The Typewriter Revolution is required reading for anyone who wants to make manual typewriters part of their lives in a digital world.
I wanted so badly to publish this work with someone for whom the typewritten bits were a feature, not a bug. And boy howdy: did I ever choose wisely!
So get the book, and let me know what you think! And thanks so much for reading.
Here we go!
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“Willis W. Chester Leaning in Desk Chair.” Digital Watauga. 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 Carrie out 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.
Many times they also got crated about everywhere the writer had to be. Which was sometimes a lot of places.
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.)
Is the woman using the typewriter here inside the WPA-era Appalachian High School (now Chappell Wilson Hall), as the distinctive stone work might suggest? That building is right next to the new library now.
Maybe not. There are a lot of stone walls in Boone. Or maybe…
What’s this guy so happy about? Could it have something to do with his silk jacket? That jacket would make me happy, all right.
“Man with Receipt Maker and Typewriter.” Digital Watauga. What about her? Maybe she is happy that her typewriter has already lasted twenty years, and shows no signs of stopping.
“Woman Typing on a Typewriter.” Digital Watauga. 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.
What will you say?
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Being some half-baked thoughts on Dana Goldstein’s December 12th article, “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.”
Excited to try a new scanning process to make my typed human words more legible and accessible! I am still with the charming ’63 Hermes 3000. We’re developing a serious long-term relationship. It really gets me…
I have no rights to the B&B image, which is the cover of an out-of-print anthology, but hope Mike Judge would consider it fair use. FWIW, you can buy it here.
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Post title from this delightful image by our friend Jo Musser at AbacusCorvus. Buy their gorgeous art! Resist legibility!
