Human Teaching: How Recentering What’s Real Sustains Your Practice is now available, in paperback only (no digital download!) at this link.
I am pricing it at near-cost through the end of February–because I am so excited to get these ideas out into the world, and continue the conversation that started in these pages. I hope you’ll order yours today!
In Human Teaching, I use a combination of word-processed, typewritten, and hybrid pages to explore the relationship between seeking out unmediated reality and thriving in your teaching practice.
As our lives become more and more virtual–more and more invaded by screens and algorithms, and the billion-dollar efforts behind them that compete to extract our attention–I am more and more convinced that the way forward has always been beneath our feet, before our eyes, and right under our fingertips.
Maybe this moment, despite it all, is the first moment in which we can truly see reality for the endless source of sustaining power that it has always been. If we choose to stop fleeing from it in the name of speed, convenience, and ease, we may find that friction is our friend.
We may regain our living, breathing teaching selves by losing the stories we’ve been told we have to believe.
The core of the book is the “Five Spot”: a scheme for understanding the research-based principles of sustainable teaching practice that have infused my burnout prevention work with preservice and practicing educators for years.
What’s the “Five Spot”? Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
While the themes that underlie educator burnout are complex and interwoven, I think we can engage the most urgent ones in five moves. Five is a manageable number! It is counting on your fingers; it is the days in a school week. It is how many periods I taught each day, when I was a middle and high school teacher from 1993 to 1999. It’s a handful—and it’s just enough.
At the school where I began my career, a “five spot” was what they paid you to sub for an absent colleague’s class. If someone called out sick, and you had planning period during one of their classes, you could volunteer in morning meeting to cover for them. Sometimes they would leave a plan; usually it was study hall. But when you were done, you would go to student accounts, and the woman who ran the shop would hand you a five-dollar bill out of the cash box. And now you had money for an extra value meal at McDonald’s up the road (at 90s prices), which you could just make in a lunch period if you really boogied. Maybe these moves are like that “five spot”: do a little extra, extend yourself a bit—and immediately start to see something better in your day, something sustaining and lovely, that wasn’t there when you got up that morning.
Jazz fans will have thought of the third thing first. The Five Spot Café was a storied club in Greenwich Village from 1956-1967, where some of the most innovative musicians of the period played residencies, sat in, and cut records. Thelonious Monk had two long stands there; Ornette Coleman made his east coast debut there with his avant-garde improvisations. It was an unpretentious, inclusive, and adventurous place, where food and drinks were cheap and all were welcome. Being part of the new thing was everybody’s business, not just a select few. I hope the same sense of freedom, openness, and possibility comes through in these pages.
I will blog a bit about each of the elements of the “Five Spot” in the coming weeks, so keep reading to find out more!
My sincere thanks to Dr Richard Polt, curator of The Classic Typewriter Page and editor of Loose Dog Press, for his unflagging enthusiasm for this project since I proposed it to him eleven months ago.
When I began this journey with real-world words in the depths of covid-dark December 2021, his was the first page of the “Typosphere” I found. His terrific book The Typewriter Revolution is required reading for anyone who wants to make manual typewriters part of their lives in a digital world.
I wanted so badly to publish this work with someone for whom the typewritten bits were a feature, not a bug. And boy howdy: did I ever choose wisely!
So get the book, and let me know what you think! And thanks so much for reading.
I am thinking a lot lately about places. What being in a place, or being of a place, gives us. What we need from our places that we don’t even realize we need–until we don’t have it anymore.
For example: as education becomes more virtual each year, “where you went to school” becomes almost meaningless.
Last Friday I met a doctoral student of mine face-to-face for the first time, when she came to campus to attend commencement and receive her degree. Zoom meetings are such an unremarkable part of our work now that I had not realized we had never met in the flesh.
After commencement, I walked with her family up through campus to the bookstore and gave them a little tour of “her” school–where she had never set foot in her life. She didn’t know where the bookstore was. Why would she?
What do we lose from being placeless when we learn and teach?
I used to think typewriting in the 21st century was about being “distraction-free.” But for me, it increasingly is more about being “place-full.”
Every day I type with a particular machine, on a particular sheet of paper, atop a particular desk. When I do that, my writing is happening both in a place (this room, this desk, this machine) and upon a place (this page). My utter control over what I write stems from its place-ness.
Do I mail this page to one other person, and make its words happen in one other place too?
Do I scan it and put it on my blog, instantly making it happen in countless places everywhere? (Though possibly less seen than the page I mailed to one reader.)
Do I send the manuscript to an editor and get it published? Or do I rip it up and burn it, and make it no longer exist in any place?
I have total control over what happens next—but only because I am here in this place with these words on this page. If I had written it in Google Docs instead, the words would be every place there is a computer…and also no place.
And they would belong to…well, to Google, as these words belong to WordPress. And by courtesy, to me and to you…for now…
(Stephen King’s wife famously fished the first typed pages of Carrieout of the wastebasket and suggested to him that he keep telling that story. “‘You’ve got something here,’ she said. ‘I really think you do.’” How many drafts abandoned on hard drives will never see other eyes beyond their frustrated authors?)
It turns out that the constraints we wanted so badly to slip out of when we first met our word processors are now actually freedoms.
In the 80s, when my family acquired our first home computer, I longed to be free from typos, from spelling errors, from typing clean versions of rough drafts. I longed to be able to change and change and change what I was saying and how I was saying it with no resistance whatsoever.
Now, with all my computer writing being ephemeral and inscrutable (“where” really “is” my document, on my hard drive or in the cloud?), my typewriter gives me back the freedom to do with my words exactly what I will. Nothing, or everything. My words are now truly free in the world, exactly to the degree I wish them to be, intelligible and malleable and fungible. Or not.
Typewriters have always happened in places. They came from places, first of all: factories in Connecticut or New York, in Ivrea, Italy or Wilhelmshaven, West Germany, or Yverdon, Switzerland.
They came in crates, they came from the office supply store downtown. For a little while, they were dropped from planes.
And once purchased, they got set up on desks in offices and bedrooms and studies–and many times they stayed there for decades.
The Digital Watauga project features 53 images tagged as having typewriters in them. Their spaces are filled with ephemera and helpfully-dated calendars. There are pages in many of the typewriters, and the trash cans are often full. Their users are sometimes named and sometimes not; the photographer’s jokes they are often smiling at are gone, but their typewriters remain.
So do many of the buildings where these offices were, in my historic town where some buildings are historic and some are just old, and most of both are still around.
What does it mean to walk into the Antique Mall that now occupies the old Belk department store building, and look up at the balcony where the manager leaned back in his office chair in 1952 and glanced at the photographer interrupting his afternoon?
(NB: His typewriter is barely visible in the back left corner; the desk holds an adding machine, which is not yet an obsession of mine.)
I own most of the typewriter models in these photos. They weren’t rare then, and they aren’t now, if you are looking for one.
But seeing the actual machine on your desk, next to a photo of a different machine on a different desk from 75 years ago that sat less than a mile from where you do, imbues it with a different power.
You look at the real typewriter, and you look at the photo. You are here, they both say to you, with your machine. And also, this person was here, with their machine…that was their turn to have their say, and now it is your turn.
You are different, and your life is different, than theirs. And it is not.
You labor differently today, over different tasks, than they did. You fret over different news that you receive differently.
But when you are done you will also get up and leave and go home to your family and your dinner, and your Christmas in a week, just like they did.
Those moments are yours…and they are theirs too. They are all of ours.
A typewriter is a token of the freedom to be oneself and to have one’s say…and the freedom to know you are one of the crowd too.
That was then, and then, a thousand million thens.
But you are here, and so is your typewriter. You are alone together in the world, right now.
That is probably the only French I will attempt here—though it is hard to resist, mais oui.
Because for the last two nights I have been submerged in Richard Linklater’s new film Nouvelle Vague, which tells a story about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 French New Wave classic Breathless. I want to think about their typewriters, and the texts they purportedly yield.
I have watched / rewatched them both, Kanopy open in one tab and Netflix in the other. Fighting Richard Brody’s urge to make of the latter film “a nitpicker’s delight…any viewer who knows anything about Godard’s story can find contrivances, departures from the historical record. I won’t bother; if I want the details, I’ll read a book” (perhaps his).
I won’t say I really know anything about the “historical record” of Breathless. I shotgunned it only once a couple of years ago–in the name of cultural literacy, really, when my son came home from college raving about it. He was gobsmacked by his distinguished professor’s thoughts on Bicycle Thieves, and The 400 Blows, and this film, so I tried to catch up. A film autodidact at best, I do know what I like. And I liked these pictures.
In the 1959 milieu of Nouvelle Vague, typewriters are ubiquitous and unremarked. After all, Godard and his partners are the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma before they become filmmakers, so there is (supposedly) a lot of writing happening.
The offices of that magazine are imagined here as a large dining table with three high-end standard machines atop it on three sides. Two are easily identifiable as Olympia SG-1s, apparently brand new and perhaps purchased together for office use. The studio standard machine for people who write for a living, they are completely plausible presences here. First manufactured in 1953, they dominated the European and American markets. Mine is from 1960 and hulks on the table behind me right now.
The third is harder for me to make; it looks plastic and sloping, not exactly the Olivetti 82 but pretty close. We barely see it in the establishing shot of Godard, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette typing, and in a later shot of a brief speech by Roberto Rossellini to his assembled acolytes it is missing altogether. Perhaps it belonged to Rivette and he took it home? Pretty big machine–not for commuting! But it would make sense: another serious machine for forging a new age of film.
There’s also a lovely Olivetti Studio 44 in the presumed offices of the Breathless shoot itself, tucked into a corner behind Godard’s desk. I have one too, from 1961–though it began production in 1952.
He never touches it, or even acknowledges it is there; the light looks bad for serious typing on it, to me. The machine was style-forward in every conceivable way. Entirely reasonable that it would be the choice of one as presentation-conscious as Godard, so eager to make his mark in the vanguard.
Marcello Nizzoli’s sketches for the Studio 44. Cribbed gratefully from Oz Typewriter.
Whether he ever types anything on it is unclear–and improbable, as we shall see.
But the third typewriter scene is the most interesting to me. In Breathless‘s extended afternoon almost-tryst that Patricia and Michel enjoy in the tiniest hotel room in Paris, we glimpse a portable typewriter on a cluttered desk by the bed. It is Patricia’s, because this is her hotel room. We know she is aspires to be a journalist, despite mostly just selling the Herald-Tribune rather than writing for it, and she also notes that she will have to enroll at the Sorbonne in order to keep her financial support flowing from home in the United States. (From where in the US is unclear to me–though Jean Seberg was born in Iowa, as her flatly-accented French reveals whenever she opens her mouth.) These are all good reasons to have a neglected typewriter on your premises.
And the typewriter is the least interesting thing on that desk in the original film. There is paper in it, but it mostly serves as a flat surface for a hat to rest upon. Later it supports a radio that plays “music to work to”–and is promptly switched off, since its strident tones interrupt the afternoon-delight reverie each is enjoying on different terms.
I would guess it is a Remington, by its round keys and distinctively-hooked carriage return lever. It could be an Envoy Type 2 like the beautiful one I own. Manufactured in 1941-42, and indestructible as a cockroach, it is a sensible machine for a budget-conscious gamine to be carting to Paris seventeen years later. So far so good.
BUT: in the otherwise-fastidious recreation of that hotel room in Nouvelle Vague, the probably-Remington has unmistakably become…an Olivetti-Underwood Lettera 32. An anachronism, since Olivetti first made this machine in 1963—and the distinctive faceplate identifies it furthermore as a later iteration, probably from the late 60s. Catastrophe!
This machine is coded completely differently! Italian vs. American, stylish and sexy vs. boring and reliable. She might have even bought it in Paris.
Who even is Patricia, if this is her typewriter? Other than a time traveler?
Pour quoi?
In a lovingly-detailed recreation and invocation of a very specific time and place…why would Linklater get the typewriter wrong?
Well, maybe he missed it. As a cineaste friend of mine noted, “if I found out you knew more about mid-century typewriter manufacturing than Linklater’s production design team, I wouldn’t be shocked, exactly.”
But isn’t it more interesting if he didn’t? If it is on purpose? Consider.
Nouvelle Vague presents Godard as someone with a complicated relationship to writing. At best. A running theme of the story is that Breathless has no script. In pursuit of a purity of experience, a spontaneity, never before seen, he shot without one. The film used a camera that was too loud to allow synchronized sound, but did permit unique still-camera film that, spliced into long rolls, could capture natural light in extraordinary ways. That meant all the audio was dubbed later, and Godard could and did feed lines to the cast while filming…lines that he would read from scribbles in a series of Moleskin notebooks where he claimed to have the whole film plotted.
Which does not mean the Godard of Nouvelle Vague fears text: he begins each day at a cafe with a pile of paper upon which he makes notes in what Seberg calls “beautiful handwriting,” and sometimes communicates important info by passing those notes to those they concern.
What this Godard fears is committing to a text: to typing it up and saying, this is what it will be. The script manager helplessly flips a single page back and forth on her clipboard. The producer fumes at how this same spontaneous relationship to text extends to the relationship with time and budget: Godard won’t shoot if he is uninspired. Nothing on any of his private pages dictates how and when to make the film: they are just gaps of indeterminacy, as Wolfgang Iser says, that will lead to new possibilities yet unimagined.
The fungibility of printed text in the film also boggles the digital-era, backup-savvy viewer. Presumably, the treatments we do see bandied about are bare stacks of paper, without bindings or apparent copies. (Le mimeo is glimpsed once in the background of the office: it sits silent.) A single copy of the story itself is handed back and forth between Truffaut and Godard on a metro bench; the first assistant director carries a fistful of paper through a bar, responding to Godard’s insistence that he “show it to no one” by shoving the pages briefly into the face of an innocent customer with a smirk.
Where is the text? It is scribbled here, it is handed around there…it is none of these places.
There is no text for Breathless: the film is the text, and the film only seeks to capture the untrained and unplanned interactions that result from Godard’s willingness to commit fully to their pursuit.
At one point, Godard is frustrated with his two leads planning what they are about to do when camera rolls (Allez!)
“What are you filming?” asks a passer-by. (He is shooting on the street, with real people unknowingly serving as extras.)
In frustration, he snaps back, “A documentary about Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg acting out a fiction.”
Everything he didn’t want: people planning to do things, which means they will not actually be doing things. (“Though a documentary would have sync sound,” Seberg grumbles.)
That is what Godard wanted, and got. Live action!
And that is what he inspired in those who followed, including Linklater: to seek out reality as best they can contrive to. Linklater, who played with time itself in Boyhood and the Before trilogy–synchronically daring, insisting on time shaping what appeared and what went on the film.
Because the text isn’t in the script, and it isn’t in the typewriter.
And if it isn’t in the typewriter…maybe it isn’t in the choice of typewriters, either.
Typewriters make dead fictions to be acted out, this out-of-time machine seems to say.
This is alive.
Even in this recreation, homage, impression, of what might have happened seventy-six years ago in the process of committing life to film…the choice seems to say: this is alive, too.
Allez!
*I wish I could figure out how to share screenshots from Kanopy and Netflix, but that stuff is locked down. Check out the films themselves! Get Kanopy from your library!
**I had pretensions of using some Roland Barthes in here somewhere but it’s probably in everybody’s best interest that I didn’t.
***The Olivetti Studio 44, by the way, also graces Susie Myerson’s office desk in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel–which is incongruous, being way more of a home machine. Until you consider that the office is being operated on a shoestring mainly to book Midge: she must have loaned it from home.
This week I am listening to one song on repeat in the car, every day: “Way Back Home,” featuring Ronnie Cuber on baritone saxophone, from Steve Gadd and Friends’ 2010 album Live at Voce.
Saxophone is, I guess, a hard thing to love now? Two NYT pieces in the last week say sax is suss: a hot take on the current preponderance of the instrument at weddings, and “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Alto Saxophone” (because if it can’t be done in 5 minutes, it can’t be worth doing). It is certainly the instrument that never sounds like anything else. You can mute a trumpet, you can prepare a piano, and if you amplify anything you can run it through yards of effects—but sax is sax.
I have been on a guided saxophone tour for the last few weeks, led by my youngest son. I was spinning Getz / Giberto in the car at pickup one afternoon, and he had questions. So I explained the three primary sax variants one finds in the wild. The alto: the intellectual’s horn, that of our first alchemist Charlie Parker and later technicians like Paul Desmond. The tenor: the alto’s soulful uncle, who can’t hold down a job but is out wailing on the bridge every night. Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Coltrane and of course Mt. Getz. (The fraught history of the soprano is excused for another day.)
And the baritone…well, no bari player came to mind. So I asked Spotify for one, and it coughed up this record. Thanks, algorithm! What a gem! (Also a favorite of Donald Fagen, according to the YouTube link above: my excellent taste is affirmed.)
Against its better-pedigreed colleagues, the bari sax always sounds like your sketchy friend leaning across the table to tell a dirty joke. The bari knows it is here for its personality, and leans into it. Perhaps the bari is the trombone of the woodwinds: it eludes its reputation only by occasionally embracing it.
I do not know anything about Ronnie Cuber other than his long long resume on Wikipedia, and the fact that he played in the SNL band. I think I recognize his tone from bumper music in the years when you had to be up at midnight to hear it. He would probably be considered a very accessible player. “Way Back Home” has no arch bebop changes, is not “out” in the slightest. It is boogie music, feel-good music. A two-chord vamp that only goes to the third when you cannot take the pressure anymore; puts me in mind of Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy Mercy Mercy”, which despite Cannonball Adderley’s intro about persevering through adversity has always been a joyous song to me. Here to move your booty, not push you through the doorways of perception.
And that tone! The growl and the hum and the whine. I have seen one photo of this hulking man and am put in mind of Mingus with his double bass: parity between player and instrument, clash of the heavyweights. I am pretending I know everything I need to know about him from that Wikipedia page, and I like every single bit of it. I am not looking up any more: I do not want to know if he treated his collaborators like garbage or sold his horn for smack. I want to just climb inside that tone and spend a long, lazy weekend sliding down the surface. He enjoys the lowest honks of the horn and is not afraid to let you love them too. He knows his instrument is ridiculous on the way to being sublime: that the two are inseparable.
And he knows he can do anything he wants on it, and a big part of the joy of listening to him is the physical feat he is pulling off. Because that is the other thing about bari sax that can’t be ignored: its size. Its weight. I am finding curiously variable numbers online, and do not have one handy to check. Does it weigh twenty pounds? The neck strap introduces a whole new problem in the long term I bet. Posture implications. More than the weight, though, is the distance your air column has to traverse. All the way down to those lower notes, with the big clanging pads, is four feet at least. Bari is a physical commitment.
I played bari for a couple of years in my high school jazz band. I was a competent clarinetist, and my indulgent band director told me I was welcome to audition if I could learn the bari. If I could hang, maybe there would be a clarinet feature in the future. Jazz band practiced at 7:15 in the morning twice a week, is my memory: you had to want to be there. I had to muscle that metal into submission almost before I was awake.
I learned it well enough to honk along with the real saxophonists. Sax is nominally simpler than clarinet, thanks to Adolphe’s ingenious design that makes the same fingerings work for the same notes all up and down its range, vs. the clarinet, which puts you off a fifth in between octaves. And I did hang! True to his word, we did “Woodchopper’s Ball” passably, and I made an absolute wreck of Jobim’s “Wave” at a festival once.
But the real long-term benefit for me was getting to spend hours up close and personal with a horn that big. Cuber does not seem to notice the heft of the thing. His dexterity and speed is improbable, unimaginable. Especially when you have also tried to wrestle with it and been bested. I love his playing because I know how much work it is.
I got out my alto* this week, inspired by Cuber’s deftness and tone, and was immediately reminded how you either are married to your instrument or struggle with it.
And I struggle on sax! Twenty years ago, I joined a band in Chapel Hill for a few months on that alto. They were named, gloriously, “The Guns of Navarone.” A serious montunos-for-miles cubop piano player, an upright bassist, a traps drummer, and a conga player. And somehow me. I knew by the second rehearsal that I was way outclassed by this project, but they kept me on, so I stayed. We worked up two sets–“Caravan,” some Horace Silver maybe?–and I played one gig in a dim weeknight room on Rosemary Street. I remember the piano player glaring at my honking, keening tone all night, waiting for my to materialize into the player of his dreams but remaining the same mess I had been in rehearsal. I quit the next day, and went back to being a well-satisfied drummer ever since.
But I am going to keep up my honking and keening regardless. My saxophone-remembering has every place on this blog, because music-making will always be a physical act. Most of the music I love comes from real people and objects working at each other and finding harmony, or at least detente.
And computers can now emulate nearly any sound with alarming fidelity. In my last DC band we would haul an actual Rhodes stage piano up and down stairs into second-floor clubs, cursing its weight and size all the way. Now my friend who played that Rhodes gets all its sounds and more (Hammond organ!) out of a tiny Nord that weighs less than my cymbal bag, and I am sure his back thanks him for it.
The music I most love lets you hear a person and an instrument working it out together. I love John Bonham’s drumming because I can hear his right foot on that (squeaky) Ludwig Speed-King, can hear the lightness and the thunder exactly where he put it before you could quantize a tempo. I love Wynton Marsalis on “Jig’s Jig” because I can hear his breath easing over the top of his figures, his conservatory nimbleness trying to ooze into something looser. I love Steve Williams’ (oops, Billy Hart’s) quarter-note ride behind Shirley Horn because his swing is implied, is in the air around the notes. I love music that is people with things in the world.
And I love Ronnie Cuber’s peace with his horn and the world he makes in it. Check it out–and then go play some yourself today, how about? Go ahead: get out your horn from high school, if it has survived the moves and yard sales, and see what you got today. I bet you’ll care less about getting it right, about being “good,” than you once did—because those are the concerns of children, aren’t they? Whether you sound “good enough”?
Well, the concerns of children and pros like Cuber, and thank god for them. But the rest of us just get to play today, if we want. Go play in the world; go be part of it. It is still there–both the music, and the world–and it is yours for the making.
*My alto sax was a gift from my band director, a saxophonist himself. It was his marching horn when he was a student at the University of Georgia. A splendid Noblet “Serie Maville,” it is in great shape, no leaky pads. If I could just get my embouchure in step with my horn, I would be flying high! So grateful to have his horn here, and so grateful to that man—and his co-director, and their extraordinary public school band program–that made my musical life so satisfying and durable. Go Dawgs, B.C.!
On this Halloween morning, I awake gnawing on an unexpected seasonal treat: a new-to-me horror film that delivers on all the creepy potential that makes me love the genre above all others.
And there’s a typewriter in it too! Which, like most typewriters for most of their existence, doesn’t seem to matter that much—but actually might be the most potent symbol in this story of power craved and feared, hidden and revealed.
The film is 2021’s Hellbender, by the independent film-making Adams Family. Married and creative partners John Adams and Toby Poser created it with their adult daughters Zelda and Lulu Adams, on their Catskills property during the Covid lockdown. And it is shot through with family intimacy and trust and dread (as well as some deliriously batshit dream sequences).
The performances come right off the screen at you in the familiar ways real-life mother and daughter connect, resist, negotiate, and eventually evolve their relationship the only way it can go. Not since Let the Right One In have I seen domestic and supernatural powers woven together so deftly and effectively.
Its provenance is almost otherworldly: can any family be this cool? But the resulting film gets its oomph from the reality of its surroundings. A restored nineteenth-century house with Shaker-white walls and spare furnishings hiding dark recesses; a bougey outdoor pool where ancient and modern forces sniff each other out and negotiate inevitable collisions; the revolving seasons of the gorgeous and terrifying woods, fields, streams, and creatures of rural New York state, an uncredited but witnessing presence.
Chekhov famously said that no element in a story can be introduced without eventually becoming relevant. If a gun is shown hanging above a fireplace in the first act, goes the example, it must be fired in the third. I am no literary scholar, but Wikipedia tells me this law is meant to be broken. No less author than Hemingway loved to introduce story elements that never “go off”–because the reader’s awareness that it could go off heightens their sensitivity to what might happen, and what things might mean.
I spotted two typewriters in Hellbender, and—spoiler, sorry—neither one ever types a word.*
We glimpse one on a dresser in a bedroom, apparently a merely decorative or sentimental object (no one could really do any typing at a dresser). But the second lives atop a desk in a dark and hidden room behind the eaves, which can only be accessed through the coolest demonic user-authentication tech I have ever seen. It sits alongside an unassuming leather-bound book, among several old portraits of women ancestors who shared the mother/daughter bond the movie explores. Book, pictures, typewriter: that’s all the nerve center of an ancient sisterhood apparently needs to sustain itself.
It looks like a Smith Bros. standard from the 1910s, from what I can make of its space bar design, but I am not sure. In any case, we do not get much of a look at it. It is definitely black.
Like this one! From Richard Polt’s post about a restoration he just pulled off!
It’s the book that gets the most play, not the typewriter. The book seems to be the repository of the ancient power these women own, celebrate, struggle with. When one of them places her hand on it, she is transported through violent visions to historical moments in their lineage, as well as possible or foretold futures. There is enormous power in the words the book, we assume, holds—because books have words in them, right?
But as far as I can recall, after viewing the film only once (so far): we never see any words in the book. We never see anything in the book. The book never opens.
Toby Poser’s unnamed mother possesses immense wisdom and lore about the nature of their shared power. The combinations of herbs and roots and bark that summon various capacities, the nature of the gift / curse they bear—but I never remember her reading about these things. She just does them, and explains and demonstrates them for her daughter. The wisdom is witnessed and told, not written and read. Probably for aeons.
So…why a typewriter?
Who has written with it, and what was written?
Was what was written in the book?
Is there something yet to be written?
There is so much power swirling in the world of its film: is any of it in written words? And if not–or not yet—why is there a word-making technology at its center?
I wonder if there might be a clue in how the daughter, Izzy, explains herself to a new friend. Her first and only friend, it seems. Mother has kept daughter isolated from the world to protect the world from this power, or maybe to exert, futilely, the parental desire to save their child from pain by shaping them in their own image. (Shades of Carrie, of Firestarter…)
“What do you do for fun?” the friend asks her.
“I hike…I draw…oh, and I swim, I swim a lot.”
This answer doesn’t spark much enthusiasm from the new friend (played by Lulu Adams, Zelda’s real-life sister). So she reaches for the one other detail of her homeschooled feral-demon-child life that she hopes will give her some cred.
“I’m in a band too!”
“What do you play?”
“I play the drums…
“And I sing…
“And uh…I write the lyrics.”
This does the trick. The new friend accurately acknowledges that being in a band is cool. (Writing lyrics is cool, at least. “I dated a drummer once. He was dumb.”) And their relationship, for better or worse, begins.
The band is another mother-daughter collaboration: dark metal. We see and hear them several times in the film, mother on bass and Izzy on drums, performing in their house for only themselves. Each time they are dressed and made up differently in Ziggy-Stardust-meets-Kiss makeup and accessories. Indeed it is a band! One of the ways they connect with each other, before and while they begin to connect around the emerging understanding of the powers they share.
Mother sings, mostly—but the words are Izzy’s. Only Izzy writes in this world.
Izzy writes the lyrics.
Is the typewriter to be Izzy’s?
What else is Izzy about to write?
The movie’s logic finally becomes clear: Mother explains that their lineage reproduces by each generation consuming the one before, “like spring eats winter, and summer eats spring.” They are the titular “hellbenders”: “a cross between a witch, a demon, and an apex predator.” And in the mother’s telling, they are evolving and changing–though it is left open whether that evolution is actual, or is merely the mother’s vain hope for a kinder, gentler future for them. (Reminds of another terrific maybe-evolution, in 2016’s The Girl With All the Gifts.)
And in the midst of that ambiguity—in that promise that, one way or another, something else is about to unfold—the typewriter sits like it always has, before now. Maybe the new something will be written and shared. Maybe it will be a new book of new power. Maybe it will activate a network of holders of this ancient power that find each other through correspondence and connection. Maybe it will write the record of what has been and what might come.
We don’t know yet—but a typewriter will eventually type, even if it hasn’t yet. Its owner will find it and do with it the only thing it can do.
How terrifying, how thrilling.
How horrific!
Happy Halloween!
*I was hoping for a Fringe-type dimension-piercing magic typewriter. Maybe next time!
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.
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)_/¯.
*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.
A student works it out at Typewriterfest, April 2025.
Here is my post from 9/11/2011, on yet another morning when we wake up horrified by the news and braced for what might come next.
Yet again, I am weighing the events of the moment against the peremptory start of class at 9:30. A teacher’s capacity to be ready for the start of class is one of our many superpowers–but that singular focus blinds as well as illuminates.
In my 2011 post, I wonder if I should have pushed for sharing more info with our young students that morning. As it turned out, my instinct not to say anything and keep a news blackout all day was what we did, as a school. And I wonder if it was right, and decide that if I had it to do over I would instead share the news and be part of discussing it with them.
This morning, though, I am not at all inclined to address the events of the day in class. It is a different landscape, of course, than we met in 2001. One in which what might materialize in the next few days is also unpredictable, but is uniquely inflamed by the extremity of the rhetoric–and the technologically-weaponized speed with which information travels and is converted to sensation, message, and action.
My scheduled work in class today includes a good amount of semi-structured time with my manual typewriters. I am using them 1:1 with my undergrads this year, once a week. They each choose a machine to work with for a few weeks, and I am building in time for reflective human words typing about both our shared curriculum and their daily experience of life.
I am doing this to invite them to discern the different levels of experience they get to choose to have. To help them feel the rarest of feelings in the swirl of messages we receive every day: like a subject acting, rather than an object acted upon. This seems to be a fundamental capacity for people we will soon trust with our youngest and most vulnerable humans.
Perhaps the best I can offer them today is exactly that: a moment away from phones and socials and provocations and interpretations for them to try to discern who they are, how they feel, and what they want to do next. In the slow, letter-at-a-time process that the typewriter requires: the only thing it can do, and the thing it does without peer.
With a typewriter in front of you and nothing to do but write, you find yourself saying to yourself, what about this? And this? And this? In 2025, the typewriter gives you back to yourself, sentence upon sentence.
It details the thrill of Tom Mullaney, an obsessive history professor (I thought I had it bad) searching out, finding, and saving the only extant example of this machine from oblivion.
I have never seen any Asian language typewriter in person, but the gorgeous photos here really give a sense of the engineering feat accomplished in this protoype.
Imagine!
Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Mr. Lin (YuTang, the inventor) called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one.
Mr. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Dr. Mullaney said, Mr. Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet.
He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to “clear and fast.”
Ibid.
It was never manufactured. Lin had a single prototype made in the 30s at his own enormous expense, and tried to sell it to Remington, the General Motors of the era’s American typewriter industry. It failed during the demo; he went bankrupt; the machine was stashed at his job, then moved here, then there, and was presumed lost.
“Gone the way of most obsolete technology…had most likely ended up on a scrapheap. The right person hadn’t been there to save it, to tell its story.”
What is worth saving?
I think typewriters tend to be! My typewriter collection does not enter Dr Mullaney’s rare air, for sure. All of my machines were made in the hundreds of thousands, if not more, and none could be considered truly scarce. Though some, like the 1967 Hermes Ambassador that tops my blog, are definitely scarcer than others.
But the course of the Ambassador is exemplary of the path I think once-precious things often take when they become outmoded. It got stashed in the back of a dry closet, under a cheap plastic cover someone had the presence of mind to replace before forgetting about it for decades. And that afterthought by some anonymous someone is why it surfaced in an estate sale, perfectly functional, when so many others that were left uncovered in damp basements or attics do not. (Cover your typewriters, children!)
I think so many manual typewriters are still around because they were so expensive. They were workaday tools–well, some were more stylish than others, and they had different price points, so maybe they were more like automobiles than tools–but they were dear to acquire, about the price of a laptop today. So even when they were no longer needed, and were replaced by an electric or a desktop computer, folks couldn’t imagine tossing them out.
That cover wasn’t an afterthought. The Ambassador was a luxury model! I like to imagine that it was the owner’s child, or grandchild, that finally made the choice to store it safely. Maybe because they had been told over and over that it wasn’t a toy. You can’t play with it. It’s precious. Treat it like something precious. And that someone–or their child–did.
So maybe that’s why one generation’s expensive stuff tends to still be around for future generations to rediscover, reassess, and decide if it has anything new to offer in a present-day recontextualization. The kids get told to take care of it–and they do.
But…what about the true ephemera of our daily lives? Will we miss any of it when it is gone?
Cruise FB Marketplace’s “free stuff” section in a college town right around the end of July, when all the student apartments are turning over, and wonder. Will anyone ever miss flatpack furniture? Entry-level vacuum cleaners? Futons? (So many futons.)
So much hideousness. Here in my personal college town, our sustainability-branded university students used to collect all the discarded stuff, spend a few weeks cleaning and sorting it, and then sell it back to the incoming frosh in “The Big Sale” that happened at Legends, proceeds to scholarships. A one-day Black Friday delirious feeding frenzy of plastic and upholstery and area rugs. It was a gas.
Unimaginable with social distancing, “The Big Sale” got cancelled during COVID…then, like so many things, just quietly never started up again.1 I have a mediocre electric fan from the last one in 2019. It cools nothing, but reminds me of stomping around the bedlam of that sunny hot morning in a packed Legends with my then six-year-old in wide-eyed tow. Glorious memory.
You miss the ephemeral stuff if you have reason to miss it; you miss stuff if it has a reason to matter. It was from the last “Sale.” I didn’t know it was the last sale, any more than Lin knew the typewriter would be the only one ever made. The meaning got loaded into it after.
And of course you can’t save everything just in case it matters later–because that is the high road to hoarding. If you never throw anything out, how will anything ever be precious?
You have to miss something for anything to matter. Like Sheryl Crow sang, “there ain’t nothin’ like regret / to remind you you’re alive.” Better to lose too much and make space for the new, run the risk of having tossed something you long for, than be hemmed in by stacks of everything in case some of it happens to matter to you again…
Right?
So: save some of it, I guess?
Maybe that is how to honor a past you were part of–and, eventually, as you grow older and more judicious about what is beautiful, a past you weren’t part of too.
But also, let the world have its way with ephemera, which of course is most everything. Burn through stuff made to be burned through.
What matters will become clear later…and we will have the delectable chance then to rediscover what once we could not even see, and treasure it up in our new world for the preciousness it brings us from the old.
Ibid.
Besides, Legends was torn down this week. Victim of Helene, supposedly–but also was hard to program the last few years, and nothing that doesn’t fill up right with value stays as-is on this campus. Will it be missed? Maybe if you saw Hank Williams Jr there, or Dave Matthews, or A Tribe Called Quest…some hyperlocal cred to be collected if you did. I saw a great band there once featuring students I taught in middle school twenty years earlier. That is enough for me to miss it–especially because it will almost certainly be replaced with some “nice”, institutional building with all the soul of a Holiday Inn Express. ↩︎
Chris Osmond PhD 