That's not easy in a noisy world. It's not easy in a world of constant content generation. Words pushed out, extruded from the complex cookie cutter of what came before. Do words mean anything anymore?

I've been troubled recently by thinking how to contribute, how to speak, in a world that is overwhelmingly loud. (In other non-anonymized worlds, I am loquacious, playing the role, out there doing the thing that one does.) A moment on social media is deafening with all the shouters, the “look at me!”, the “hey, pay me to influence you!” Linkedin has been my particular eye strain recently. It's not just the pinterest-ified work/life shares and stories, but also the wagging admonition and advising, that is truly insufferable.

I grow more misanthropic the older I get, I know.

How do you have a quiet conversation? I don't need a thousand followers. I don't want a thousand followers. I don't really care about the hollowness such things.

And yet... I know things. I know some very technical things, things with value and perspective that others don't have. I find myself growing ugly. “I know more about this than those morons.” “I can write better than those hacks.” “Is everyone just cut and pasting ChatGPT shit nowadays?”

And I hate them. I hate them so much because they won't shut the fuck up. Do they listen? Do they ever listen?

It's like the worst of high school social culture vomited all over the internet.

What if the internet were not made of producers and consumers, but listeners? ACTIVE listeners. Not sheep, not “followers”, not “likers”. Would that make any sense?

What if platforms cultivated listening and reflection? How would that work exactly? Or does everything just devolve to the active yapper / silent majority split? Is that too niche? What are the alternatives to the users and abusers out there? Is there a quiet version of the internet — or is that just what used to be Mastodon (before the great migration) or the geeky corners where small bands don't care about being on the radar. Is that where all the introverts hang? In the corners, like in real life, hoping not to get noticed by too many people but maybe, just maybe, get noticed by the right people, the like minded, someone else who might fancy a quiet chat, over here in this corner, where we can hear ourselves think.

Put simply, the university is one of the most oppressively hierarchical types of organizations around; management skills are the bread and butter of surviving in that world.

What Do Professors do again?

The work of professors is often opaque, even to those close to it.

I am often reminded, though not surprised, that even people who spend careers teaching adjacent or, for higher ed, around professors in various capacities, have significant blind spots as to what it is that professors actually do. For many college students or ex-college students, they see a public view of professors as teachers and imagine that this is the sum total of what goes on. But for most tenured or tenure track faculty, teaching makes up a small or smallest part of their work (depending of course on institution). For other faculty, typically adjuncts, teaching may make up the bulk of their hours each day; but what students tend not to see in the case of adjuncts is then the inverse, i.e. the pressures and hours spent trying to do research or in semi-exploitative administrative and logistics work. There are many many configurations.

My point isn't to focus on those varieties so much as to emphasize the way that insider/outsider distinctions are just as prevalent in education as in any other field. Being a doctor is different from visiting a doctor. So too being any kind of teacher is very different from having been in a classroom as a student. The difference is that I think people tend to imagine that they know what being a professor (no work! summers off!) and being a teacher (classroom stuff!) is like, in part because of the long periods of time people have spent in school themselves. Anyone who has had a negative educational experience has opinions and judgements about how to make it better. Anyone who had a good experience has opinions as to why those teachers were so good. They've gamed out their impression of the profession or the activity in ways that reinforce the biases of a consumer rather than an insider and educational professional.

This is not confined to any particular field. I remember thinking at one moment nearly 15 years ago that maybe it would be a good idea to purchase a coffee shop near me. Why? Because I am a career cafe rat and it was a bargain basement price. The couple who did buy that business proved to me how much I had to learn. They bought that place and did an amazing job, and they made clear, with hints of their invisible labors, over many years as a patron and friend, how very different the business of running such a place was from the enjoyment of it.

Soft Power

The daily work of being a professor is nothing but management skills in action. Those who haven't lived in that world might assume that it's all about teacher to student or researcher to student relationships. But those are just one facet, one where growth is particularly important and which aligns with management styles and methods where the point is to activate the best version of each member of a team. But outside of that, much more daily and constant are the series of downwards, lateral, and upwards management relationships. As a professor you need to cultivate relationships at your level, at levels above your own, and also have a light touch with those who may be just entering the system (graduate students especially, with emphasis on the fact that graduate “students” are in fact proto-professionals whose division of labor itself combines elements of students, teachers, and, more minimally, admin). It's particularly complicated as the division between university professionals (e.g. in various offices) and faculty can be stark. Powerful individuals within certain offices might have less academic status but have vastly more actual power. Everyone is overburdened, understaffed, under-resourced. So getting things done requires herding the cats at every level.

Again, a romanticized view might make an outsider imagine that it's all about faculty acting as peers. But anyone who has worked in a university knows that these are among the most hierarchical of institutions in the history of the world (I'm not prone to those kinds of statements— in fact, I usually excise them from student writing, but in this case, I'm willing to make the claim). Faculty use affectations like talking about their coworkers as “colleagues” in part because they are so constantly aware of and anxious about place in the hierarchy. All part of the charade, except when it isn't; but otherwise, as potentially sugary as a “bless your heart” uttered to your lifelong enemy. In fact dealing with “colleagues” always involves careful negotiation of status. Working together with other academics requires building trust and good practice because so little in that work is binding or structured and because so much in collaborative work at the university could — in the absence of agreement to move things along — proceed at a glacial pace.

Even graduate students tend to have this blind spot about what professors actually do. There's a big change between doing your graduate degree and taking on an academic position. To put it bluntly, you've got to deal with the shit now. You have to deal with the bureaucratic stuff, the paperwork, the minutiae that eat away brain cells. But you also have to become adept at working with multiple stakeholders within departments, across campus, in various subgroups of an academic discipline. If you do something like run a program or run a department, then you have all the administrative hassles of any white collar management job and also the joys of trying to get a group of (often) radically individualistic stakeholders, many of which can't be fired, to do something kind of sort of together.

Even where we might think that there is the most professorial power, in the classroom, in fact this tends not to be the case.

Teaching is itself an exercise in soft power.

This is not what most students think. When you're a student everything seems to point in the opposite direction. Grades, rules, curriculum — these are all hard guidelines, things to rebel against, resent, or rely on in varying degrees and depending on your predispositions.

But as a teacher, one of the most important realizations early on as you gain experience is recognizing that all you have is soft power.

As a professor or in higher ed, where everyone is a “colleague” and lines of management among diverse stakeholders (staff, faculty, graduate students) can be tricky to navigate and negotiate, all you have is soft power. As an administrator of any program, it's soft power. Within a discipline or field, working with people at other institutions, it's soft power again.

All you have is soft power. And all you need is soft power.

At least, that's the only way to get things done.

Trying to keep the panic at bay. News headlines serving both as responsible warning and as sensationalist click-bait don't help matters. Media diet always feels good, but it is too late to tune out the constant drumbeat of doom.

Feels like I should bunker everyone elsewhere for a few days. I have rarely felt such insecurity in a home.

It has me thinking about the importance of security for everyday things. Generosity flows from security. Study and learning and growth require security. Play and experimentation require security. Despite the silicon valley ethos of unease, innovation requires security and safety and trust.

And then I think about the media and the doom-scrolling and the constant sell-able headlines. Every murder reported, stories of true crime, Nextdoor's constant adrenaline rush of thefts and neighborly warnings to watch out, an ever-flowing sludge of fear and suspicion.

We manufacture our own insecurity in times of security. And I don't know whether now, with real threats, it is kicked in overdrive or not nearly active enough.

So now the pace on mastodon seems to have picked up and this past week has seen a marked uptick in academic twitterati and influencer types jumping ship to mastodon. With that has come the inevitable snap judgements of the platform, some of it good and generous, and then other bits of newcomers walking in and immediately wanting to rearrange the furniture.

I don't particularly care about any of that, though it does amuse me to see so many (loudly online) academics acting like these twitter alternatives are some great discovery. Now, if they all moved back to gopher or gemini, maybe that would be a bit more of an obscure-ish discovery relative to the academic familiar. I suspect many are thinking and wondering why in the world academics weren't mostly on mastodon the whole time. After all, you can create a server for your own interest, federate with who you chose to hear from (and keep out people from servers you don't want to hear from), and generally create a bunch of mini disciplinary worlds. Seems like a good way to do the basic thing that twitter did for many academics: give you a tool where you can keep up with what was going on in the field.

Interesting to see how this will go and whether it will stick. I suspect for academics that mastodon will prove quite a good fit, now that many have been prompted to move over en masse, which was, after all, what was holding any individual back. Academics are, after all, herd creatures. Anyone who has sat in a faculty meeting or in tenure review or on an academic committee of any sort can tell you that. The only thing that matters is what other people think.

Which is, I suppose, why I started writing this. All that academic flocking reminded me why I left.

Perfectionism is an imperfect term. We all know that. It's one symptom for a complex condition, like saying you have a cold or a fever when the true cause is a virus, infection, injury, or any other ailment and the symptoms extend far beyond body temperature. It is most of all, for me and I suspect for many others, a cycle of anticipation and fear, a cold sweat under the mask of imposterism. The cause is, ironically, success and competence. The better one gets across a wide variety of things, the more likely it seems — to the deranged perfectionist brain — that it is all a mirage, a conspiracy of the senses to convince me it's ok to go further when that further is right off a cliff. I think a lot of musicians and artists at the highest levels (because I'm an amateur or prosumer in that regard and so can gaze at the lofty peaks while knowing that's not where I'm bound). The better one gets as a musician, the more one knows that every performance is flawed. That imperfection drives further refinement, but the number of performances that are just right is vanishingly small. (Even practice sessions lie somewhere on that curve with very few reaching the peak that one knows can, occasionally, be achieved.) Measuring everything by your best effort is both exhausting and unfair; it is also the worst blocker for any technical work.

Any technical domain, any technical art, from music to writing to coding, is susceptible to this perfectionist blocker. It's insidious because it's not really about the stuff itself. It's about the person and insecurity. There's good reason that Agile and Scrum are about cycling through and clearing blockers, good reason why delivering early and often is a mantra. That's the structural antidote to blockers outside of the code itself. It's the reason why, for writers, daily writing or daily notes can unblock things. Just the procedure of it all can have therapeutic effects.

Which is all to say, time to grab a ticket and dig in.

As I sit here cafe-ing the day away (i.e. working), surrounded by technoristas putting their startup specs into Notion documents, Slack-ing with comrades in between messaging warm leads on LinkedIn, I can't help but wonder at the unnaturalness of it all. My back is going to hate me later for sitting in front of the screen and my eyes will grow ever weaker. There was a time when I used to go to a cafe to enjoy a book and some writing.

Back to work....

So, here's a fantastic long-carriage, senatorial typeface (square-ish small-cap-ish type), Olympia SM9. Possibly the best “portable” typewriter ever made.

What makes it so great? Perfect touch. Smooth action. Easy maintenance. Features galore.

It's more than a little huge. So I don't recommend lugging it far. It's wider than most 1920s and 30s desktops and almost as heavy.

There's nothing simple about this machine. It is precise engineering and carefully designed at the end of decades of innovation and development. But it makes the whole thing feel simple. And that is a beautiful thing.

The world just seems a bit less settled than it should be. Anxiety creeps in at the edges for no good reason. I've got stuff to do (so much stuff...) but I'd really rather watch tv. And I rarely would rather watch TV.

Maybe I'm hungry. But it's late in the day and they're out of all the food. Why does a cafe run out of food like that when they are open plenty more hours? Maybe it's a headache. (Is it a headache?) Maybe it's too much sugar. (i can certainly do with less of that.) Maybe I do need to eat something.

It's one of those days where I feel like I'm in a cocoon of tasks, all cutting and strangling but also completely irrelevant.

Just out of sorts.

Or election day. Maybe it's that.

And yet...

... this mode of work is incredibly difficult for many people to understand or allow for or tolerate, particularly if they are the checklist people. They see everything as a straight line to an end and this seems like circling and deviation and taking on too many things at once. And I look at them and think how boring, how impoverished, how rigidly set against the intrusion of creativity, is that straight line you want to force on everyone around you. Surely there is room (and benefit) for both types?

It was a revelation a number of years ago to read Barbara Sher's Refuse to Choose, where she beknights a class of “scanners” and, compassionately, gives permission to harness one's strengths rather than the conversion therapy of conforming to other's disapproval. It does indeed feel like a left-handed child no longer being forced to write with the right hand. I had long been slandered as a polymath or jack of all trades, with emphasis laid firmly on the master of none. I wonder now where this fear came from, particularly in my parents, since I was and remain in fact master of many more so than of none. The dilemma tends not to be that you can't do a thing so much as that capability turns to obligation or assumption that one must do that thing rather than have someone else do it.

And the resentment at being forced to choose that one thing which everyone else says you must have leads often to simmering hostility, even contempt.

“Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.” Flatland (Abbott)

I find myself there too often, dangerously haughty. You think what you see is a straight line to an end. But you've missed the fact that the course itself wanders. It is particularly true of writing and software, but true as well of businesses and teaching. Why should I make myself conform to your world when it is, so far as I can see, based on blindness to the true nature of things?

But I'm probably too nice to say all that. At least without turning the idea back on itself and taking it all back, a snake swallowing its tale and erasing any trace of the thought and the hubris, and choking on the resentment that lingers.

When I fell into the abyss — noonday demon, mid-life shit, call it what you want — collecting was symptom and salve. It was clearly a symptom of madness that I amassed some dozens of typewriters in a short span of time. That I fixed many up, that I spent hours tinkering and typing, all further signs of the madcap depths. I sold many off, accumulated some more. They went from being soothing and enjoyable to being a burden, immense hunks of steel that stop bullets but cluttered the garage, secret shame of my period of disquiet and upheaval. But on the other side, they were indispensible. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and imprinted much on the page that needed to go on the page.

There's a joke in my extended family that my grandmother only gave away things that were valuable. She kept all the junk but the one of kind baseball cards, all gone. The good furniture, someone acquired that in the move towards the end of her life. The Lionel trains that would have been worth something today, those were given away to some random person. Uncharitably one might think she simply was swindled by those who better knew the value of things. More charitably, foreknowledge is never assured. Who would have done better in that situation? Books were kept. For the lower middle class, those books meant something. A promise of upward mobility perhaps? A reminder of learnedness in the face of economic mediocrity? It was the other stuff that was swept away. And would it have been all that valuable today? Fantasy perhaps.

It wouldn't be her fault anyway. It's a family trait, according to family lore at least. There were mines and mountains out in the west. Now these are all worthless. Someone either lost them in the Depression or didn't pay the taxes. Whatever the cause, the documents are pretty. So fancy and a reminder of a family whose wealth has all been lost.

I've collected pens and cameras and saxophones and books, always the books. In professoring, that voracious accumulation can be an asset, a ravenous capacity for absorbing more information. I suppose that's an appeal of a Ph.D.. One can know a canon and a body of knowledge.

But knowledge is portable. And things, the typewriters and instruments and books — so many books — they take space and impose weight.

And it comes time to move. A downsizing move, where the cost of living is so high where we're headed that the prospect of having more than a broom closet for an office is a daily fantasy. The typewriters will have to go. The National Geographics, which my grandfather saved — for what reason I have no idea — have already gone. And the books, so many books.

My grandfather lived his entire life in the same few miles of a town. He lived most of his life in the same house, from childhood till death, in a row house which was sold only when my grandmother moved down the street, so she could be right next door to my aunt and uncle and cousins, and then moved with them when they finally saw the neighborhood so far deteriorated and blighted by crime and poverty that they had no choice but to leave. I can feel the stairs of that house, the front ones with all their splinters which got me when I was little. I took my then future wife there, a short ride by subway, from our dorm, for holidays. I was there after my grandfather's funeral. And it was that same block where I took my months old daughter to meet her great-grandmother.

I don't know why my grandfather kept those National Geographics — the man who lived his whole life in on the same block of the same street within a mile of where he was born. I don't think he meant them to be passed on. Someone just asked me, do I want them. And then it became a thing, that they would be saved for me, until I could take them and had somewhere to put them. We moved here and amidst all the space for my books, the library of bookshelves that I had fantasized since childhood, there they finally found a place.

It's a beautiful library. It was, but now we have to move.

A former professor friend spent most of his life amassing his scholarly library. It included the normal scholarly books, the rare scholarly books, the special and rare editions of old scholarly books. It was an amazing collection, so much so that to fit it (mostly) into his office he had to put the shelves back to back and so close together that he could only slide sideways into the spaces. Just enough room for a small statured man to reach in and grab what was needed. And when he retired, he was at a loss, contemplating the fact that he might sell them all. He wrestled with this, selling his collection which had meant so much to him in the amassing. He therapied about it. And he got bids from book buyers. They lowballed him and he thought, maybe I'll keep it. But then, inevitably, it was such that keeping was not really an option.

I heard a news story — I'll pretend it was on NPR, though I suspect it could have been Vice or something smuttier (Slate?). Wherever it was, it was a story about bespoke porn, about how people would pay for very specific kinds of custom videos and how this sort of video making was a lucrative business. One of the weirdest requests was from a guy who ordered videos of adult stars destroying his postage stamp collection. This collection was worth tens of thousands of dollars, but he was so ashamed of it, he needed it defiled and destroyed. He paid to have videos of the destruction of his collection, album by album, and was grateful when they were all gone.

I don't think I want pornstars to pee on my typewriters. Or my books. Or a video of it.

I read somewhere else that collecting gives us comfort in times of stress. It can give the illusion of control or of plenty when either are in short supply. That was certainly something of the typewriters. It was an emblem of writing, a romantization of one particular problem and block that I was having at the time. It was nostalgic, and relatively cheap, and so it was easy to find that accumulation comforting.

There's a joke about typewriters. They reproduce when you leave them alone. Leave one typewriter in a car and before you know it there are three in your trunk. It is unfair to call it a joke. It is in fact the true story of how typewriters reproduce. For a while there I was going around buying and reparing typewriters locally. Since then and in more recent years, people knew I'm the guy to bring things to, and so typewriters came to me, unbidden. I have acquired at least 20 in the past few years, none of them purchased. Just donations because I can take care of them, like cats or some otherwise unwanted feral animal. Normally one would say that that is an indication of lack of value, but I think in most cases these were owners like me, just hoping to find a better home for something that once had to someone in their family; they want it to go to someone who, they hope, might appreciate that value.

I feel that obligation that things go to “good homes,” to people who might appreciate them. I could just give everything away, but I really can't, because of this tug of obligation. Am I obligated to get these objects to someone who cares? Is that why they can't just go back into the donation spinner? Do we owe something to the objects we purchase? How fucked up is that?

I have to downsize. There won't be room for all the books. I know there won't. Every time I move books now I feel it in my back. I used to haul those books from place to place. And now I'm no longer that scholar and the books—– so many books — I think maybe my kids will appreciate them. But I know they have their own interest and will hvae their own stuff to explore. That abundance, that need for abundance, is it because my parents didn't grow up with a lot? They instilled in me that collection fetish, that ache borne of deprivation.

There's comfort in knowing that these things are there, that I could have them if I want. I haven't read some of those books in 20 years. Some will never get opened again, and yet they're there, as a symbol of the vast learning and accumulation of knowledge. My kids will never want them. I'm fooling myself. Some books would see me die, silent witnesses still unread.

Will I be me without the books, without the machines, without the accumulation of words?

My parents passed on my toys— the Star Wars, the Legoes — all things “worth” “something” in the vacuous uncertainty of value. They've sat in the closet for decades. I let my kids play with them, which they enjoyed, but then they went back in the closet. And they need to be sold. I don't know what use I have for them aside from occasional nostalgia. I have boxes (more limited) of the things my kids wanted to save.

In my computer browser, I have over 100 tabs open.

I finally went through all my old academic papers and photocopies and assorted detritus. Most of it at least. And most of it went to the trash.

Conventional wisdom is that collecting is a form of control, a channeling of interest that borders on obsession, an outlet, usually safe, for finding safety and comfrort in objects, the satisfaction of seeing things in order. Maybe not everyone's collecting is pathological.

Collecting is a blow against death. It's a futile attempt to assure oneself that the past is not just forgotten or tossed aside, an even more vain effort to leave something behind, set against the known truth that being tossed aside and of no consequence is precisely the only outcome that awaits any of us in the fullness of time. Collecting is yet another response to anticipating oblivion.

I wondered, when I was in the darkets places many years ago, whether there would be a time when I didn't need something to hold onto, when I could be free of that anticipation and fear. I thought to myself that maybe that's how I would know. When I could let go of the typewriters or the spinning thoughts or the books — so many books — then I would be cured, I thought. I would know I was better when I didn't need that crutch to make me feel better about not being remembered, about doing nothing of consequence, about being a blip barely registering in the passage of the world.

I wonder why my grandfather saved those national geographics. Did he enjoy them? When he walked every day to the corner store, the same store, for decades, in the same neighborhood, did he find them transporting? Was that window into the rest of the world hat did it? Or was it the mark of education and culture and knowing things? Did he keep them just because they felt like the kind of thing one would keep? They seemed to have gone straight into the attic and never left, 1940 onward. I think there was 1950s and 1960s dust on them. They hadn't been touched since then. Why did they sit there? What was the point of their waiting in the dark all those years? They are obsolete. All of the content, glorious digital copies of the images, is available. You can buy it all, have it all, and not need shelves or storage or transportation to haul it all around.

They saved them for me but no one else wanted them. I have to remind myself that they sat in the garage because there was no where else to go.

I find myself loving home, sitting out back and writing at the table there, and not wanting to go anywhere. I understand that part of my grandfather.

Why do we cling to the collections of others? Why would I assume that my kids would ever care what I collected and saved, except as an oddity to be remarked on in passing and then tossed? I don't want to leave them with a burden of having to go through my trash or sort through my stuff.

My professor colleague, now retired, saw the box I kept in my office. “Future Trash” it said. And in it went all the papers that I knew students would never come collect, all the little ephemera of professorial life that are valuable for a period of a year but no further.

What are words but the collection of ideas? I collect those too.

My books — so many books — are they just future trash? So but for the grace of god go...