"What are you DOING?"

No Telling

I read an interesting piece about experiencing vs. spectating our lives. It reminded me of this irritating woman I follow on Twitter who leaves upward from 60 to 100 tweets a day. She’s a high school English teacher who does, I admit, leave a scads of good education links in some of those tweets. Every single time I check Twitter, she’s unloaded another fifteen to twenty more links, comments, insights, and hourly whatevers. Fine.

Yes, I know I don’t have to follow her. There’s this strange combination of connection (she’s a codirector of a group I’d rather not name, just like me) and fear of Bad Manners. Southern twitterers must bump into this dilemma all the time. UNfollowing someone, especially if you have a connection of any kind, feels a lot like walking off in the middle of a conversation at the grocery store. It’s rude and ungracious.

Yesterday, as the cloud of grades and final exams finally blew clear, I opened my Twitter to actually leave one. I don’t do this often enough to be remotely interesting to anyone, so if you follow me, well, it’s going to be a little dull. At any rate, I opened my account and there she was, this high school English teacher twittering away about this and that and filling up my whole page.

And then it occurred to me…this was a school day. She was at a high school somewhere up north with a rotating classroom of students every hour on the hour. I counted, and she sent over forty tweets between 8:00 and 4:00. That’s a little over five tweets an hour.

When did she teach? I’ve been a high school English teacher myself, and I know averting your eyes from the crowd at hand for more than ten seconds can be A Very Bad Idea. I also remember nonstop teaching, planning, conferences, lunch duty, and grading during those hours. I also remember the four or so hours at home each evening dedicated to most of that list. Teaching high school English is an all-consuming vocation.

At what point does she push away from the computer and teach in the moment? or at all? And why on earth do I need a running string of electronic teaching ephemera from someone who only twitters teaching?

Here’s the bottom line. Experience needs the luxury of time and reflection to fully explain its multiple layers and provide real meaning. Twittering bypasses reflection and allows us to forgo internal monologue and true understanding. It happens too instantly and is discarded too quickly. Twittering also eats up the moment; constantly narrating our lives turns us into spectators without actual experience. If we Twitter five times an hour we can’t be doing anything.

I’m going to set my Southern upbringing aside and UNfollow this poor woman. My guess is she’s tied up in a broom closet right now, 25 to 30 teenagers laughing and texting each other as they run to their cars.

Big-Ass Rolls of Paper, Part Two

Fresh Ribbon

Just when I thought it was safe to get back on Ebay, a little search turned up a couple of good finds. I’m talking about that big-ass roll of Kerouacian paper that someone else snagged not long ago. Well, I’ve found about about 144 more rolls. It’s teletype paper.

Take a look HERE for the canary, Army surplus teletype paper (sans carbon).

Peek over HERE for the carbon, multicopy paper rolls with carbon.

This is a good news / bad news situation, though. It seems they’re only sold in boxes of 12 right now and the shipping is crazy-high. Not to worry, I’ve left a note for the seller asking about selling singles. Anyone else interested?

Hey, I’m just here to help.

UPDATE: The seller is willing to part with these individually, so if you’re interested, click on the link and contact him. His name is Mike and he sounds delightful.

Go Hug a Single Mama

No Telling


It’s true. You know, single mothers deserve a whole month of free spa days with paid vacation and an on-call nanny. It won’t happen, of course, but there should be a little something more than a card or an almost forgotten card and the celebration should last at least a week.

Single mothers work hard being everything to everyone all the time. It’s a tough job description that takes a special kind of woman to make it work. Most of my generation has taken a stab at single parenting at least once – some, several times. We never list that on our resumes, though. We should, because nothing says I Can Get Things Done like a single woman with a couple of kids, a job, a house to run, and at least one ex-somebody calling regularly to complain. Despite and because of it all, we manage to make the whole shebang run smoothly.

It’s no surprise. We’ve had generations of training. My grandmother was a war widow at 21 – five kids and no high school diploma. Make no mistake – just because there’s a box marked “widowed” on the form, that doesn’t mean the parenting is different. My mother has been married to my dad forever, but her marital status didn’t alter the fact that Dad was on the road most of the time and she was In Charge. Talk to any woman married in the late 50s and early 60s and they’ll tell you about single-parenting with or without the vows. Things were what they were in those days.

I’ve single-parented and now my daughter is, too. It’s not easy and sometimes it’s not fun, but it is what it is. Just tonight she managed to bathe afternoon play dirt and Ranch Dressing out of her son’s hair before the bedtime snuggle. Then she fixed the stopped up sink and repaired the disposal via googled instructions. If we find a wayward spider on the floor tonight, I imagine we’ll kill it ourselves.

Tomorrow’s our day – all of us out there loading the dishwasher and starting a pile of laundry and dragging out the trash now that the kids are in bed. We’re the queens of multitasking and the goddesses of Getting It Done. So bring on the macaroni necklaces and dandelions stolen from the neighbor’s yard – we’re ready to bask in the 24-hour glamor of Mother’s Day and we deserve all 1,440 minutes of it.

Booktalk: The Iron Whim by Darren Wershler-Henry

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Note: I finished this one a few weeks ago and was promptly buried underneath piles of freshman essays. Tomorrow I’ll be buried under final exams, so there’s this window and I’m jumping through it.

I’m going to give it to you straight – The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting has its moments, but is overall Strikethru was right – it’s a bit academic for casual reading. Given that it’s published by Cornell University Press and that the acknowledgments page thanks his graduate committee for their help, it’s likely The Iron Whim is a post-thesis incarnation. It’s meant for a different audience and for a much different purpose.

Regardless, I found some bright spots. The chapters on “amanuesis,” for example (typewriting and dictation) and the women who, like ghost-machines themselves, entered the work force for paltry wages and changed the definition of “women’s work” long before World War II did that in a more permanent way. Good stuff. Men created and women translated. While much is written about business writing and the office-proper, I was much more interested in the discussion of Dracula and how Mina crosses that create/translate line in the novel first by using the typewriter to make her own voice, then by becoming demonic. Nothing like a good techno-feminist reading to make me feel my literary oats again.

On the whole I found the book just as fragmented as the subtitle suggests. All the better to skim and pick, actually. There’s a section on machine history that didn’t interest me, and the end of the book fell into a hole or two discussing contemporary readings in children’s and sci-fi typewriter-themed books. Not my cup of tea, really. There’s a chapter early on that discusses Ebay and the cult of nostalgia that should certainly make most of us wince, but in a good way.

We are who we are.

In the end, I didn’t fly through The Iron Whim anticipating the next chapter, but it was perfect for recuperative, post-knee-surgery reading. I’ve honestly spent more time with the bibliography than with the book itself, but I’m funny like that.

Wershler-Henry has an online place, by the way, and he Twitters. Let’s just say he’s been formally introduced to typecasting now. And that’s a good thing, because at the end of The Iron Whim he’s made a sort of promise I’d like to see him keep:

“…there are other books to be written about typewriting. At least one of them will be about typewritten concrete and visual poetry, because I’ll be writing that next…”

So, hows that new one coming along, Darren? No pressure.

Someone Needs to take this On The Road

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(click to enlarge)

Yes, it’s a portion of the original On the Road scroll typed frantically by Jack Kerouac back in 1951. With a little pharmaceutical aid, he was able to slam the novel out in three weeks. The scroll, by the way, is on tour and probably lounging around Dublin right about now.

I won’t go on and on about Kerouac or On The Road. Most women I know (of a certain age) find the book fairly appalling and Kerouac even more so, but Kerouac is not the point here. The scroll is. It’s morphed into an art installation and by the miracle of technological wizardry, a very large typecast.

The thing is, I know a lot of people who can slam out a novel in a month. Maybe they aren’t all Kerouacs, but they do it and there’s a die-hard group of Luddites blowing the top off the NaNoWriMo word counts via manual typewriter every year. You know who you are.

While taking a little paper-grading break today, I hopped on Ebay and found the perfect ditty for a NaNoWriMo Typewriter Brigader. Or for a Kerouac wannabe, makes no difference. It’s a big roll of three-part carbon paper – that’s one original copy to keep and two canary copies to send ’round to the art installations in Dublin.

Eighteen days left on that auction, and a chance to make a legend. Who’s up for it?

Eye on the Prize: Grading Momentum, Self-Denial, and a Request for Good Reading

No Telling

I’m two weeks from No More Papers to Grade. Anyone who teaches knows the final jag of the semester is about responding and grading and paperwork and wrapping things up. They also know it’s a self-inflicted time of pleasure-reading famine. There’s simply no time for the foolishness of lounging with a delicious book.

We who teach know all about self-denial. We’re masters of the craft. We don’t visit anyone, take the night off, dream up exciting recipes for veal, or blog. We eat Lean Cuisines from the microwave and wash it down with cold coffee because both are fast. It’s important, though, to dangle a carrot or two to keep us going. Here’s where you come in.
Give me a list of books to look forward to. Dangle the dream of rewarding hours prone on a divan with piles of novels and poetry and anything that doesn’t resemble a freshman argumentative essay. I live to teach, but the grading stack is high just now and the work is daunting. I need a tasty book list to help me make it through final papers and final exams.
Think of it as a public service.

Street Poetry at the Arkansas Literary Festival

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Despite the spitting rain, the Arkansas Literary Festival was in full swing today at the River Market in Little Rock, and the Great Bear Writing Project was there. We manned (womanned) a booth under the tents to greet visiting teachers from all over and to spread the National Writing Project gospel. It’s our site’s tenth anniversary, so we had cake and giveaway drawings and books. Oh my.

More importantly, we had a typewriter and two reams of manifold paper. Anyone with a hankering to make poetry could sashay by, type a bit, and leave with a finished bit of writing. We strung a little clothesline and hung each poet’s copy with a few clothespins. The storm neared, the winded whipped, and the poetry flowed.

Even poet and fractal artist Terry Wright took a break from hawking copies of The Exquisite Corpse to slam out a poem. It’s been a while since he’s composed on a machine, but I think he awakened the hunger for an old manual machine. Terry says he used to be an Underwood man, so I’ll dig under the bed and find one he can use.

The storm we expected at noon failed to materialize, and bought the street poets a couple of hours. Who were our best customers? Young kids and college students. They couldn’t keep their hands off the Royal. There’s just something about poetry on a typewriter – no laptop can replicate the aesthetic.

My favorite poet of the day was a fifth grader who, bless her heart, went into a semi-zen state while typing her poem. There’s nothing quite like watching the birth of a writer. When her moment was done, she whipped the paper out and asked to read aloud to all of us.
These are the moments writing teachers live for. The child read triumphantly and had us all in the palm of her hand. After our ovation, she watched us pin one of the copies to the clothesline, hanging on to the original like a sacred object. Her eyes went back and forth from the poem in her hand to the clothes pinned poem flapping in the pre-storm winds. If she forgets that moment it won’t matter, because we’ll never forget.

A couple of hours and a celebratory sheet cake later, the bottom fell out of the sky there at the River Market. Every author and book seller under the tents scrambled to save copies from the downpour and themselves from the lightning. The Great Bear Writing Project loaded up in a hurry because down here, we don’t fool around with the weather and second-guess a storm.
Besides, everyone knows typewriters and water are a bad combination.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

No Telling


It’s a good thing The Perfect Grandson is so young, because he doesn’t know enough about the Easter Bunny and egg hunting anticipation to be disappointed this morning. Big storms are moving in and it looks like Easter is indoors today. The neighbor lady’s wind chimes are swinging fast right now and that’s never a good sign. Cross your fingers that it clears up by mid afternoon for at least one muddy hunt.

Next year, we’ll require perfect sunshine, a thousand colored eggs, and an Easter Bunny who hides goodies in the yard at dark-thirty to beat the boy to the hunt. This year, he’s sleeping in unaware.

Oh. And a big thank you to the mysterious E. Bunny who dropped off the touch-and-feel duckling book in our mailbox yesterday. I know who you are…

NOTE: If you’re into Peeps, the boys over at Poor Richard’s Almanac left a trail to this plethora of peepness.

Speaking of Fabulous Journals…

Fresh Ribbon

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3694538&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Nearly done! from UPPERCASE gallery on Vimeo.

Journals are popping out everywhere. Strikethru is taking submissions for a new retrotech journal that should be required reading for anyone who even wishes they owned an old typewriter. Visit and sign up to submit immediately – you’ll want to be a part of this project.

By Tuesday, the Vortex Magazine of Literature and Art will release its 200-page, full color glory on every undergraduate at the University of Central Arkansas. As the faculty adviser to the publication I have to say this is the most stunning issue ever, so get ready for the bragging. This staff headed by editor Abby Wolf is going to redefine undergraduate literary magazines. And more.

The GORGEOUS magazine in the video should be ready to send almost any day now. I’ll be watching my mailbox and tapping my good foot in anticipation, because UPPERCASE looks like a visual vacation, dessert, and sweet dream all rolled into one. Here’s the description:

We’re inquisitive: learning from other artists, illustrators, designers,
photographers, filmmakers and musicians, whether they’re upstarts or icons,
famous or shy, verbal or visual.

We’re inspired: enchanted by great ideas and strange inventions; by colour and pattern; things fancy and frugal; the charm of vintage in a modern life; the ridiculous and the sublime.

We’re adventurous: traveling to destinations both real and imagined, peeking into creative spaces and discovering magnificent people and memorable places.

We’re eclectic: curating souvenirs, collecting treasures and celebrating the extraordinary in the everyday.

We’re playful: delighting in visual amusements, intelligent distraction, entertaining wordplay and sweet indulgences.

We’re UPPERCASE: a magazine for the creative and curious!

Color me completely charmed. How can any of you resist?

If there’s a journal or magazine out there that no one should do without, please let us know. This is the Season of Fresh Publications – better than Christmas, twice as good as Thanksgiving, and you don’t have to eat mysterious casseroles.