Author: Herb Childress

Back in 1990, I was a grading assistant for Paul Groth’s course in American vernacular architecture. As the junior member of the teaching team, I was sent downstairs to get fancy coffees for the rest of the team and myself. When I came back up the stairs, I had the cardboard cup tray on the palm of one hand, and distributed cups to friends with the other. Paul noticed that, and complimented me on my skill. I said that I’d spent a little time as a waiter. And Paul, who was gay and lived in San Francisco, took a beat, and then said, “In my community, waiters have to be gorgeous.”

We all know that every upscale restaurant in Los Angeles and New York employs a wait staff made up of aspiring performers who rely equally on talent and on physical beauty . You can still encounter a normal human at a neighborhood taco shack, but if you have to make a reservation, you’ll be waited on by a perfect specimen.

I was at an event recently at which one of the guests was a professional party organizer, employed to put on bridal showers and lawn gatherings for wealthy families. She told us of one such party in which she and her team were selecting “cater-waiters” from a portfolio provided by a modeling agency. They had requested both clothed and shirtless photos of all of the men they were browsing, quickly sorting into piles of acceptable and unacceptable based on the character of their abdominal muscles rather than food knowledge or service experience.

The family’s criteria for service staff had been explicit and simple, she said. No Uglies.

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“The hustle” has become a defining work mode of our time. Everything is done with an eye to how it moves you forward. And it has a lot in common with drowning, grasping in desperation at any passing branch, hoping it’ll keep you afloat a little longer. When stability and security aren’t available, you need to have your eyes in motion and grab whatever feed presents itself.

About the time I was working for Paul at Berkeley, the sociologist Hugh Klein published one of the most influential articles I’ve ever read — “Adolescence, Youth, and Young Adulthood: Rethinking Current Conceptualizations of Life Stage.” (Youth & Society, 21:4, June 1990) His argument was simple: that we conflate culture with nature, and so presume that stages of life like “children” and “teenagers” and “retirees” are biological facts. Age is certainly a biological fact, but the social roles that a five-year-old would be expected to fulfill have varied enormously across history and place.

Klein focused his research specifically on the stages of life that we’ve created to describe people between 14 and 25 or so. There weren’t really any teenagers until compulsory high school education created them; there weren’t really any young adults until college became such a ubiquitous experience that we had to call those people something. ¹ So in light of our current economy — in which pick-up work is often all that’s available, influencers are dense as dandelions, and Patreon and OnlyFans and Substack offer the chance to make a living one subscriber at a time—I’ll propose a stage of life between 25 and 35, specific to contemporary American life, that I’ll call the Hustlers.

I think that by the time you’re a few years out of college, you’ve started to realize a fact that’s both unspoken and irrefutable—that the boundary between prodigy and has-been is sudden, sharp, and unpredictable. That with no warning, and by someone else’s decision, you might find yourself on the wrong side of the fence. That you might find yourself left out of the cater-waiter portfolio, that the arc of your trajectory has apexed out. There’s an increased awareness that the clock is running and there’s a deadline.

You’d better hustle.

1. Endless intellectual nonsense has been generated because of the unwarranted generalizations of Neil Howe and William Strauss, who codified the idea of Gen X and Millennials and all that crap. Their work lives in the same general neighborhood as astrology. ↩︎

I was having my weekly coffee with a friend this morning, who’d recently finished reading my book & Sons. He had another commitment to get away to, but he asked if we could talk about the book next week. And he asked a question I’ve never been asked before: “How would you like to talk about it?”

Having been in lots of situations where a group of people were talking about what I’d written, I can tell you that the same handful of questions and comments come up over and over.

• How do you know so much about (plow truck driving, table tennis, being in a big band…)?
• I really liked it! (Usually followed by the recounting of one particular scene that stuck out to them.)
• I know someone like that, or we’re going through something similar right now…
• It would be better if (followed by some major restructuring that completely negates my work as a writer, and takes agency for themselves)
• There’s a typo on page 187.

So, if not just those, how WOULD I like to talk about it?

Well, the surrounding conversation was about letting go of imagined futures, about those richly imagined stories we’d once built about who we were bound to be. Stories in which we had become professional baseball players, or musicians, or college faculty members. When those mirages inevitably vanish, I think we don’t do enough work to acknowledge our grief. And what is grief, really, but coming to terms with a new future that doesn’t include the old one? We grieve our partners, because our own future doesn’t include them. We grieve our pets, because our own future doesn’t include them. And I think it makes sense to grieve our truncated dreams, whatever they were, when our own future doesn’t include them

That’s what my best writing does.

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I shared a story with my writing group a year or so ago, and they reiterated their core complaint with my work, which is that the characters don’t have enough bad things happen to them. They subscribe to the aphorism (of unclear origin) that the writer’s job is to get the protagonists up into a tree and then throw rocks at them.

I’m not interested in hostility as the basis for writing, and I’ve talked a lot about that in this space. But they followed that recommendation with the idea that this story felt to them like “wish fulfillment.”

Close, but no.

I think, in the work that feels closest and most successful, I’ve played out one of my lapsed selves, as realistically as I know how to do. That means knowing its disappointments and disillusionment as well as its successes and pleasures. I’ve been able to be a professional table tennis player, and to know how much of the rest of life I wasn’t able to taste because of the singular focus required to be that good. I’ve gotten to be a college faculty member, gotten to be tall and attractive, gotten to be a professional musician, and I’ve learned those lives well enough to NOT have them be merely rainbow-pony wish fulfillment.

I’ve done the same thing on behalf of others. I wrote a book in which my mother had some of the life she never got to have, and felt what it meant to have her success be both powerful and anonymous. I wrote a book in which our local road foreman got some of the respect and resources he’s deserved, while still acknowledging how brutal the work is.

Wanting those other lives so badly, on behalf of myself and others, is what made them worth writing about. It’s what’s lifted those stories beyond the realm of their instigating ideas, and made them fully inhabited. That’s not wish fulfillment. It’s a form of grief, allowing the lapsed dreams to be realized so fully that I can finally let them go.

“Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading. If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” This statement, spoken by Toni Morrison in 1981, is the basis of my writing. No one else has written about the lives I’ve lost, so I guess I have to do it myself.

Okay, I know I left off my last post with “more again tomorrow,” but things have intervened. I’ll have more to say about that further below. For now, let’s get back to the work of failing to measure up.

Part of what it means to produce “work of quality” is to locate the work accurately within the conversation it wants to be part of. An IKEA cabinet is a work of quality in important ways: it’s accessible in cost and construction to millions of users, and it uses stable, veneered plywood rather than expensive and ever-moving birch hardwood. It’s true to its Scandinavian Modern origins. And it holds things out of the way of dust and dog slobber. All good.

Steven White’s cabinet in the image above is also a work of quality. The joinery is exquisite, each joint cut to its specific location along its curve. (Try to make a curved drawer. I dare you.) The design idea carries through in smart ways: the button knobs curving up the (sometimes implied) centerline of the curved case, the two paired side cabinets providing the front legs while the taller back cabinet provides the back legs. The light wood of the side doors and the dark buttons balancing the uniformity of the cherry body. And the whole thing looks like Fantasia, bewitched furniture becoming animated. This is a person who’s studied not merely cabinetry but also art history, and understands what contrapposto is.

It’s almost certainly wildly expensive, because of its innumerable hand-cut joints. And although it protects its belongings from dust and dog slobber, you can’t just throw your wallet on the top when you go to bed, because it’ll slide off.

Which is the “better cabinet?” That depends entirely on what conversation it wants to enter.

I ran face first into this question, which I’d never considered before, when I went to architecture school and entered studio. These were artists who had no interest in whether you could toss your wallet on top of the dresser. Whether someone could care for a sick child or have a dozen friends over for cocktails. Had no interest in the relationship between bathroom and bedroom. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were trying to break us, like wild horses made tame. To unlearn everything we’d ever known about houses and stores, about streets and neighborhoods; to erase all of that vernacular wisdom and enter the world of studio art.

The work we were to emulate was wildly expensive, just as unique in execution as that cabinet. It mostly didn’t have to respond to any programmatic requirements, being instead an exhibition pavilion or a vacation house or simply a drawn idea. We were asked to enter a new conversation, one for which I at least had no vocabulary nor native interest.

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Lots of fields have this division. Publishing clearly differentiates between “literary fiction,” in which questions of language and form are central, and “commercial fiction” that emphasizes pageturnability and adherence to genre norms. Literary fiction is scarce and resource-intensive, which is why so many of its practitioners are employed by universities whose patronage applauds the publication of one moderately-selling book every few years. Commercial fiction and its authors rely on reliably sufficient book sales in order to survive, and thus engage in a different conversation.

Popular music, folk music and “serious” music. Dirt-track racing, NASCAR and Formula 1. Different conversations within the same general category, and thus judged by different criteria. I remember going around the table at our first Bread Loaf meeting, where we were all asked to name a few favorite writers. Mostly I hadn’t heard of any of them, even as the others all muttered after each name with that hushed “mmm” of connoisseurship. I named Walter Tevis (a highly successful commercial writer) and Rex Stout, the author of a forty-year mystery series. And I could feel the pity of the serious writers, wondering how a person of such diminished judgment could ever have been allowed through the literary gates.

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So that brings me to the work that’s kept me away for a week. My new play “Old Dogs on the Porch” is having its world premier this Friday, and will run for the next two weeks on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. If you’re in New England, I think it’s worth the trip. Tickets are available here.

This week has been the work of installing the set, getting the sound and lights right, and having the cast become accustomed to doing their work in a designed space rather than around folding chairs and through implied doorways. There are about twenty people who’ve been involved in bringing this production to life, and I’m grateful to each one. I hope to see you if you’re able. And we can have a conversation.

So yesterday, I used my lapsed bowling career as an example of the distance between people who are merely reallyreallyreally good and people who are at the peak of whatever endeavor they’ve chosen. I think, in principle, that the same general logarithmic distance is true in whatever field of practice we might consider. Every step is a mile, and there are a lot of steps to take.

But bowling is limited in its utility as a model, because it’s objective. Scores are scores, tournaments are won and recorded, and there’s no argument about intentions or values. There are lots of endeavors in which we might excel in ways that aren’t as easy to know, or to agree upon.

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I’m enough of an elitist to resent being labeled a “local author.” But certainly the objective record of my fiction writing is exactly that. I’ve not had fiction published, by a major house or a minor indie. I do it because it’s a meditative act, because the craft matters. Using language to render complicated lives in complicated circumstances… there’s nothing that absorbs me more fully.

But if that’s my motivation, why would I inflict the outcomes upon others? Why not just leave it on the hard drive? That’s the point at which the questions of relative quality emerge. Is it good enough to share? Am I proud of it? Will the person I’m sharing it with enjoy it? Will they TELL ME they enjoyed it? It’s just an ugly smoothie blended from mixed ingredients: vanity and generosity, validation and hope.

One of the thoughts I’ve shared with my writing group a few times is that for me, giving someone one of my books is like making them a meal. I just want them to have a nice evening, and I have enough confidence that my cooking matches their tastes to make the offer. And ohhhh, does one of my colleagues hate that idea! It demeans the craft, it doesn’t take the work seriously. He’s also said that he’s terrified of dying, though, and I think he wants something to live on when he’s gone.

I don’t, oddly enough. When I’m dead, everything I ever could have done, generous or otherwise, will be done. The rest will be compost. So because I’m not in the game of “legacy,” I have a little less interest in comparing quality. It’s as good as I know how to make it.

What I need is to be acknowledged, by an audience larger than my friends and neighbors. And that’s a sad fact to sit with.

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The Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play here as well. When I was a Level Three bowler, I thought I was going to be a professional. Once I got to Level Five, I recognized that I wouldn’t. Not because I’d stopped trying or gotten lazy, but because I knew so much more that I could appreciate how much broader the chasm was that lie ahead. The more you know about something, the more you know you don’t know. The less you know about something, the easier it seems. I mean, everybody can write, right? Everybody can sing, everybody can drive a car and ride a bike. Being a professional at those things must just mean doing more of it.

You have to go a long, long way down the road to realize how vast and complicated the road is. And by that time, you’ve dedicated most of your young life to the journey. The craft matters to you, you’ve given yourself to it and received so much beauty in return. But there will come a moment when you realize that you will never be Simone Biles, or LeBron James, or Yo-Yo Ma, or Lewis Hamilton, or Emma Stone. There will come a moment when you realize that your ticket won’t take you to the final station, that you’ll disembark in some one-dog town along the way.

More again tomorrow.

I hate to bring us back to eleventh grade, which at least for me was miserable, but I want to talk about logarithms. (Sister Claudette would be pleased that I remember what they are.) Specifically, I’d like to talk about logarithmic scales of measurement, of which the Richter scale for the measurement of ground movement is the best known. For every digit increase in the scale, the actual amplitude of ground movement is amplified by ten times. Thus:

• Magnitude 1 = 10^1 = 10
• Magnitude 2 = 10^2 =100
• Magnitude 3 = 10^3 = 1,000
• Magnitude 4 = 10^4 = 10,000

And so on. As the amplitude increases, the likelihood of occurrence decreases. Magnitude 1 earth movement is almost constant, completely imperceptible without advanced instruments. A Magnitude 9, like the Alaskan Good Friday Earthquake of 1964, happens three or four times a century.

I think talent works that way, too.

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Half of every profession is below average. And that’s the proportion of the people who’ve actually trained and been accepted into that profession! The rest of us know very little, and probably ought to admit it.

James Elkins, in his remarkable book Why Art Cannot Be Taught, says this:

Out of a thousand art students, maybe five will make a living off their art, and perhaps one will be known outside her city. That’s not a condemnation. It’s the nature of fame, real quality, and genuine influence to be rare.

This fact of logarithmic levels of art has been on my mind for a long, long time. It first occurred to me on a weeks-long bike camping trip. We stopped in at some nondescript grocery in a nondescript Missouri town; some kind of bland retail music was playing. But I’d been on a music-starvation diet for three weeks by that point, so it caught my attention. In particular, there was one syrupy, abysmal arrangement of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” every bit as awful as you might think it could be. But it struck me that all of those players were remarkably skilled, even though doing undemanding work. They’d been given their sheet music twenty minutes earlier, probably; had run through it once; and then recorded an errorless take and moved on to the next. Each of those musicians, in a lay environment, would be by far the best musician we’d ever met. And no one would ever know their names.

I once thought I was going to be a professional bowler. I was wrong, though I didn’t know it at the time. So let me put forth a Richter scale for bowlers:

• Level 1 — has bowled once or twice at a birthday party or a drunken Saturday college night
• Level 2 — likes bowling enough to have joined a league and bowl every week.
• Level 3 — has made a conscious decision about which bowling ball might suit their game, and practices once in a while outside of league.
• Level 4 — bowls in more than one bowling center, and thus learns different conditions.
• Level 5 — has enough variability in strategy and equipment to be able to reliably score 200 or more on most conditions.
• Level 6 — is reliably top ten in their city. Has joined the Professional Bowlers Association.
• Level 7 — is reliably top ten in their region. Participates occasionally in professional tournaments that come through their area.
• Level 8 — reliably cashes in professional tournaments.
• Level 9 — has won a professional tournament, and no one would be surprised if they won again.
• Level 10 — has won five or more professional tournaments, might be mentioned in Bowler of the Year conversations.
• Level 11 — has won twenty or more professional tournaments, might be mentioned in barstool arguments about “the best bowler of all time.” (There’ve been about 1,900 professional tournaments in the past 60 years. These fourteen people have won about a quarter of them.)

I was at about five and a half on that scale. Which means I would probably have been the best bowler you’d have ever met. And I was infinitely far away from Level 9, which is kind of what I thought when I said “professional bowler.”

I know so, so many people on the middle ranges of their various scales. People with remarkable talent and dedication, years of experience, accumulated wisdom. The logarithmic scale shows just how many of us there are, and explains why we’ll go unnoticed beyond our neighborhood.

More tomorrow.

See the glory
Of the royal scam

Steely Dan (Donald Fagen/Walter Becker), “The Royal Scam,” 1976

We had no reason to imagine that our doctoral hoods were merely emotional courtesy prior to execution. The blindfold before the guillotine.

Most of us in academia, eighty percent or more of all new research doctorates, will be exiled from our adopted home. Will be shot directly from the most vertical rise into a vast, airless nothingness, jettisoned into the silence just as we imagined that we were about to be cleared for a new stage of flight.

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Those of us who’ve been associated with graduate education have a very specific, lived, daily experience of the holy land. We know its pleasures, and we know the ways in which we could imagine making it even more sublime. Every one of us comes to the work with our own specificity in detail—in names, institutions, disciplines, graduation dates—but with a remarkable uniformity in the wonders of intellectual life. We have all lived within, and helped to manufacture, heaven.

None of us were prepared for hell.

Aside from the various mythologies—of burning pits, sulphureous lakes, being herded by demons with forks—the most basic concept of hell is that it is a full removal from the presence of God. Academic hells are like that. The particular experiences might be unique to each of us, but what they have in common is the absence of specific emotional qualities that we have come to love.

It is this sense of absence from the divine that binds us so closely, even after our condemnation, to the enterprise that has banished us. Online trolls plague every discussion of adjunct life with some variant of, “well, if they’re treating you so badly, why don’t you just leave?” And the easy psychological response will have something to do with identity—that we have framed a particular kind of self (and self-narrative), and are bonded to that identity in ways that we shouldn’t be expected to easily abandon. But I think that there’s a second force at work, which is that we hope to be paradise-adjacent. To hold at least a gauzy, pastel version of the vivid pleasures we once knew so well. To imagine that there is, after all, one last final exam we might pass in order to be welcomed home. 

Let’s examine nine specific blessings from which we will be held apart. 

The First Circle of Hell: “Your Call Is Very Important to Us…” The abandoned scholar will no longer have software, either general nor discipline specific, at her disposal. She will not receive updated computers, will not have automated backups, will not have a local-area network, will not have an IT team on call. She will not even have a photocopier, or a cabinet of pens and legal pads. She will not have a single W-2 at the end of a year, but instead a scatter of 1099s. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of what it means to be part of a community, a specialist contributing to and supported by a team. She will know instead what it means to surrender time to tasks that she would have expected to outsource. What it means to be a sole practitioner rather than a member of a professional culture.

The Second Circle of Hell: Banished from the Garden. The abandoned scholar will no longer have a free on-site health club, nearby food service, or a beautiful campus landscape within which to walk, with its own grounds crew, its own public safety service, its own transit system. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the aesthetic nature of the academy, the ways in which beauty and generosity have been core facets of the academic enterprise, from the Groves of Academia to the monasteries and private libraries and collections that gave rise to the modern university. The abandoned scholar will do without the unnecessary but ennobling powers of beauty which are so often foregone in workplaces more dedicated to purely economic principles; will no longer have places, and lives, that are outside the simple demands of maximized production.

The Third Circle of Hell: Each Day the Same as the Next. The abandoned scholar will have no recourse to the liturgy of the seasons: the year that breathes between the opening and closing of semesters, the programmed temporal movements between immersion and recovery, between service and discovery. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the rituals that make a calendar into a sacrament. We will instead live within a flattening of time, in which the pressures of “time is money” have made all hours and seasons into fungible commodities. 

The Fourth Circle of Hell: Non-Member Rates. The abandoned scholar will have no access to the common heritage of intellectual life. The library—its books and journals, its databases and collections, its invitation to browse freely rather than be solely strategic—will be supplanted by Google searches for the random, pirated PDF copy of an important article. The abandoned scholar will have no support for memberships in scholarly societies nor to register for and travel to their meetings; their professional community will be replaced by email and LinkedIn. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of serendipity, of bringing intelligent people together to talk freely, and thus to discover fruitful intersections that power new ideas. The abandoned scholar has not merely been abandoned, but undergoes the active process of cashiering, of dishonorable discharge—the ritual disgrace of the fallen officer, stripped of sword and stripe; the service record stricken from history. 

The Fifth Circle of Hell: Free Agency. The abandoned scholar will no longer have a daily community of the like-minded, a cohort that has set aside worldly concerns for the unreasonable pursuit of wisdom. The daily exchange of the secret languages and iconography of one’s field, the collective effort to continually redefine one’s discipline, all will be set aside for the blunt intersections of the co-worker: the project update, the check-in, the annual review. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the commonality of wisdom, the awareness that intellectual life is communal more than individual, that the debate and argument and peer review of scholarly life are all mechanisms through which a community both rises and binds together.

The Sixth Circle of Hell: Billable Hours. The abandoned scholar will no longer have the freedom to take her work wherever her interests might lead, to spend months or years chasing an idea to its natural conclusions. Research will be reduced to fact-finding, strategic planning, product R&D, client service, market forecasts. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the power of curiosity and exploration, the importance of having an entire profession of people who specialize in the things they don’t yet know, the benefits of whose work might arrive in years, or decades, or generations.

The Seventh Circle of Hell: No Thru Traffic. The abandoned scholar, having finished her dissertation, will now find her intellectual path truncated, her enormous work leading to none further, the ladder reduced to a stepstool with no higher levels. That imagined family tree, bearing forty or fifty further years of discovery, has instead been uprooted and burned. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the increasing sophistication of thinking that becomes possible with sustained engagement, of insights that can only fostered by accumulation and repetition. It will lead us toward thinking about the meaning of life, of setting a trajectory of values rather than merely accomplishing goals.

The Eighth Circle of Hell: Barren. The abandoned scholar will have no leverage with which to influence a new generation of young thinkers, will never have a second or third course with a particularly lively undergraduate, will never have graduate students, teaching and research assistants, dissertation advisees. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the lineage of ideas, of the personal evangelism and encouragement that brings new initiates into the faith.

The Ninth Circle of Hell: Ghosted. The abandoned scholar will be excluded from a machine expressly designed to offer all of its participants regular feedback, with extensive individual commentary and recommendation. Whether course grades, student evaluations, peer-review judgments, or tenure and promotion structures, the academic structures of individual appreciation and growth will now forever be closed. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the powers of admiration and recognition, of the emotional value of being meaningfully appreciated.

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I can’t count the number of times when some tenured faculty member, hearing about the indignities of adjunct life, said something about how hard life is for us on the inside, too, you know… To which I can only say, “Trade you.”

Cultures are lived from the inside, but understood from the outside. So it’s no surprise that faculty members might become blind to their blessings, and instead attend to small nuisances. They can take for granted the continuation of things the rest of us can only remember.

I’ve often been criticized for not holding out hope for collective bargaining for adjuncts. And it’s not true. There’s absolutely no justification for paying someone three grand per class with no expectation of renewal, no justification for eliminating someone’s course the day before the semester begins and thus removing even that meager income. I’m all in favor of banding together to change the compensation and work security of the majority of college teachers, and I think that it can actually work a little bit. But for me, the economics have only been a small part of the ache of banishment. Far more important is being told for decades that we belonged, only to discover that paradise was provisional at best. Far more important is being exiled from a community and its language, its patterns and its tools. It’s important to see heaven clearly, to burn its pleasures into mind, so that at least we can comfort ourselves with the paradise we once had.

Lots of discussion in certain circles last week (probably didn’t enter conversation on the porch of the general store, for instance) about the egregious behavior of star chef René Redzepi, of the restaurant sequence Noma. Verbal and physical abuse of his employees for decades, unpaid servitude billed as “internships.” Angry men excused again and again for their behavior because, somehow, they are brilliant. Same thing throughout history in art, in science, in fashion, in architecture, in MFA programs… abuse too often overlooked, or even expected, even celebrated, in the pursuit of the sublime.

Nothing new to see here. What prompted me to write today was Helen Rosner’s very smart article about it all in today’s New Yorker Food Scene newsletter. She raises important questions about what a restaurant is for, but I think she answers them in a way that itself contributes to this culture of abuse.

I think the goals that the restaurant pursues, and that its vast and largely anonymous corps of workers achieve—novelty, technique, narrative, surprise—are, in many ways, the only things that matter in restaurants, once the bare physical fact of hunger has been satiated.

In this formulation, restaurants appear only at the base and the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid. We either eat and survive, or we eat for intellectual stimulation. And I say that misses so many things that a good restaurant can do.

A good restaurant can comfort the exhausted, give us a warm place and a night off.

A good restaurant can be the place where we know we’ll see our friends every Wednesday.

A good restaurant can become the anchor that defines a neighborhood.

A good restaurant can make us feel like friends, welcomed back, celebrated again.

A good restaurant can make its magic visible, without docents, and leave us feeling like we might try something like that ourselves.

A good restaurant can make its workers visible, so that we might appreciate everyone who created our evening.

If you really want to spend $1500 per person to “accept the potential artistic merits of this type of formal play,” that’s fine. You could stack some red-enameled metal in the middle of a city block, too. But you could instead aspire to kindness and welcome, much less expensive and much more accessible.

You may have heard about the red protest hats, drawn from similar hats worn in Norway during the Nazi occupation as a wordless sign of resistance to authoritarianism. The Minnesota fiber store Needle & Skein is selling patterns for knitting and for crocheting at $5 per, and have raised nearly three quarters of a million dollars for immigrant support services by doing so. It’s hard to get red yarn right now because of the power of this moment. Nora has hosted knit-ins for the past three weekends, and everyone in the room has been working on their red hats. We have friends in Canada and in Sweden who’ve knit their own in support.

However, we recently got word of this Instagram post about Crochet.com asking their “influencers” not to mention the name of the company in any posts having to do with the creation of these hats. Apparently, they’re trying to not piss off the petty tyrants in the administration, and would like to just be left alone to make money, please.

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Let’s take a step back. Crochet.com is owned by another company, called Local Crafts. Isn’t that a sweet name… Local Crafts has assembled an extensive roster of fiber-arts companies: Knit Picks, We Crochet, Madeline Tosh, Jimmy Beans Wool, Berroco Yarn, Connecting Threads, HandiQuilter, and Della Q. Probably others. Each of those was started by a person who cared about yarn, about knitting, about fiber arts. And each of them was eventually sold to a company that doesn’t.

From the Local Crafts website, we see that their CEO, Veronica Collins, is “a seasoned ecommerce leader. Veronica has also focused on scaling tech enabled consumer companies across industries both organically and through targeted M&A.” Sounds like every knitter you know, right? And guess where she trained before this MBA word salad? At Amazon and at Bain, Mitt Romney’s old vulture shop.

Local Crafts itself is owned yet further upstream, by Premier Needle Arts, which is a nice shell name for one of the twenty companies or conglomerates owned by Blue Point Capital in Cleveland. Blue Point Capital doesn’t specialize in any particular industry—their companies range from post-fracking industrial washout services to rubber and plastic gasket makers to blank t-shirts and merch for the promotional-printing industry. What they specialize in is operational efficiency for “lower mid-market” companies of $5M to $50M in annual sales. Doesn’t matter what you make, it only matters how much. As the former president of US Steel once said, “We don’t make steel. We make money.”

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I don’t begrudge anyone who comes up with a good idea, builds it, and then later decides to sell the company and buy a house or send their kids to school or whatever. I get that. But what happens far too often is that the company lives on as a zombie, a corpse with no heart left to it, roaming the streets in the lurching pursuit of cash. Madeline Tosh Yarn started out as an Etsy shop twenty years ago. Jimmy Beans was a neighborhood yarn-and-coffee shop in Truckee, California. Knit Picks was launched by a husband and wife who used his engineering and her knitting experience to start manufacturing knitting needles and crochet hooks. In each case, the founders wanted to bring pleasure and human connection. Now those hollow names just shamble through the world consuming dollars. If industrial washout services make more money, yarn will be abandoned without a second thought.

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Four decades ago, I spent a miserable year working in the kitchen at one of the outlets of Bennigan’s Tavern. Bennigan’s Tavern was a subsidiary of Steak and Ale, itself owned by Burger King, itself owned by Pillsbury. In the regular human world, all of these shell companies and holding companies and subsidiary agreements would be called “aliases,” and would mark you as wholly untrustworthy. In the corporate world (and as Mitt says, “corporations are people, my friend“), they’re everyday practice. It’s enormously difficult to untangle who owns what, and it shouldn’t be.

The fiction of the corporate entity allows enormous malfeasance, because everyone is protected from the implications of their decisions. I mean, you can’t blame a zombie for eating brains, right? It’s what they do. But don’t hide behind the name of the corpse. Just call yourselves YarnCo and be honest. Shareholders don’t care what the company makes, as long as it makes money. To quote Napoleon (ruthlessness recognizes ruthlessness), “Money has no motherland. Financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”

I’m doing some assessment research, and one of the steady findings is that students in the program feel less welcomed by the professionals around them at mid-project than they did when they started. This shouldn’t be a surprise. For a lot of people, the day they were hired was the last day anybody told them that they were smart, or that they were valued. After that glorious honeymoon, they’re just furniture. Increasingly familiar, shopworn furniture.

Think about that transition from college or from grad school to workplace. A person goes from having identifiable humans giving them specific feedback on a regular basis to… well, to what? To the mechanical arms of the HR mother, giving annual review notes and a COLA?

That transitional band ought to be a structured adjustment from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, from external rewards to internal satisfactions. But often, it’s just silence. And when the performance monitor suddenly flatlines, we don’t know if the monitor’s unplugged or we’re about to die.

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Let’s talk about intrinsic motivation. It’s easy to get all shouty-grandpa about kids needing constant validation and participation medals, but let’s slow down and think about another aspect of that transition from school to workplace, which is the bait-and-switch. I think about this a lot with architecture students, going from a high-design, high-autonomy environment to being the third desk on the left doing endless flashing details for a branch bank drive-thru. Job titles and job descriptions are largely lies. I once had a job called Director of Research that should actually have been called Director of Justification, because the work was to tell our funders that their programmatic investment had paid off and they should give us another infusion. (And friends, sometimes you have to search through a big old pile of horseshit before you find a pony.)

Before that, I’d finished my dissertation to high acclaim and near-immediate publication, only to find myself a spreadsheet jockey telling my boss how many kids the Butte County Probation Department were likely to have in juvenile custody in thirty years. There wasn’t any intrinsic motivation to be had in that job, which is why they ran through a rotating cast of analyst associates for years. It kept the rent paid and the car fueled, but that’s not enough to make you eager to go to work in the morning.

Far too often, we ask young people to go from a high-autonomy, high-feedback, high-growth environment to a low-autonomy, feedback-starved, static environment, in which the rules of business outweigh the rules of intellectual honesty. And we don’t understand “kids these days…”

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Learn to say thank you, and to remember to do it. Learn to spot the flashes of enthusiasm in the pan, and find ways for that enthusiasm to be challenged and fulfilled. Just because your own job title doesn’t say “mentor” doesn’t mean that you aren’t one, either through action or inaction.

Having gotten the above dog last summer, I’m now going through dog training for the first time. Small treats are a central element of the training. You reward good behavior with a click and a treat, you lure the dog away from bad behavior with a treat, you get the dog’s attention with a treat. And one of the terms of art, when a dog is highly distracted by all the other dogs and handlers and scents in a class setting, is that you might need a “higher-value reward.” [String cheese, as it turns out, is maybe the highest-value treat there is. The gas station convenience store near the training center recently started stocking string cheese just because so many dog owners were stopping in on their way to class. Makes me wonder what proportion of string cheese is going into grade-schoolers’ lunchboxes, and how much is for dog class.]

For me, the highest-value treat in my life was a grade. An A, or a 100, were the core markers that I’d been a good dog, that people loved me. I still remember learning the “times tables” in third grade; every time you felt ready for the next step, you told the teacher that you were ready to do your threes or your fours. Then the teacher’s aide would take you into the next room, and you’d say four times one is four and four times two is eight, and so on through twelve. (Why twelve? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?) If you got it right, your little marker on the chart at the front of the room got moved forward a step. (Why was it important for us to treat this as a competition and introduce shame yet again into some kids’ experience? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?) Anyway, I finished my twelves while everyone else was on fours and fives, and I remember being really disappointed that I couldn’t go on and do thirteens. (Why couldn’t someone be interested enough in something to do more than the curriculum mandated? I don’t know. Why do grown-ups do anything?)

13-26-39-52-65-78-91-104-117-130-143-156-169, and yes, I did that in my head just now, faster than I could type it. Where’s my cheese, bud?

From reading in kindergarten through winning an architectural history award as an undergrad, from multiplication through dissertation, I lived in a world of high-value rewards. I’d done what was asked, done it in an exemplary way, and people loved me.

So what happens when people don’t love you any more? When the rewards don’t match the behavior? When the treat bag goes empty?

More tomorrow.