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The portrait above is a historical recreation by the British artist Geoff Tristram, a 2016 effort to capture the best possible “accuracy” of Shakespeare in advance of the 400th anniversary of his death. I don’t know what Shakespeare’s face looked like, but this dude looks like a writer. The slouch, the sweatpants, the baggy eyes and bad shave, graying at the temples… I’m not a fan of the pinky ring, but in all his other schlubby, rumpled glory, this guy’s got writer stamped all over him.

The artist has fallen into the trope of the author photo: “hey, Will, just look like you’re writing, okay?” Posing with his quill nowhere near where he would have been writing, and his sleeve isn’t dragging fresh ink around. He might as well have his chin in one hand…

We’re in a highly visual age. Cameras are trivially available, and every actor and athlete and pop star has to be a model as well. It’s not enough to be good at something, you have to be good at it and cute, too. It’s a burden too far for some of us.

Nobody knew what Shakespeare looked like except for his neighbors, his friends at the pub, and the actors who put on his little shows. His manuscripts didn’t have an author photo on the back. Likewise Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, or pretty much every author until about 1970. We might have seen a photo in the paper, might have seen them on Dick Cavett, but the fact of an author photo actually attached to the book is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that I think should never happen again.

They say in the law that if the facts are on your side, argue the facts; if the law is on your side, argue the law; and if neither are on your side, bang on the table. So the author photo is definitely not on my side, though I hope that the language might be. And I’ve got a decent voice (“a face made for radio,” as the old joke has it), so maybe those two out of the three will work.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Colleges contain rituals that are inexplicable when examined from outside. In the Midwest, we called one of those rituals wapatuli. Elsewhere, it’s known as jungle juice, hairy buffalo, or most literally, trashcan punch. Everyone at a party brings a bottle of some cheap liquor and dumps it all into a trash can, along with a gallon or two of sticky-sweet fruit juice. After five or six Solo cups’ worth every Friday and Saturday for a semester, it just seems normal.

Wapatuli-like ideas are all throughout higher education. At the urging of private colleges and adjunct teachers alike, California’s pending Assembly Bill 1466 would designate part-time college teachers as exempt employees, not subject to overtime laws. Nobody seems to be arguing that adjuncts should actually be paid better, just that they should be spared the inconvenience and degradation of punching the clock (and that their employers should be “exempt” from paying adequate wages).The whole thing is a trashcan punch. The way we think about adjuncts isn’t a conscious recipe, it’s just a bunch of bad labor ideas dumped into a bucket.

The point of adjuncts is to purchase teaching at reduced expense and reduced obligation. That’s bad idea #1, that “teaching” is a commodity crop, interchangeable across providers. If someone chooses not to do it for a terrible price, we can always find someone else who will. Quantity (measured in “content” or “units”) is paramount and quality irrelevant.

A second bad idea is to assume we know how long teaching takes, in general or in particular. Let’s say a college pays its adjuncts $3000 per three-credit course. Does that course have twelve students or thirty-five? Is it writing-focused with innumerable hours of review time, quiz-focused with a little homework grading, or a studio arts course in which an instructor could do one-on-one, in-class reviews with no homework whatsoever? The uniform registrar’s record of the credit does not translate to any knowable amount of instructional work.

Given the broad variation in out-of-class demands, the time card starts to look reasonable, allowing us to bill for all those late nights at the kitchen table…  except that in most hourly-wage environments, workers are under direct supervision. That raises our third bad idea: that we don’t want to spend any time actually supervising adjuncts. That leaves no way to keep fraudulent people from padding their hours, nor to help well-meaning teachers become more efficient or more effective. (If we actually paid $15 an hour for teaching work in a writing-intensive course of thirty students, it would probably run seven or eight thousand dollars per course even for a relatively efficient instructor. So we’d have to put some kind of ceiling on compensation, taking us right back to bad idea #2.)

Bad idea #4 is that hourly wages are demeaning, an oddly class-deaf argument. I’ve had hourly jobs, as well as salaried jobs in which I kept a billable-hours program running on my laptop. None of those is inherently a less respectful way of getting paid, they’re just different kinds of labor agreements with different kinds of outcomes. If tracking my hours gets me a weekend, that’s a win. But salaries equal “professions” and wages equal “jobs,” and one is good, and one is bad. With adjuncts treated as badly as they are, three thousand dollars for a course just feels better than eight or nine dollars an hour, even if they’re factually equivalent, and a salary or a contract just feels better than a time card.

Salaries themselves are part of bad idea #5, that employment should have no limits. Salaries, and e-mail, and the endless expansion of workplace engagement, are an integral part of contemporary American culture. “On the clock” will soon be as meaningless an expression as “dial the phone” or “hit rewind,” because nobody will remember that there ever was a clock.

Finally, bad idea #6 transcends the others: that healthcare and old-age safety both rely on employment status. It’s no wonder that employment conditions are so fraught; the definition of a “position” includes the most basic conditions of survival.

So there’s six bad ideas stirred together, probably with a canoe paddle, in a thirty gallon plastic bin. And just as wapatuli cannot be made better by exchanging Stonecutter gin for the Captain Morgan, adjunctification cannot be made better by instituting one modification to a tub filled with other horrible ideas. A college that relies heavily on adjunct faculty is just as juvenile an experience as a frat party, getting wasted as cheaply as we can rather than considering the larger joys and wisdom of careful hospitality. Changing one ingredient or another is not going to fix the problem. We have to face the debasement of our faculty and students head on, and not pretend we can make decent drinks from this trashcan punch.

One of the great blessings of having written The Adjunct Underclass is that a huge number of people have reached out to tell me what the book has meant to them, or to tell me their own story. But sometimes, people reach out to disagree. To tell you that what you’ve written has hurt them.

Last summer, I was at a writers’ conference, and one of the facilitators, the poet Patricia Smith, said that writers have the right to write about anything or anyone we find interesting… but that we have the responsibility to stay and be part of the conversation that writing generates. To hear back from our readers, about their satisfactions and about their complaints.

This week’s story has done that. I’ve had readers tell me how much they appreciated it… had another reader tell me that it wasn’t my story to tell. So I hope I’ll hear from you as well. I always want not merely to be a better craftsperson, but a more generous storyteller. So let me know how that’s going for you, with this week’s story, “Angels Among Us.”

There’s a lot of churn at the college executive level, as schools try to figure out which programs to bolster and which to trim away, what kinds of student support are essential and which could be expanded even further. And although the questions to those should be informed by data, I think that they can’t be determined by data. Those questions, and hundreds of others, are ultimately expressions of values. And without expressly naming those values, we run the danger of building incoherence, of building a college at cross purposes with itself as one unit goes one way and another unit stands in opposition.

I’d like to name four core questions that any college (or really, schools at all levels) should deliberate carefully, and come to at least some tenuous collective agreement upon. The collective answers to these questions will, I believe, deliver some first principles that almost all other decisions can stand upon.

Question One: Who owns children? That is, are educators in the business of serving parents? Or serving the state’s department of labor? Or serving a leading local employer? Or serving God, as you imagine him or her or it to be? Or serving students themselves? Whose proxy is a school voting? On whose basis do we act?

Question Two: Are people fundamentally individuals, deserving rights? Or are we fundamentally members of a community, fulfilling responsibilities? Are we in service to individual or collective goals?

Question Three: What should all humans do before they die? What are the irreplaceable elements of a well-lived life?

Question Four: Is education primarily in preparation for, or primarily an experience of? Is it an investment, or a worthy period of life on its own?

None of the answers to any of these questions are right or wrong. But they will be absolutely distinct, and lead us in absolutely different directions of daily action. And like good social science questions, they are independent of one another: the answer to one does not determine the answer to the rest. So if we imagine that each question has n responses, then this simple array of questions will lead us to n to the fourth kinds of colleges, and they will look remarkably different from one another.

I wrote this story in Fall 2006, and I thought it was done. But then, a couple of years ago, a chance conversation brought it back, and I wrote it again, modifying what I had and adding a whole new second half. It’s called “My Cupcake Pal”

A week or so ago, I wrote about being stuck with my next story until the right characters arrived to tell it to me. Well, they’re here. I don’t know their names yet, and I don’t know the rest of the people around them yet, but I know exactly what they look like, and how they move, and how they sound, and why they love each other even though they don’t like each other at all.

They’ve been at each other a lot in the last few days, and I’ve eavesdropped on all of it.

Here’s one of them, who plays a large role in the introductory chapter. I know his name: it’s Amicus. The two main characters use Amicus as a mode of nonverbal communication, since they can hardly stand to talk to each other directly any more.

Lots and lots and lots more to come…

This week’s audio story is a character sketch of a quiet, focused man. Get yourself into a Zen place to listen to this… the pace and detail is part of the character. It’s called “Dead Air.”

Old vaudeville joke: There’s two kinds of people in the world—the ones that believe there’s two kinds of people in the world, and the ones that don’t.

I like binaries. Never to claim that they’re the only way of seeing the world, but as a way of making a decision clear. What does it mean to be T and not R? Do I see myself as more aligned with C, or with J? Do you want what’s behind Door Number One, or Door Number Two? It’s only through sitting patiently with the Hegelian dialectic of thesis and antithesis, through taking those differences seriously, that we can approach synthesis.

Historically, investigative methods have been bifurcated into deductive logic and inductive logic. In deductive research, one begins from a theory to create a hypothesis about some untested situation, and then creates a test that will or will not validate the hypothesis. In inductive research, one immerses oneself into some situation, and examines it without a lot of preconceived ideas until some mode of organization and explanation presents itself.

Throughout research history, different thinkers have stated this same bifurcation in ways that reflected their era and their interests. So Thomas Kuhn, in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions (1962), spoke of “normal science” that crept forward incrementally along knowable paths, and “paradigmatic science,” the revolutionary moments in which some thinker accepted all of the available evidence but created a new and more expansive way of putting it together. Ten years later, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber proposed the idea of “tame problems” that responded to rules, and “wicked problems” that could neither be defined nor solved. In the first half of the 20th century, the phenomenologists asked us to “bracket” all of our definitions and schemes and just look at the thing in itself, the etre-en-soi. And at the beginning of the 21st, Zadie Smith identified writers as “micro-managers” probing forward a line at a time with no sense of the end, or “master planners,” those who build the story’s frame and then fill it in.

I’m an inductive thinker, and I specifically chose to look at American cities through an interdisciplinary program. My research on teenagers in a suburban community could have been done in an urban planning program, or in a sociology program, or in cultural geography or anthropology or folklore or material culture or American studies. I started with the kids and their places, and read whatever material I could get my hands on that helped me frame some of the questions that those kids and places raised for me. My doctoral program was housed in an architecture department, so I have a PhD in architecture, which is a meaningless shelf tag for the things I know and do. My dissertation committee came from architectural history, psychology, art history, geography, and fiction writing. Every one of them helped me see something new in the phenomena I was curious about.

—*—

I write about all this today because I’ve been a little stuck in my fiction writing in the last couple of months. I finished a book-length story back in July, and wrote a short story in August, but for the past five or six weeks, I’ve felt dry. So I’ve come up with probably two dozen different frames for a new piece of work, all of which have failed to launch because they’ve been deductive. “I could write about two women struggling for respect in a traditionally male profession.” “I could write about a teenaged table tennis player and his endless labor to reach the top of a profession that no one cares about.” “I could write about the quartermaster of a military campaign, and the ways that getting materials and food to the troops won a war.” And on, and on, and on. All of them stories about generic ideas, not stories of specific people and their problems.

Hilary Mantel once talked about the experience of starting to write The Giant, O’Brien. She said that she had to wait until O’Brien came to visit her—she writes of him as a fully corporeal person, not a creation—and that when he came into the room, he ducked to get through the door, and then visibly tested the chair to see whether it would bear his weight. And only then did she feel that she knew him well enough to tell his story.

And that’s really it. I’ve been willful in the past few weeks, deductive. I haven’t been patient enough to sit quietly and see who’ll walk through the door. A story isn’t mine to create, any more than I could have imagined in advance how all those kids would use their bedrooms and living rooms, would walk the streets and the vacant lots, would inhabit their cars and beaches. The story belongs to the people I write about; it’s my job to be quiet and attentive, and to tell it on their behalf.

I’ve been working to learn the software and techniques of audio production for my short stories. The first two were fairly straightforward, but this third one…

Nonetheless, “Off Tag” is now complete as a 30-minute audio short. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

A few years ago, I was with Nora in New York, and as she was shopping at the vendors in the Union Square Park craft fair, I was watching a game of blitz chess out on the sidewalk, a full game with five minutes per player and twenty bucks on the line. A young man was in a seemingly weak position, and his older opponent charged in. The young man, having set the trap, then made a quick, unseen move, reversing the game to his own victory within the next two moves. He began to set the board for his next game, and said, “wouldn’t it be nice if it were so simple…”

I was an awful chess player in junior high and high school, but I played a lot, and still retain some affection for it even though I haven’t touched a board in thirty years. It’s like math in that way. It’s just intellectually elegant in a way that few other endeavors can touch, and you occasionally remember that you used to be able to do it, now that life has become less clear.

I just read a book about chess that actually felt like that game in Union Square: Sasha Chapin’s All The Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love, and Ruining Everything. He lulls you in, then snaps you to attention with something you hadn’t expected.

On its surface, Chapin’s story is one of obsession, the ways in which chess becomes so compelling to him that he often loses track of the rest of his life. Work, girlfriends, food, sleep, all secondary to staying up for yet another game of online chess. In fact, he describes those other things with such a light touch that they become unimportant to us as well. Now he’s in Kathmandu, now in Bangkok, now in New York, now in Toronto, now in St. Louis. Now he’s with Courtney, now with Elena, now with Sundae, now with Katherine. None of those are shown to us in enough detail that they matter at all, and we start to zone out, wallowing in his languid inner life. Then, without warning, the easy monologue reveals the blade:

Lacking any responsibility, I went to bed at 6 am every night, watching the gelid early morning crawl across my filthy feet. Seventy percent of my diet was salty snacks in shiny bags. It got to a point where I realized that I was walking quickly around my apartment because I was fleeing my own smell. (43)

That’s the sharpest description of lonely despair I’ve ever read, its suddenness like a bishop rushed forward from the back rank to change the tone of the game.

Chapin does that quite a lot in this book, letting us imagine that we understand something—his inner life, a relationship with a coach, what chess means—and then in a bold stroke, showing us that we don’t. He plays that way, too, with a desire for the impulsive reversal, the incontrovertibly brilliant strategy. As with his writing, it means that he isn’t paying all that much attention most of the time, but once in a while, comes to life.

Badly played chess is kind of like badly played life. Real problems are dealt with poorly or not at all, while much effort is expended on avoiding imaginary danger. (34)

Being the kind of writer I am—a memoirist, I guess— has always struck me as a little sad, because it means that I’m constantly wondering whether any definable portion of my experience is marketable. I’m forever observing myself from a mercantile perspective, noting whether any of my minor melancholies or brief decomposures might be salable. Essentially, I’m a parasite on my own life. (67)

…if there’s one thing that particularly distinguishes us [as humans], it has to be abstraction. The way we take our fleshy, silt-covered world and cover it with metaphors, maps, formulas, and poems—how we incessantly make wickedly complicated models of everything we live in. According to us, the sea is wine-dark, the earth is composed of metropolitan areas, and some numbers are irrational. (89)

Los Angeles is where dreams die. All day, the waiters realize that they’ll never be actors, and the actors realize that they’ll never be famous, and the famous slowly dry out under the nearly narcotic sun that falls on all the facades of the hot, sprawling city, clustered together in bright clumps like dirty candy. (172)

Like chess and baseball and soccer and bass fishing, Chapin’s book cries out for this kind of highlight-reel coverage, a few transformative moments lifted from what might otherwise seem like drudgery. A different kind of writer would help us see the steady beauty within the quiet. A different kind of writer would play a different kind of chess.