As schools around the country at every level make plans for the strangest fall in a good while, it’s hard to balance expectations from the former times against the realities of today. Some folks are worried because school won’t look anything like it has in the past. Kids staying put in one room the whole day! Not eating in the cafeteria! The desks so far apart! And so on. Often an old guard out of school for some time and far from decision making, they fret that what schools propose, the hybrid and adapted models, simply won’t work. It’s not what school is, because it’s not what school was for them. School has got to be face-to-face this fall. Not because it’s safe, but because that’s the way it is. This nostalgic concern cannot be allowed to hinder a well–planned return to school.
It’s not like it used to be is a perfectly natural reaction to, like, everything right now. I say it’s an old guard fretting, but all us veterans of the before times have had the feeling. We’re all grasping for anchors to hold us to life in a previous world. But we must be careful. It’s not like it used to be often precedes so why bother. It stifles a solutions–oriented conversation that we desperately need to have. It quashes the kind of creative thinking thinking necessary to make the start of school as small a disaster as possible.
We have to put aside all memories of school as it was. We must imagine school without cafeterias, without passing time. We must imagine making older students caretakers of the younger, providing daycare for parents who have to go back to work. We must escape the confines of brick-and-mortar buildings and imagine classes in tents on the lawn. We must imagine remote learning. Not because any of these things are the solution, alone or together, in a given place. Not because they are ideal. But because—however little they resemble school as we knew it before—they are possible.
There is a legitimate kind of practical concern: do we have the space, the personnel, the budget, to make our plans work. Practical concerns abound, but they can be solved for. To say that the situation is far from ideal, while true, is not solvable. Not one administrator I’ve heard of is *ahem* remotely happy to be doing remote learning this fall. No one on any side of the system is looking forward to week-on-week-off hybrid formats. Schools are planning for these possibilities because they have to: it’s their task to solve the problem. Unideal solutions are our best chance to keep students, faculty, staff, and every person in every freaking community in these United States safe.
We need to act boldly, and right now. We need to think openly about what is possible in the future, free from the stubborn limits of what things were like before. Because the future, for schools, is coming up fast.
“I just do the work that is in front of me,” says Jessa Crispin (via Austin Kleon). “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” says Annie Dillard (via Maria Popova).
Do the work that’s in font of you; spend your days as you would spend your life. As a person, I want so badly to live up to these words. As a musician, I know I have to. The music demands it. To do good work bit by daily bit, and then build up the work of days into progress over time, is the definition of practice. Without practice no skill can save you. I believe this. I know this. And still. Still I find it so hard. After months of basically not practicing organ at all, I’m trying to get back to basics. I’m trying to get some work done at the keyboard. I’m trying to practice again.
Practicing music is one of those habits, like exercise, that’s easier to fall out of than it is to get into. Would that it were the other way around, like nail–biting or doomscrolling. As it is, it’s one of those things that’s dastardly easy to manage not to do. It’s not that I’m doing anything instead of practicing: I have plenty of spare time in my summer days. And it’s not at all inconvenient: I have a piano upstairs and a digital keyboard downstairs and an organ at church, just a two-minute bike ride away, that I can play any time of night or day. I have the time and the means. But I’m out of the habit.
Practicing is also… not entirely pleasant? My teacher sometimes calls practice “doing the dirty laundry.” Boring, perhaps, but necessary—don’t do it and you’ll stink. Again, I believe this. I know this. And still. It’s not exactly an encouraging start to know how much of a slog a practice session will be. Organ practice means getting all the fingers and both feet to do the right thing at exactly the right time, all together. This means going v e r y, v e r y slowly and repeating the movements over and over and over and over again until they come naturally from kinetic memory. Maybe some folks find the repetition meditative or relaxing or something. I never have. Some must find joy in it. Lately, I haven’t, as much as I’d like to.
Part of the problem is that I have all this music from the spring semester that I can play so well! Some of these pieces I’ve been working on since last fall or longer, perfecting and tweaking, to get up to performance level. But I can’t keep on repeating the same old stuff. I do want to learn new pieces, which means doing the often unpleasant work.
Everything is new and hard. I’ve been away a long time. But I’m trying.
I don’t like to set no–fail goals, but any kind of playing time is critically important right now. So I’ve put one absolutely essential, necessary, no-failure-allowed item on my calendar. Be on the bench practicing for an hour, at least, every day. No exceptions. This is the only way I know to build back up the habit of regular practice.
Hopefully, I can start to do the work in front of me again, to order my days more as I’d like them to be. It’s rough going here at the start. I’m occasionally still failing to get my no–fail hour in—okay, more than occasionally. And the hours I get are never the most productive they could be. Day by day, though, I’m making progress. Learning. And I’m feeling, faintly, the joy that’s possible in the slow regard and perfect execution of little things. I’m hoping that joy will grow; only time will tell.
I read Senator Joni Ernst’s Ending Taxpayer Funding of Anarchy Act, mostly because the title made me lol, and because I try to keep up with what the Iowa delegation is up to in Congress.
The bill’s ultimate purpose (beyond scoring some law & order points and media coverage &c.) is obviously to take federal funding away from the state of Washington and the city of Seattle specifically for not sending in the National Guard to level CHAZ. The Autonomous Zone is clearly what the bill has in view when it defines an “anarchist jurisdiction.” According to the bill, an anarchist jurisdiction is a state or political subdivision of a State that purposefully—
abdicate[s] the reserved powers of the State or political subdivision of the State, to be performed by non–governmental actors in a manner that is detrimental to the health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of the State, or political subdivision of the State
Some notes and nitpicks:
One: If the abdication results in an exercise of power that isn’t detrimental to but actually improves the welfare of the citizenry, such a place wouldn’t be an anarchist jurisdiction by this definition. You could argue that exercise of the police power in this country by government actors has long and often comprised an abuse of that power and a perversion of the stated purposes of the government. That the state, not anarchists, have exercised powers in a manner detrimental to the health, safety, and welfare of citizens is exactly what BLM is protesting.
Two: The bill’s definition of non–governmental actor specifically—
Does not include a nonprofit organization.
So if the people of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone want to keep receiving those sweet sweet federal dollars, all they need to do is get organized enough to fill out their 501(c) forms and become a nonprofit. Because government without paperwork is anarchy!
Really, the point is that the bill is ill–formed and pointless. It shows the limits of compatibility between two things that modern American conservatives claim to love: states’ rights/limited federal powers (for policing is certainly a State and local concern) and a vision of national law & order
Sometimes I think about these lines from Richard Hofstadter’s the paranoid style in american politics:
However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well–financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well–being and safety would become impossible.
Here are some things I love about the introduction to Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer:
One: the brief explanation of what the book is. Dreyer introduces himself, his job (copy chief of Random House), and what exactly he does in that job. The book, Dreyer writes, is a chance to share some of the skills that he’s gained over years of work in proofreading and copyediting, “from the nuts-and-bolts stuff that even skilled writers stumble over to some of the fancy little tricks [he’s] come across or devised that can make even skilled writing better.”
Two: the clear explanation of what the book is not. Dreyer isn’t writing a new be-all-end-all manual. No one book can cover everything, he writes, and no two books can agree on anything anyway. He’s not writing a ponderous new tome, a new edition of what he calls a “big fat stylebook;” he wouldn’t dare. Here be the caveat, the hey! look out! beware! This may not be exactly the book you want. This book can’t be everything to everyone.
Three: with these caveats in mind, a more specific follow–up explanation of what the book is—
In setting out to write this book, I settled on my own ground rules: that I would write about the issues I most often run across while copyediting and how I attempt to address them, about topics where I thought I truly had something to add to the conversation, and about curiosities and arcana that interested or simply amused me.
If all this seems like run of the mill organizing-your-writing stuff, well, I guess it is. You introduce your topic, you narrow your topic. But Number Two, the what-it’s-not, is super important and not entirely common. Sometimes the best way to focus is this kind of pruning around the edges. It’s good for both author and reader. It prevents the author from claiming too much competence or stretching their topic too far. It says, I could talk about all of these larger orbital points, but that’s too broad for today. I could drill down on all of these smaller sub-points, but that’s too specific for today. Making clear what-it’s-not puts guardrails up at both sides of the topic. These guardrails help the reader as well; they manage expectations. The reader has an honest chance to stop reading if the book isn’t shaping up to be what they had in mind. It’s hard to complain that something you think is essential wasn’t mentioned when the author told you up front that it
wouldn’t be.
In just a few paragraphs, Dreyer anticipates what a reader might expect from a book like his. If you want a banterful approach to common questions peppered with some occasional trivia, step right up. If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide, look elsewhere. I’d like to think this saved Dreyer from some angry Twitter mentions. I’m not sure, but I suspect—unfortunately—not. Nonetheless, carefully putting up guardrails is a sign of his integrity.
Four: an address of one more expectation before the book begins. Library shelves are chock full of stylebooks that hand down Law to their readers. They speak with such authority. Ask and they have a good reason. Some people look to books like these precisely for this kind of confidence. In contrast, in Dreyer’s last ground rule, he bares his humanity—
I would remember, at least every now and then, to own up to my own specific tastes and noteworthy eccentricities and allow that just because I think something is good and proper and nifty you don’t necessarily have to.
This is the caveat to end all caveats. The most beautiful admission. I love it for its honesty. It strips away all the snooty know–better pretension that troubles so many books in this genre—so many books, period. This stuff may be my job, it says, but a lot of this is gonna be my opinion. And even expert opinions are but opinions in the eyes of God. It admits a weakness of our human brains: we like to have a reason for things, even when we don’t actually have a reason. We post–rationalize to ourselves and to others. We like to justify. We crave good reasons.
But real reasons are often not rational. Dreyer is rare among grammar gurus (and authors generally (and people generally)) for so frankly admitting this. Some important things we can argue about logically, and should. Other things, like matters of style, say, aren’t all that important. When the time comes to lay down a law he can’t explain, Dreyer doesn’t shy away. He doesn’t add to the heap of false and pointless arguments. He admits that sometimes it comes down to a person’s preferences. So when he makes grand pronouncements later on, we know they come from one place and one place only: his opinion.
Dreyer writes that it isn’t the job of the copyeditor to overshadow the voice of the author. It isn’t the job of the copyeditor to standardize all writing with the bludgeon of universal Law. It isn’t the job of the copyeditor to impose their will in order to crush an author’s idiosyncrasies.
It is is their job to help the author along, to make them stronger and clearer, to make them… more themselves than they could be alone. How wonderful it might be if we did that in all our writing—in all our interactions with one another. Not insist that our way is the one true way. Not burden with grave importance every argument we make. Rather, make clear exactly what we mean and identify precisely what’s at stake; draw out and revel in the differences that make but little difference in the end; when tempted to argue over little things, refrain; and help each other be the better people we can be.