Category: Yellow Pine Journalism

Lately someone anonymous has been sending artisanal cured meats – charcuterie – to the Lost Art Press storefront. Addressed to “Professor Bespokus,” each small package has contained two lovely sausages but no indicator as to who sent them.

The meats aren’t poisonous (I had Megan and Brendan try them out, and they suffered no ill effects). And the meaty delights have become an important part of our lunchtime ritual at the shop.

So whoever you are, oh meat patron, we thank you.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. And if you don’t get the “Professor Bespokus” joke, read this blog entry and it should make (some) sense.

This morning about 4 a.m. I sat bolt upright in bed when the bells at the Niederaltaich Abbey began making an end-of-the-world clanging. Instead of cursing, however, I laid back and felt a small measure of solidarity with the noisemakers.

One of the things I love about teaching (or assisting a teacher) is listening to the students discuss how they accumulate woodworking knowledge. During the last few years of careful listening, I can see how I – as a communicator – am becoming obsolete.

This is not a complaint. I welcome my obsolescence and am happy to stare at it in the face over a beer.

For now, the world belongs to the YouTube woodworker. Advertisers – even car companies – are pouring money into the sector. More important, my students’ conversations revolve around the personalities, projects and exploits of the YouTubers.

This is not a complaint. Maintaining a YouTube channel is damn hard work. Finding an audience has always been the key to surviving in the media profession. And I’ve never chased advertising dollars.

Video is not for me. For me, the best way to learn woodworking is through print and in person. Video bores me to tears. (Yes, I’ve done it. I hated it. I did it to please people I like – not myself.) My brain sees video as inefficient. “Skipping to the good parts” never works. So I have concluded that I have a fundamental disconnect. I would rather read a book, draw on a sheet of paper or go to the dentist than watch someone on my phone build something.

It might have something to do with the way I view sports. I love to play. I hate to watch.

All this is to say that I can feel myself hunkering down for a long winter. Print is – for the most part – in decline. I refuse to give up on it. In fact, I have structured my life so that even if print is flushed down the toilet, processed at a waste treatment plant and then squirted out at some sausage plant in New Jersey, you can’t put me out of business.

My plan is to make woodworking books until I die. Our audience might defect to the short-shorts and man-bun dancing monkeys, but I’ve decided to let the people in 50 or 60 years decide if John and I are doing the right thing.

After you’re worm food and cannot rise to your own defense, that’s the true test.

This idea saturates me here at Niederaltaich Abbey, where I’m teaching woodworking for the next seven days. For the most part, the world has left the monks here behind. And they live a life that is entrenched in an older way.

Brown robes are not my thing (my color analyst says I’m a winter), but yeah, I feel it. Especially at 4 a.m.

— Christopher Schwarz

 

This morning I freaked out a bit. Tomorrow I head to Dictum GmbH’s classroom at Niederaltaich Abbey, and I realized that I’ve forgotten my universal translator.

The universal translator has nothing to do with transforming my English to German (the class is taught in English with German curse words and American showtunes). Instead, the universal translator is a tape measure that has both U.S. Customary Units (inches) and metric.

This way I can translate my drawings and instruction into metric without asking (for the thousandth time): An inch is about 25mm, right?

So I stopped in a hardware store in Munich named Suckfüll. It was a small store, smaller than your neighborhood ACE or DoItBest, but it had a shockingly good selection of woodworking tools. As I was looking for tape measures, I stumbled on traditional beech try squares (where both the blade and handle are wood) in several sizes. And miter squares that were also 100 percent wood.

The last time I saw that in the U.S. was never.

A little farther down the aisle and there was a complete selection of Two Cherries bench chisels, more than I’ve ever seen in a Woodcraft. Next to that – a full selection of carving tools. I turned around – wooden jointer planes and smoothing planes. And a full line of wooden-handled screwdrivers.

Lest you think this was a woodworking specialty store, the rest of the place was filled with typical hardware store stuff. Light fixtures, extension cords and small appliances.

Sadly, the only thing they didn’t have that I really wanted was Suckfüll T-shirts.

— Christopher Schwarz

“A wise man once said: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

— Chapter 10, “Legion”