The Wit’s Guide to Maintenance

Or, up with upkeep

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Detail from Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art © Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Everyone wants to buy you a puppy. No one wants to buy food for said puppy. (“I’m hungry,” said puppy.) I borrowed that observation from David Cooper, a transit consultant who was telling the Toronto Star about the city’s problems funding transit, but he may well have been talking about maintenance. Or puppies.

“After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
— Mierle Laderman Ukeles

The patron saint of modern maintenance is the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. She is the living response (at age 87!) to Cyril Connolly’s observation that “there is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” Ukeles was an accomplished artist when she had her first child in 1968, and said child went into that pram. (“Push me,” said child.) And, Ukeles recalls, “people said to me, when they saw me pushing my baby carriage, “Do you do anything?“...Then I had an epiphany... I have the freedom to name maintenance as art. I can collide freedom into its supposed opposite and call that art. I name necessity art.”

“My life is a constant struggle between the maintenance of my apartment and the maintenance of my sanity.”
— Fran Lebowitz

Ukeles’ works include painstakingly scrubbing the steps of a museum and a Japanese snowplow ballet performed in the middle of summer (“I asked ‘people believe you are the heroes in winter’ when I met snow-clearing workers and they answered ‘yes’. I then continued ‘but people forget about you in summer’ and they grinned and said ‘yes’. I said ‘why not remind them of your presence this summer’.) She was named the first-ever artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation in 1977 and her 1979-80 magnum opus, Touch Sanitation Performance involved her personally greeting and thanking the more than 8,500 people responsible for taking out New York’s trash.

“There’s birth, there’s death, and in between there’s maintenance.”
— Tom Robbins

Is Ukeles underappreciated because she’s a woman or because she chose to focus on maintenance? Yes. If you define art as innovation, maintenance is the opposite. Make it new, Ezra Pound said, leaving someone else to dust the old.

“Women are the true maintenance class. Society is built upon their acquiescence and upon their small and necessary labours.”
— Phyllis Diller

And so arrives Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, the new book by hippie prophet Stewart Brand that puts the man in manifesto. His subjects: Guns! Cars! Solo sailing around the world! Assault rifles! YouTube teardown videos! Rocketry! The also-87-year-old founder of The Whole Earth Catalog celebrates such classics as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and admits that he’s a reluctant convert to maintenance as the underpinning of civilization. “Maybe we prefer to think in ideals,” he writes, “and the gritty reality of things constantly decaying and breaking offends our sense of the world.” One of the sailors he profiles refers to it as “sailorizing.” It’s the whole job.

“If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra

If Brand succeeds in making maintenance an avatar of manliness, great: Everything needs upkeep and everyone needs to pitch in. But there’s a scent of Columbusing about the project, a discovering that’s more of a noticing. “This book, I’m pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general,” Brand writes — so general, in fact, that not a single woman is mentioned. But someone washed the steps that Brand walks. Ukeles’ manifesto predates Brand’s by 56 years, and the ideas of said manifesto were built to last. (“Keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advanced; renew the excitement; repeat the flight,” said manifesto.)

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“My mother used to say that the best way to keep a man is in a jar of formaldehyde.”
— Dorothy Parker

I didn’t intend to write about gendered maintenance! And yet the prospects of duelling 87-year-olds captivated me. This week we replaced the ice maker on our 10-year-old fridge and I’m happy about it. Next week?

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I’ve had a good long think about what to do for the scores of paying subscribers to this newsletter. For almost two years, I commissioned Riposte Cards, beautifully illustrated quips created by artists I admire. Then I made Aphoristicks, a series of witty stickers. In between, there was Recommentions, a catalogue of all the best books, movies, shows, and spectacles referenced herein. And all the while, I felt like a passenger on the sinking ship that is Canada Post.

Now, thanks in part to the Ninety-Second Get Wit Quick Reader Survey that only took you three minutes to complete and served as a balm to my spirits, I figured something else out: We’re in this together. The esoteric ephemera and random connections that deliver the dopamine for me each week do the same for you. This clever community is what it’s all about.

So, you guys write the newsletter from now on while I sip mai tais by the pool. No! I don’t even like mai tais!

First, I’ll now be calling my paying subscribers my Supporters, because that’s what you’re doing. (Those who pay a bit more are heretofore known as Generous Supporters). When you plunk down some dinero, I’ll mail you a welcome package of all the analog ephemera I’ve created over the years. And every month, I’ll curate a special issue for Supporters called Get Wit Picks, wherein we share the great quotes, books, movies, ideas, zingers, aphorisms, and logical twists that have recently inspired, amused, intrigued, and jollified us. I imagine it as a top-notch creative recommendation engine for enthusiasms powered by this clever community, and I can’t wait to see what it produces. Supporters, I’ll follow up with you wonderful people shortly. Everyone else, thank you for reading and do consider jumping on this brilliant bandwagon!

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Get Wit Quick No. 357 is in its maintenance phase. But also innovation! And, per Jack Donaghy, innovention. And I don’t not like mai tais. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Dust off the ❤️ below with a tap.