The Kabuff: My Desk

“Otto’s name for the corner of the basement where my desk is located was the German ‘Kabuff,’ but that word implies a dark, dusty studio, and my stateside kabuff is ‘a clean, well-lighted place’ to steal a phrase from Hemingway. The 45 years I’ve been in the clutches of the kabuff have been one of the solitary luxuries of my life though I’ve not always been alone. If the grandchildren were visiting, they were often drawn like iron filings to my ‘magnetic’ desk where they began to draw, color, or explore my cartoon and picture files. To protect our sane asylum, I posted the following signs: ‘No stupid people,’ ‘Caution: irony,’ ‘You’re not in Kansas anymore,’ and ‘Trespassers will be wedgied.’”—Skip Eisiminger

Skip the B.S.

By Dr. Skip Eisiminger (aka The Wordspinner)

I.“It is inevitably oneself that one collects.”—Jean Baudrillard

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Hubris)—May 2025—Over the 42 years I taught English and interdisciplinary humanities at Clemson University, students arriving at my office door were greeted by what must have been a bewildering array of passive-aggressive cartoons, photographs, and quotations. These were taped, glued, and thumb-tacked to my door, door frame, and bulletin board. 

I’m not sure where the impulse arose, but it might have been Emerson’s advice to write “whim” on “the lintel of your door post.” I had no such romantic pretense; I only wanted to introduce myself to those waiting for an audience in my chambers. Many times, I arrived, and finding students perusing my door, I was reluctant to interrupt them. Often, they were not my own, but I was always pleased that someone was paying attention to this vast, incremental work in progress. When I departed 808 Strode, I used a razor blade to peel off each of 754 items, which I then glued to 39 3×5 cards.

Over the years I was curating my office door (“My Office Door At Clemson U,” Hubris, March 2011), a similar but more private work was in progress at home: this was my six-foot tall by six-foot wide desk, which included a large cork board on the wall behind the writing surface, as well as ten shelves and six drawers. I bought this massive but primitive structure from Jim Angevine Lewis, a fellow undergraduate who’d built it from two 8’ x 4’ x 3/4” sheets of plywood and 28’ of 11” x 3/4” shelving in 1963. In 1970, with the help of Otto, my German father-in-law-cabinetmaker, we added a hinged door to cover three of the open shelves, covered the rough plywood edges with some sculpted molding, doweled or screwed all the joints, added an overhead lamp, and painted it all antique red. Though I’ve moved it three times, it remains stubbornly part of the family.

Otto’s name for the corner of the basement where my desk is located was the German “Kabuff,” but that word implies a dark, dusty studio, and my stateside kabuff is “a clean, well-lighted place” to steal a phrase from Hemingway. The 45 years I’ve been in the clutches of the kabuff have been one of the solitary luxuries of my life though I’ve not always been alone. If the grandchildren were visiting, they were often drawn like iron filings to my “magnetic” desk where they began to draw, color, or explore my cartoon and picture files. To protect our sane asylum, I posted the following signs: “No stupid people,” “Caution: irony,” “You’re not in Kansas anymore,” and “Trespassers will be wedgied.” 

However, if a visitor’s motives were philological, I had two signs for them, “Welcome to Dictionopolis,” and “You are not unwelcome.”

II. “My desk’s origins lie in Francesco Petrarch, Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, and Michel de Montaigne, which leave me wondering what Jesus of Nazareth would have become if he’d had a desk of his own?”—The Wordspinner

The longer I occupy the kabuff, the more it resembles that marvelous museum that Kurt Vonnegut describes in The Sirens of Titan, a repository of “dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone . . . .” 

I recently performed a desk inventory, the first in the years it has occupied the basement corner I mention above. No one will be surprised to learn that I have 52 pens and pencils in a Yorkshire mug (“Ey up!”), hundreds of paper clips, a pair of scissors, a container of Elmer’s Glue, a silver letter opener (a gift of the Seneca Metropolitan Women’s Club), several colored highlighters, scores of rubber bands, a stapler, a bottle of Wite Out, and a rubber fingertip. Less expected, even to this compulsive compiler, are the following in various receptacles:

• 1 – chopstick
• 2 – three-minute egg timers
• 2 – dice
• 1 – track spike
• 1 – marble, blue
• 1 – Muskie/Humphrey lapel pin
• 1 – 9 drachma “owl” stamp that reads “Myo pia” (Say what?)
• 1 – polished piece of petrified wood
• 1 – coupon for an oil change at Jiffy Lube
• 1 – Indian rupee
• 50 Irish pence
• 5 Mexican pesos
• 1 Euro two-cent piece
• and 50 Polish groszy

Above the receptacles and tacked to my cork board are several lists. These include:

• Open times for the gym, the library, and the barber shop
• Phone numbers for the Southpaw and Cruz Cycle shops
• The combinations for my bike and garden-shed locks
• A list of stroke and heart-attack symptoms
• A list of words like “invidious” and “co-op” that I struggle to recall
• And a list of places to visit (Whiteside Mountain, etc.) and things to do (skate, bowl, etc.) when the grandchildren are here

On finishing my inventory, I found several notes to myself most of which I have ignored, including:

• Chew each mouthful of food 20 times.
• Limit sugar intake to 30 grams a day.
• Raise the front end of the treadmill as far as it will go.
• Don’t forget the benefits of a post-dessert stroll.
• There’s a $100 in the ___ dictionary.

As for the owner and operator of the desk and its corkboard, I am the:

• ink-stained wretch,
• chief strategic daydreamer,
• marginally weird bastard out of Carolina,
• charismatic silverback,
• and the no longer studly studmuffin.

Two beloved items tacked to the board include our son’s gift of a “USA” Olympic pin collected at the Barcelona games and the 2025 New Yorker Cartoon Calendar, a gift of our daughter and her husband. At the heart of the board is what I call “the Lena collection.” Lena is the youngest of our four grandchildren, and as the only female, she often gets more attention than the others especially from me. (Sorry, boys.) 

The collection is chronologically arranged as follows: a photograph of her in diapers and me on my bike taken by her nervous mother. This is followed by one of her first drawings: a Halloween “ghostes.” Next is a six-banded “Rainbow” because we didn’t have an indigo crayon. In the first grade, she taped a note to my board reading, “Lena was here.” In the third grade she copied a painting of a flower vase her mother had made in high school. After a trip to the beach in the fifth grade, Lena brought me a small, pink sand dollar that now is pinned to my board. And in my bowl are three immaculate white shells she has gifted me over several years. I’ve written her name and date on each.

As a former teacher of interdisciplinary humanities, I’ve always been a sucker for the visual arts though I’ve never made a memorable drawing in my life. To fill that void, I have mounted for my pleasure small reproductions of the following:

• Katsushika Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa,
• Ernst Barlach’s Woman Laughing,
• Albrecht Durer’s St. Jerome and the Lion,
• Durer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil
• Durer’s Rhinoceros,
• An untitled flower by Georgia O’Keeffe
• and Botticelli’s Three Graces, a detail from his Primavera.

Perhaps because it strikes so close to home, my favorite illustration by a professional artist is an anonymous 12^th-c woodcut showing a scholar in his study with his nose in a book, his wife cuddling with a young messenger in the foyer, two small kids wrestling in the foreground, and the youngest of the three children relieving himself under his father’s desk. My wife and I have two children, so I’m sure the artist didn’t have us in mind.

III. “Dear Pro. Eisiminger: I am so appreciate your teaching English and help me so much.”—Echo, a Chinese student

For some, a desk is an ottoman and the wastebasket off to one side is a basketball goal. My desk, especially the quotations I’ve attached to the frame of the bulletin board, is something of a charm against chaos. In Isaiah Berlin’s terms, I’m a fox generalist, not a hedgehog curled around his specialty with his spiny backside to the world. I think my vulpine alignment is evident in the following list which helps me keep my bearings on a sea that is increasingly rough. These include:

• “Make a virtue of necessity.” Geoffrey Chaucer
• “Nothing is hard if you love it.” Robert Pirsig
• “Growing old means shrinking in the mind’s eye.” Carll Tucker
• “Give more, expect less.” Prince Ea
• “Assume the best until you know the worst.” various sources
• “Enough is plenty.” Felicity Hayes-McCoy
• “Do no hurry, do not rest.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The quotation I return to most often for a course correction is the following from Archibald MacLeish’s J.B.: “Blow on the coals of the heart. The candles in the churches are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coal of the heart, and we’ll see by and by.” I’ve blown on those embers so often, the margins are curled.

Finally, there’s this well-thumbed snippet, “Ingrid, tangible proof of God’s benevolence. She’s the sky; all the rest is weather.”

To order copies of Skip Eisiminger’s Letters to the Grandchildren (Clemson University Digital Press), click on the book cover below or contact: Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson SC 29634-0522. For Wordspinner: Mind-Boggling Games for Word Lovers, click on the book cover.