Monthly Archives: October 2021

Place of Safety

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I try to avoid the discourse. Writing online has for the most part turned into a game of takes, and the stakes of the takes are always rising. Who can write the fastest on the scandal floating through the air that day? Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were already living through a takes pandemic. They go viral, after all. 

But here I am anyway, conscripted briefly into the culture war. At least I’m not writing about that kidney-donation-short-story-litigation disaster. 

I was talking with a friend about what books could still be assigned to students and whether certain books, though historically significant, were now so far out of intellectual fashion that they should be replaced by better, different, more appropriate books. We were talking high school, that is, students who are still deemed children. But then, concurrently, out popped articles about Bright Sheng, the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan, who was teaching a music composition course on opera in which he showed the Laurence Olivier version of Othello in which Olivier portrays the hero in blackface. His students were “shocked” and quickly expressed their dismay to the powers that be. As a result, Sheng has stopped teaching the class and has written two public apologies. 

I don’t want to argue for or against Sheng’s showing of the film in his class. I don’t know anything about music composition, opera, various versions of or depictions of Othello, or the history and implications of blackface, aside from the obvious contemporary point that it’s connected to race relations in America and is thus absolutely radioactive in current polite society. What was Sheng’s pedagogical reason for showing the film? Should he have used a different depiction to better prove his point? Should he have provided a more thorough scholarly context for it? Should he have simply “known better”? I don’t know. I do think that a professor’s selection of course materials is a specific site of pedagogical dominion and an implicit articulation of importance, and that the course itself becomes an arena to debate the very inclusion of its own material. To use Shakespeare as a convenient example, any Shakespeare course, aside from its more top-level focus, is on a sedimentary level an argument that Shakespeare is worth studying and these works in particular are worth studying. Do you agree? Well, by the end of the course, if you’ve done the reading and participated in the class, you should have a fully developed opinion. But aside from that kind of 16-week long digestion, I don’t know if Sheng is right, wrong, careless, careful, or not. Perhaps I’m being too English major-y. I tend to take the teacher’s side in these matters under the assumption that the teacher chose the material on purpose, and it’s their class. I don’t question the tools my plumber uses when he’s working on the pipes at my house, because I don’t know anything about plumbing, and I want to be able to flush my toilet again, and as a result, I operate from a premise of respect toward the plumber.

What I am more interested in is a quotation from one of the students: 

“I was stunned,” [freshman Olivia] Cook said. “In such a school that preaches diversity and making sure that they understand the history of POC (people of color) in America, I was shocked that (Sheng) would show something like this in something that’s supposed to be a safe space.” 

Here I would like to stand on firmer argumentative ground: the college classroom is not a safe space, nor should it be. I mean, it should be a safe space in the way that all societal spaces should be safe; you should be safe from assault, battery, etc. But that is not the sense in which the student uses the term. The college classroom should not be a safe space for the students’ feelings. 

An important premise: the college students are purportedly adults and present of their own volition. But after that caveat, did seeing this movie hurt the students’ feelings? Impinge on their sense of propriety? Jump the tracks of a contemporary political taboo? Offend their decency? It doesn’t matter, because their feelings are not to be spared in the college classroom.* Why are they attending college? To learn an academic discipline? To obtain the credentials to get a job and secure a middle-class adulthood? To be immersed in the best of what has been thought and said? Whatever their reason, anytime that students learn about a discipline, they will be necessarily exposed to the history of that discipline, and by virtue of it hailing from the foreign country of the past, it will not comport with their current view of the discipline or society as a whole. Of course the students were shocked. They should be shocked. The film was released 56 years ago — three of their lifetimes. It’s so far out of current performance fashion that it now seems odious to the wide majority of society, and yet covering your eyes and insisting that the professor not show that movie does not make it go away. The bogeyman of the past is still out there killing innocents. Ignoring past cultural artifacts that are now deemed offensive doesn’t make them go away and doesn’t obviate why they were deemed important in the first place. Ignoring Olivier in blackface might make you feel more comfortable in the present moment but it does nothing to address current racism or to understand past racism. All it does is prolong one’s own ignorance of what actually happened. “Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear” is no way to learn. It’s difficult to learn anything without having your feelings hurt, because learning is a form of conflict. And you only win that game if you do the reading. 

When I lived in Alabama and tornados were a routine part of existence, the weatherman would come on the screen and say, “It’s time to go to your place of safety.” This was a handy new euphemism for basement. It sounds poetic and cozy but it also makes sense. And for tornados, it’s accurate. When the storms are descending on your street, you can better protect yourself by getting to that un-windowed hallway. But intellectually, there is no place of safety from the ravages of the past. Of all the lessons an 18-year-old composition student might learn, this one could be the most valuable. 

*Their feelings are important, but they are less important within the context of the classroom.

Time Hex

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Sometimes I think about not wearing a watch. Sometimes in fact I don’t wear a watch. But mostly I wear one. I feel odd without it, naked, though I’m obviously not naked. I thought about communicating this to anyone I met in a given week, and thinking of no one who actually wanted to hear me moon about this topic, I have decided to tell you, dear reader. 

I am currently wearing a Timex Weekender 38mm Fabric Strap. Before this it was a Casio Men’s Digital Illuminator Sport Watch in navy blue, a Target find and my preferred watch. But the rectangular bitlet strap-holder broke. I keep wearing these vestigial devices though I, like everyone else on the planet, also carry a little supercomputer in my pocket, a remote control for life, a psychological fidget spinner. I also stare at a clock located on my regular computer at work. And there is a clock in my car. And there are multiple clocks around my house, not synchronized but close enough. I’m never without the ability to check my time. Why should I keep wearing a watch? 

For some men, it’s a piece of jewelry, covert or not. I’m fascinated by high-end watch culture in the same way I’m fascinated by snake handlers or scientologists; there is a belief system there that I recognize but don’t follow. Spending several thousand dollars for a watch that you have to hand wind seems bizarre and potentially reckless, even though I adore certain outmoded forms of technology whose relevance seems purely sentimental (hello, typewriter collection). I mean, the watches look good, if a little big. There’s also strange terminology which I admit I don’t understand. Bezel? It’s like when photographers talk about bokeh. What? I realize these are actual terms, but they give off the whiff of nonce words, secret passcodes kids invent for the game of the day. Or simply boys being boys. 

I do not wear a smartwatch and I take an absurd amount of pride in this. Their presence on my contemporaries is steadily increasing. It’s an object that began as an avant-garde class marker and that quickly devolved through ubiquity to a marker of civilization, a declaration not of money or advanced taste but of reasonableness. It’s just what people wear. It’s the fleece jacket of wrist-wear. But I can barely function as it is with my little supercomputer singing sweetly in my pocket. I don’t need to know anything that a smartwatch could tell me. I realize it could keep track of my heart rate and notify me that I’m not moving around enough, to which, duh. Part of me wants to keep the watch, qua device, and do away with the smartphone. Checking work email away from work was a Rubicon I didn’t know I was crossing lo those so many years ago. And now there is always a social trap one could check; they fill so quickly! And now texting people is so woven into my daily existence that the thought of not having a good texting device seems unthinkable. Device-less, I would surely be less addled, but I would be lonely. Or lonelier. Or even lonelier. 

So I wear a watch but with the effortful thriftiness of wearing a cheap watch. It is convenient to check the time so relatively inconspicuously. You can fish the phone out of your pocket to check the time during a conversation, but it signals you’re bored and want to look at your phone rather than continue the conversation, which may be true, but still. Whereas looking at your wristwatch, while insulting, is somehow less insulting to your fellow conversationalist, speaking at least in current terms of the evolution of our personal technologies. 

Part of this affection for cheapness is that I’m hard on watches. Briefly in my twenties I wore a Karim Rashid–designed watch from Alessi. It was a single band of chocolate brown polyurethane that housed a raised, square-ish time piece that contained hands but no numerals. It was like a stylish miniature piece of furniture on my wrist, a small gesture toward the Design Within Reach standards that were still yet out of my reach. It was once glancingly admired by a dentist and self-professed watch guy. But I slowly destroyed it by clipping the face against doors, drawers, cars. I am clumsy, unaware of my bodily proportions; I regularly pinball through jambs. Even my current low-profile Timex gets whacked weekly. And then there is the wrist sweat, the slow corrosion of being exposed to my body’s excreta. After a week in the Mississippi heat my watch smells like Satan’s jockstrap. Dear Hodinkee, I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly. 

Perhaps my ambivalence has to do less with my crippled sense of fashion or my showy sense of thriftiness and more to do with my sweaty grasp on time itself. By which I mean the concept. I know enough about time management to know that I am terrible at it — as if time were easily organizable and not in fact fluid, always expanding or contracting with no attention to one’s dominion. Time changes with the activity. You try to save time, you try to capture it, blowing air into a balloon, and you come back an hour later, and the balloon is geriatric on the floor, its face wrinkled. That time you saved was no good floating around unused. It’s worse than an opened champagne bottle. Time flies, yet feels interminable. Is there anything slower than a bad play? But go on Twitter and an hour vaporizes. The brownies are burnt. I have some place I need to be. Is it over already? I am constantly 5-7 minutes late to everything and yet I hate waiting around for stuff to start. I’m always cramming more tasks into those small envelopes of time prior to departure, time I realize too late I should have used for driving. It’s called a deadline because it functions like miniature death. Remember there were goals you wanted to accomplish before you died? Way back when you did not think you were actually ever going to die, but now that you’re old enough to have a fleeting notion on your own mortality, you’re too tired to remember what they were, much less do them. There’s no time for that. You’re worn out. It’s time to go. Lunch hour was supposed to be a half hour ago. Perhaps I don’t want to wear a watch because I don’t want the constant reminder of how time whips me. 

I realize this is all totally meaningless, and yet these are the kind of branching thoughts I chew throughout my day. Plus there is the desire to simplify. There is so much detritus that can’t be avoided (papers home from school) or won’t be shunned (Twitter), so much physical and mental lint, that any personal kind of trimming of the sails makes one feel, makes me feel, slightly more intentional about my progress through what is admittedly a fairly unintentional landscape. Maybe Tuesday would feel better without a watch. Would it even still feel like Tuesday?