The Classroom Conservative

Ron Sexsmith, Love Shines

I caught the Ron Sexsmith bug about ten years ago when I bought his Blue Boy album on a whim.  I remember very clearly hearing the horns on “This Song” and being a little put off by the overproduction of that first cut, but I was immediately won over by the simple brilliance of his lyrics: for “Cheap Hotel,” for “Just My Heart Talkin,” and for just about every other song on that CD, on all his previous recordings, and on each of the recordings he has released since.  Blue Boy, in some sense, was an anomaly: roots and country legend Steve Earle, from the producer’s chair, had Sexsmith work in a variety of genres, and yet the lyrics kept outshining everything else about the record.

Long Player Late Bloomer, Sexsmith’s twelfth album, has been out for a couple of months.  Produced this time by Bob Rock, the CD sets out to achieve for Sexsmith a big radio hit, a money maker.  The musical accompaniment is polished, and the vocals are robust.  But there is no evidence that Long Player Late Bloomer will rival Lady Gaga’s Born This Way.

Douglas Arrowsmith’s documentary examines the phenomenon of a Canadian legend, a critical darling, who cannot afford a washer and dryer for his home.  Love Shines sets out the contrast between critical acclaim and commercial success, but it ultimately fails to answer a fundamental question about how professional musicians make money.  Ron Sexsmith has had twelve albums, and his songs have been covered by artists who sell more records.  After Napster, after iTunes, CD sales figures seem quaint.  So what does Sexsmith have to do, practically, to be able to afford to bring his band on the road with him?  Even in the age of e-books, I know that you can support writers by buying a novel and buying a couple more to give friends.  How does the average fan support a favorite, underappreciated singer/songwriter?

What I found most interesting about Love Shines was the footage of Sexsmith in the studio with Rock and the session musicians.  Though a life-long music fan, I still find the process of record producing rather opaque.  It was interesting to see how Sexsmith would approach his producer with a lyric and a melody – and how Rock layered sound atop it.  It is clear that the words themselves are most important to Sexsmith and that he has always seemed open to packaging those words in a way that reaches more people.  It is not just about the money, he attests, and you believe him.  But you can feel the frustration of a man who has the admiration of some of the world’s greatest musicians but whose work lacks the cultural pervasiveness that would spell greater security.  Steve Earle is correct; Sexsmith is most fortunate that people even know his name.  Heck, Elvis Costello says that Sexsmith has revived for him “Every Day I Write The Book”!  However, Sexsmith needed a fortieth birthday gift in order to secure a piano, the tool of his trade, and, at some point, critical acclaim is not enough.

Professor X, In The Basement Of The Ivory Tower

Those of us who have spent time as adjunct instructors, and those of us who hire and work with adjunct instructors today, might be forgiven for expecting In The Basement Of The Ivory Tower to be a very different book.  A great deal of post-secondary instruction in North America is done by part-time staff, an arrangement whose challenges deserve to be examined from the inside out.  The wages are poor, and the benefits can be modest; instructors must, by necessity, do a range of uncompensated tasks to complement teaching, tasks that are core, paid duties for tenured professors; it is difficult, and perhaps unfair, for part-timers to engage with their institutions in the full range of ways from which students would derive benefit.

To be fair, Professor X does touch on these things in discussing his life teaching nights at “Pembrook,” a four-year private American institution, and “Huron State,” its slightly-down-at-heel rival across town.  But the real thesis of this book is that, just as more and more vocations in North America demand university credentials, fewer and fewer students are prepared adequately to take even introductory classes.  As much as Professor X enjoys teaching, so much so that he takes great pains to conceal his identity from employers who would not appreciate the publicity, he does not think that he and his colleagues enrich students enough to justify anyone assuming student debt.

At its least interesting, In The Basement Of The Ivory Tower is just another cranky indictment of credential inflation, an endorsement of quick, vocational training.  The problem is that Professor X demonstrates the efficacy of the liberal education he seeks to devalue: needing mortgage money, he uses the flexibility of his training to broaden his skills and lease them to an English department.  He spends so much time lamenting the disconnection between basic literacy skills and a first job that he discounts the role of universities in laying the foundation for his students’ long-term careers.  It is true that the compositions he wants his students to write might not be relevant to the entry-level of their vocations, but the semester they spend with him will benefit them in ways Professor X acknowledges when he describes the best parts of his home life, a life enriched by the liberal arts.

Should students know more by the time they emerge from high school?  Yes.  Should it be possible to receive a broad-based liberal arts education without assuming a lifetime of crippling debt?  Absolutely.  But are those self-evident arguments more interesting than Professor X’s story itself, a story obscured by the various techniques necessary to conceal his identity?  (There is no linear narrative; to move towards some climax might tell too much about Pembrook and Huron State.)  I found that I wanted to hear even more about the need for his household to secure three salaries to stay above water in his mortgage; I found that I wanted to hear even more about how he developed as a classroom teacher over a decade of toil out of necessity.  Much has been made about Professor X’s pessimism: his conclusion that he cannot, in three months, teach his students enough fundamentals to undo years of intellectual neglect.  Though too much more “inside baseball” would have scared off a publisher, he has still not convinced me that, for a single tuition, students do not benefit from learning even five or six basic skills.  But what might those things be?  In broadening his story to book length, that kind of analysis fades to the background.

The English Professor’s Pet Peeve: Their As A Singular Pronoun

Charles Mudede, the talented Stranger feature writer, published a column last month about kissing.  It was an interesting piece, but it was the zesty comments section that captured my attention.  One reader calling herself or himself the “Carnivorous Chicken” objected to Mr. Mudede’s use of “their” as a singular pronoun.  “Jessus Christ on a crutch, Charles, this error is throughout the essay,” the Chicken squawked.  “Have you not heard of pronoun agreement?”

Other readers quickly jumped in to accuse the Chicken of pedantry and, within forty minutes, Mr. Mudede explained that he had debated the issue with Jesse, his copy editor, and Jesse’s approach prevailed.  But I’m with the Carnivorous Chicken.

As anyone who writes is aware, the sexist convention of using “his” when you do not know the gender of someone referenced is as inadequate as overcompensating by defaulting to “her.”  Unfortunately, “his/her” and “his or her” is not even as elegant as “s/he,” which you can use for a subject.  Many people will attempt to make a plural to take advantage of the gender ambiguity of the plural pronoun.  You might want to tell a student where to submit his or her essay and write, instead, that students must submit their work to the department office.  But when saying that you are short one submitted essay, you might wonder when his or her work will arrive.  You cannot pretend that you are short two scripts.

Still, by more and more frequent convention, of course, some people will lament being an essay short and wonder when the student will arrive with their work.  But the reason I still prefer the clunky “his or her” or, if you like, “her or his” is that it reminds me to pay attention to context.  I do not know who has shorted me a script because while, a couple of generations ago, the student would have been male, women now make up more than half the people in my classes.  Waiting for the doctor?  He or she will be busy with someone else.  Going to see the nurse?  I hope he or she is good with a needle.  Call the cops?  They will be right over.  But when the cop comes to your car window, you had better not make fun of his or her hat.

Moreover, when I suggest that a student see an advisor, I can assure that student that her office is private.  Why?  All our advisors, currently, are women.  It is not that this is good or bad; it is simply a reflection of our current staff complement.  It reflects no issue that needs to be addressed, but it should also not go unobserved: and that is exactly what happens when we try to change the language to pretend that no gender distinction exists.  When we do need to draw attention to inequality, when you want to point out that you saw the Olympic ski jumper on the way to his room, you need to have a way to do so.

The Pixies In Calgary

Groggy, unable to hear clearly out of my left ear, I walked around a Calgary hotel room in search of Mike Bell’s review in the Calgary Sun.  “Nostalgia For Pixies Wearing a Little Thin,” the headline read.

I marveled again at how it can be that two people can hear the same thing and draw very different conclusions.

I was amongst 2,500 fans at the Jube on Saturday night.  Tickets were difficult to come by.  One of the seminal bands of my youth, a group that disbanded nearly twenty years ago, was returning to Calgary, where they had played during their 2004 reunion, and I had a chance to go.  I arranged my work schedule at the end of term so I could get there, and I was not disappointed.

The conceit, this time around, was that the band would be playing in its entirety Doolittle, their breakthrough 1989 album.  Whereas music fans today download individual songs from iTunes, and concerts from iconic bands are buffets of greatest hits, the Pixies sought to remind us that recorded popular music was once conceived in a pattern defined by two sides of twenty minutes each.  Albums were tiny narratives, and Saturday night had a story of its own.  It began, as David Bowie shows once did, with scenes from Un Chien Andalou, the French surrealist film that reifies “slicing up eyeballs,” the noted “Debaser” lyric.  After racing through four B-Side cuts, Kim Deal began the bassline of that song, and I was reminded – suddenly – of the impact this band has had.  As influential as Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa might have been in some circles, it was that first song from the first side of Doolittle that signaled something new in music, something that would help give birth to Nirvana and the whole grunge movement, but something that actually defined a whole new vein within popular music, something that really was never emulated.

Why the Pixies were unique had a lot to do with the style of guitarist Joey Santiago, and that was evident again at the show in songs like “There Goes My Gun” and “Into the White.”  The heavy drumming of Dave Lovering was featured on “La La Love You,” and I marveled again at his steady presence.  The melodies of “Here Comes Your Man” and “Monkey Gone to Heaven” belie the dark images of the songs.  But the real key to the Pixies, now and then, is the tension between Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis, Frank Black) and Kim Deal, as the latter tries to adapt her tremendous gifts to a band that has always been forged in the vision of the former.  The mending of their relationship was documented in Loudquietloud, the chronicle of band’s reunion tour, and one can only speculate as to how it manifests itself today.  She speaks to the crowd; he remains Black Francis, throughout.  She smiles, having fun, explaining to us how a needle once worked on a record.  He steps forward to say “Hey!” and you think that the fourth wall is finally crumbling before realizing that he has simply begun Doolittle’s third-last track.  Together, their harmonies are better than ever, truly better than ever, as her voice has improved with age and his control and range has not diminished one bit, but when they take on “Gigantic,” from Surfer Rosa, as a final encore, he steps back.  Is he giving her a moment, finishing with the only song she sang on that first, full-length record?  Is he hacked off?  Is he disappointed with us?  Have we been a good audience?

While some of my reactions may have been foolish, they were not simply nostalgic, as Mr. Bell asserts.  I shake my head at the fifty year olds around me, with their lighters, with their tokes, jumping up in the first rows of the balcony as if they could not, otherwise, see.  I do marvel that so many people their age – God, my age! – know the words to “Wave of Mutilation,” but I am under no illusions: it is not 1989.  When Thompson performs now, I understand how all this work underwrote his solo success from the mid-1990s.  The songs are polished, hard to realize live amidst all the thrashing about.  When, finally, something does go wrong, on “Dig For Fire,” with its intricate interplay between percussion and rhythm guitar, Mr. Bell calls it “an unmitigated disaster.”  On the contrary, I was reminded that some of these encore numbers, like this Bossanova favorite, are not played every night.  And I marvel, anew, at what it takes to maintain such command over such an impressive oeuvre, as the Pixies have done.