If you are hating on Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Queen, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Dave Grohl, Joni Mitchell, Pearl Jam & Neil Young, free speech wasn't something you ever really cared about in the first place.
— David Hansen (@dhansenx) January 30, 2022
The week began posting this tweet, which is not the most sophisticated social commentary I have ever made, and then watching it receive nearly twenty thousand likes, which is absurd. Thank goodness for the “mute conversation” feature because I had absolutely no interest in what anyone would have to say in response to this.
The vast majority of responses have been positive, a much smaller amount were negative, and then there were the people who were trying to school me on the inaccuracy of my statement. These artists haven’t pulled their work from Spotify, they scolded. Of course, I never said they did. I was making fun of the people who were, as of Sunday morning, denouncing this list of artists as though they had. But I wasn’t about to explain that to anyone. What’s the point?
I did get a lot of new followers out of the experience, so that was nice, and an unsolicited email or two from people who like the cut of my jib.
The week was a bit grueling in other ways, cold, cold and quite cold. We have a fire in the hearth but then the rest of the house, even the adjacent room to the fire, gets real cold. It is demotivating.
Because there is so much to do. A concert to attend. A book to be read. A play to be read. A writing assignment. Another writing assignment. A third writing assignment. Another book to be read.
And a script to be revised. A film to be edited. Scheduled to be drawn. Schools to be visited. And classes to be taught. Online. In person.
All in the same week. And then came the storm.
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| "Coversations in Tusculum" (The Public Theatre, 2008) Andrea Mohin for The New York Times |
We read Richard Nelson’s Conversations In Tusculum, which is a prequel to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I mean, technically it isn’t. It’s not in verse, the playwright used a more historically accurate spelling of the name “Porcia”. But really, it’s a prequel to Shakespeare’s play. Or it’s for people who have an in-depth knowledge of the historic events that led up to the assassination of Julius Caesar, without being familiar with Shakespeare’s play, and then ask how many of those particular people would make up the audience for a play.
I enjoyed reading it, but I question how many would who weren’t already fans of Julius Caesar. What I was most struck by was how it depicts great men, feeling impotent in the face of mounting authoritarianism, might lash choose the course of assassination. The play is not about assassination, never even mentions it. This is all before. But it goes deeper into how and why then even Shakespeare does.
Mornings this week I have been teaching an online class for high school students in (ta-da) Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which is a thing I have been doing for over twenty years. Not online, that’s new, but it’s the same lesson plan. I am glad to report that Nelson’s play encouraged me to ask new and different questions which I had not thought of before.
Earlier this week I visited a high school in Parma to watch a team of actor-teachers conduct the in-person version of the same Julius Caesar lesson plan I had conducted online a few hours earlier. Stepping into the classroom they were working in, I was struck with a strong memory.
This was the last classroom I had worked in, nineteen years earlier, almost to the day, before my wife went into labor with our first living child.
Nineteen years. Remarkable.
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