Hello YouTube, my old friend. I’ve come to watch old baseball games, again.
This is my purest form of pandemic leisure: the vintage uniforms and cartoon moustaches, the scores you know ahead of time.
But before I sink into Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, I’ll be forced to watch an ad. It’s a tax on my sloth. Serves me right for not taking a Duolingo course in Russian.
Most likely the ad will be for a website called MasterClass. It’s everywhere these days, beckoning us to improve ourselves as we burrow into another guilty pleasure. The luxe “M” logo looks chiselled from marble. The highbrow celebrities – Neil Gaiman, is that you?! – arch their eyebrows and dispense pithy advice.
There are videos on the internet that will teach you anything: grouting a wall, or waxing your back or roasting a leg of lamb. MasterClass offers something else: the promise of approaching greatness. Serena Williams on tennis. Werner Herzog on moviemaking. Doris Kearns Goodwin on presidential leadership. If I’m not going to learn Russian, at least I can pick up a little presidential leadership.
The lockdown self-improvement trend is now as axiomatic as a loaf of homemade sourdough. Spare time is what we’ve always needed to tackle War and Peace or perfect our fricassee, we tell ourselves. Who, hearing the story of how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during an outbreak of the plague, hasn’t had the urge to brush the Tostitos crumbs off their hoodie?
But Shakespeare didn’t learn to write King Lear from a video tutorial, and we may find ourselves asking, midway through an online yoga class or Zoom-based pottery workshop: Is this working? Isn’t there something a little suspect about the idea of learning this way?
I thought that by submitting myself to the slickest digital correspondence course on the internet, I could investigate how these trends are playing out, and discover what can be learned, and what can’t, at Pandemic U.
Plus, a MasterClass membership is only 240 bucks a year. I sign up.
For the sake of fairness, I choose instructors who are up my alley – which takes a while. Diane von Furstenberg on “Building a Fashion Brand” (“Every. Thing. You do. Is at the service of. The brand.”) is probably someone’s idea of useful, but not mine.
David Sedaris, however? One of my favourite writers and possibly the greatest American humorist since Twain. I’m in.
The classes come with a “workbook,” and this one asks students to keep a diary as they follow along. There’s no point including dates with my entries because I watched the whole 3-hour course in two days. I love Sedaris.
- Dressed in a light blue jacket and forest-green pantaloons, David tells us we are privileged to be writers. For a select few, he says, everything is copy. “Normal people, something bad happens to them and there’s nothing they can do with it. Except feel bad, or complain, or press charges.” Already, this is funny, wise and I’m feeling great about being a writer!
- Oh no. Fifteen minutes in and I’m losing focus. The tabs on my web browser are multiplying like mushrooms after a heavy rain in one of those time-lapse videos from a nature show. I think I missed part of an anecdote where David was rude to a hotel clerk and then felt bad about it …
- When you go to a classroom in person, there’s pressure to pay a certain amount of attention. But I’m doing all kinds of other things while listening to David’s videos: reheating stew for lunch, checking e-mail, clipping my fingernails (which I have managed to stop biting in quarantine: now that’s self-improvement!).
- “Connect incidents to something bigger.” This is my first encounter with the “easier said than done” problem. (It will not be the last.)
- “Everything’s funny eventually,” David says. “Make the most of it.” All the while he’s smiling his wry, slightly wicked smile. For 10 seconds I feel better. I think to myself: that’s just what I’m doing. Stuck at home during a global pandemic, vulnerable loved ones all around, in a constant state of worry about their health and mine – and making the most of it. Taking a MasterClass, no less! But then I pause over that thought and reconsider. Maybe this pandemic will seem funny one day. But, then again, when’s the last time I read a really good piece of humour writing about the Spanish Flu?
I need something more mechanical to practice. Writing isn’t like that. It doesn’t help to be told: hold your pen at a 50-degree angle to the page, and use only your thumb and index finger when stroking your chin.
What about basketball? I’d rather be good at basketball than writing, anyway. And Stephen Curry, the greatest jump shooter of all time, has a MasterClass.
It starts promisingly enough. Steph’s advice is concrete and memorable. “Ten toes to the rim.” Keep your knees back. Aim for the net hooks. Gooseneck in the basket. Index finger on the valve.
Steph also gives catchy names to the mistakes I’m guilty of: the chicken wing, the catapult, fanning, valgus. Check, check, check, check. In fact, when I shoot naturally, I look more like “Brandon,” the poor guy recruited to demonstrate what not to do.
There’s some solace in Steph’s encouragement that I’ll be able to overcome the deformities in my jumper with practice. Well, with a lot of practice. Steph’s daily warm-up involves making 100 shots from various spots on the floor. To cool off at the end of every workout, he takes 100 three-pointers. If you’re willing to be in the gym every day, doing some version of this, “you can be as great as you wanna be.”
The court behind my apartment does not have a three-point line, one of the rims is too low and the other is too high, and the young fathers in board shorts and sunglasses always look at me like I’m a sketchy teenager trying to sell drugs to their toddlers. It’s not exactly Oracle Arena, but it will have to do.
My shots from close are falling. I’m “loading my hips.” I’m putting the gooseneck in the basket. (This refers to the shape of your follow-through.)
It’s the distance shooting that gives me trouble – that saps my will. Clang. The ball flies off the rim almost spitefully. I’m practising alone and spending most of my time chasing misses. Clang. Clang. Now I feel the dads in board shorts watching me. Clang. I don’t have the strength for Steph’s exquisite technique. I need to start hoisting a little. Clang. I’m at 60 makes, and it’s dinner.
On my way home, it occurs to me that I may never be as great as I wanna be, and also that I forgot to put my finger on the valve.
More my speed: wine appreciation. The host: James Suckling, whose name roughly describes how I’ve been drinking the stuff. Here is a skill I can put to use right away.
Like Mr. Suckling, I live in Tuscany, and have an assistant named Andrew whom I call “buddy.” It has, too, been one of the great joys of my life to share a love of wine with my English-accented son, Jack.
Okay, so a common problem intrudes again: relatability. MasterClass instructors are a breed apart, and it helps not to think about it too much. You can dress in Sedaris’s weird deluxe Japanese men’s wear brands when you have 12 million books in print, but probably not much before.
A nice thing about the James Suckling class, though: drinking wine is basically not that lofty an activity. Whenever James starts getting a little haughty, the act of sipping fermented grape juice brings him back down to earth. I also sound like I’m drowning when I gargle.
As for the ability to say an Italian red tastes like “black pepper” so emphatically it’s like you’re saying “Black Sabbath” at a Black Sabbath concert – I’m not there yet, but that’s what MasterClasses are for.
Among the truly useful things I picked up from James: greater confidence in pairing light, acidic reds with fish; how to tell if a wine is corked (a telltale cardboard taste); and a renewed belief that Champagne is the perfect drink any time. It’s also cool to know that sauvignon blanc often tastes like gooseberry, which is a fruit I might have believed was fictional.
I also sampled lessons on gardening, cooking, screenwriting and even magic, but for my money, wine appreciation was the most useful course on the site. Maybe that’s because it came closest to approximating the lesson I really wanted: how to feel better.
Throughout my experiment with MasterClass, I had a recurring fantasy about an alternative service that would provide instructional videos for more abstract and frankly useful skills: how to talk to a friend who is considering self-harm because she can’t take the isolation; how to stay connected to a loved one in a hospital you can’t visit because of COVID-19 protocols; how to console someone when embracing them is a health risk.
I know the fantasy site would be a bust. The videos would say “it depends” a lot, or “ask the person what they need”; sometimes the videos would just be footage of someone shrugging. MasterClass revealed a lot of the problems with “e-learning” – distraction, trouble with motivation, the lack of feedback – but it’s a fun, polished version of what it’s trying to be. The larger problem? The self-improvement I could use right now is different from the kind you get in an online tutorial.
In the meantime, I’ve actually gotten better at running during the pandemic. And chopping vegetables. Plus, I have a solid eight months to teach myself Russian. Or, failing that, presidential leadership with Doris Kearns Goodwin.
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