Here’s my favoirate thing I wrote this year. It’s a short piece about sound, young folks, teaching, and a rapper. Much of what’s here is material that got squeezed out of an academic article I wrote in the same year. But I’m happy it did because what I mostly wanted to do was share the little exchanges among youth that thread through the article: how they tuned into what they were hearing, how they took matters into their own hands, and even how they hurt my feelings sometimes. I wanted to share these things without having to step too far away for some kind of academic analysis.

What I like most about the piece is the ending. Here’s why.

Pieces like this that reveal tensions in education spaces often end with neat recommendations. They try to clean up the mess they made. Cleaning up can be good. I tried to for a long time. But it didn’t feel right, mostly because I still don’t have those kinds of answers to what is in and around the text. So instead, the ending turns back on me and how “the strikes and blows of these reverberations hit me too because of the relational ties I hold with these artists.” With that approach, I think I stuck the landing, especially with the final sentence that keeps things unsettled.

Sada Baby stays in motion even now, echoing through my writing as I toggle over to his Soundcloud page, press play on his songs, and wonder if I will hear something that makes me tune in differently to the young people around me.

But here’s something else: I wrote that final sentence four years ago in Memphis on a writing retreat. I wasn’t writing this piece yet — far from it. I was working my way through sound studies readings in anticipation for writing the larger academic article this piece would be cut from. The sentence is a description of what I found myself doing in Memphis. It’s in a blue notebook with pink and orange sticky notes flying out of the pages. In fact, the sentence probably started on a sticky note.

This is one of the ways “writing is a form of time travel.” That sentence traveled with me for a period of four years. Or rather, it’s likely more accurate to say I traveled four years back to it in order to finish this piece. Or maybe, in Memphis I traveled four years ahead to write it, and the end of this piece is when I finally caught up with myself.

I don’t have a therapist right now but some of my friends do, which means they share insights about things like decoupling feeling busy from feeling stressed - because they’re not always the same thing. You can be busy and not feel stressed, I think, perhaps - if you’re busy with the right stuff.

The Case for Giving Workers Ownership Rights.

Workers have the expertise, they have the knowledge, they know how to run whatever is being made or whatever services are being provided, and they run it themselves. And that could save a lot of jobs, it could save a lot of livelihoods, and it could create a lot of economic security on a common need for people.

I have my students write insights at the end of most classes. Tonight was the last class. “Bigger.” That’s the word – the insight – I take from this one a student wrote. Teaching should be bigger. It should feel. It should feel bigger. It must feel bigger. Certinaly right now.

Day 1 cycling off coffee. Feeling good but wondering if this diminished bottle of bourbon is a correlate.

I didn’t know until today there is a color of the year.

Illuminating + Ultimate Gray

Architectural Possibilities of Renee Gladman’s Prose Architectures

Many researchers, however, describe the writing of impact statements as works of fiction.

Works of fiction? Impact statements should focus on pathways to impact over short-term outcomes - Impact of Social Sciences

I’m coming up for air to tell you I just read a 118-page equity profile report on Grand Rapids, MI. It was sponsored by PolicyLink and Kellogg Foundation. The intro says, “Cities are equitable when all residents – regardless of their race/ethnicity, and nativity, neighborhood of residence, or other characteristics – are fully able to participate in the city’s economic vitality, contribute to the city’s readiness for the future, and connect to the city’s assets and resources.” Okay, sounds good.

Guess how many times the word “racism” appears in the report?

Zero.

People keep asking who I think should be the Secretary of Education. Truth is, I have no idea.

My only criterion is that the person must have written The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children published in 1994 by Jossey-Bass.

Every now and then a little surprise comes inside a used book, like Ishmael Reed’s autograph. Hope Tom in Memphis is doing well and doesn’t mind.

Giving an invited talk next week. Putting on my smarty pants.

Listen Up! Sound-Making Publics in Urban Education

Artists and activists have important assets to enrich school and community settings, but systemic barriers often keep these assets from educators and youth. In this presentation, I focus not on the barriers but on what happens when urban educators overcome them. My particular focus is sound-making publics: hip-hop and electronic music producers, DJs, and artists/activists who apply the aural humanities in schools, libraries, rec centers, and other public spaces. I use examples from a decade of work connecting artists, educators, and youth to make beats, scratch records, and manipulate sounds. Listening in on this work, we will hear how young people’s aural imaginations guide their learning, how micro-networks of assets evolve over time, and how educators use sound as a response to injustices around them. Come with ears open and headphones on.

Lefebvre:

Don’t confuse silence with secrets. Those who speak of it less might know more about it than others.

Margaret Wheatley:

In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of “critical mass.” It’s always about critical connections.

I asked students two weeks ago how they wanted class tonight to feel, how they might want class to go. I’m not inclined to cancel class the day after an election, no matter how bad it goes. But I feel the need to gather insights from students and consider those when planning class – especially when those students aspire to be teachers. It’s my design inclination, I think. They wanted two things, one serious and one silly: A chance to process the election together and Tik Tok videos that might cheer them up.

To process, I turned to a favorite analog tool: feeling cards. I spread these out digitally on our Mural with this prompt: “Look through all the feeling cards and pick one that describes how you are feeling about the election. Pick more than one if need. But don’t pick too many.” We then did a 10 minute solo write around this prompt: Which cards did you choose and why? I asked them to write in prose, not in bullet points or outline form. I told students they would be invited to share what they write but would not be requited.

Then we wrote. Myself included.+

I reminded students of a norm we set together at the start of the semester: Use disagreements as an opportunity to learn, respect, and educate. I told them we set the norm before we might need it. We might need it tonight; who knows. So let’s speak it in the space and hold ourselves to it, if we can.

I then invited students to share what they wrote. I was clear to say, “What you wrote is for yourself. You are invited to share, but you are not required.” For students who shared, I asked them to read exactly what they wrote rather than paraphrase it. This was to give them a useful constraint, a script — so to speak. But they were also free to finish any thoughts the time limit had cut off or to comment on what they wrote if they felt it was necessary. I did this because feeling confined to what you wrote in a timed, inauthentic writing setting can be stifling. Sometimes you write what you mean. Other times you don’t and need to explain.

I gave students three filters — sentence starters, if you will — through which to listen and respond to one another, if they wanted. I offered these to direct the conversation and anticipate different positions students might hold in class. I felt these filters might promote generative interaction and give students productive ways to respond to one another. Here they are:

“I also feel that way because…”

“I hadn’t thought about…”

“Your response challenges me to…”

Some read. Some respond. Some listened. And everything spoken is sacred to the space, so I won’t share it here.

I then moved us to think about self and community care. I did this with four areas and asked students to drop one sticky note in each.

“One thing I can do right now to take care of myself is…”

“One thing we can do right now to take care of each other is…”

“One thing I can do in the coming weeks to take care of myself is…”

“One thing we can do in the coming weeks to take care of each other is…”

I feel the individual and collective is important. I feel the immediate and long-term is important.

Before we finished, I told students I wanted to return to what we did tonight at some point and talk with them as educators about it. I want to explain the reasons behind the order of things, the phrasing of things, and the design of things. At their request, one reason we did this is so they — as aspiring educators — could see and feel one way to help students process “day after” events. From the experiential standpoint, those purposes might not be clear, so we need to return and debrief later.

+What I wrote:

I picked the word “peaceful” because, to my credit, I feel like the boundaries I set for myself in the last 24 hours have been right on. I haven’t been glued to media, watching every single uptick in percentage points. I haven’t been doing electoral math in my head. And I haven’t let countless tweets or posts get their hooks in me. I’ve jumped over to a news site only a few times to get an update and jumped out before it could pull me in. I’m proud of this clarity and the boundary I set. I haven’t always known how to do that.

I also picked the word “tense” because I think it describes the relational state of some people in my family who have different social convictions and beliefs. I imagine us in this distant orbit with gravities pulling upon one another from afar as all these votes are counted, and I wonder what will happen to the orbits when it’s all finalized, whenever that may be. Orbits are pretty predictable unless space objects like meteors or NASA junk get in the way. [Metaphor incomplete.]

Monday’s newsletter: Some notes from a 2-square mile Detroit-enclosed city named Hamtramck. Issue #36 of Elements & Embodiment.

Detroit.

Me (Aug 2020): No late work will be accepted.

Me (Sept till infinity): Hey turn it in whenever you can. Whatever works for you. No worries. It’s all good. Glad you’re here. Hope you’re okay. Let me know if you need any help.

Just voted. ACT, SAT, GRE, PRAXIS - never in my life have I filled in a singular bubble so crisp, cautious, and complete as I did just now.

For the last year I’ve been writing a weekly newsletter that goes out by email. Yes, email. Here’s why and what I’ve learned.

I started writing Elements & Embodiment after reading a cluster of books that started unbreaking my brain from the damage done to it by digital platforms. The books were Digital Minimalism, Work Clean, Deep Work, The Shallows, and some others. The platforms are the big ones, the usual suspects. I did the digital detox outlined by Cal Newport in DM and learned there are two worthwhile, practical reasons for me to be on those platforms: 1. To know when and where my local friends are having music/culture/community events. 2. To learn of articles friends and colleagues are reading. Anything else is outside my values, health, and capacity. I know I sound like a Luddite.

A fix for the first point is easy: I now jump onto The Platform that May Decide The Election once a week and do one set of actions: I click on events, see where my friends are DJing or going to events that look fun, log those into my personal calendar, and them I’m out. No posting, no liking, and very little scrolling.

To fix the second point, I started using a RSS feed to bring relevant articles to me outside of these platforms. I should have done this a long time ago. What comes to me is actually better than what I could get via friends online. I now get posts from design blogs, music sites, The Anarchist Library, the usuals like The New Yorker, and I don’t get that same Education Week article across my feed 10 times in three days.

To keep track of this content, I started using a Pinboard to bookmark sites and articles that come my way through email, imbedded links, and really anywhere. The platform isn’t flashy (it’s been called “social bookmarking for introverts”), and it doesn’t need to be. I no longer have browser tabs open to articles and readings that I hope to come back to at a later point but usually don’t. They’re all in one place now. I occasionally schedule some time during the month to dig through what I’ve bookmarked. I often find things I didn’t know I had bookmarked. Or I’ll click on a tag I’ve generated – like “Dilla” – and see that all those would-be-open browser tabs have amounted to an interesting micro-archive on a topic. Pinboard sometimes feels like my record collection: I’ll go digging through it and find good stuff I somehow forgot I had.

So what do these other tools have to do with the newsletter? A good amount. But one other point first. I started writing and sending out the newsletter before telling anybody about it. That means it was going out to nobody. It felt right, trying this thing out and perhaps finding some kind of groove before letting others into it. I started sharing it on other platforms at issue #6 and letting people know they could sign up to receive it.

These other changes meant that over the past year, my primary way of communicating with folks “out there” was the newsletter. No Facebook posts; not a lot of tweets.

What I didn’t expect was how special this would feel – writing to a small group of people who signed up to read outside of the digital gaze. This felt different from people who read tweets or Facebook posts. In those places, it seems – at least to me – that we’ve fallen into a kind of entanglement with one another by the algorithm coaxing us into hitting the friend or follow button. Typing your email address into the newsletter “sign up” field isn’t a heavy lift, but there’s more intention behind it and more of a willed decision compared to those other places. I know people want to be there and – just as important – can not be there if they no longer wish.

Knowing that a specific group of people might be expecting something from me in their inbox each Monday felt like a healthy push forward to write and finish an issue each week. What this push often did was send me digging through my Pinboard, reading articles I had bookmarked on the fly but not yet taken the time to read, and picking out connections among them to share. Maybe it was something on John Brown. Maybe it was a profile of T La Rock. Maybe it was a story about the ghostly radio broadcast outside Moscow that nobody claims to run. What’s in my Pinboard has reminded me how much I like to read permiscuously, far outside of any degree I have or subject I teach.

Digging into the archive often sent me searching for more on a topic to fill out a newsletter. So I’d plan to share some of Lorna Simpson’s collages because my RSS feed pulled an article from The Paris Review about her. But then I get to searching around and find another piece on her upcoming show in Hong Kong, and I’d be learning more about an artist or topic than I had when I started. In not too much time, an issue would be coming together, like #29. Sometimes an issue was on one topic, like OG Village Voice articles or John Brown abolition art. Other times – most times, actually – an issue was an assortment of treats, like issue #20: Myths & Proper Covers.. The tagline of the newsletter is rather accurate: my weekly path through art, education, culture, and more.

I’ve been slipping into the past tense above because after one year in, I think the newsletter may have run its course with respect to what it has done for me. Or maybe it’s this season we are all trying to survive, literally and morbidly. The way to find out for sure is to take a step back and see how it feels. 📝

SAULT gatefold 📷

This week’s Elements & Embodiment newsletter has a handfull of treats related to a man who created “a third way of relating to musical time,” J Dilla. 🎶📝

I tried something new: I did the introduction to the Sound Studies, Writing, and Rhetoric keynote panel as a DJ/turntablism set while theorizing over top. Why not push the boundaires with conferences going virtual.

Sharing some art from Alex Dodge & early writings on hip-hop DJing from music journalist Robert Ford, Jr. in this week’s newsletter. I do have fun sharing in this format the things I come upon.

I hate writing bios, so I end up rewriting myself every time I’m faced with the task:

Emery Petchauer is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, but he feels most at home organizing DJs and music producers to put on workshops for young people, and that’s because he’s been a DJ for much longer than he’s been a professor.