##Reading
I’m still working my way through Britt Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. I’m enjoying the ways that vanishing is showing up in the novel beyond the twins’s most obvious act. There is Reese’s past, Early’s routine that takes him out of town, and more. I know Stella has to reappear at some point. She does, doesn’t she? Or is she gone for good? But even in vanishing, she’s not really gone.
##Writing
I met the deadline for my promotion narrative. One thing that took me a while to figure out was why a distinction between hip-hop as content and hip-hop as aesthetic form matters. This part was less about why it matters and more about which matterings I felt it necessary to name for the audience that would read this essay. Here is ultimately how it landed after lots of writing and revision:
This distinction was and remains important for at least two reasons. First, it asserts the practices, sensibilities, and heuristics of (often Black) artists as the starting points to generate education practice, theory, and research methods. Second, this distinction compels scholars and (English) educators to expand beyond close readings of hip-hop texts/songs and begin thinking about hip-hop culture how its creators do.
That last phrase,thinking about hip-hop culture how its creators do, went through the most revision – with lots of academic words put in and, eventually, taken all the way out. I think the finally phrasing is most simple and best. That’s really what it’s about for me.
##Listening
Music by friends
The new Medicine Bag album by Sacramento Knoxx – Detroit Indigenous hip-hop and electronic raps and beats. Love the story excerpts from Knoxx’s mom, too.
Five tracks by Detroit legend Scott Grooves – soulful, electronic, indestructible. I buy every SG record I see while hitting record stores in Detroit, even the ones with blank white labels that only have a handwritten “SG” on plain white sleeves. If you know, you know.
Mixes I’m playing
Two hours of African downbeat by Rob. Stunning music. I can’t get enough of it.
A two-hour mix by my friend Adam appropriately called THAT RUGGED SMOOVE ISH.
I’m still running this Detroit hard techno mix I put together a few weeks ago.
What I’m making