It’s short. It’s indirect. But that doesn’t matter because we’re all connected. Here’s my Shock G story: I organize community beatmaking and DJ session for young and not-so-young people. Two years ago, a mother — new to Pontiac — brought her 7-year old son to a session at the public library. Bohemian vibe. West Coast vibe. All the way through. Little man hit some pads, twisted some knobs, but planted his feet behind the turntables. There’s always one or two who do – can’t see themselves doing anything else. I can relate. But he didn’t grip the fader. He gripped the needle, delicately dropping it in and out of the groove to control the sound between two fingers. “Hey, should we call your uncle?” mom says. “He’d love to know what you’re doing right now.” Little man isn’t sure, more into the sounds cutting in and out when the needle contacts the black vinyl. On the other side of the decks, I’m wondering just who “uncle” is. She pulls out the phone, presses on the bright screen. Somebody answers, a laid back Oakland drawl, maybe a bit nasal — I can hear on the other end. She gives little man the phone, “Here’s Uncle Shock. Tell him what you’re doing.”
Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground will be published for the first time this month. To write it:
He used an Ediphone—a recording device that etched a simulacrum of his voice onto a spinning wax cylinder when he spoke into its handset—to narrate his story, then edited his work by playing it back and revising as he listened. And the effect of that process can be heard in the text, which strides forward with the hurried rhythm of someone speaking to themselves aloud.
Reading
I read Adam Mansbach’s memoir + poem I Had a Brother Once in a single sitting: on the front stoop, next to the mailbox, with the shipping envelope torn open lying next to me. It’s a book about Adam’s brother’s suicide. Adam is a friend, and I was with him 10 years ago the night he received the news. We were at a lounge DJing together in a small booth, and he got the call from his father. I can say the experience of reading this book was unlike any other I’ve had – not simply because of my proximity to the tragedy and some of the people it shattered, but because the book starts on that day, in that DJ booth, and with that call. It’s a stunning book/poem about grief, loss, and ritual. And it has me thinking about times I’ve felt entirely inadequate to comfort people and how entering into that suffering with them is perhaps the most one can offer.
Teaching
We’re closing out the semester of YA Lit + Anti-Racist Teaching with some creative projects. I launched students into them by having a gripes + dreams session and then turning each gripe/dream into a How Might We challenge question. We then did some sharing about which HMW questions were most compelling, and that sharing was good enough to show who had common interests to move forward together, and who should go it alone. Oh, and project charters: I have students working together fill out a project charter document so the focus and roles for everyone are clear from the start.
Listening
This new album by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, & London Symphony Orchestra. Brass, strings, and ambients carry that opening refrain through the entire album – a full, complete, compelling thesis. Mastery.
Haram by Armand Hammer & The Alchemist. More incredible digs and loops from The Alchemist in the now Griselda era. I like what this Pitchfork review said:
On their collaboration with the Alchemist, ELUCID and billy woods drag postcolonial wounds onto the examination table. They don’t just embrace the darkness; they wear it as a protective cloak.
Fun boogie R&B from New York art kids group Michelle with the endearing lyric I don’t want your Instagram / Just want you to hold my hand on the song “Get Off Ur Phone.” And listen for the MJ “I Can’t Help It” nod in the melody of “Mango.” This is summer time fun time music, good people.
Put the needle on Sly’s “Trip to Your Heart” for a homie tonight. It’s a special kind of joy watching someone hear a sample like that for the first time.
Incredible release:
Arthur Russell’s The World Of Arthur Russell reissued on 3xLP thevinylfactory.com/news/arth…
Issue 041 of my newsletter went out Monday: Teena Marie on Cash Money, Wingdings, and more.
Reading
Finally getting around to finishing Isabel Quintero’s Gabi, A Girl in Pieces – which is good because I’m teaching it next week. The novel is written in first person journal entries – pieces – so, in form, the novel is a girl in pieces (get it?). I think this is where we’ll go next week in class.
Writing, from Microblog
I gave in this year. Instead of asking students to read an assignment sheet before class, I started rolling it out as an editable google doc in class. I have them read and annotate it together with comments in the margins. I then respond to their comments in the doc real time, and we talk through issues I hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes I’ll leave blanks in the sheet and ask “what do you think should go here?” Or, “I went back and forth about this part, what do you think?” The comments and my responses then stay in the margins of the assignment sheet for when students are later working on the assignment, or – even better – for students who couldn’t be there in class that day. It’s messy, but what I ask students to do is usually messy anyway. Call me professor messy. The practice has me thinking about other ways to unfix assignments and assignment sheets, letting students speak into what I’m asking them to do.
Teaching
One thing I’ve learned this semester: as much as students need their professors, they need each other more. And that’s beautiful.
Listening
Inamorata by Methods of Defiance. Jazzy, chaotic drum and bass.
Fondue Party by Polyrhythmics. Five songs, 23 minutes — just follow the flute.
A longer story: There was a certain window of time I would stop by Dave Adam’s house on 48th street in West Philly at 8:15pm every last Thursday of the month to borrow one of his turntables on my way to DJ the monthly Philly Gathering. The RCA cords on the turntable worked – mind didn’t – but it was also missing a leg. So with the turntable came a stack of old BodyRock flyers rubber banded together to work as a leg.
A few weeks ago Dave tweeted about Teena Marie’s two albums released on Cash Money Records in the early 2000s. Dave’s point was that there is a whole body of music in the early 2000s by 80s R&B stars, made at the tail end of their careers, that many of us failed to listen to. His point: It might not be what it was, but there are some gems in there. I think Dave was right. So I dug up the albums this week and listened. You can hear on the intro to her first CMR album, La Doña, a pretty corny attempt to fit her into some kind of crime syndicate family narrative. I picture Teena sitting on her own Cash Money Records album cover throne. But there are some gems on the album. And by the second album two years later, she’s really in the groove for most of the album. Dave was right.
One thing I’ve learned this semester: as much as students need their professors, they need each other more. And that’s beautiful.
I gave in this year. Instead of asking students to read an assignment sheet before class, I started rolling it out as an editable google doc in class. I have them read and annotate it together with comments in the margins. I then respond to their comments in the doc real time, and we talk through issues I hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes I’ll leave blanks in the sheet and ask “what do you think should go here?” Or, “I went back and forth about this part, what do you think?” The comments and my responses then stay in the margins of the assignment sheet for when students are later working on the assignment, or – even better – for students who couldn’t be there in class that day. It’s messy, but what I ask students to do is usually messay anyway. The practice has me thinking about other ways to unfix assignments and assignment sheets, letting students speak into what I’m asking them to do.
Today I overheard a young person in technical concentration whisper to himself, “I’m good at this,” and it blessed me.
Really dig using SesssionLab for facilitation planning. Both solo and team. Won’t be going back to G. Docs anytime soon.
Reading: I plowed through David Yoon’s Frankly in Love, in part getting ahead for the YA Lit course I’m teaching. It’s been a long time since I read a YA romance novel. What a treat it was. A total delight. I can’t wait to talk about it with my students.
Writing: Field notes, related to the community songwriting and beatmaking project I’m a part of. Here’s one of my favorite parts from last week.
K bursts out into laughter. I laugh with her – mostly just because she is laughing – because I don’t even know what she’s laughing at. I bring the needle back so we can hear that part again. “…energetic and deeply FO-cussed” says the speaker. K. approximates the grain of her voice to intonate and inflect like the speaker: “Deeply FO-cussed” she says through laughter, placing a hard emphasis on the first syllable of the word. She keeps saying it like this and laughing. “I guess this is the part we’re sampling,” I think to myself.
Teaching: Mostly grading a very rewarding assignment I gave my students.
Listening:
Inamorata by Methods of Defiance. Jazzy, chaotic drum and bass.
Fondue Party by Polyrhythmics. Five songs, 23 minutes — just follow the flute.
Zoom, Slack, Zotero, Vimeo, Votero, Zimeo, Sotero, Zlack: welcome to my evolving command + spacebar Spotlight searches.
Current listening, right in the groove: Stylin’ 900 mix by Ennio Styles
From “E-mail is making us miserable,” an article preview of Cal Newport’s new book. His previous books pitch practial solutions to problems like these, so I look forward to checking it out.
There are many reasons why e-mail makes us miserable. It creates, for example, a tortuous cycle that increases the amount of work on our plate while simultaneously thwarting, through constant distraction, our ability to accomplish it effectively. We’re also, it turns out, really bad at communicating clearly through a purely written medium—all kinds of nuances are lost, especially sarcasm, which leads to frustrating misunderstandings and confused exchanges. But lurking beneath these surface depredations is a more fundamental concern. The sheer volume of communication generated by modern professional e-mail directly conflicts with our ancient social circuits. We’re miserable, in other words, because we’ve accidentally deployed a literally inhumane way to collaborate.
Reading: Back to some YA lit with Darius The Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram.
Teaching: Mostly one-on-one meetings with students as they prepare to finish their first major assignment. I’ve come to call these meetings collaboration sessions since they really consist of us working together rather than a student asking me questions that need answers. At times I have students overlap in these meetings as well so they can listen in on the ideas, challenges, and solutions of classmates. The sessions are absolutely time-consuming, but if I can muster the time in my schedule, I find them always worth it when I am later reviewing, grading, and giving feedback on the finished assignments.
Listening: Rae Khalil is special, and so is the band. I get the same feeling while listening that I did when first hearing The Internet. Tiny Desk concert for the win.
Making: Still digging deeper into Koala sampler, especially with this really creative way to get a granular effect out of existing features. But really I’m just stalling before blocking off a whole weekend to get into the Live 11 update.
Here’s issue 40 of my newsletter sent earlier this week. It contains notes on creativity, the body & sound, and more. Elements & Embodiment 040
Star Vehicle: On Translating Poetry - Los Angeles Review of Books
The translator is someone who carries goods across the border, someone who, despite even their greatest moral fairness, will, in the process, smuggle more than what is written on the page, who will participate — whether they mean to or not — in contraband activities.
Reading
I finished Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. This is the third book of his I’ve read in the past few years (first was Sag Harbor and then The Nickle Boys). As I read more of his books, I find myself trusting him more. Like when a chapter starts and it’s about a whole new person we have yet to meet – and I’m a bit disoriented as a reader – I trust him that it will not only matter but will be worth it for me. I imagine all authors deserve this generosity from their readers, and we the readers are the ones who loose if we cannot muster such a gesture toward the author. So I’m hoping I can extend it toward other writers, too.
Teaching
We are taking our foot off the gas a bit in Readings in Young Adult Lit + Antiracist Teaching. The challenge in reading Ghost Boys was to understand how a novel written from the standpoint of a young Black protagonist could, at the same time, center whiteness. I think we got there without critiquing all goodness out of the novel. Now, we are onto an assignment that has students listen to, annotate, and draw insights from how they had been discussing the past three novels. This is possible because I had them audio recording their pod conversations, even though they didn’t know the exact purpose at the time. It’s a very different kind of assignment – one I’ve been thinking about for years and finally designed this semester while leaning on the excellent Letting Go of Literary Whiteness. I’m excited to see the results. I always tell myself: If I’m not excited grading and giving feedback, then how must students feel while actually completing it?
Listening
A whole bunch of beats on vinyl that I put together in this mix on my Soundcloud. It’s called “People Still Make Beats” because people still make beats! The standout track comes in 11:20 and is from one of my favorite Detroit producers, Illingsworth. His signature vocal chops are in there. Check it out.