Emery Marc Petchauer

What I'm reading, writing, listening to week of 06.27.21

##Reading

I’ve been reading some under-the-radar pieces related to Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs, including:

“A Lifelong Search for Real Education,” where Detroit educator Julia Putnam reflects on how the Boggs shaped her ideas about education. This is a tender, moving piece because of excerpts like this, when Julia tells how it felt as a teenager to know that Jimmy was proud of her.

I was moved, touched that this man who knew nothing about me was proud of me. Had I been that starved for this kind of praise? I think so. My family praised me, but it was for things I was supposed to do—I was obedient, didn’t cause trouble, and my grades were fine. For that, my family was proud, appreciative. Jimmy was proud of me for going beyond that. He was proud because I cared about something other than myself. I’d never even thought to give myself credit for that. I was ready to put my time and energy toward a Detroit that I could be proud to live in.

Then there is “Another Education is Happening” from 2011 where Julia tells the story of how she was shaped as a teenager by Detroit Summer, the youth program organized by the Boggs. She drops this gem:

I had not even known that I craved being asked to do something important until I was actually asked.

I’ve been thinking about that sentence – and even its verb tenses – and texting it to people all week.

##Writing

I’m still moving forward, with frequent steps back, on an essay about theories of change in activist education scholarship. Here is how the focus is shaping up:

This essay, I reassert the importance of theories of change, and their ontologies and epistemologies, for contemporary scholar activism in education. For this task, I draw especially from decolonizing and Indigenous approaches to participatory action methodologies, for they have a great deal to teach us about this topic. While these ideas have long been central to scholar activism, I offer that these considerations are especially important in the early 21st century as scholar activists extend traditions and invent new formations to carry out their activist work, especially outside state-related, settler colonial institutions.

##Listening

  • Incredible head-nodding in the clouds soul from Goiânia, Brazil. It’s Corpo Possível by Bruna Mendez.

  • Conclave by Conclave, a group of rotating musicians “inextricably woven around the living, breathing rhythm.”

  • The group we don’t deserve is back with an album we didn’t know we needed. The group is SAULT. The album is NINE. And you should press play.

What I'm reading, writing, listening to 06.20.21

#What I’m reading, writing, listening to 06.20.21

##Reading

Lots of reading this week related to an article I’m working on about theories of change in activist education research. I’ve revisited many of Eve Tuck’s articles that cross Indigenous thought, theories of change, and participatory action methodologies. A Third University is Possible by la paperson also showed up in the mail right on time, and the decolonizing frames make for good conversation with Tuck’s work. Any time I’m thinking about theories of change, I’m thinking about Grace Lee Boggs again, so I’ve gone down a short path of writings about her work too. Of note is the essay “Living by the Clock of the World” by Matt Birkhold, which provides a lucid clarification of Boggs’ idea of visionary organizing, and the critical reply “In Defense of Struggle,” by Aaron Petkov.

##Writing

I’m almost to the point of First Shitty Draft for an essay I’m writing on theories of change in activist education research. Writing this piece has me thinking about the various activist traditions from which scholars may think about themselves as scholar-activists. It’s also got me thinking about the different kinds of formations – many of which are not legible to institutional heuristics – that these activities form. The risk in this piece is inadvertently drawing lines in the sand about who is and isn’t a scholar activist. That risk has me thinking about lines and what they do. So the intro has this small part on lines. I’m not sure if it will make it to the final version, but I find myself liking this kind of thinking

I proceed below by drawing lines that connect theories of change through participatory action methodologies. By drawing these lines, I take some risks. Lines can connect dots to renderer a useful sketch, and they can also provide a path to a destination. But lines can also also divide, enclose, and separate.

##Listening

Mixes I’m playing

Music by Friends

The Winter Tried To Kill Me: Sad nDn Love Songs by Sacramento Knoxx. (Click to listen.) Screen Shot 2021-06-19 at 3.23.08 PM.png

New discoveries

Heavy funk covers of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and “Thriller” by The Traffic, from Australia.
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Deep tech house from here in Detroit by producer Nuntheless. Vinyl is available for pre-order now! Screen Shot 2021-06-19 at 3.27.18 PM.png

What I'm reading, writing, listening to 06.07.21

##Reading

On the academic side of things:

On the non-academic side of things:

The modern state — with a capital S — does not refer to individual states, but rather to the entire system they form a part of: the political, social, economic and cultural order we live under, including capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism and racial and gender hierarchies, all working together as a single, complex mechanism. We can think of it as a vast operating system for ordering and controlling functions and relations among human society, economy, populations, and the natural world, analogous to a digital operating system like Windows, Unix or MacOS.

##Writing

I’m starting an essay about theories of change in activist eduction research. It will be a shorter piece; I think I can finish in before July. This week I did a lot of iterative drawing and sketching in different colors about the piece. I’m finding this is a better way to start a new piece than putting linear words on a screen. Here’s a peak into the notebook:

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In this process, I’m usually capturing stray thoughts that will need to go somewhere, writing out anchor ideas and quotations, making lots of arrows about relationships, and redoing all of this page after page to refine things. The colors have a loose meaning too.

##Listening

Mixes I’m playing

Music by Friends

Horray! There’s a new record label in Detroit called Papaya Records. It’s founded by my friend Eastside Jon, and the first two releases came out this week. Both releases are by local stars, Dez Andres and Hazmat Live. Click on the pics to take a listen. Dancing shoes on.

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New discoveries

Descendants of Cain by KA. Dark, earthy, sorrowful writing over melodic loops. Most songs don’t even have percussion in the beat. I’ve been playing this album over and over.

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Records I’m spinning & sampling

Dubby cover version of Evelyn “Champagne” King “Love Come Down.”

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What I'm reading, writing, & listening to: 05.24.21

##Reading

I finished reading Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. I loved it. Looking back, I see how time is an important character in the novel. Time that passes, time that doesn’t, and us as readers wondering what time has done and is doing to the Vignes twins, their mother, and the people in their lives since the twins ran away decades ago. Time makes up the five parts of the novel as well: 1968, 1978, 1968, 1982, and 1985/1988. I won’t say why, but in the end, time collapses through the twins’ mother. The consequences of liner time are no more, or at least not how I expected when The Reunion happens. Looking at the five divisions of the novel and their order, I guess this could be a signal against the linearity of time – that it won’t matter in the end how we think it will – because it has folded over onto itself.

I also finished Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone and Colson Whitehead’s 2011 zombie apocalypse novel Zone One. Perhaps more thoughts on those in the future, but for the moment, I’ll say I had a difficult time appreciating Zone One. A friend who is a zombie novel aficionado has ranked it second on his “all time” list (World Word Z is his #1). When one critic wrote that the heavy and unpredictable use of flashbacks in Zone One “deny the reader any feeling of narrative satisfaction, through denseness and obfuscation,” I can say I felt that. But I also think I get that Whitehead was trying to represent in narrative form the Post Apocalypse Stress Disorder (referred to as “PASD”) that all of the characters suffer from. “PASD” sounds like past, and that’s where flashbacks take you. Get it? I’ll still take The Girl With All the Gifts as my #1 novel featuring zombies, but it’s partly for how it affords a kind of reading about teaching and education.

##Writing

No writing this week, and that’s fine. I took the week off to read in full, as you might detect above.

##Listening

Mixes I’m playing

New discoveries

Reissued Philly soul in this short LP by Mitzi Ross.

Records I’m spinning & sampling

Late 1970s soul from Columbus, Ohio. The WEE record was reissued a while back by Numero, but I managed to land a gifted, original copy through my friend J. Rawls.

Funk from Hawai’i. This standout track, “Hunk of Heaven,” has been reissued on Jazzman records, but this week I got into the deeper cuts of the LP in a studio session with a collaborator.

Former member of the Supremes, Jean Terrell, takes off in this rocket ship of a track.

What I'm reading, writing, teaching, & listening to this week: 05.10.21

Reading

I’m reading Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. I picked it up in a nice stack a few weeks ago during a session in an actual bookstore. How filling the time was. It’s true: I’m shallow enough to judge a book from the first sentence. This book begins with an excellent one:

The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort.

It’s not lost on me that this opening flash takes place at a diner, and many interactions in Bennett’s other novel, The Mothers, also took place at a diner. It’s not the same diner, and it might not matter at all, but I like those kinds of things and always look for them when I read multiple novels by an author.

Here’s another great string of sentences from my first 20 minutes with the book:

Telling Stella a secret was like whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight. Nothing escaped her. But she hadn’t imagined then that Stella was keeping secrets of her own.

Whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight. I know that image will be in my heart all week.

Writing

Still working on my promotion essay. I riffed a bit on relationality this week. I don’t think this part is in final form, but it’s getting there – and writing around it taught me something I hadn’t realized about relationality and my work.

The connections among these pursuits is neither a matter of consequence nor of “expertise” trickling down to teaching and outreach. Rather, these connections are a matter of relationality. I don’t mean relationality only interpersonally. I mean “being well attached….By identifying more threads of association, we are better able to see these attachments not as constraints but as forces to harness” (Unflattening).

Teaching

No teaching as the semester is now finished. I have on my mind to complete a post-mortem for myself, debriefing on the new class I taught, but I’ll have to get a few things off my plate first. I’m hopeful that too much time won’t have passed before then for it not to be useful.

Listening

What I'm up to this week: 04.26.21

Reading

A few short essays/reviews:

Writing

Drafting the reflective essay for (deep breath…) my Promotion to Full Professor. It’s a writing task I enjoy so far, looking back across the last six years and making some meaningful connections. I don’t feel the need to cover everything I’ve done, and that’s freeing.

Listening

  • Broken beat, downtempo, electronic excellence in the form of Pulse of Defiance by Yoshinori Hayashi.

  • The constantly excellent 24-hour selection at Soul Public Radio.

  • All of the music by Ester Rada, an Ethiopian soul-jazz singer born in Israel. I learned of her while watching a lecture by legendary music engineer Bob Power. Her unique cover album of Nina Simone songs might have gotten her the most attention, but her other albums — including the ones she sings in Amharic — are just as good.

  • The overlooked B.U.M.S. (Brothas Unda Madness) hip-hop album Lyfe ’N’ Tyme. Oakland, CA. 1995. What else do you need to know?

Teaching

Bringing things to a close in YA Lit + Antiracist Teaching. Class time this week has been mostly facilitating collaboration structures for students as they complete creative projects. The end of the semester is always jarring to me. You’ve met regularly with a group of people for over three months, and then you don’t. I sense the end of this semester will be especially jarring to some since class has replaced some of the social interactions the pandemic has taken from us all. I know that’s true at least for me.

What I'm up to this week 02.29.21

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.

What I’m up to this week 03.01.21

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.

What I'm up to this week 02/08/21

Reading: I started The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It’s riveting. I can’t wait to see where it goes. By “it,” I mean both the book and the literal underground railroad train that Cora and Caesar took away from the Randall plantation in Georgia.

Writing: I’m working on an article with two colleagues about the rhythms, networks, and hierarchies of teacher-led organizing spaces. This one has stretched on for quite some time, but that’s fine. There’s no rush. One of the last wrinkles we are ironing out is making sure the earlier dichotomy between physical and digital space is no longer in the article. Because it’s just space.

Teaching: Up this week in Readings in Young Adult lit was All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. This novel has taken the place of To Kill a Mockingbird in some high school English classrooms, and for good reason. Here are some of the discussion prompts from the second half of the week, all through the course focus of anti-racist teaching: >*How is the basketball team and practices an extended metaphor for broader racial justice efforts?

*What do we learn about Rashad’s trauma, healing, identity, etc. through his art – woven through the novel?

*How does trauma and healing circulate through/among the members in his family?

*How does the guilt, loss, loneliness, etc. in his family relate to his letting go of whiteness?

Listening: I’ve been spending more time in the music studio these past few weeks hanging out with records. One result is a mix of vinyl releases – mostly all records pressed, made, or bought in Detroit – I posed on my Soundcloud. You’ll hear music by Kyle Hall, Norm Talley, DJ Holographic & Alex Wilcox, and more. But watch out for that Gustav Brovold techno heater at 33:20. Big ouch!

What I'm up to this week 1/25/22

Reading: Getting ahead a bit by reading Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera.

Writing: Some final edits on a series of articles coming out in Kairos written by a group of graduate students who took my BreakBeat Lit class last year. This has been special: moving together from seminar papers to publication. Kairos only publishes webtexts, a format I’ve honestly never had any experience with before. But having to dig into this new world has certainly got me thinking differently about alternatives to print-based scholarship, like this amazing thing that I don’t exactly know what to call it.

Teaching: Some norm building and early architecture in the first week of the semester in my anti-racist YA Lit course.

Listening: This new stomper “Murphy’s Law” by veteran Irish singer Róisín Murphy. Live version recommended. I hope I’m not too late to grab the 12” vinyl because this needs to be played out when dance floors are a thing once again.