Emery Marc Petchauer
Me: Can’t wait to start class tomorrow! Here’s the zoom link! C-ya then!
Every student in class: Um professor we don’t start class until next Wed.
Me: Right, right. C-ya next week!
Le fin.
Issue #30 of Elements & Embodiment went out to the inner circle on Monday. It touches on Renee Gladman’s Prose Architecture, a turntable lesson in the park, and what I’m reading, writing, & hearning.
From a wise colleague:
We cannot overstate how much our whole human selves need to be seen and acknowledged at this moment. We must fight alienation at every level, in speech and deed.
I had been wondering when it would happen, and it is today: “pandemic” is in the title of an article submitted to the academic journal I co-edit.
Feedback:
I question whether race intentionally — alone — as you set it up, is a meaningful strategy of change. That is, in light of the racial and linguistic shifts in schools, why is race intentionally as a practice the one to forward rather than, for example, explicitly anti-racist pedagogies? Will race intentionally shift language ideologies in equitable directions? Another point worth considering in this regard is the need to resist a hard distinction between educators who are race evasive and race intentional. The second wave of critical whiteness studies explicitly resists the either/or framing of whiteness and white folks. I recommend you draw more deeply on this body of work to highly how race evasiveness and intentionality among educators is complex, shifting, and contextual – most certainly not an either/or practice.
His questions:
Where does the sound come from?
How does the sound come out?
What do the little circles do?
Is this a record player?
What happens if you play it upside down?
Why does it start spinning when you move the arm?
What does this switch do?
Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm.
Lefebvre in Rhythmanalysis.
Elizabeth Dias writing in the New York Times, “Christianity Will Have Power.” >Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.
I need a major late pass on this one, but I finally, finally watched Blindspotting. Now I have serious post-semester regret for the ways it would have sat right in the groove with Angry Black White Boy, Long Division, and even Shadowshaper in my BreakBeat Lit seminar last fall - especially for the ways it attends to both hip-hop content and form. Or, add Sorry to Bother You, La Haine, and Do the Right Thing, and we’ve got a nice module on hip-hop film aesthetics.
Issue #29 of Elements and Embodiment, my regular newsletter, covers the collage art of Lorna Simpson and Visions Collage – plus what I’m reading, writing, and listening to this week.
Stripped and sanded my grandmother’s old bench with the intent of reapplying a dark stain. But hold up! Might just seal it and leave be.
Issue #28 of Elements & Embodiment went out today: From Russia with Buzz. It covers the fun story of 4625 kHz, a mysterous Russian shortwave radio frequency that nobody has ever claimed to run – in addition to what I’m reading, writing, listening to, and making.
Rethink Your Resources: The Origin Story of Derute tells how our worker cooperative around racial justice came to be. 📝
Baldwin writes to King
James Balwin’s letter to MLK in 1960.
Dear Reverend King:
I certainly do not expect you to remember it, but we met over two years ago, in Atlanta. I was then doing a couple of articles about the South, and I am in the South again, for the same purpose.
I am writing you now because Harpers Magazine has asked me to do a profile of you, and I am coming to Atlanta—I do not know whether you are there or not, but one must start somewhere—to see if this can be done. I know that you are extremely busy and my effort would be to bother you as little as possible. I have read your book, and Reddick’s book, so there are many things I will not need to ask you. If you will permit it, and if it is possible, I would simply like to be allowed to follow you about for a day or two, or longer, in order to be made able to convey some dim approximation of what it is like to be in your position.
The effect of your work, and I might almost indeed, say your presence, has spread far beyond the confines of Montgomery, as you must know. It can be felt, for example, right here in Tallahassee. And I am one of the millions, to be found all over the world but more especially here, in this sorely troubled country, who thank God for you.
I will be in your church on Sunday, and if you receive this letter, and if you are there, I trust we will be able to talk.
Very sincerely,
James Baldwin
Just sent Drums & Baldwin via Buttondown to the inner circle – which includes a short letter Baldiwn wrote to King in 1960. It’s issue #27 of the weekly dispatch, Elements & Embodiment.
Derute Cooperative member meeting this afternoon. On the agenda:
- Habari Gani
- Quarterly project check-ins
- Pilot of new external communications cycle
Field recording today from Campus Martius, Detroit. Freedom March drums meet Miini Giizis drums after some conversation. Water flows in the background.
This country owes itself to the Shameikas, the Iyannas, the Octavias, the Breonnas. To all the Black women who built men up so that they may stand erect while stepping on them all the way.
