I read four novels last week. I read two social science research articles today. It made my spirit die just a little bit - the contrast between expansive world building and empirical certainty.

I finally made time to sit and read this precise, critical research article on edTPA. One might call the article quantitative ether. It reminds me of something Greg Dimitriadis wrote in his 2012 book, Critical Dispositions. A great deal of the book is about evidence in social science education research. It says a lot about research methods and methodologies too. Here is the specific excerpt the article brought me back to:

There has tended to be an unfortunate conflation of epistemological and methodological concerns in both the literature and “received wisdom” on research. That is to say, the assumption is often that those with an interpretive orientation use qualitative research methods, whereas those with a positivist orientation use quantitative methods. In addition, there is also an assumption that the former tend to be more progressive in disposition, and the latter more conservative. (p. 105)

The authors of the article don’t position their inquiry as an overtly critical or progressive one. In my read, they take deliberate steps early on to avoid some of the more charged controversies around the exams, and I wish they hadn’t. They almost apologize at the end of this article for their “quite unusual” recommendation that states place a moratorium on the edTPA. But the article does what Greg argued in this chapter and in this excerpt, and that is refreshing to me.

Enjoying this slow and global jazz mix for the afternoon work session 🎶

https://www.mixcloud.com/rob-gebhard/jazzabation-funky-global-eclectic/

Just told someone there’s a difference between it being out of control and out of your control. Not sure what I meant but it went over well.

##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

• Strictly Rockers Jamaican Roots etc. mix by DJ Patience. Sunday afternoon gardening soundtrack.

• Dub Hi Fi Session 7 from Dub Hi Fi over on Mixcloud.

• Heartical Roots by DJ Vadim. You see the trend recently, right?

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.

One of Chakaia Booker’s pieces from the Broad Museum. The real party’s in the shadows.

Took a break from reading, by reading this interview with Ishmael Reed. Many gems, many maps. Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 100

An elder who I deeply respect responded to my email with, “How’s it going beloved?” – and I now couldn’t feel any more warm inside.

##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

• My friend Yukiko brought me back a record from Philadelphia two years ago for my birthday. It was Jean Terrell’s solo record. It’s got the stunning track “No Limit” on it, which begins with single hits of a kick, snare, and open hi-hat. Then it has Jean harmonizing over some lush strings and key swings before the 4/4 hits the floor and the rocket ship take off. I chopped it up this week and put some vocals over it from Royce Da 5’9”. So here’s the track I’m calling Jean da 5’9”.

I put the finishing cuts on this track today. Hard to re-do a classic but…

Another FNR Detroit sure shot. A bunch of them, actually.

Studies show all meetings are better when you play a round of The Best Gift Ever improv game. Take it from me. I am “Studies.”

Cilantro and thyme vying for second place in the herb grow back race. Mint way out ahead, no signs of slowing down.

Big feel good mix from Rob for the AM session.

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

• Lots of hard techno for this vinyl mix I put together. This ain’t study music. It’s more like fighting music. And definitely dancing music. I love it.

• Some great releases this week by Detroit’s Funk Night Records. You can just run through all of them on FNR’s Youtube channel, but the standout for me is “Gorilla Funk” by Jeffery Scott Greer.

• Sunny & The Sunliners “Give it Away.” — rare Chicano soul from Texas. I came up on a copy of this LP a month or so ago and keep coming back to this track.

• And “Give it Away” could easily be followed up by Wanda McDaniel “Gangster Boy,” which I’ve been loving for a long time and finally located on 45 recently. Not many of these left around.

When brother Eddie Kendricks said he walked out the door with a bag full of blues, I felt that.

Made this mix today. Hard techno records up front. Grooves on the backside.

Took a minute, but I got the sonic composition site back up. This work was equally fun and challenging. I’m glad my students took the risk.

My blurb for Ian Levy’s forthcoming Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Therapy in School Counseling: Developing Culturally Responsive Approaches

Ian Levy accepts hip-hop on its own terms. As a result, this book shows how hip-hop — its expressions and collective practices — can promote humane and whole counseling experiences for students. This book will expand the culturally responsive repertoire of school counselors and even classroom teachers.

Here is this week’s Elements & Embodiment newsletter that went out on Sunday: a very visual edition with some treats for the eyes.

Reading

I started reading Claudia Rankine’s newest work Just Us: An American Conversation, the center of which seems to be an essay of sorts about whiteness and critical whiteness studies. I’m tying to decide what are fair expectations to put on a book like this, or maybe I’m just hesitating to say that I don’t like it so far because it seems to be her deciding what she thinks of critical whiteness studies and letting us in on the entry level thought exercise. But I’m sticking with it.

Writing

More work on my reflective essay for promotion to full professor. I like this part I wrote. We’ll see if it makes the final cut:

My work in this area has provided a third avenue through a topic divided by research methods and conflicting epistemologies. On one side: scholars who advocate for the use of these exams by using mostly quantitative research methods. On the other side: scholars who critique the exams as culturally-biased instruments that discriminate against teachers of color. In my work, I maintain the critical stance of the latter group but have a different epistemological starting point. My starting point is the subjective experiences of students – mostly students of color – who take the exams. I argue scholars, teacher educators, and policymakers have the most to learn from them.

Listening

• This album Play With The Changes by Rochelle Jordan just came out. It’s got UK house and garage, a few slower soul joints, and her super dope singing.

• Indestructible Philadelphia Soul by The Ethics.

• 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.

• I made a beat. Check it out.

Teaching

How the semester started:

How it finished:

Reading my students’ final self-evaluations and it’s still true: they need one another more than they need us. They need us too, of course. But supportive, healthy relationships with one another in class will make what they learn with us persist past the semester. Also true: we can set routines and forms that help facilitate these relationships among them. That’s actually one of the ways they need us.

Black Thought on writing:

I think a writer should always be aware of his or her surroundings. The material is there. It’s already in the world. You have to be in tune with it to hear it and see it. The best essays, the best books, all wrote themselves. Same with paintings and dances—all of the best art, all of that shit just comes from the universe. You have to master the art of being in tune enough when it’s time to create.

From The Paris Review

A friend asked:

Do you have a reading practice and a time and place you do it in?? Gathering data. Need to reinvent my approach. Seems like you pick books to read in advance.

I had a hard time coming up with an answer, so I figured I’d write my way through it.

The first question is easy. I read in the evenings in the place of TV (or not) and sitting on a couch or chair. I need a pen and some sticky notes nearby too. I’m not a bed or bedroom reader. Never fallen asleep with a book in bed in my life. Can’t really read outside either, and definitely not in the sun. Once a month if I can swing it, I might block off a day and try to read most of the day. It’s 75% because I want to and know I’ll feel refreshed afterwards, and 25% because I want to rebuild my reading stamina eroded by social media and work. I don’t know if this matters, but as a kid or teenager, I never read books without someone else making me. I was outside doing something sweaty and not inside reading something interesting. I was an unlikely English major come college. I chose it because I had a philosophy class at the same time as a British literature class, and it felt like the literature class was philosophy in stories, and that was cool. Plus I figured all of the material would be new to me since I didn’t ready much on my own prior to college.

The second question is more complicated. I’ve never planned out a year of reading in advance, and I’m not one of the people who keeps track of the books they read in a year, ticking them off at the last page. I know some people who do: the guy who decided to read only Big Books this year so he might become okay not finishing books; or the other person going hard with Black speculative fiction this year. I’ve had the impulse to do something like that – wondering what it might afford – but never followed through on it because I am too easily swayed by what books I hear other people talking about on a podcast, on Twitter, or in my RSS feed. (More on RSS feed in a minute). Last year I heard two people on a podcast talking about José Saramago’s Blindness. I hadn’t set out to read pandemic fiction in an actual pandemic, but I had to grab it and read it because of the way they talked about it. Wow. Or, I work with some people who do scholarship in this interesting corner of literary studies called distant reading. I had never heard of it, so I read a book that traces that field’s development, and it got me wondering if there can be a kind of “distant listening” in hip-hop studies or ethnomusicology. Or I saw people tweeting about Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino, so I read it, and it had me thinking of all the ways the white supremacist narrative used to cover that lie mapped out onto the school district next door to me and its narrative to dissolve the “alternative” school where they had funneled many of the African American students in the district. The books that end up staying with me over a year usually come from indirect recommendations from other people.

I should say this too: the separation between what I read for “work” and what I read for “me” has never, ever been clear. Sometimes I think it is clear, but then it turns out it’s not. For instance: I read Carol Levine’s Forms: Rhythm, Network, Hierarchy, Whole only because it looked interesting by title. But then the heuristic she outlines got in my head for two years — it’s so elegant, so useful. I saw it everywhere I looked. I tried to write it into an academic piece because it was so compelling – that didn’t work – but now it’s all up in a funded grant my colleague Ruth Nicole Brown and I wrote. So I guess it did turn out to be “for work.” Who knew.

I’ve tried in the past two years to be less swayed by what I see other people reading, which might afford me more intentionality. I tried by spending less time on Twitter where I’m encountering what articles and books people are sharing and, instead, starting an RSS feed (Feedly) to discover things to read. I think this has helped, and I know there is now an extra layer of thinking where I ask myself, “You you really want to read this now? Or should you save it for later?” before I open another book. I now set some aside for later, or just throw it up on my pinboard and rest assured I know where it is.

Finished #YA308. Special class. Really special group of students. Some great books, too. Last one in the zoom, I felt like Fresh Prince all alone in that empty living room. Hope we get a reunion, too.