two new things

Brittney Cooper is my favorite news commentator.

She spoke at the Y a few weeks ago, and they taped it, so I watched it.

Two (of the) things I learned from her:

(1) The sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline.  I knew that many, many people who are incarcerated -- especially women --- are survivors of sexual abuse, but I'd never heard that term before, and I think it's a brilliant way of naming that reality.  Naming is so important.

(2) The critique of intersectionality coming from scholars arguing for assemblage as a more helpful construct.  I don't exactly understand the distinction, but now I want to.

Also, at 59:30, she gets asked about the 2016 election, and the way she responds is so YEAH YEAH EXACTLY YEAH.

Audre Lorde

"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence.  It is self-protection, and that is an act of political warfare."

screenshot from the Stanford AAAS page

a glimmer

Rather than write today, what I really want to do is get started on the project I’ve got to complete this afternoon.  But because my whole person is so deeply driven by guilt and obligation (Thanks, Catholic school!), I’m gonna hammer something out here because I promised (promised who?) I'd post every morning.

I’m working on a fifteen-week curriculum for a GED prep class at a prison.  This class is so cool.  It was founded and is run by incarcerated men who, knowing that many men have jobs during the day and so cannot attend the daytime GED program in the Education Building, petitioned the warden to let them create a night class.  I think they’re inspiring; they’re honestly the primary reason I’m (I guess) committed to staying in the Bay Area instead of packing up and moving home.

We’re meeting this afternoon (the inside leadership of the program and a few of the outside volunteers) to discuss this coming semester.  We’re moving toward a model where the inside leaders do the vast majority of the teaching and the outside volunteers support them.  I can get real excited about the idea of an emerging parallel program: GED prep/teacher-training.  And then beyond that, this badass, dynamic, humane learning community that becomes not just a model for other prison education programs but for learning and teaching communities, full stop.  I believe that these guys could help folks really meaningfully think and work against the larger carceral state.  For real. 

Okay, seriously seriously, I need to get shit ready for this meeting.

Is it fair for me to use this as an example to show my students what I expect?

I could cry I love her section on feminism so much (It starts around 15:00 but everything before it is awesome, so skipping ahead is probably not a good idea):

"But um, it's not the age of women unless it can be the age of girls, too."

Worst moderator ever.

Eoin's birthday present

No, I have not given up my blog.

I just didn't have anything to say. But now I do, or at least I have stuff that someone else has said that I feel like posting here. That's something.

From the blog of style rookie, a "Tiny 13 year old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats. Scatters black petals on Rei Kawakubo's doorsteps and serenades her in rap. I have no where near 4 million readers. Rather cynical and cute as a drained rat. In a sewer. Farting. And spitting out guts.":

People like Anna Piaggi, Lynn Yaeger, Julia Frakes, Isabella Blow, Daphne Guinness, Vivienne Westwood, Iris Apfel, Grace Jones, David Bowie, Little Edie, Diana Vreeland, Bjork, Marchesa Luisa Casati, Catherine Baba, Anna Dello Russo...these people that dress to extremes simply because of a very deep, pure love for fashion...are inspiring to me.

And then people like this girl in FRUiTS, or mad old women, or funny toddlers, who dress for the same reasons and may not even know it's called fashion, inspire me as well. They make me want to write a story using what's in my closet, or in a kitchen cabinet waiting to become some type of headpiece.

And that, in the end, is all I want to do. Use my resources, and just have fun with dressing. Weirdly enough, it's when people anywhere-outside, in school, online-don't understand my outfits or style that motivates me to just be stranger. Not that I think I'm Bob Dylan or some type of ENIGMATIC ARTISTE or an artist at all, but this refusal of others to try and understand why somebody dresses a certain way (for which the real reasons are, in the end, nothing complex) just makes me want to dress more obnoxiously. Be more difficult to understand, more over their heads.

Or, I'm a malicious and spiteful teenager!

But really, I love it when I love my outfit and I walk from class to class and feel like I'm practically floating. My head is bobbing around like Bjork's when she walked for Jean Paul Gaultier and I just feel very confident in myself, not because I think other people will like my outfit but just because I do. And maybe even because I know other people won't like it because it isolates me and I can be in my own world for a bit. And it makes me feel good, and being creative makes me feel good.

And I think that is all I really want to do, and have ever wanted to do. The idea of being a mad eccentric who is constantly slipping into different skins is so appealing to me. I started this blog because I wanted to explore my style. Now I have more of an idea of what it is and will just continue to try and apply it every day.

Now, another reason I started is because I wanted to be part of the fashion blogging community and because I think fashion should be discussed. So let's get a discussion going: What inspires you? What keeps you in love with clothes? What makes you stray from sweatpants every day? Tell me.

I mean, why should I blog when there are teenagers out there who are better at it and have interesting things to say rather than inane things? Writing a story with her clothes? That's good.

If you're going to read any of her posts, I'd start with this one.

And for the record, here's me stylin' out in middle school. How is it possible that she and I could have such relatively similar haircuts and she looks chic and I look like this. Eh? Tell me.


(And that "Tell me," Russian spammers, is not an invitation for more of your shite.)

here's something cool

Here's one thing I love about hip hop: the use of "Aww" or, "Unhhh" as a way of pausing to let the beat catch up or think of something to say, or... I don't know... lots of things.

For example, in "D.O.A." (see below), Jay Z uses it twenty-four times. I counted. I think it really contributes something awesome to the song, and I'm not being facetious.



Here's another good example:

good one

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, 1967

Why is public transportation so intriguing?

Jealous. So jealous.

run-ons

He felt that he had fallen on the soft and thick cushion while his body, light
and weightless, had been run through by a sweet feeling of beatitude and
fatigue and was losing consciousness of its own material structure, that heavy,
earthy substance that defined it, placing it in an unmistakable spot on the
zoological scale and bearing a whole sum of systems, geometrically defined organs
that lifted him up on the arbitrary hierarchy of rational animals. His
eyelids, docile now, fell over his corneas the same natural way with which his
arms and legs mingled in a gathering of members that were slowly losing their
independence, as if the whole organism had turned into one, single, large, total
organism, and he --the man-- had abandoned his mortal roots so as to penetrate
other, deeper and firmer, roots: the eternal roots of an integral and definitive
dream. Outside, from the other side of the world, he could hear the
cricket's song growing weaker until it disappeared from his senses, which had
turned inward, submerging him in a new and uncomplicated notion of time and
space, erasing the presence of that material world, physical and painful, full of
insects and acrid smells of violets and formaldehyde.

Three sentences from "The Other Side of Death" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the stories in a collection of his that I'm currently reading. These kinds of sentences are common in Marquez's work, and I generally really like anything he's written. But they're so long, WTF. It takes me awhile to sink down into (and I really think that's the best way of phrasing what needs to happen for me to understand his work) his writing. It's just so different from how I use language myself, slow-moving maybe. Any one who knows me well knows that I generally do things as quickly as I can. Sometimes when I'm just washing dishes or getting dressed I get out of breath from moving too fast. (Also, I'm out of shape, apparently.)

I can't articulate exactly why, but this need to adjust my language-intaking-process reminds me of this project that I just did this summer. I'll be thinking some more about this.

I miss Alabama.

I'm incredibly excited to be getting ready to leave for New Orleans to spend a few days with Arianne. And excited again at the prospect of getting to visit Melissa and Josh later this summer. My time in Alabama was seriously one of the most important learning experiences I've had, for countless reasons, not the least of which was the intelligent, ambitious, and remarkably compassionate friends I made. Just impressively thoughtful and action-oriented people. (So impressive, one might be inclined to think that they can't party. But, oh no. They can.) I mean, check out Chris' latest blog entry. (And this from a guy whose nickname I shall not include here.)

on (I think) my 21st birthday

whoa

No matter how many times I hear this part of "Go Go Gadget Flow," I'm still amazed at the very rhyme-iness of it all. And at the connectedness of it, to itself and to other people's stuff.

They race in circles like they raisin a gerbil
I race in a circle like I'm raisin a horse
I'm racin a Porsche while they racin in place
They race in a cage I race on a course

That case in the court did not defer the dream
I am still a raisin in the sun ragin against the machine

Plus, Lupe dances like I dance.

I can't BELIEVE I forgot that I love reading.

I'm an English teacher for Chrissakes. It's just so easy to not read books when I spend all day reading emails, worksheets, student essays, blogs, news articles, message boards, my Google reader, Facebook, body language in my classroom.

In the last two weeks, though, I've read this:(Holy cow.)

this:

(Tres compelling.)

this:

(Kinda dumb and kinda awesome.)

this:

(Inspiring.)

and this:(Challenging. As in I feel like I better do something.)

Now I'm getting started with this:(Required reading for my summer course!)

All excuses accounted for, I seriously don't know why I let myself get out of the practice of reading all the time. Shameful. These last two weeks, I've found that my books have woven into my thought processes even when I'm not reading; I'm making all kinds of connections between what's on the pages I'm reading and what's being said, written, performed, resisted in my classroom.

I mean, duh. This is what I ask my students to do all the time. Why the f did I think I was exempt?

good friendth

Here's a reason why Kasey's great. When I was telling her today how disappointed I was with myself for getting impatient -- extremely impatient -- with a student today, she got as irate about the student's behavior during my telling as I had gotten in the moment. I told her what happened, and when I to the part in the story at which in the moment I wanted to put my fist through the computer screen, she got super angry for/with me. It's not that her reaction made me feel justified, just human.

Here's a reason why Jessica is great. When I told her that I had to write my first discipline referral of the semester, and that one of the things that I had to write on the form was that the student went into the adjoining computer lab, raised his arms high in the air and yelled at all of the students in that class, "You are all idiots!" she about died laughing. And while in the moment part of me knew it was hilarious, the part of me that's striving for a rigorous learning environment did not. Laughing -- especially laughing that hard -- at my own failures is super useful, seriously. Laughing at funny shit like a student yelling at a bunch of people he doesn't know, "You are all idiots!" is also very fun.

half a sick-day

I took the morning off to try to get over this bear of a cold. I woke up to this in my inbox from Sydney. Which was very nice.



This makes me think of Cassie. And I hope on our summer roadtrip we can make something like this happen. Yes?

Mom's a little peeved

that I would suggest that I like sensible women because of how many times I watched Mary Poppins and read Malory Towers and not because I grew up with a sensible, shit-getting-done woman for a Mom. This lady right here:


Okay, probably a combination of both. After all, it was Mom who introduced me to Enid Blyton.

two songs I can't stop listening to these days:

I take it back.

Because I liked meeting with Kasey and Rachael and Gia today about the not-activist conference we're planning. It was exciting and productive, and those three are oh-so thoughtful. I think I can narrow my displeasure down to meetings that are not productive. Or purposeful.

book recommendation

I'm reading a book by Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown called Black Girlhood Celebration Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy.

I'm only into the second chapter as of yet, but so far she's arguing for Black girlhood celebration as a "format" for working with those individuals who call themselves Black, female, and young rather than any sort of girl empowerment programming or mentoring. She asks, "What if we abandon the notion that we Black girls are not good enough? What if we got rid of the thinking that says programming makes young people better? What if we did not define 'adolescence' as inherently problematic? What if we valued who Black girls are, including what they say and how they speak? What if we understood Black girls as producers of knowledge rather than consumers? What if we recognized that there is no magical age when one 'gets over' the racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia that collude to make us, as Black girls and women, the problem?" (29).

I think what she has to say is fascinating in that she takes a critical look at well-intentioned programmers who in fact miss the point that investment "in a [girl empowerment and/or mentoring] program's singular narative of who we need Black girls to be. To get funding. To make us feel good. To be good feminists, Black women, teachers, mentos, whatever" actually disallows those Black girls that a program intends to "fix" from taking an "explicitly political approach" to celebrating their identities in a world that rarely does so. (How's that for a run-on sentence?)

I can't wait to read more of what she says on how hip-hop theories and cultures can and should be woven through spaces that seek to celebrate Black girlhood. I like this part:

For the girls with whom I work in our community, as is the case with my girlfriends, hip-hop gives meaning to our girlhood. That makes us experts. Our expertise is rarely acknowleged.

Consider this example: I was working at a community center with a group of girls. it was the first time I had met them, so I concentrated very hard on learning their names. One girl in particular had the polysllabic but familiar name of 'Tameka' that I mistakenly mispronounced as 'Tamesha.' When I 'called her out of her name,' she responded, 'Get it right, get it tight.' A graduate students , Nita... acompanied me on this expedition and afterward sared with me how 'disrespectful' this girl had been in correcting me -- being a Black female adult with a doctorate degree. I shrugged it off. To Nita's dismay, I was not bothered by the girl's defense.

'I did call her out of her name,' I responded. 'Besides, I rarely take offense to the language She was probably quoting some rap song I'm too old to know about.'

...

On my way home from the recreation center that night, I searched for the hip-hop station on the car radio. Not even one mile from the community center, I heard the song 'Ms. New Booty' boosting the chorus, 'get it right get it tight!' The year was 2006, and Bubba Sparxxx, a White rapper from LaGrange, California, rapping an oft-used msogynist trope of objectifying Black women's backsides, was the rapper Tameka decided to quote that night at the recreation center. Catchy beat aside, the lyrics confirmed my suspicions.

Tameka sampled a line from 'Ms. New Booty' to speak to me. In my work, I found that Black girls literally speak though hip-hop. Even as she corrected me, I did not think she was talking abck to me or speaking disrespectfuly. Tameka was demonstrating a leracy that at one time I was too well-versed in. (33)