DOOM & Dashes / Elements & Embodiment 037
Hello! I took a break from this newsletter a few months ago, and now it seems I'm back, at least for the moment, with issue #37. As before, you are welcome to unsubscribe at the bottom if its contents no longer fit your reading preferences. You can also forward it to anyone else you think might enjoy its contents.
Now, on to some material across the spectrum I've been working through -- plus my routine status board about what I've been reading, writing, teaching, listening to, etc.
Image via Ibrahim Wijbenga/@ibrahimwijbenga
Since news of hip-hop artist MF DOOM passing away became public on the last day of 2020, articles commemorating his life and work have been trickling out. I'm more attracted to the old ones that have resurfaced, like this one from The New Yorker in 2009 by pre-fame Ta-Nehisi Coates. It might not be a surprise that my favorite part is where DOOM gives a window into his writing process:
“When I’m doing a DOOM record, I’m arranging it, I’m finding the voices. . . . All I have to do is listen to it and think, Oh shit, that will be funny. I write down whatever would be funny, and get as many ‘whatever would’ funnies in a row and find a way to make them all fit. There’s a certain science to it. In a relatively small period of time, you want it to be, That’s funny, that’s funny, that’s funny, that’s funny. I liken it to comedy standup.”
First, I'm all here for "whatever would be funny" as a meaningful unit of composition. Second, for me as a listener, this description of DOOM's writing process maps out distinctly onto his lyrical product. I don't mean that his lyrics only make sense if you know his process. You can certainly hear the string of "whatever would be funnies" in his lyrics whether you know his process or not. It's more that the process he describes sounds like it would render exactly what you hear in his music, and perhaps only what you hear in his music. In my experience, this isn't the case with other emcee's processes, like Jay-Z composing on the spot in the studio (SB: if this is actually true) or a battle rap friend of mine rhyming into the voice memo app on his phone until the punchlines start hitting. Those processes could render many different lyrical styles, and those lyrical styles could be rendered by many different processes. DOOM's creative process and lyrical product seem linked in a singular way.
But what I'm most intrigued by in DOOM's description is what these "would be funnies" looked like written down in his notebook. His reference to this artifact takes me back to something a student/emcee told me while interviewing him for my first book in 2012. We were talking about how the practices of emceeing fit themselves into his daily life, especially as a college student. He had developed a type of writing and notation system for writing in his rhyme book. The system was a kind of shorthand to catch the lyrics on the page as quickly as they were coming to his head. So he spoke about how sometimes in class when the professor was talking too quickly, he would revert to this notation system in order to catch the material. In fact, that's the only reason the notation system came up in conversation; he was talking about class. I write about this process abstractly in the book, but what I'm kicking myself for now is never having him walk me through the notation/composition system at work in specific pages of his rhyme book.
I wish Coates would have done this extra work too in the piece, especially because of other things DOOM said about writing and writing artifacts, like this:
“Ever since third grade, I had a notebook and was putting together words just for fun,” Dumile went on. “I liked different etymologies, different slang that came out in different eras. Different languages. Different dialects. I liked being able to speak to somebody and throw it back and forth, and they can’t predict what you’re going to say next. But once you say it they’re always like, ‘Oh, shit!’ ”
Taking notation out of hip-hop and into task management, here is the elegant and streamlined dash/plus system from Patrick Rhone. What I like most about it is how the dash can be transformed into all other necessary symbols (L or R arrow, box, triangle, etc.) to represent the status of the task. It's slick. It was making the rounds again last week on Micro.Blog and for good reason.
Status Board
Reading: I recently finished the one masterful novel unfit for reading during a pandemic: José Saramago's Blindness. I say "unfit" because it follows a group of unnamed people through an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness that has afflicted the world. I had been saving the novel for a while and couldn't put it off any longer. As it would be, I finished the last page on the last day of 2020. Perhaps that will be in some way symbolic.
Writing: We are in the home stretch of an article that theorizes the spaces in which teachers and teacher activists self organize. I came in a bit late to this article with my writing partners, but I’m happy that Carol Levine’s ideas on forms that I brought with have come to lead the way. Levine’s book made quite a splash when it came out in 2015, and the praise is all deserved. You can find a few reviews and commentaries of it on my pinboard here
Teaching: On for this semester is a course on reading and teaching young adult literature through anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches. We are starting off with the very excellent Letting Go of Literary Whiteness by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides. You can check out the course description and learning objectives on this post if you like.
Listening: MF DOOM. Like so many others, I’m revisiting his catalog on account of his sudden passing.
Viewing: I’m a late watcher by habit. So in typical fashion, I finally watched The Mandalorian. Both seasons, back to back, all the way through. Serious binge. Big pop on the final scene.