Architecture Sentences
One Long Black Sentence is book of sentences you can't understand because they are actually architecture drawings. This book of Renee Gladman's drawings -- and a written piece by Fred Moten you can read -- shipped last month and looks to be sold out already.
This kind of writing/drawing goes back to Gladman's 2017 book Prose Architecture, whose jacket describes it as:
A book of ink drawings that regards language as an exposed nervous system, uncovering the moment whereby architecture emerges out of prose, the sentence becomes a drawing, and the act of writing narrative can be examined from bodily movements.
Gladman talks about the pull toward drawing sentences as architecture:
I used to want to write about the city all the time and a lot of my books take place in cities. Then I used to talk about the sentence as a city, as a space to move through where you encounter punctuation like derailments or signs. It just got to be more abstract. I realized that, because my lexicon in drawing is these simple lines that become cityscapes or building structures, I could draw towards this notion of architecture that I was really interested in. The drawing speaks to this kind of confluence of ideas, where architecture is now a kind of paragraph or a kind of drawn shape that’s full of language or full of the suggestion of language.
Writing about these drawings in The Paris Review, John Vincler asks:
What are we reading or seeing when moving through books of writing containing only gesture and abstraction? What does it mean to write free from language?
Coming from hip-hop aesthetics as I usually do, these questions and the approach in general feel close to some of the philosophies guiding urban stylized lettering, or graffiti. I quoted RAMMELLZEE in a previous edition of this newsletter when he commented on Basquiat:
They called us graffiti but they wouldn’t call him graffiti. And he gets as close to it as the word means scribble-scrabble. Unreadable. Crosses out words, doesn’t spell them right, doesn’t even write the damn thing right. He doesn’t even paint well. You don’t draw a building so that it will fall down and that’s what he draws, broken-down imagery.
The scribble-scrabble and unreadable descriptions match some of what is at work in Gladman's drawings. But RAM assesses that Basquiat's pieces are built to fall down, and Gladman's seem carefully intact.
These ideas call to mind a useful distinction poet Douglass Kearney has made between reading a poem and looking at a poem -- a point that also applies to graf. In a dazzling lecture/performance at MSU two years ago, Kearney made this point with respect to the word cluster associations, breaks, and layers that make up a prominent hip-hop aesthetic in some of his poems, like "Wolves."
He talked about how these aesthetics are an attempt, at some level, to do with poetry what happens in sample-heavy hip-hop tracks, like classic Public Enemy: layers and reference and samples colliding with one another, subject to different listenings. He noted how as aesthetic forms, these clusters and layers often lead readers to talk with one another through their disorientation about what associations they see among these clusters. This co-reading then dislodges the poet as author, or the reductive question of what the poet or poem might mean. The aesthetic form resists a single reading or interpretation because it pushes readers to turn toward one another and ask, "So what do you see?
My favorite thing, perhaps, is introducing young people to what a turntable can do when you break the first rule: don't touch it! A long overdue collaboration with Accent Pontiac took place this past week, where one young person asked the following questions over a good 45 minutes of pushing this 7-inch scratch record back and forth under the needle:
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?
What happens if something gets on it, like grass?
Why does it start spinning when you move the arm?
What does this switch do?
From the sent folder:
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.
Status Board
Reading: I just finished Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhhà Lai. I'll be teaching a young adult literature course for aspiring teachers in the spring, and its not too early to start sampling the stack I might assign.
Writing: A bit of work spread across three pieces that are nearing completion. One of these is a co-authored academic article on the characteristics of teacher-led organizing spaces. My section is about the rhythms of these spaces, so -- you must know I'm taking a certain delight in referring to this part of the article as the "Rhythm Section."
Listening: Mostly an array of mixes by Mol on Mixcloud. These cover a range of artists and genres, and they really don't miss.