Keeping Time: Readings In Jazz History Book Pdf
Vaniria Setser
The point is so that it doesn't look like it's sweating, like that effort, you see? It must appear effortless! No matter what the style, it must have that. I mean, the seams can't show.
This newsletter-podcast is called threadings. because I want my seams out and obvious. Here, I can show my work; display for you the sewing pattern; have you trace with me the stitches that assemble me into an artist, a teacher, a great big worm tucked in a fancy scarf. I am here to be educative. I want you to remember that I am a person with very specific lenses on the world. I want you to remember that everything about our current existence in the Anthropocene (as in, a human-sovereign world) is by intentional and by design. The Anthropocene is intentional and by design. Someone(s) made all this up. World-making is an intentional and detail-oriented process; what can be made can be remade, over and over again. I want you to leave this space having exercized you ability to loacte the seams. Leave this place looking for the threads of this world around us.
Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History book pdf
Just look at Cuba, beating our US adult literacy rates despite decades of overt economic warfare. Your relationship with reading is fucked up because burning books is a bad look. The empire utilizes overt, violent oppression like that as a last resort, because it makes it near impossible to seamlessly convince people they are not oppressed. And to hide an empire like this? Of this size? People need to not know.
I have grown to detest short-form video as a means of learning, specifically because these insidious apps. As previously stated, I am a proud member of Gen-Z. I have watched, at this point in my life, hundreds of hours of educational content: everything from Ted-Ed to Crash Course to ASAP Science and many in between. It feels good, fun, rebellious even, to use my screen to learn. Even though I personally did grow up utilizing atlas books and encyclopedias in schools, I still ended up at the computer lab regularly by sixth grade. I am one of the last of my kind to never have an iPad babysitter because that technology was not widely available in my community yet. We had a computer room and dial-up internet until I was a teenager.
Can you tell me the thesis and supporting arguements of videos you watched from two calendar years ago? Not just one off that really happened to stick in your memory. Most. Can you tell me most of the claims and evidence made in the hours of videos you watched?
While I would normally use the rebuttal section to grapple with better researched critiques, I instead must review my own work because short-form engagement did not give said critics the time, space, or incentive to root their critiques in research of the author. Because all of the above is publicly available information previous to this.
Consider first this over-arching thesis: the brilliance of educational work lies in the exact opposite task. Where most art forms do work, significant work, to make it look easy (see: the seamless novel, the floating ballerina, the effortless jazz player plucking a new melody from the ether), the teacher seeks to stop a moment in time. Did you catch that? See the mechanism? The split-second decision? Look closely. Don\u2019t miss it. Taking the form, shaking it off the model, turning her technique inside out, pointing at the seams, the intestines, the world-making in each intrepid and intentional detail\u2014 did you miss it?\u2014 we find the task of the Teacher, an occupation I prayed with every Reasonable and self-perseverant burst of blood I had to never become.
Threadings. is a newsletter and podcast in which I explore the interconnectedness of our worlds and freedoms. Exploration tethers me to the art of world-making. In examining the seams which bind my life and politic together, I stitch for you all a patchwork quilt: my revelations on the systems of this world, the odd and beautiful realities of existing in public, the ways I am ignited and ionic. A seamstress of thought, just like my mother(\u2019s mother\u2019s mother)\u2014 here I am, hunched over my keyboard sewing machine, all in a labor of love.
I write to you today because I have apparently made it look easy. There\u2019s a cadence on the internet that occurs without fail: I state the need to read while giving you a piece of myself stitched together \u00BB someone (many someones) respond with the idea that I \u201Cmust not know what it is like to struggle to read.\u201D Kindly: this infuriates me. Not just because of my pride (why do people assume instead of ask?) but because it\u2019s cheap analysis. The better question is:
I announce myself as the narrator as I compete with for your attention for the next\u2026 forty minutes or so. Hello, my name is ismatu; I am a poet; I am writing a persuasive essay. I am doing you a favor announcing these things to you rather than silently wiggling into your brain to change your mind and have you think it was your idea. I encourage you to consider me critically.
Not total illiteracy, mind you. That\u2019s bad for business. The ruling class (law and policy makers, oligarch businessmen, celebrity, hedge fund managers buying up single-family housing, etc.) want you literate enough to be able to work for them, but not so literate that you realize how badly the working class gets fucked over in this world-making. Read enough to be able to consume and to execute, not to consider critically, certainly not enough to create. Because then what? A mass of people realizing we can create and recreate everything we see and touch to something kinder for us?
Countless journalism, podcast projects, quantitative and qualitative research death knell the same morbid conclusion: the US-American populace cannot read1. I\u2019ve linked a brilliant podcast project below, it\u2019s recommended all the time\u2014 Sold a Story. We know! We know that illiteracy\u2014 the inability to read, or the inability to read well enough to have it serve you\u2014 we know it\u2019s a massive problem. An epidemic of sorts. We\u2019re simply too exhausted to care.
In a great many iterations. If you were lauded for reading, put on a pedestal in front of your peership, it might be stress-inducing to return to work the muscles you know have atrophied. Are you still good or worthy of help if you cannot read voraciously, like you did as a child? If you were labeled a problem, difficult in class, slow\u2026 I bless and keep you. Worse, if you were made to feel less than because of your reading ability (unintelligent. burdensome. a waste of space. bound for prison) then you likely have a literal stress-response when someone mentions or suggests reading to you. Reading is a site of trauma your body holds onto for most of us. Anyone that suggests reading must not understand what you went through. Every objection imaginable will materialize when someone suggests that you try to read.
Many of us were given reading as homework exclusively\u2014 never as a fun or revolutionary tool, a tool of imagination\u2014 so it often feels like drudgery, even still. None of us have a neutral experience with the discipline of reading and that is by design. We live in a world ran and ruled by the written word. Similar to money, right? The tool itself is not necessarily bad. However, in this iteration of world-making, proper literacy in reading and writing (as well as financial literacy) are often the difference between agency, freedom-seeking, and autonomy for self-determination and working in someone else\u2019s world-making in abysmal conditions perpetually. Which means:
The far easier route: traumatize the kids. Make them hate reading. Tie plenty of guilt, shame, and fear in the process of returning to reading in adulthood. Make them feel like it\u2019s an innate talent\u2014 you have it or you don\u2019t\u2014 rather than a skill you need to learn, hone, and practice. You never have to burn the books if no one ever wants to read them in the first place. And this means you can allow texts that chronicle blueprints for our collective liberation to hang out in plain sight. The internet age is the most collective access to information we have ever had as humans in every iteration of our timeline\u2014 and most of us cannot read it well enough to allow it to change our lives.
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