Being other than we are

I sent this coda—a version of the end of my dissertation that ended up chopped, changed, excised and different—to Joyelle McSweeney yesterday, after reading her brilliant take on Outkast's "B.O.B." Though it's missing some of the better theorizing that the eventual conclusion became, I still like the readings that are present throughout—of Outkast, Jay-Z, The Clipse, and others. I thought some of y'all might enjoy it as well. You can download it here.

On basketball and masculinity

Reconfigurations has just published a found poem I wrote during last year's NBA playoffs, culled from ESPN's basketball blog Truehoop, which I read far more often than I should, on the theme of masculinity and disappearance. For some reason, the sports world becomes obsessed in the playoffs/during tournaments with players either 'disappearing' or 'showing up.' I was interested in how that mapped on various masculine tropes—so I set myself a project of taking a word from each line of that blog's feed for a few weeks, with those constellations of questions in mind.

Here's the poem.

Here's Truehoop.

Enjoy!