WeakNotes August 2025 - Week 1 - Teaching prep, the subway is a frame, and Fat Joe

Aug 4, 2025

Hey look - I wrote four five (!) weeks of WeakNotes. In a row, no less!

This week marked a pretty significant shift back into class prep for the fall. Classes start three weeks from tomorrow, and I'm working the MWF schedule, which doesn't allow for a lot of wiggle room. I'll be teaching three classes:

• Historical Research and Writing
• US History through 1877
• Public History Practicum

The third is a totally new prep for me and, unlike many history courses, is very hands-on and project-oriented. I am finalizing some plans for that this week and can hopefully share some details about that soon, along with my other syllabi, here on the blog.

AI has of course changed a lot for teachers at all levels, so a lot of my work these next few weeks involves redesigning course components in order to mitigate inappropriate use of LLMs. Ideally, we also use this as an opportunity to re-create activities and assignments that are ultimately more engaging -- but the reality is that most of us are quite frustrated, having now had a few years of experience seeing student use of LLMs climb, and our best intentions in the classroom sometimes foiled in the same breath. It's not always easy to silver-lining this, even though I do think some good can come from the challenge we're facing.

But I'm also assessing and rewriting some material in the US History survey to better connect to current events and interests and, honestly, just to inject some new life into it.

Overall, I actually really enjoy this part of class prep - working on new activities, readings, lecture ideas, etc. - but I wish I was better about getting started sooner. It always takes longer than I plan.

This week turned out to be a fantastic reading week. I read two novellas by Elizabeth Spencer: The Light in the Piazza and Knights and Dragons. I absolutely adored everything about Light and enjoyed Knights quite a bit as well. Spencer is the sort of writer whose sentences just lead you on, one to the next, building and twisting and turning in all the right ways. I might write about them this week, although I've also been working on posts re: Shalom Auslander's Feh and Harvey's Orbital --- so the backlog is real.

I also read the first two of three long poems from Susan Landers' What to Carry Into the Future, both of which were quite thrilling and inventive. Which brings me to...

One of this week's Ones was absolutely the first poem of Landers' book, "My Quotidian Icon." In the piece, we tag along with the poet-narrator as they travel every inch of the NYC subway system. You move from line to line across the system with them, meeting characters and seeing the city in quick, insightful flashes -- then they're gone.

Much like, well, a subway ride.

Except they're not gone, not entirely. There's a lot of subtle repetition throughout the poem: words and phrases that seemed unimportant initially reappear a few pages later. Ideas, too.

Again, like a subway ride.

It's a love letter to the city but hardly an uncomplicated one, as throughout our journey the narrator holds up bits of NYC's history alongside its present with a critical eye. The city's power structures, too, come under the poet's lens.

One of the things I loved most about it, though, was how much it reminded me of riding the L in Chicago. I lived there for a number of years, and very soon after moving there I discovered how the L really offered two experiences in one. On the one hand, there was something adventurous and eye-opening about a long train ride. Moving through neighborhoods and seeing the city from a very particular vantage point, one felt both distant from the city and immersed in it at once. Even daily trips, like a work commute, could be genuinely surprising.

But the L could also be calming, almost meditative. Late nights watching the street lights pass with the right soundtrack coming over your earbuds, for instance, maybe after a really good show or a dinner with friends -- that sort of ride had a magic about it. That came back to me vividly while reading.

I don't usually think of poems as having an argument, but this passage really gets at the core of the piece:

The subway
is a frame
for refining
one's vision,
a means of focusing
one's seeing
on a time and a place
where people in power
are not just not making sense
but striking sense with all
of their might while I am
wanting to make sense
of my life through the portals
of light formed by the elevated
tracks. Look--
see how it pours--
the light--
into New Lots
full of sunflowers
absorbing the heavy
metals from this earth--

⊕ If you're keeping track, that brings the backlog of books to write about to four. And I'm probably forgetting a title or two... I'll probably write something up on the Landers' book when I'm done, as there's another central theme that runs through these poems - that of attention - that I want to spend some time with. You can see it here in this passage, and I think it's one of the reasons I kept thinking about this poem in the days after I read it.

A quick recommendation for a good short read: On My Grandmother and Her Favorite Rap Song (Pitchfork) by Alphonse Pierre. It's one part memorial to his grandmother, and one part appreciation for Fat Joe's ubiquitous "Lean Back," but also a nice reflection on how music and culture can work on us in mysterious, sometimes inexplicable ways.

And, it's a good chance to watch the original video for Lean Back, which I probably hadn't seen since 2005. Go ahead and do the dance. It's inevitable.