Texas Standard

Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest book centers the sport, but from there spins meditations on mortality and “making it.”

The full transcript of this episode of Texas Standard is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.

2024110224_TS_EX_POD_AbdurraquibAlwaysThisYear.mp3

Raul Alonzo [00:00:00] Hey there, Listener Texas Standard digital producer Raul Alonso here with a Texas extra extended and special content for our special listeners. I first became a fan of Hanif Abdurraqib work after reading his collection of essays on music entitled They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us with some friends during a remote book club during the height of the Covid pandemic. I remember thinking to myself, This is the kind of music writing I’ve always wanted to read. Across his work, his style stands out no matter the topic that he’s writing on. Combining his extensive cultural knowledge with a sincere sort of vulnerability that makes it so easy to connect not just with the words, but with Haneef himself. In reading his latest book, There’s Always this year on basketball in Ascension. That feeling continues. Across the pages are powerful meditations on mortality and Place, all stemming from Haneef’s musings on basketball. So when I saw Haneef was among the authors announced for the upcoming Texas Book Festival, I laughed at the chance to have him on the show. Of course, it’s difficult to delve too deeply into the heavy themes of the book, not to mention chat about the many other topics Haneef can comment widely on within the time constraints of the show. So I’m excited that we are able to share this extended conversation between David Brown and Hanif Abdurraqib here. Enjoy.

David Brown [00:01:41] It’s the Texas Standard. I’m David Brown. At first glance, to the uninitiated, the book There’s always this year on basketball and Ascension might appear to be, well, simply an ode to playing hoops. In the very first lines, the reader places their hand in the author’s and is guided through four quarters, complete with a 12 minute NBA countdown clock in each as well as timeouts. But the ensuing meditations across the section span not just the game, but themes of mortality of place and the concept of making it. The author is Hanif Abdurraqib, a New York Times bestselling author, MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award finalist with There’s Always This Year, also named to the 2024 Long List. He was also recently named the University of Texas Press American Music Series editor and is part of the lineup for the Texas Book Festival, set for November 16th through 17th in downtown Austin. He joins us now to talk about his latest book and if welcome to the Texas Standard.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:02:40] You so much for having me. It’s a joy to be here.

David Brown [00:02:42] Well, so as I mentioned in my introduction there, the book is about so much more than basketball. It’s also a little hard to categorize. I mean, this is part memoir from the perspective of a fan, I suppose, part poetry collection, part cultural criticism. What did you have in mind when you sat down to write this book, or did you actually sit down with a book in mind?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:03:05] Well, I think as this is no different than my usual process, which is I sit down with I sit down with something in mind, and then once the work begins, those plans shift. You know, I wanted to write kind of a straightforward basketball book. I wanted to write a book about coming up in Ohio in the era of LeBron James as a LeBron James, coming up as a as a young player, we’re about 181 year apart. And so I really got to witness his rise through high school, which I think is really fascinating. You know, I, I didn’t really appreciate it until now that I got to watch LeBron James come up through high school in a way that, you know, now, of course, we can watch high school players all around the country just on our phones or with their Instagram clips. But in 2002, 2001, that wasn’t the case. And so it really allowed me to appreciate the fact that I got to witness something great, and I kind of wanted to write about that. But then I realized I was what I was actually writing about was childhood and the passage of time, what it means to make it out of a place and what it means to stay in a place. Well.

David Brown [00:04:03] Forgive me for interrupting, but that was a question I had. When you were growing up. Were you a fan of basketball? Did you know about LeBron James at that point?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:04:12] Well, for sure, yeah. I played I, I love the game. I knew it nearly everyone. And I was even remotely like the game of basketball, you know, even if you didn’t kind of you knew about LeBron James, you know, he was ever present his he kind of hovered over over our landscape here.

David Brown [00:04:28] So you also tackled the theme of immortality and legacy through, in a sense, through this character that LeBron James plays as a kind of fixture here in this book. Obviously, James still playing in the league, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the connection that you personally felt towards him as he was beginning his his rise, so to speak.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:04:50] Right? It’s definitely there was a sense of pride, but there was still some envy. Not in the sense that I wanted to be an NBA player. I had no illusions about my my abilities to be an NBA player. But but a lot of it was that, you know, he was making it somewhere. He was making it out of a place while I was definitively kind of not. You know, he had he had options for exit at a time in my life where I was, you know, struggling, quite frankly. And so, you know, it was pleasure and joy, but also some envy, if I’m being honest. And that was that was my own and not, you know, not anything. He was doing my own youthful foolishness in a sense. But, yeah, I’m so grateful that I’ve gotten to watch his career become come his career.

David Brown [00:05:42] Let’s talk more about this theme of Ascension, which sort of permeates the book. I’m thinking of your examination of Michael Jordan in the 1985 dunk contest toward the beginning, where it seems very much about immortality. And then there’s the parts where you talk about watching airplanes take off with your father or your meditations on your definition of heaven. In the book’s third quarter. Is there a thread between these and other examples in the book that you wanted to bring out? And I’m curious why? Why was this such such an important part of the narrative here?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:06:12] Yeah, well, part of the book too, is me trying to redefine what this what the definition of ascension is for myself, you know.

David Brown [00:06:22] What does it mean.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:06:23] To get better or.

David Brown [00:06:24] Bigger or where you have.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:06:26] Where you think For many people, ascension means to to rise upward, to rise upward from way. But for me, some of this book was me considering what if I defined Ascension as just simply moving from the place? Who dreamed to the place that you are, you know, moving from a place you. Words are the place that you dream, which happens in smaller increments, I think in this book, I think is trying to honor those increments. So yes, there is a lot of very literal imagery and questions and narratives around flight and movement. But there’s also for me, you know, I’m writing about the kind of minutia of essentially smaller parts of Ascension, the moments that are steeped in kind of I slept in a jail cell and got to dream myself shooting a basketball, and eventually I would shoot that basketball, these kind of things. So, yes, essentially in a large sense, moving upward, lying, exiting a place, but essentially also being grounded somewhere and loving that somewhere and in moving forward in small moments.

David Brown [00:07:26] Another big theme in this book is place. You talk a lot about your hometown of Columbus, where which you yourself moved back to a few years ago, and how many people leave Columbus. And you consider notions of how making it are often tied to leaving. And you know, here in Texas, obviously were one of the top line stories in recent years has been about all these people who moved here in search of opportunity. I can’t help but think that that notion has a lot of resonance. But you want to it seems like you want to redefine what it means to make it. Can you break down this new definition that you’re putting forward here?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:07:59] Sarah Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, coming from where I’m from, so many people have had put it in my head that to make it was to leave. You know, you have to leave to make it. I still get asked sometimes if I’m going to move to, say, New York or L.A. these kind of things. So making it is placing oneself in proximity to a geographical location and not and so to do that, strips of strips away any kind of emotional definition or spiritual definition or definition of it. So my my thought is and I grew up with a lot of I grew up watching a lot of talented basketball players who never, quote unquote, made it. Therefore they never made it to the NBA or or anything like that. But they’re so revered and beloved on the courts in this city, on the courts, where they were, where they were once children and once played. There are now new generations of children still revering their name, which that to me is a form of making it. Yes, it does not come with the same kind of financial windfall that making the NBA would come with, but it comes with a real emotional weight that ties you to a geographies history. You are a you are an eternal part of the fabric of a place. And that to me is a form of making it.

David Brown [00:09:05] You’ve talked before about this being a book. You’ve dreamed about writing, and I know in this book and previous ones, you’ve often written about dealing with grief. And I wonder, as you’ve wrestled extensively with that theme of dwindling time, do you feel like your relationship with that notion of mortality has changed now that you’re on the other side of writing this book?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:09:25] Right. It’s gotten deeper and more comfortable, which was which was it’s never you know, that’s not always can’t always guarantee that. But I do think my relationship with my mortality has as I’ve gotten more comfortable, I’ve gotten more this book showed me of many things. But one thing it showed me is that I can really slow time down through memory or through just the kind of tenderness and attention and focus on attention. I can. I can so I can slow time down and sink more generously into the memories that I have and the people I love who are no longer here and all these things. So I think that has softened my relationship of mortality in part because quite simply I’m thinking more generously about moments in increments and not kind of, you know, a big picture thing where time is slipping away rapidly.

David Brown [00:10:15] One of the overarching themes of this book is the dwindling of time. And I can’t help but think of that notion and how you write and speak about beauty with this book, and especially with a countdown clock that spans each section, it feels like you’re pushing us to remember that countdown clock that I guess we all must ultimately defer to. But in doing so, also consider the the moments, the now, if you will. Would you say that’s a fair statement? What were you getting at?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:10:47] Yes. You know, so much of the pace modulation of the book, you know, you think about the countdown clock and the way that in some in some notions, there’s a large chunk of paragraphs, even pages before another timestamp emerges. And sometimes the timestamps emerge in rapid succession. Even that pace modulation is asking a reader to think about what they prioritize in terms of the passage of time, for example. You know, and it bears mentioning, too, that this book I began writing this book around 2021 where, you know, this thing had happened to me and I think happened to a lot of people during lockdown and even after where at least for me, it felt like the days were going by very slowly, but the weeks were going by very fast. And that was extremely disorienting for me, where it felt like my days were taking, you know, months. And yeah, I would blink and a week would be over and a month would be over. And so I was asking some real questions of my own brain in this, in this moment of how do I prioritize and how do I not prioritize my time, but how do I kind of cherish the time that does feel long instead of treating the length of the days as a punishment, you know it treating them with a sense of gratitude instead of feeling feeling punished by them. And so, yeah, I was asking people through all of these kind of time, modulations and pace modulation saying, I know that I can make on the page this book feel both overwhelmingly fast and incredibly slow. And I guess the question I have is, what do you cherish about the time you have? What do you cherish about the time that feels even long and brutal?

David Brown [00:12:25] I have to ask, do you think that that’s there’s something unique, metaphorically speaking, between that that perception of the passage of time and basketball as as a game? Or is it just something that you knew that you knew well? And obviously, LeBron James being from your hometown and all that. Is it something about basketball per se?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:12:47] Yeah. I mean, I you know, I played the game and I’m a I’m an avid watcher of the game. And what I love about basketball is that much like the modulation in the book, the pace of a game can sometimes, you know, the last gasp, depending on what the score is and what the circumstances are. The last like three minutes of a basketball game can feel like an entire universe, you know?

David Brown [00:13:06] So intense. Yeah.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:13:08] It’s. Yeah. And I, I love that. I love that in that in that time, we kind of get to build a world around what’s happening. A great example of this is in the book I write about the game seven of the 2016 finals, highlighted by, of course, LeBron James Chase down block and the big Kyrie Irving shot in I misremembered that game. I you know, I was talking about that game and I watched it many times, but I had to rewatch it for this book. And I was talking and I was saying, it was, you know, that the last, the last five minutes of that game was so back and forth. Everything was so fast. Everyone was scoring. That’s actually not what happened. It was a slog. It was just a real, you know, carrying, carrying this heavy burden of who could score. It was this intensity high.

Unidentified [00:13:47] Blows up, misses rebound taken by a dollar, a dollar to curry back take a dollar up Block by James LeBron James with the.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:13:57] Rejection And I had realized that I had built a world around LeBron’s chase down block and Kyrie Irving shot I had built an entire universe around those things. And that’s kind of miraculous, you know, that we can sit in the slow moments of a game and build a narrative that suits our dreams, even if we have to go back and watch the game and say, Wait, that’s not how I dreamed it. But it’s still miraculous nonetheless, that basketball is not the only sport where that happens, to be clear. But for me, it’s the one that I’m most tapped into and the one that I’m most fascinated by. When it does happen.

David Brown [00:14:28] Not to put you on the spot here, but I feel like I have a duty here at the Texas Standard to ask you about one of the instances in the book where you talk about a certain Texas team. It’s in a passage where you’re you’re talking about the Miami Heat’s 2014 series against the San Antonio Spurs. And you write, and I quote here, the Spurs were, at least to me and my crew, a boring squad, a squad devoid of star power and flair. Now, of course, we’re talking about one of the last eras of the Spurs, Big three of, you know, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, not to mention the finals MVP Season four.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:15:02] Young Kawhi.

David Brown [00:15:02] Yeah. Kawhi Leonard Yeah. You do mention how many Ohioans at that time became Spurs fans out of a desire to root against LeBron. Now, I don’t want to get you into trouble with Spurs fans or anything, but I’m curious if you could talk about what to you are the aspects of of basketball and traits behind players that defined the beauty of the game when beauty obviously being a major element in all this.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:15:27] Yeah. I mean, I will say now, you know, I kind of aged out of that. You know, back then we were coming off of those kind of exciting Cavs seems the Spurs where, you know, I think at least a lot of us in Ohio who before LeBron, you know, had to face them and everyone became a fan. I think the Spurs represented, you know, boring is maybe harsh in retrospect, but. They had been kind of you know, we’d seen Tim Duncan for so long. And I think for me and a lot of my friends, there was just fatigue. It was like, okay, these guys are back again and we have to watch the style of play again. But my favorite again, my favorite Spurs teams were those kind of like in between the post Duncan teams. I like a deep they have I have a big affection for the brain and strategizing part of Gregg Popovich. And I think there’s something fantastic about just watching him work with a talent that is less than perhaps what he has been accustomed to in the championship runs, which is why this Spurs team, the current Spurs team, is exciting. I feel like last year was a wash. It felt like he was kind of just experimenting with Jeremy, so he had a point and I feel like this is the year where we get to kind of see Popovich is Julius Yeah, yeah. I mean, he’s an absolute genius in, in his has done it with so many different levels of talent and I just hope he sticks around. I mean, I know that he’s, you know he’s he could retire and be a Hall of Famer instantly, but I hope he sticks around to really see through whatever this Web era is going to be, because I think that when he needs a coach like that who can build so thoughtfully around him. So all that said, that’s my those are my story slots. Now, I will say, like back then, I wanted the heat to win. I wanted, you know, I loved Tim Duncan, but I was like, I’ve seen enough. You know, it’s like sometimes you can love a man, but you’ve seen him so many times. So you’re kind of like, I’ve seen enough of them to skip the show this time around. But I was I to be clear, I was in the middle. I was deeply as I wrote the book, I was very much in the minority that people turned into Spurs fans really quickly because seeing LeBron lose was a lot. So funny was the primary.

David Brown [00:17:23] That’s so funny. Now, before we let you go, I know you were recently named Ed to the University of Texas Press American Music series, this after your 2019 contribution of the series. Go ahead. In the Rain Notes on A Tribe Called Quest. I know music’s been a hugely important force for you, not just in your work, but your life. Can you say a little bit more about that relationship and how it might inform your approach to your role as series editor?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:17:47] Yeah. I mean, you know, for me, I, one it was just great to work with the team back when I, you know, had the book come out. It was such a wonderful experience working with that, with that team and in the work they do is really special. But, you know, I am someone who craves you know, I love music, of course, but I also crave thoughtful, insightful writing about music. I crave the kind of writing about music that extends the life of a song or an album or makes us reconsider a band that has been beloved for a very long time. Yeah, And I think you know that honestly, that the opportunities to do that are dwindling. The spaces where people can do that are dwindling.

David Brown [00:18:27] You would think that that would not be the case.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:18:29] Especially it is, right? Yeah. So what’s, what’s what.

David Brown [00:18:32] Is going on with that?

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:18:34] Well, I think there’s just less platforms for people to write. When I was coming up as a as a music critic freelancing, I could write for a massive amount of publications. And now the editorial staffs are shrinking at places. The writing staffs are shrinking at places. There’s not a lot of opportunities for people to share expansive thoughts on music and writing about music. And so, you know, there’s a real challenge there. But University of Texas Press is one of those places that has been massively generous in the kind of expansive thinking they have around what kind of books are, you know, books that can have success in the world. And to get to join that staff and help move that mission forward is a real pleasure.

David Brown [00:19:17] Hanif Abdurraqib is a New York Times bestselling author, a MacArthur Fellow National Book Award finalist. He’s been speaking to us about his latest book, There’s Always This Year on Basketball and Ascension. It’s a beautiful read. You can catch him talking more about it at the Texas Book Festival, which runs November 16th through 17th in downtown Austin. Hanif, you’ve been so generous with your time. Thanks so much for joining us on The Texas Standard.

Hanif Abdurraqib [00:19:41] Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.