I've gotten in grad school, which seems like a major feat, but it happened and I'm dealing with it. I'm excited and ready for the challenge of a new academic life. So that's why I quit my job at the bookstore. If I'm a student again, I might as well fully commit, right? Also, I just didn't care for the job that much. Minimum wage for my age, education and aspirations just makes me depressed and resentful. And now, my summer is freed up! I have all the time in the world to devote to friends, listless laying about in the apartment, taking long walks around the neighborhood and. . . READING!
When I told Evan that I was going to read like a newly freed slave, he gave a nervous laugh that suggested I shouldn't make those kinds of jokes. But there's something about summer reading that makes me feel more alive and heady with excitement. I'm rediscovering a world that I had previously abandoned in favor for work and I'm giddy with the thought of escaping to another world!
So far my summer reading list is short, but I hope to make some real progress before school starts. Here's what I'm into so far.
I wanted to read this book because I'm getting interested in travel writing and how black women, in particular, participate in it. This is an interesting narrative about a free black woman's travels before the Civil War. She went to Russia with her husband, who was a servant in Tsar Nicholas' royal court.
This book was a recommended read from a friend. We were talking about Indian women fiction writers. I really like reading Jhumpa Lahiri, but I've read anything she's written. My friend said to give this a try. I look forward exploring this novel.
I'm almost done with this book and I'd say that it went too quick for my taste. When I finish reading any collection of David Sedaris essays, I get a little depressed. This was hilarious and poignant like all of his other books. It's nice reading about another dyfunctional family that can put my own family in perspective.
This is another friend recommendation. I realized that I needed to read more Russian fiction, but was not ready to make the War and Peace commitment.
If I had it to do over again, I would be a classical
composer with chess pieces scattered across the piano lid. I would write pieces
wishing I was a ballet dancer with the body of a ballet dancer in the arms and
fingers. I have a writer’s words fingers and hands. I stole them from a dream I
had once about the only thing I could ever be and do with them. No one has done
less with the sweat of hands. Hands anxious from the sweat and
do the opposite, too. I would be that composer who makes the most of different
staffs and the notes on them. There would be staffs growing from the sides of
my grandmother’s garage while she watches televised basketball through the
window. She has her statues hanging from the walls above a green couch. I
would be that composer to wrap her shoulders in the vines to keep her warm. She
would watch her television set away from the cold she grew up with in white margarine
containers in her refrigerator. I would write a magnum opus from the mouth of the
dead bass above the doorway. I would write it on a violin made from the bass’s
stiff gills and flap tail. The music would be that flap I have nothing more to
love her with.
On the branch, the sparrows dogfight with their beaks and onto
the out of place pine. Before, beneath the birdhouse, wrestling breast to
breast in the weeds. I have waited nine hours (two of them asleep to the pages
of a chapter book) for the first sip of aluminum tea. In the nine hours I
certainly sat on the bedroom floor eating cereal from my lap. I certainly
considered the retributive violence scenarios played out in American major
league baseball (to take the bat, with one, out to the pitcher’s mound for the
war?) I annoyed myself awake with the same meditation that usually brings the
sand. Lamps were on the way the sun is through the left-middle tree. My stomach
ate away at itself and bran. It was a way to live.
The time that is not spent waiting for the tea is the
ceiling fan and DMX’s “Ruff Ryder’s Anthem” connection to “All I know is pain /
All I feel is rain / How can I maintain / with mad shit on my brain?” Guilt (?!)
over wanting to recognize that same rain while admitting that, No, I was not in
the airport parking lot on that fateful day. But wondering if I had to be to
growl out the incurable ache. Because I was, after all, in the airport diner
watching her gag an omelet into a red cloth napkin because her throat had
forgotten how to swallow. I was there for those airplanes taking off enough to
rattle the silver skillets and the scale models and the rental cars. I could
not stomach the breakfast with a hacking music teacher at the bar behind me,
and that should say something about appetites and taste. It should say
something about what we are allowed to say about what we know of pain.
But there were also the mornings before little league games
with holy grail Power Ranger figurines dug up from garage sales with the
newspaper classified map. The ever-youth they promised more seductive than a
line drive stuck in the web of a mitt. And I did make that catch at second base
with the Black Ranger in the back of my mind. And I did not consider the workers
at the factory that fabricated his mastodon tusks and chop-action arm (his
fingers balled into a fist at the hinge if you wanted them to. You could make
him a warrior with a hinge.) No one told me about those workers working for me
to play. I did not talk to them on the telephone during those mornings because
the Power Rangers were not telephones to be talked into. I used to pretend and
play. I am told not everyone is allowed these luxuries and this is meant as a
commentary on birth(un)luckiness.
…
Arielle Greenberg wants a Gurlesque space where women can
write about dolphin stickers and postpartum
depression and tongue-kissing boys and tongue-kissing girls and rape and baking sugar cookies with rainbow sprinkles. She wants a space
where the painful and pleasurable/girlish mingle over strong cocktails and
slinky dresses, maybe upping the ante of the mingle to a make-out session in
the faux fur coat closet. I want this space, too, where trauma and nostalgia
cross-dress for each other and it’s more than a dress rehearsal for a
performance no one will buy tickets for (because the box office refused to
print adequate seating information for fear that people might actually come.) I
want a space where things can be cute and
going very very badly. It is a necessary space. It is a necessary, potentially
healing, space.
I also hope there is a space where men can write about Jean
Claude Van Damme martial arts flicks and feminist
politics and protein supplements and tongue-kissing girls and tongue-kissing boys and being over-privileged WASP’s and being emotionally insecure and the overt homophobia of their
upbringing and falsetto singing. I
hope there is a space where the boyish and the hypermasculine arm-wrestle over
beers only to realize they have been holding hands the whole time. I hope there
is a space where desiring to dominate and dominating and feeling dominated and
desiring to be dominated are the web of a baseball mitt while daydreaming of
the Black Ranger. Because there are patriarchal fathers who forget their sons’
fifteenth birthdays and the things of these sons can be cute and going very
very badly. I hope for this space. It is a necessary, potentially healing,
space.
I want/hope these spaces over DMX and rosebushes and breast
augmentation optical illusions on television and sparrows dogfighting while they sing to each other. The
want/hope is a potentially healing space. I want/hope more.
A mid-morning (1:00 p.m.) walk after scrambled eggs led us
to the doorstep of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad or his neighbor’s at Armando’s
Tire & Auto Repair. Malcolm X was in the dead leaves fallen from the ginkgo
tree pink, and his widow was the pigtailed girl on her scooter talking about
the imminent arrival of first-grade school supply shopping. Probably J.D.
Salinger lives in the crooked roof of the apartmentgarage on the corner and the other
old recliner on the corner, too, is where he does his writing. All of it, the
scene, was a Dave Chappelle sketch, with the joke’s punch line being three
young women passing on the sidewalk and asking, “how y’all doin?” and us saying
“hello, how are you?” on the way south to Comcast Cable headquarters (neither
of us trust the television in the living room enough.) I had thoughts of my
body flopping in the skin of my body unfamiliar. There were German Shepherds
standing upright like humans. There were “No Trespassing” signs. There were shantytowns
of gray-capped mushrooms and a woman I went to Spanish class with smoking a
cigarette in front of her children.
James Baldwin met Elijah Muhammad at his South Side Chicago palace
for a dinner of white devils and not-pork. Stuff was probably mad tense because
the writer was raised deep Southern Baptist while the Prophet or whatever had
spiritual slumber parties in state prison cells with X (says the Spike Lee
joint, at least.) And the Prophet always, especially around dinnertime, had a
hankerin’ for ideological hard sells. Also, there was a gaggle of Fruit of
Islam tightening their belt buckles and fiddling with their cufflinks, and
white-clad sisters a table over minding their food with a reverence usually
reserved for hypnotists and game show hosts. Knowing the religious sales pitch
would eventually come, Baldwin decided to wipe his mouth with a spiritual declaration
and tuck it in his shirt, over his heart, like a napkin.
“I left the church twenty years ago and I haven’t joined
anything since,” he said with a look and tone I know nothing about.
“And what are you now?” Elijah Muhammad asked.
A question that chips its own ice with a dull metal pick (to
get to the bottom of things.) How often, in the actual words, does someone ask,
“What are you?” (“What makes up all that you are and define yourself as?”) Of
course, it’s furtively asked all the time (the McDonald’s billboard on the
raised train tracks, with its glistening patties, asks me “Are you the person
who will 99-cent-menu a block north on your right with the rest of the
drive-thru line?” And I say, “No, those burgers in your microwaves are not the
what of me.”) But rarely do leaders of major political, religious, or social
movements confront people with questions about their ideological makeups over
decaf coffee. Barack Obama has not asked me about my political party
affiliation. Donald Trump has not asked me about my views on global capitalism.
The Pope has not asked me about my takes on theology and Italian cuisine. I
wonder, though, how I would react if they did ask me. Would my
reactions/answers to these figures, because of who they are, be any different
than my reactions/answers would be if I was asked the same questions by friends
or colleagues or strangers? Would the pressure of having to answer for the
“what” of who I am to a major figure push me to dumb-down my answer, or clam up
with charismatic leader stage fright, or change the subject over cheesecake?
Baldwin, bold, answered “I’m a writer. I like doing things
alone.”
And for this answer I find Baldwin a brave man with bullfrog
cheeks and neck. Not because he got all “holy artist” and started spouting off
lines about how his intellectual and creative work were his religious
affiliation (thus, declaring that his spiritual alliances lay preoccupied elsewhere.)
But instead because, when confronted with a pointblank identity-validation
proposition (my nightmare because of the confrontation sweats), he calmly
answered by stating what he did best and how he liked to do it. He answered,
“Would you like to join our herd?” not with, “No, thanks, I already belong to
another herd,” (probably what I would do with my baby wildebeest backbone) but
with, “No, thanks, I’m not really into herds right now.” Which is brave because
herds are so comforting and safe (ask a baby wildebeest) that people often make
concessions (political, moral, personal, spinal) to be parts of them. To reject
the comforts that come from comrades watching your tail at the watering hole (in
favor of watching one’s own tale, drinking less, or drinking alone [and
probably at a different watering hole]) signals an individual courage I don’t
see enough of in the small corner of academic/professional/social jungle I live
in.
Maybe Baldwin’s maverick bad-assery is what we should expect
from our forward-thinking artistintellectuals. After swiping a copy of Russell
Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American
Culture in the Age of Academe, off the “free books” table (which doubles as
the “chips and salsa and leftover donuts” table) in the English Department mail
room and reading the preface in my upstairs bathroom by the trashcan of beard,
I’m more and more on board with his notion that “In the life of the mind, as in
life itself, vitality requires resisting the lure of the familiar and the
safe.” If the herd mentality could constitute part of the “familiar and safe”
Jacoby is referring to (which I think it could and does or I wouldn’t be
bringing it up), then an (as much as possible) independently formulated system
of self-identification is crucial to those pursuing “the life of the mind” (Whatever
that is. Sound gross though.)
While I still might not have the mettle to lay down a
cold-blooded “what” of me declaration to the prominent leader of a social
movement (or anyone) if confronted, Baldwin’s handling of the Elijah Muhammad
Nation of Islam pressure cooker gives me an example of courage. And courage could very well
be the most necessary tool towards self-identification we got.
To be sure, the best time to watch Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) for not the first
time is at 2:45 in the morning on a summer Monday while the rain is stamping
its feet on the overhang. And, to be sure, the best time to write about Moulin Rouge is in the early evening of
a summer Monday, while the rain is still stamping its feet and Tchaikovsky is
stamping his feet. Of course, Tchaikovsky’s strings are strained through the
vinyl of a second hand complete symphonies box set, so the afternoon is not
nearly as melodic as the early morning on the back of an Indian elephant statue
in motley lights. And the Little Russian in speakers from an older address is
not as minimal as, say, Elton John singing “This is Your Song” over and over to
the Parisian moon on the tip of a windmill. But, it has been rumored that Ewan
McGregor’s front teeth are the distant relatives of Pyotr Ilich’s old piano
keys, and so the connections seem favorable to write the modern musical’s sexual
motifs into my newly placed corner desk. By the window of rain and familiar
bird.
In the year of our Lord, Two Thousand and One, every
hometown high school girl had a notebook inside cover with “the greatest thing
you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return” in glittery gel pen. These
young women also had scraps of the Eifel Tower pasted inside and sang a
soundtrack to their showerheads. Now, as current data makes clear, these same
late-twenties women who were once hometown high school girls have the referenced
quotation on their list of favorite quotations section of their Facebook pages.
For the record, in 2001 I could not drive an automobile and trusted Nat King
Cole as much as I could get a comb through his processed hair (I did, however,
dig his throat and listened to him talk me down when I was in a holding cell of
a fellowship room before the commencement of my older sister’s wedding [in
which I played the role of a wobbly groomsmen.])
I never got the then-girls-now-women’s love of the quotation
and still kind of don’t. Even back in 2001, when I wore oversized white Nike
tennis shoes and played badminton like whoa, Christian (McGregor’s romantic
idealist writer character) and his pop song poetry seemed like the easy way
out. Maybe it’s the way “just” works in the quotation to make the acts of
loving and being loved sound no-brainery. I felt like the hometown high school
girls heard the quote in the film and were like, “It all (i.e., the constant
decision making and position taking that make up human interaction as we know
it) seems so simple now! I just have to love and be loved in return like the
handsome man says with his dreamy voice!” Not ever really stopping to floss
between their braces brackets and consider how difficult it can be to love
people (even [especially?] the ones you love), and how it’s damn near
impossible to be a loveable person (let alone to be a loveable person who is
loved by someone, since the two are not the same thing, that is, one does not
necessarily lead to or imply the other.) Maybe I was just salty that I couldn’t
sing any of the songs in the right key or that I had adolescent acne and a
belly that doubled for, as a kind classmate once informed me, a “big bowl of
jelly.”
But enough about the quote. I was watching MTV’s teen-misfit
dramedy series Awkward yesterday and
it brought up some issues I saw in Moulin
Rouge and have beef with (maybe the beef is seeing played-out tropes twelve
years apart in the same day or whatever. Basically, my beef begins thusly :
THE FOLLOWING BEEF FEATURES POTENTIAL ROMANTIC SPOILER
ALERTS
In Awkward,
16-year-old badass-nerd-writer Jenna finally has the boyfriend she wants in
clean-cut class president Jake. Except shit gets weird when Jake finds out that
Jenna is not a virgin (the previous summer at [of course] summer camp, she had
sex with her first love, Matty [the sporty one who would never go for the unpopular girl but did for a night after a camp
party because he finally saw how much of a badass Jenna was.]) Jake doesn’t
know that Jenna slept with Matty (he actually doesn’t know who she slept with
at all because he doesn’t ask and she doesn’t tell), he just knows this: his
new girlfriend is not a virgin and he wants her to be one and he is jealous
that she could ever be sexually attracted to anyone but him. None of this
pissiness is helping Jenna become a virgin again, of course, but it does allow
Jake to guilt Jenna out about her previous relationship and show off his best
puppy dog eyes (they are, I must admit, advanced puppy dog eyes for an actor his age. The kid's going places.) Because, in the end, his feelings about his
girlfriend’s previous sex life are more important than her feelings about them.
Fast-forward (or rather, rewind in production time) to Moulin Rouge, where Christian falls in
love with porcelain-skinned and diamond-tonsilled courtesan Satine (played by a
top-hatted Nicole Kidman) only to get wrapped up in some patronage drama that ends
in a gross Duke wanting to sleep with the object (emphasis on “object”) of
Christian’s affection. Satine’s all like “But the owner of the Moulin Rouge
signed a contract that said if I don’t sleep with the Duke the show won’t go on
and the Moulin Rouge will close down and the Duke and his scarfaced crony will
kill your ass. So I should probably sleep with him and stuff.” And Christian’s
all like “No, no please don’t sleep with the Duke. I really want the show
cancelled and your place of employment burned to the ground and you to be
unemployed and homeless and for me to be killed by moustached thugs. Let’s have
all that stuff happen instead because I can’t bear the thought of you sleeping
with someone besides me and the countless men you slept with in your long
career as a courtesan that no one brings up.” In the end, Christian (name
implications) sweats out a long night of Satine not sleeping with the Duke,
dodges a botched assassination attempt, and freaks when Satine dies in his arms
while he does not talk about his own sexual history or anything about that.
So we can have these themes of undying class
president/outcast love and loving and being loved in return and stuff, but when
push comes to shove, our lead male Awkward
and Moulin Rouge characters, to
varying degrees, buy into the tired female purity tropes that plague so many
American romance narratives (e.g., the woman is looked on as less-than [not
attractive, potentially not worthy of a relationship, not respectable] if she
is not a virgin, the woman’s reproductive organs [and sexual feelings] become the property of a man
the moment she enters into a relationship with him, the woman’s sexual history
is the business of the man and fodder for testosterone-filled temper tantrums,
etc.) All of this goes on, of course, while the man’s sexual history is either
applauded or kept silent (implying that the man’s sexual choices were
undoubtedly appropriate and, thus, not worthy of conversation or dispute. It is
the woman’s sexuality that must be examined, scrutinized, and judged, so as to
make sure the woman is acceptably “pure” and “good.” Vom.)
Narratives where heterosexual male “love” towards a woman is
not-so-subtly acted out in his dominance over her sexuality lead me to make
connections between conceptions of romantic love as a means of possession. In
these narratives, Awkward and Moulin Rouge offering prime examples, it
is not enough for a man to respect and desire to share lifespace with a woman;
he must “have” her. More than this, when he sufficiently “has” her, he must
make sure no other man has “had” her (this will lower her value, and thus, make
her a less desirable thing to have), and he must guarantee to himself and the
world that no other man besides him will ever “have” her. I wonder how many of
these sexual power plays were untangled and considered when the famous Moulin Rouge quotation was scribbled in glittery gel pen or on Facebook by the hometown high school girls I knew and didn’t
know. I wonder how many past and current young men and women grow up with possession/purity tropes playing in their minds as they navigate the challenges of real romantic relationships.
In the end, I worry about a world where young (and old)
people think “the greatest thing [they’ll] ever learn is just (for men) to
have and (for women) be had in return.”
‘Cause that ain’t love, no matter how well you sing it.
A beard is in the upstairs bathroom trashcan. It is in a
clump next to the empty toilet paper roll. The empty toilet paper roll is
cardboard brown. It is making love to the metal turnstile because they have
known each other so long there is a necessary intimacy. There is a necessary
need to get things out of the way and enjoy them at the same time above the
toilet boll rimmed in red streaks. The rim of the upstairs bathroom sink is
sprinkled in beard and neck hair. Un-May-like weather means the air
conditioning is kept under the pit bull’s armpits. Her armpits so bald from run
friction and humping differently, from humping the day out of the thrift
chair. The chin and cheeks are the same kind of bald now, barren with the former
beard in the trashcan and the ceiling fan swimming laps above the washer/dryer.
Later, the hair will smell like chicken noodle soup to some, barbecue meatballs
to others, and, to still others, one of the most convenient and cost-effective
ways to live.
An authentic dance style comes out
when the beard is in the trashcan, and the dance style reflects the
problematicness of the word “authentic.” The dance style, in its leg movements
and shoulder pops reminiscent of a small backyard hedged in bumblebees, itself
challenges notions of authenticity while drinking one Corona beer because it has to
drive international graduate students home after the night. The dance style is
twenty-six-and-a-half years old and weak in the lower-body joints from
penitent. A bouncer with a pectoral t-shirt told it to pull up its shit or it
wasn’t allowed in with its tucked business casual shirt. The shirt was wrinkled
from napping in it and writing in it with stiff arms and neck. The stiff shirt
had nothing to do with the authentic dance style, or maybe it did. Maybe
authentic dance styles stem from the stiffness of business casual, or the
casual business of moving through the world in planned or
not-meant-to-look-like-it movements.
The sad part was the people without
the dance movement style standing in a rectangle spilling their drinks on the
floor and watching dancers spill their drinks on the floor with ice. At one
point, a dance partner slipped on the ice and said it felt like high school prom graduation all
over again and again and again because she slipped three more times. I said the
pounding from the DJ booth, high up above shouting the occurrence of birthdays,
was the rose on a rented lapel. The pounding from the DJ was a scene from the
television show Happy Days, where
everyone knows that each other have not been virgins for some time. I watched
people watching and watching with their arms folded across their pectoral
t-shirts. To the folding I did a lizard neck movement and did not blend in with
the Southeast Asian men in leather vests. These men, one of them, would tongue
kiss a mirror before the night was through, and next to them would be a young
woman treating her baseball cap like a wild horse. The young woman broke her
baseball cap backward on her own head. She broke it tame and shook her own ass.
The other most sad part was the
group dances played at post-collegiate weddings where people dance in a group
and a group of lines. Think about a long game of bingo with ping pong balls
read through a microphone and people sitting in their seats and making movements
to the microphone’s instructions and saying in their minds, “Yes, I do know how
to move after all now that the sounds overhead are familiar and in that
dictatorial way.” To the music that was directions and also love letters to the
sound of sampled disco songs sung by disco singers. I could not participate in
the group dances because of the directions and the anarchy propaganda a woman
in a long dress pulled out of her purse and read aloud to the people near our
glass of water table. Near our table draped in leather purses and stacked with
water glasses. She told us to rise up and she told us to rise up with her hips
made of boxing gloves. She punched us with her boxing glove hips and we were
sensical after that for the rest of the night. With the sensical vibration from
the puddles of drinks we left at 1:30 in the morning and knew that we were much
too old to style. We were this yelling thing after we got out into the street
and saw a cigarette smoking on the ledge of a smoking shop selling smoke out
into the street.
Ending in a rapper surprised by the
internationalist nature of a peanut butter sandwich and an eyebrow ring. A duo
of innocent teachers talking dirty in the back next to the box speakers. A
drinking out of the vodka bottle with the help of a German woman and a concrete
steps. Two bicycling women and their flashing lights on the not with the
bicycle man. Two different purple eye sockets on the floor of a VHS tape and
box of dirty laundry. Two women who went home from the dance style exhibition
without their backbones or rational reasons for being without them. Thinking
going on about those women and how they walk and what they will use to dance
with later. To hold themselves up.
This all not being too much unlike
the first time, in the cafeteria, planning diarrhea for a week over the talk
next to the baseball diamond in the park two years before. All that diarrhea
for the touching of a belly and the touching of the side of a belly from the
side and from the front. Squares of men and women planning the similar touches
and revealing those touches and the plans for them with a handful of bottle.
Bottles and the old joints keeping things different from the diarrhea before, in junior high school.
Still similar diarrhea the day after it all, or days after it all if relating to
the newly pregnant woman on the way to her bathroom beyond the DJs. Her own
belly something different from the earlier planned touches and friendly kinds
of paranoia about all the things we’re going to need to read and remember for
the week.
I drove by the old house on Linden with the dance studio
attached, and evenings it was lit up with television blue from the front room.
Television-screen blue lit up the front room window blinds and sat on the front
porch drinking Miller High Life beer out of beer bottles. Through the blinds,
the blue, I saw angry and exasperated on the television. Distrust anger on the
television spouting its exasperation in blue through the blinds and out onto
North Linden, where I drove without my windshield wipers ticking. I saw the
exasperation clear and maybe attributed it to the shade of the blue, how the
blue was artificial and not the color of water or the sky or other blue things
outside the front room. But the artificial television blue was familiar in the
way seeing something every weekday evening for forever can make a thing
familiar to someone. No other lights are ever on in the house except the front
room television light. No other lights are ever on in the upstairs laundry room
or in the attached dance studio. If the house was a face instead of a house, it
would be a lifeless face, angry and exasperated.
…
I don’t hate
Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly simply because he’s a close-minded, arrogant
asshole.I hate him, or rather, the Hater
character he plays on bluescreen TV, because he represents a dialogic paradox
that makes me anxious when I think about it (or worse, have to plan for it. Or
worst, have to react to it):
To engage or not to engage in critical (or friendly!) discourse
with a Hater who will (likely) think you are stupid and wrong and untalented
and worthless no matter what you say or do (unless, of course, you agree with
him/her)?
O’Reilly represents, for me, the
former elementary, junior high, or high school teacher who thought I was a
loser when I was in his/her class and who tries to maintain my loser status in
his/her mind, despite my limited academic and/or professional successes, by
making me feel like a small town loser with nothing going for him (Note: in
reality, you could substitute O’Reilly out of the equation and insert any hard-headed
Hater you might know or interact with in your real or imagined life. I invite
you to make this Hater narrative your own.) Here’s how the situation goes down
in my anxious head (and in like two or three different real life situations of
the past few years):
I am out and about in my hometown
(where I attended all past and present academic institutions and where I currently
live.) A former teacher (or classmate) spots me, weirdsmiles, and walks over.
The conversation starts something like this:
Former Teacher: Hey, Evan. Still in town I see?
Me: Yes, I am. Just going to
school.
FM: Ahh, still in school? You always did go about things in your own way.
And at this point we have reached the paradoxical moment
typified by many an O’Reilly “interview” (is it still considered an interview
if the interviewer isn’t genuinely interested in hearing anything the
interviewee has to say?) Obviously, the Hater is doing his or her best to hate
(e.g., trying to make me feel like a weenie for still living in my hometown,
trying to make me feel like a weenie for traveling a less-traditional academic
path.) The Hater (and O’Reilly is a professional, just check out the “The Hater
Elite” list in the most recent issue of Vibe)
will always try to discount the hatee’s identity / beliefs / ideas/work by claiming
the hatee is a total weenie for this or that reason. As I see it, in the
discourse with the former teacher outlined above, I have two ways to proceed:
1.Engage
the Hater – Calmly and rationally explain who I am, what I believe in, and
why who I am and what I believe in are valid and worthy of respect. I might
explain how personal and economic factors (rather than lack of ambition or
wanderlust) played large roles in my identical past and current geographic
location. I might explain my current academic status in terms of my drive for
post-graduate success (not delayed or non-linear undergraduate enrollment.) I
might point out the value of advanced education, postmodern literature,
creative writing, etc., in the expansion of a thriving cultural and political
democracy. I might use facts, figures, and all manners of pie chart (the
rhetorical possibilities are endless.) In the end, the Hater might still hate,
but at least I know I stood up for myself.
Or,
2.Do
Not Engage the Hater – Turn my back on the Hater (perhaps call him or her a
dirty name) and more or less walk away. In the end, the Hater isn’t worth the
time or energy of a guaranteed argument (especially one he or she probably
won’t listen to/engage in/value anyway.)
As a trained thinker and language user, I am immediately drawn
to Option 1. I suppose this is because, deep down (in my idealistic heart of
hearts), I desperately want to believe that, when presented with a sound
argument buttressed by reasonable data and presented coherently and
persuasively, even the most stubborn Hater will at least consider a hatee’s
point of view. But then I witness discourses like this:
and wonder if it’s even worth it to engage a chronic Hater
in discussion when he/she is so completely intent on hating that things like hatee
identity (“you consider yourself a learned man don’t you, Professor?”),
academic/professional credibility (“your Princeton, or wherever it is, students”), and referenced data (hear: the
silence of dismissive indifference followed by finger-pointing gab) are totally
disregarded in favor of exasperated weeniefying (i.e., telling two noted African
American public intellectuals to “knock it off with the Black business.”)
Maybe it’s
easier, and less psychically draining/traumatizing, to choose Option 2:
and tell all Haters to “suck my dick” because, after all,
they’re probably “motherfucking pricks.”
Unfortunately,
when it comes right down to it, both Hater-dealing options pose potential
problems of their own. Both options actually kind of suck, actually, for to engage a
Hater means to validate a Hater-argument with a response (thus, giving the
Hater a fight [which is probably all the Hater really wanted in the first
place]), and to not engage a Hater means to risk coming off as just as
closed-minded, arrogant, and assholish as the Hater him/herself. This nasty
paradox haunts me in almost all potential Hater confrontations and is, I
suspect, the concern of many academic pacifists who still want to stand up for
themselves and the things they believe in.
In the end, I guess, while there
may never be any “right” or “easy” way to deal with the persistent hating of
Haters (“Haters are,” as the old adage goes “going to hate”), I take solace in
the fact that Haters rarely hate on people who aren’t shaking things up, doing their things, and getting theirs. Maybe
the simple presence of Haters means that just enough people are doing big stuff
in the world. Maybe the best way to deal with Haters is to keep doing the
things they hate.
It can be considered that we are different people every
second we are alive, in the way I read once that we can never step into the
same river twice (the flowing-all-the-time water forbidding it.) All this water
movement (and, more importantly, the movement being horrifically out of our
control) reminds me of the chorus of the lesser known Stone’s song (originally
written and performed by Otis Redding, no doubt) “(Dis)satisfaction,” and how
we can get ourselves plenty of it if we obsessively reach for that next cool thing
we don’t have. “(Dis)satisfaction” was playing on a Walkman while my father
tried to wade across a whitewater river in Colorado, and my mother begged him
to stop because she knew he couldn’t swim. He made it to the other side and was
fourteen different people as he survived it, and the river was over four hundred
different rivers because of the water current speed. The water current speed polished the
flat stones of the riverbed, and the stones were many different stones in the
time it took my father to climb up the other side bank in his big shorts. I was
nine years old and the Houston Rockets were about to claim the NBA championship
while Michael Jordan was out shagging fly balls. Briefly, while my father was his
eighth or ninth different person of the wade, I imagined how his body
might tumble down the river and bounce off Colorado boulders until I was
fatherless. While he was on his tenth and eleventh different person, I took
moments to imagine him gone forever down the river, and I was dissatisfied right
along with the song playing in my ears. When he survived on the other bank, the
song ended and the family talked about the satisfaction that comes from a
properly cooked salmon fillet.
All of this
is to say that, in a roundabout way, if I had to guess at an overall theme for
the first two seasons of Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, I would guess “dissatisfaction” and feel dissatisfied with
my guess. I watched the first season of Girls
after a familial birthday present DVD purchase went characteristically wrong,
and held a two-day marathon viewing of the second season online while my new
roommate ate frozen pizza next to me and looked content. At certain points
during the second season, the two-year-old pit bull sat with us on the couch
and rested her big head on my left knee looking dissatisfied. At these moments,
on the living room couch in front of the silver computertelevision, the three
of us were at our most misguided summer vacation twentysomethingness (the pit
bull being adolescent in her dog-yeared body, but close enough to get the gist), and I recognized, for better or worse, that we were, on that gray couch of dog
shed:
1.Unrecognizably
handsome with nowhere to show our faces in town
2.Not
living in one of the trendier boroughs of New York City
3.Past
the years of having casual sex with mail carriers (if the years ever existed at
all)
4.Very
much writing people with voices in our heads telling us to not write (these
voices coming from other people we know somewhat well, and also our own voices
influenced by these other voices, negatively.)
5.Begrudging
Millennials with our eyes set on an innocuous prize “out there.”
6.Stuck
in a Girls-themed game of
carrot-hanging-from-the-end-of-the-stick, where the carrot represents
“fulfillment” and the stick’s length is mathematically represented in the following
equation: lifespan (to the present moment) + opportunity x privilege ÷expectations [note: the
total, due to the inordinately high value of the expectations, always equals
less than 1. And 1 is the goal so, you know, everything sucks.]
For those of you who haven’t sufficiently trekked the Girls terrain, allow me to break the poshy
landscape down for you: The female (and male, for that matter) characters of Girls have a lot of good shit going for
them, but that doesn’t keep them from wanting/kind of demanding and/or laying
claim to more good shit. They have college degrees and, often, intro-level
jobs, but they want Mac-adorned offices and careers that caress their creative
minds and oversized egos (and they want these jobs, and their accompanying pay
raises, yesterday.) They have comfortable apartments to live in, but drool over
luxurious brownstones and dream of the days when they’ll be able to not only
have enough money to own their own swanky places, but also fill them out with
furniture and art from (insert names of trendy boutiques and galleries here.)
They have, where applicable, stable relationship partners, but they want
dangerously exotic sex adventures where they desperately need and are
desperately needed, where they are romantic objects of affection and amateur
porn stars at the same time (they also want intelligent, respectful
conversations with their partners to fill the mornings after the sex adventures. duh.)
In short, the women of Girls have
educations, jobs, money, homes, friends, lovers, but want better jobs, more money, cooler homes, cooler friends, better lovers.
They want and, interestingly, feel like they deserve (for reasons best
considered in future posts) upgraded versions of their lives. They, like many
Americans, want the almighty More (i.e., the Supersized life, without the extra calories.)
And it
isn’t (Dunham's alter ego) Hannah and her posse’s constant push for More (or subsequent disdain for
what they consider to be their own sorrowful lots of Less) that irks me. It’s
that I’m pretty sure Dunham wants me to empathize with Hannah’s existential
woes (cue not-so-subtly sad orchestral music when Hannah’s sweet-ass-internship
director does not [gasp!] offer her a salaried position after all her hard work
writing copy for I don’t know like twenty hours a week or something.) But how
can I, or anyone, empathize with a kid who gets a piece of chocolate cake and
cries because it doesn’t taste the way she thought it would (or, maybe even worse,
because it is not [double gasp!] served on a vintage dessert plate)? Are
viewers actually supposed to forget that not everybody gets a piece of
chocolate cake? Are we supposed to forget that chocolate cake signifies surplus
(i.e., it is only served after all
nutritionally adequate foods have been consumed. And if not everybody is
getting the chocolate cake, are we supposed to forget that it is likely that
not everybody is getting dinner either?) Are we to forget all of this and start
craving a piece of (More-flavored) chocolate cake of our own?
After completing the many hours of
show (some of them viewed from locations as exotic as a fourth-floor
Quality Inn and Suites bedroom couch in Lansing, Michigan), I suspect Hannah has
rarely fleeced her More-hungry shoulders in Dr. Dustin Hoffman’s I Heart Huckabees therapeutic universe blanket. For if she had clothed herself in the universe blanket, she would know
that “Everything she could ever want or be, she already has or is.” Dr.
Hoffman’s point being, of course, that if one looks strictly outside of oneself
for "fulfillment" (perhaps the ultimate More), one’s bound to get mad exhausted
during the search (see carrot-hanging-from-the-end-of-the-stick reference
above.) A little mindfulness/appreciation of what one already has might go a
long way (even in “Brooklyn, New York City where they paint murals of Biggie.”
Shout out to Talib Kweli.) Maybe we could take “has” to a capital H place and
give More a run for its insatiable-appetite-money? Granted, Zen characters void
of passions/desires/vices don’t make for must-see big-time television, and I
get this. Not many viewers are likely to tune in to pay-cable episodes of Dunham’s
Hannah sitting on a meditation cushion in her reasonably priced apartment while
she counts her breaths and the items on the long list of things she doesn’t
need to reach enlightenment. Contentment just doesn’t sell.
But I also wonder about the
healthiness of selling white, upper-middle-class (potentially misplaced) existential
discontent to American audience members who are likely still (knowingly or
unknowingly) dragging their tired legs and credit scores through the hopefully
soon-to-thin-out economic sludge. At what point is it socially inappropriate
for viewers to be led to look at Hannah’s character [twenty-threeish, recent college-graduate,
supportive parents, present friendship circle, somewhat healthy socio-sexual
opportunities] with pity, simply because she doesn’t have the stellar life she
has “always dreamed of” and “worked so hard for?” And before an answer is
decided on, let’s consider that a recent New
York Times article places the national unemployment rate at 7.5% and the
national unemployment rate for college graduates at under 4%, meaning that
Hannah’s prior-to-season-one-earned liberal arts degree puts her well ahead of
the fictional (and, symbolically, real life) pack when it comes to running away
from economic insecurity and/or poverty. Are we to feel bummed that she can’t
make this runaway in oh-so-cool, unreleased Dr. Martens? Isn’t it more
appropriate to feel bummed for those who can’t run/keep up in the first place?
Isn’t it cooler to let the bummed feeling push us towards some sort of
More-for-all (with no Emmy-nominated strings attached) program? Could that
program make it on HBO? It’s More than TV, I’ve heard.
Matthew Donovan, when he sings a certain song on the stage
of a pizza restaurant, expresses a pain I have since I was very young. I have
not been able to express the pain myself in any scratching way. I have not been able to
write the pain or read the pain away. The pain was not under the covers of any
Beethoven symphony. The pain was not Tupac Shakur with his shirt off and
abdominal muscles flexed. The pain was not any of the shoes I bought with my
best friend in high school. Also, I should not be speaking about the pain in
the past tense, that is, I should not be saying the pain “was.” Because the
pain surely “is” at least as much as it ever “was.” So, to be clear, when
Matthew Donovan sings the second to last song of his set last night at a pizza
restaurant, he expresses a pain that is and was in a way I have not yet.
He is the
long and far away from the microphone shriek, and in that is the very pain. He
doubles over to vomit out the high pitch. He vomits up the water from the
disturbed bigot man before the song and wipes it up with his canvas shoes. There
is a long white cord draping in loops towards a sound amplifier and a clamp at
the end of a guitar that bites on wood and metal. All of this is in the creases
of Matthew’s mouth when he shrieks, and I am not the help to him. He is the
deep and heart-arrowed help to me on his t-shirt. Later, I will carry the sound amplifier to
the back of a long car. I will touch Matthew on the shoulders and spine and
distressed neck curl across a forehead. There will be a twinge burning in my
bicep and right hip that Matthew predicted near a curb and a small public
shrub.
Back to the
deep and more meaningful pain. It involves the amnesia of my mother’s ovaries
and how they forgot and forgot. Also, the gonads of several other important relatives
that forgot along the way (namely, my father and the significant parts of him.)
Their combined memories, all of them, fit on the recipe cards my mother used to
document her famous summer salad. There are ramen noodles, slivered almonds,
vinegar, chopped cabbage, and a handful of black pepper on the index cards with
lines. The cards fit into a box covered in strawberry stems. The entire box was
over the old microwave and once told me to take a liquid of ulcer medication
before I was allowed to play in the backyard. I took the cherry medicine and the
box touched my back in the way to tell me to go outside and run. My stomach and
the lining of my stomach could be forgotten about for that afternoon, along
with the parts of my brain that miscalculated the release of stomach acid and
that regulated stomach lining depth. These parts of my brain were never
considered in the first place or typed into the small bank calculator my mother
used to balance her checkbook in the first place.
All of the
gonads’ forgetfulness led to the worse and worse. Also, there was a
forgetfulness especially in its cold quiet near the basement door. Near the
special installed desk with cheap bleeding porous wood. Not one of us, to this day,
knows who installed the desk or how it was paid for. It was not there one day
on the white and specked carpet. And it was there one day on the white and
specked carpet to where my father kept a manuscript of a book he wrote about me
drinking Kool-Aid and there being fresh cut grass in the background. Above the
desk lamp was a window that led to the backyard where the dachshund used to shit
in the rocks. The window opened up to the level of the rocks and the small
pebbles of shit. On evenings, my mother and father sat on the desk with their
shoes off and swung their legs and feet above the carpet to forget little
things about how we felt. Sometimes their feet scratched the carpet in a sound
that meant it was all happening and could not be completely forgotten in the
way sounds are permanent things to point at. I heard that sound from my room
where I was a crying witness to it. I remember the sound and I keep it in my
fists.
Matthew
Donovan shrieks the sounds out of my fists. Out of my fists and into a tile
floor and the pain pinched across my face. In a way I twisted the pain into the
strands of my beard. My beard was long at the base of my neck because of him
and people noticed my beard after the police left. I talked about my beard into
the windshield of the long car. I mentioned Matthew in the front seat of the
long car and everyone of her understood and said the word “gentle.” We didn’t
argue about the meaning of the word gentle and agreed it was not the pain so
much. It was about the pain so much. I held the gentle instead in my fists and
noticed the missing long car mirrors.
I'm standing in front of the classroom, by pant legs are soaked from running to class in a thunderstorm. I'm sweating through my sweater and floundering. My students seem to be staring at me, blankly, wondering what my credentials are. What on earth can this 28 year old teach me about my life? I feel them thinking this as I reiterate what a memoir is. After thirty minutes of talking at them, I ask if anyone has questions. Suddenly, a student takes her glasses off and cradles her head in her hands. She abruptly announces: "I think I might be in the wrong class."
This is a rocky start.
My teaching experience, up until today, has been limited to Thai children, who have no interest in learning English. If I remember correctly, some of them branch off in the forty student classroom and begin doing their make up in the back of the classroom. Many days ended with me walking home from school in daze, wondering: "What am I doing wrong?"
And now, I have a classroom full of 9 older students, all of them over the age of 55. They have lived lives that I have no idea about. And now, it's my job to teach them how to focus their efforts on writing about one facet of their journey thus far. And now, one of them has questioned my methods. The student who looks like she's having a meltdown, "who might be in the wrong class" is making my world fall apart. I wonder how many of her are in the classroom right now. Will they rise up and rebel against me?
She admits that she had no idea what a memoir was. She was under the impression that she would be free to write about her entire life. When I explain that she's thinking of an autobiography, she looks like she's not the only one under that impression. There will be a mutiny, won't there?
That's the way the first class ends. I pack up my things and watch as the students file out the door and wonder: "What am I doing wrong?" I will beat myself up over this for the next week, until I sit down to plan the second class, the night before it starts. I make a lesson plan for myself, guiding me through the two hour class, I make a PowerPoint with graphics and videos, I copy off examples of memoir writing and articles. I exhaust myself with planning until it's out of my hands and in the hands of fate.
The second class, is not so precarious. Students return as I set up my "act", they take their seats and wait for me to preform for them again. The nervous student from last week tells me that she almost didn't come back. That she thought about dropping altogether. It sounds like a threat, a challenge for me to prove myself. She's now become my main motivator. This one student is the litmus test for the entire class and if I can impress her, I might make it.
This time, I'm on my game. I give them so much valuable information that they furiously write notes, ask questions, make comments and share experiences. I assign them their first serious home work assignment: go home and write a 750 word essay about a specific theme in their lives. They appear to be up to the challenge.
The third class is where things take a miraculous turn. Students return and they sing praises of my skills. It's so odd, validating and unexpected that I don't know what to think. They've written their essays and want more. Unfortunately, the class ends after one more meeting. Knowing this, makes them feel an urgency I've never head of. They want more classes, they want more time with me. They've only just gotten in their groove that they need more motivation to write. One students said that she's contacted the director and complained that we need more classes. Another student, suggested that we all meet outside of the class at a local coffee shop and continue class. In other words, I've changed the way they see the written word.
At the end of class, I pack my things, shut down the class computer and say goodbye to my students. I'm moving in that all too familiar daze, but this time it's slightly different. It's not disappointment or anxiety. It's a sublime realization that I'm doing an okay job at this teaching business. In fact, I might be good at it. I might actually know what the hell I'm doing!
I don't know if I've been praised of motivating another person to write and write well. Their excitement is motivating to me and I now know what it means to work hard not to disappoint another learner. I have one more class meeting with them and I'm nervous and excited to feel their energy again. I have to make a plan, I have to find a way to invest in their writing goals and push them forward.
Is this what teaching is? Having already been on the opposite end of teaching, the frustrating one; this is exhilarating. I've learned that this is quite possibly the thing that I was meant to do.
This is the question I will ask on the first day of my Memoir Writing class at the university. My students, who are older people (55+), will have lived lives that probably warrant recording, but why? What have they seen though out American history? What changes and events have they experienced? What makes those changes and events so important?
I'm in the process of planning this class, which starts in mid-April, and I've been thinking about lives that have been written down. I sit amongst stacks of books, borrowed from the library, all filled with tales of other people's lives and ask: Why were these lives so interesting that they were deemed publishable?
As I sift through them, I noticed that these people know about to spin a good yarn about one facet of their lives. They have careers, childhoods, neurosis or travels that are intriguing enough to read about. They write about these events in such a way, the reader is pulled in and forced to see the world through a new lens.
Just by reading, you're taken from your bus ride to work to Anthony Bourdain's kitchen in Manhattan, where the sous chef is screaming at a coked out waiter about beef wellington. You're feeling the exhaustion and anxiety of Barbara Ehrenreich's 10 hour day of waitressing for below-minimum-wage. You're in the car with Hunter S. Thompson on an amphetamine addled journey to Las Vegas.
From the most mundane to the frantic, individual lives are so colorful that most must be recorded. Just by reading these books, I think of my own life. All 28 years have been fraught life changing events that need recording. The fear of dogs began when I was eight. I was chased up the block by a yappy dachshund who forced me to jump on the hood of a park car. I blame my mother on that embarrassing day. Her fear of dogs transferred to me and it would be something for me to deal with for years.
I can express this story in a poem, that's my medium. I want to let my students that they can express their stories in different mediums as well. Their stories don't have to be chronological chapter accounts that start at the crib and end today (that's technically an autobiography, anyway). They can write essays, a book of poetry or draw the whole thing like Persepolis. So long as they tell a good story.
I'm really excited to learn from my students as well. They have a lot to share with me about living in Toledo, OH, raising children, fighting in wars. My job will be to teach how to share with the world. I look forward to the task!
What would James Baldwin think of our First Negro President?
If he met him today, what would he say? The closest we have to such an answer, is in the book The Cross of Redemption. It's an collection of essays, speeches and letters written by James Baldwin and I'm enthralled by it, reading at the laundry mat, in between washing cycles and folding.
In the speech, called Nationalism, Colonialism and the United States, Baldwin recalls a conversation he had with Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy promised, "'. . . that one day---thirty years, if I'm lucky---I can be President too.'" Baldwin claims that he's not so wrapped up in what happens on the day this "first Negro President" takes office, but what kind of country he'll be president of.
And then we get into what the Negro Problem actually is, in 1961, how it pertains to the former days of colonialism and what it says about nationalism today. According to Baldwin, there was no Negro Problem, instead there is a nation-wide degradation of culture at the hands of capitalism.
Whew! It took me a while to read and then reread this speech, but I think I might have a grasp on it. Reading essays and speeches written by James Baldwin is difficult for me because of his tricky but elegant way of streaming together ideas. It's like reading Faulkner but more exciting!
He then asks us, the audience, Americans, why we're blind to how unhappy our lives are. "It is astonishing that in a country so wealthy, and with nothing to fear in principle, everyone should be so joyless, so that you scarcely meet anyone who hasn't just come from a psychiatrist, or isn't just running off to one."
The main distraction at the time was this supposed Negro Problem and Communism. The minor distraction that Americans had in aiding their blindness, that made them feel better about Harlem riff raff and Cuba located 90 miles away, was having a small piece of "American living."
Having a "Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence," is what's making everyone think they're "just fine." Baldwin finds it bewildering that in a country "so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak." Well, when everyone is so comfortable with the materialism they possess, there's hardly enough room to be revolutionary.
Baldwin speaks a bit about the middle class and it's complacency, citing that "there is nothing but a middle class in this country, because no worker thinks of himself as a worker." Evan and I have talked about this ever-expanding illusion of the middle class. After our country's last financial crisis, you'd think that people were more aware of the shrinking middle class. But we all think we're in the comfortable middle.
If Baldwin were alive today, he would see that there is a new exploited group of people. With hardly any manufacturing jobs left in America, the information industry is quickly becoming blue collared. That includes most college students and their professors, retailer and anyone else who isn't "making" something.
So what kind of country is Barack Obama president of? With the exception of The Negro Problem and Communism, things are pretty much the same as they were in 1961.
No one produces anything, instead, we consume everything.
We're still fighting the tired battle of States Right, not with integrating schools, but with gun control, immigration reform and abortion rights.
We're still using, what Baldwin called, "a paternalistic" manner in which to police the world. We're no longer disciplining Red Vietnam, but our new problem children are Iraq and Afghanistan, who refused, for a decade, our help to spread freedom and democracy within their borders.
Americans are still unhappy and don't know why.
So there we are. Some things never change and sometimes we never learn from the past. Who really knows what Baldwin would think of Obama. While it's fantastic that there is a black man that can call himself leader of the free world, I think Baldwin would ask us, "Just how free do you think you are?"
For some reason I thought I was could just assemble a motley crew of
poems into a book and send it out. I'm a little lazy.
That's not how you write books. I'm almost certain of it. And besides,
the bushel of poems are struggling to figure out how they know each
other.
"Were you written by the same person who wrote me?"
"Maybe, is she the same one who was obsessed with Sartre two years ago?"
"I'm not sure about all that, my author was on a big squirrel kick."
This is to say, most of these poems lack cohesion. A certain
over-arching theme to bring them together. And then there's that whole
statement of purpose you send a prospective editor. I don't have one of
those either. I have no statement that clearly says what this gaggle of
poems represents or who the lunatic who wrote them is.
My husband came up with a terrifying idea. "Why don't you fill in this
collection with new poems? That should tie them together somehow."
You want me to write more?? You want me to actually work at this? And
that's when I got down to the root of the problem. I was stuck in a
corner and I wasn't prepared to write my way out. I thought it would be
easier than this.
This is what happens when you haven't created in months. You feel
bloated with medieval humors; lackluster, dull and frustrated. I've been
suffering from the malaise of "not creating." Let's mix more medical
metaphors: Assembling a chapbook was supposed to be the band-aid
covering a gushing head wound!
When it didn't work, when I became light-headed from the blood lost, I
had to return to the drawing board. I read three books. Four chapters of
a terrible paperback romance, two essays out of a sexual identity book,
and about six poems from an anthology.
Reading. Who knew that was the trick? I'm being ironic, of course. I
know that to become a decent writer, you must get out of your own head
and into a book.
The very act of reading produced two poems today. This effort must be
done, much to my chagrin. My husband reminded me that there are no short
cuts in creating. I have to remind myself that although I am the deity
over my own work, I'm not necessarily God. I cannot create a chapbook in
seven days.
In his review of
the 2009 memoir Brother West: Living and
Loving Out Loud, A Memoir, Scott McLemee derides Dr. Cornel West’s
reflective work, calling the text “the most disappointing thing I have read in
at least a year.” The focus of McLemee’s critique centers on the reviewer’s
belief that Brother West did not make
good on a late-1990’s promise Dr. West made to compose “an intellectual
autobiography ‘modeled on black musical forms.’” In short, McLemee felt let
down by the memoir, arguing that it did not meet the intellectual and scholarly
standards put in place by Dr. West’s earlier writings (most notably, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism).
Compared to McLemee’s favorite conceptually dense and stimulating Dr. West
texts, Brother West is only, at its
core, about “how Cornel West feels about Cornel West.”
To be
honest, I can see where Mr. McLemee is coming from. There were several moments
during my reading of Brother West
where I stopped, looked up from the book, and thought, “My goodness, this man
wants us to know a lot about how many people he knows and how important his
scholarship is to the American racial-political-economic discourse.” The
following selection from the memoir, which McLemee also cites in his review, nicely
demonstrates an example of West’s “West-centeredness”:
“I like seeing Race
Matters translated into Japanese, Italian, and Portuguese. I like seeing The American Evasion of Philosophy
translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. I like that there are hundreds
of thousands of copies of my book Democracy
Matters translated into Spanish. There’s also an edition that’s selling in
the French-speaking world. I like the fact that all nineteen of my books are
still in print with the exception of the two that won the American Book Award
in 1993” (248).
It is
difficult to read a couple hundred pages about Dr. West’s intense emotional and
spiritual connection to those whom he refers to as “the least of these,” only to be
confronted with an unabridged “Gratitude” (i.e. “Acknowledgements”) section that
serves as an inflated who’s-who list of Ivy League faculty and
internationally-acclaimed intellectuals. In fact, I don’t remember West
individually naming any of “the least of these” whom he has encountered in his
ample bluesman wanderings—although I do remember him, on many occasions,
engaging in some heavily-seasoned academic name-dropping.
But for all
of Mr. McLemee’s gripes (many of which are justified), and for all of Dr.
West’s unabashed mantra recitation and self-promotion (“I’m a bluesman in the
life of the mind, and a jazzman in the world of ideas,” ad infinitum), Brother West floored me with its heart
and message; a heart and message I needed in my life right now. While I agree
that the memoir could have done more theoretically and substantially, what it
did do was enough for me to love it and need it.
And, to be fair, it is
important to note that Dr. West did not intend for the memoir to reach for
original or unique theoretical heights. Nor did he intend for the text to serve
as a model for how others should think or live their own lives. In a 2009 interview
on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Dr.
West said he hoped his text could work “maybe to
provide an insight, here or there, to help somebody come to terms with the dark
corners of their own soul, to come to terms with the undecided, their own sense
of self, and maybe help develop a capacity to love - to love wisdom, love
justice.” And, in reaching towards these hopes, I think Brother West was successful.
In
the chaotic midst of academic paper deadlines, graduate-level reading
assignments, other graduate school application submissions, and planning
lessons and grading student papers, I had forgotten, from the fall of 2010 to
the early winter of 2012, about death. Not forgotten about death’s existence as
a concept—the human tragedies plaguing the covers of international news
periodicals have made it so that death is in my line of vision, in plain black
and white, every day (whether I want to look at it or not is another matter.) People
who were once now aren’t, because of a bomb or a bullet or a disease. But death
as an end did not feel real, that is, it did not feel like a personal
reality (i.e., something that could happen to me, as a twenty-something-year-old taxpaying white man living in Middle
America) in the face of such dynamic and multi-faceted life (viewed both
through my eyes and the eyes of computer and television screens) until I read
the following words in Brother West:
“To be human is to call for
help. We [West and his friend, scholar James Melvin Washington] saw birth
itself as a catastrophe: you’re thrown in space and time to die. The flesh
fails. Then the question becomes simple—how you gonna cope? Life is shot
through with contradictions and incongruities. But that doesn’t mean that any
ol’ life is acceptable” (101).
Dr. West’s
call to be present in the understanding of our mortality is, of course, nothing
new. The well-known theologian Thomas à
Kempis, in his seminal early-fifteenth Christian treatise On the Imitation of Christ, writes:
“Very quickly there will be an end of thee here: look what
will become of thee in another state. To-day we are here, to-morrow we
disappear, and when we are gone, quickly also we are out of mind…Thou oughtest
so to order thyself in all they thoughts and actions, as if thou wert about to
die” (43).
What West
and his Medieval Catholic forebear are calling for is not to be confused with
any Tim McGraw song-styled
pop philosophy. Their advice is not for the faint of heart, not to be
painted into an alliterated aphorism like “Live, Laugh, Love” and placed above
one’s kitchen sink. What Dr. West calls “the death shudder” is the
understanding of a cold-blooded reality: We’re here. We’re not always going to
be here. And in the moment between here and not-here, we’re going to have a
chance to decide if being here was worth it. That moment will be lonely,
painful, and potentially terrifying. But it will no doubt come. So what do we
do while we’re here to make that inevitable moment less awful?
Dr. West
spends the entirety of Brother West
answering that final question with a resounding and unequivocal “Love each
other!” And I say, in the funky words of one of West’s poetic idols, Marvin
Gaye, “right on.” Mr. McLemee is spot-on with his critique that BrotherWest did not bring many new philosophical or sociological ideas to
the table. But what it did offer was a re-presentation of a handful of very old ideas, maybe the
oldest ideas: We’re here. We need each other. So let’s be good to each other.
Sometimes a
slim, readable reiteration of old ideas proves more valuable to an audience
than an esoteric jargon-heavy doorstop, especially if said audience is likely
marinated in 24/7 messages (visual, tactile, and sound-based) that promise it
it’ll never die (or, perhaps more dangerously, that dying won’t sting too much) if it buys
this or that thing (while slyly omitting the wicked and unappetizing death-shudder
fact that the thing will likely outlive its buyers, regardless of the buyer’s
best efforts). I appreciate Dr. West’s blues-based effort to tap readers on the
nose and say, kindly and with gapped-tooth mouthfuls of tragi-humor, “The results are in. You’re
not going to make it. But try to do some good before you go.” It was a
nose-tapping I needed and will continue to need until that final not-here
moment.
