Girls Just Wanna Have More: Lena Dunham's Hit HBO Show and the Rise of Millennial Dissatisfaction Tropes

          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.

Teaadora Nikolova Singing a Cover

           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. 

The Business in Front of the Classroom

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.

How To Write a Memoir

Why does the story of my life need to be told?


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!

James Baldwin Thinks You're Unhappy

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?"

writing books

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.

Ringing in the New Year to the Tune of Existential Blues: A Review of Cornel West's "Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir"

            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 Brother West 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.