<kirby's "dear derrida">
2003-10-25.1:24 p.m.
Dear Derrida David Kirby �������������������� My new grad-school roommates and I are attending our first real lecture, which has gone okay, we guess, since none of us understands it, �������������������� when one of our professors rises, a somewhat prissy fellow with a mild speech impediment, and says he takes issue with the speaker's tone, �������������������� which he characterizes as one of "sar, sar," and here he raises his voice a little, "sar, sar, sar," and wipes his mouth with a handkerchief, "sar," and turns red �������������������� and screams, "sar, sar, sar--DAMN EET!--sarcasm!" The four of us look at each other as if to say, Hmmmm, nothing like this at the cow colleges we went to! �������������������� After that, whenever we'd spill our coffee or get a sock stuck in the vacuum cleaner, �������������������� we'd look at the mess ruefully and say, "Da, da, da--SARCASM!--damn eet!" �������������������� Our lives were pretty tightly sealed, and if we weren't in class or the library, either we spent our time in wordplay �������������������� or cooking: what with girlfriends and passersby, we always had a pot of water boiling on the back of the stove (It's like you're ready to deliver babies, �������������������� somebody said once), either for spaghetti or sausages, though one evening Chris, the English student from England, came by for a sausage supper, and after he left, �������������������� we ran up on the roof to pelt him with water balloons, though when we did, he fell down as though he'd been shot, and one of us said, Jeez, what's wrong �������������������� with Chris, and somebody else said, You know, Chris eats nothing but sausage, �������������������� and a third party said, Hmm, maybe we ought to vary our diet a little. �������������������� And that was our life: school, the boiled messes we made on that stove, and hanging around that crummy apartment talking about, �������������������� I don't know, Dr. Mueller's arm, I guess, which hung uselessly by his side for reasons no one fathomed--polio, maybe, or some �������������������� other childhood disease--though Paul said he thought it was made of wood. Can't be made of wood, said Michael, you can see his hand at the end �������������������� of it, to which Paul replied, Yeah, but you can have a wooden arm and a real hand, can't you? And that was what our life was like, �������������������� because mainly we just sat around and speculated like crazy while �������������������� the snow piled up outside, so much so that by the time spring came, �������������������� I'd had it, so I moved out of there and in with Grant and Brian and Poor Tom, who were philosophy students but also genuine bad asses, �������������������� believe it or not, because at that time you more or less had to be an existentialist, i.e., tough, and not a deconstructionist, which was a few years down the road yet �������������������� and which would have left everyone paralyzed, since all texts eventually cancel themselves out. Of the new roomies, I hit it off best �������������������� with Grant, who became one of the big-brother types I seemed to be looking for at that period in my life, and in fact he rescued me on more than one occasion, such as the time I was talking �������������������� to a local girl outside a bar called Jazz City and her three brothers �������������������� decided to "teach me a lesson" and would have if Grant hadn't punched one of them �������������������� across the hood of a parked car, or the night he and I were in this other place where a biker gang called Quantrill's Raiders �������������������� hung out and into which wandered a well-dressed couple so unaware of their surroundings that they asked the bartender to please make them some hot toddies, �������������������� which set everybody to laughing, only the Quantrills decided we were laughing at them and jumped up to "teach us a lesson" and would have, too, if Grant had not thrown �������������������� a table at them and dragged me out of there to dive behind some garbage cans and choke on our own laughter while the drunk, fucked-up bikers howled �������������������� and swore and punched each other since they couldn't punch us. All this was therapy, �������������������� I figured, since grad school was stressful enough to send three people I knew to the clinic �������������������� with barbiturate overdoses (two made it one didn't), and I'm not even listing here all the divorces I know of that were directly �������������������� attributable to that constant pressure to be the best, be publishable, hireable, lovable, that came from professors and sweethearts and parents but mainly from ourselves, �������������������� as though each of us were two people, a good and capable slave, on the one hand, and, on the other, a psychotic master who either locked us up with our pots �������������������� of boiling water or sent us out to dance with the devil in the streets of Baltimore. That year magi appeared from the east: Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, �������������������� Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida brought their Saussurean strategies �������������������� to the Hopkins conference on "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," �������������������� where they told us that all language is code and thus separate from reality, and therefore everything �������������������� is a text as long as there is nothing more than this half-conscious linguistic interplay between perceiver and perceived, which is another way �������������������� of saying that language is the only reality or at least the only one that counts. As different as these thinkers are, each was telling us that there is no us: �������������������� that cultural structures or the media or Western thought or the unconscious mind or economic systems make us �������������������� what we are or what we seem to be, since, in fact, we are not, which isn't such bad news, �������������������� if you think about it, because it means we don't have to take ourselves so seriously. �������������������� Derrida and company make it impossible for anyone today to read a book as he had before, but we didn't know that then. �������������������� Grant didn't, that's for sure; four years later, he put a gun in his mouth and blew the back of his skull off, and sometimes it makes me sad �������������������� when I think of how long it takes for new ideas to catch on, because, yeah, deconstruction might have saved us.
back /& forth /& frosting
names are often sad