The Colt 45 Chronicle #92

The summer before the summer I left the Groves of Academe behind I worked as a laborer at a construction site, an apartment building that was being built in downtown Oakland not far from the public library and Lake Merritt. My friend Greg lined up the job for me.

Greg was the friend of a friend who I got to know mostly through working this construction job in downtown Oakland. His cousin was a drywall contractor based in Seattle who had decided to bid work in the Bay Area because Greg lived in Berkeley. (Greg had lived in Seattle but couldn't take the dark falls and winters; so he had relocated to the Golden State.)

The summer of 1987 was sort of an ideal time for me. My girlfriend, whom I would marry the next summer when we were in our way to New York City for her to attend medical school, had moved out, leaving me to my buddies and my books.

That summer was a steady bacchanal. The San Francisco Giants were playing well. And on the days I wasn't needed at the construction site, and my cousin, who had moved into the apartment with me when my girlfriend had moved out, was off working at the health food store where he was employed, I sat in a large stuffed chair and read Homer's Odyssey or Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or a collection of Frege's writing.

I idolized Greg because he was older than I was, a big guy with a wry sense of humor who was a superb multi-sport athlete; he was also a big drinker. Mostly I think that I looked up to him because he seemed very independent. Unattached to a woman, though the ladies loved him, unencumbered by familial ties, though he worked for his cousin, his lot seemed to me worthy of emulation (since I was ensnared in a long, flawed relationship).

That summer of '87 freedom seemed possible to me. My girlfriend, as I said, had moved out, and, while we were still seeing each other, it was not clear that she would reel me back in (which she would do effortlessly four or five months later after whatever tryst she had been pursuing expired).

In the short letter below, addressed to Greg, I look back drunkenly and longingly on that summer from two years on. For some reason, I choose to focus on the morning ritual of making coffee for us to drink while we make the short drive from Berkeley to downtown Oakland.

Autumn 1989

Greg, goddamn, it's always good to hear from you. You're always up and going forward, and taking no prisoners while you're at it. -- Let me quote: "Go to the job site and do the job. FIRE OUT!" That's it. 'Nuff said.

I'm drunk. I've finished all the malt liquor in the house, but fortunately there's a half-filled fifth of Jack Daniels and I've been dipping into that; at first it was shots, but now I've moved on to ice and a little bit of tap water. I put the ice and the Jack and the tap water in an old salsa jar, and I swirl it around vigorously. It's doing the trick. I've got Neil Young on the turntable. TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT, a great album, one of my all-time favorites, and I'm thinking back to those 6:30 AM truck rides to downtown Oakland in the gloomy bay fog. 

I'd wake up before 6 and start that mud brewing in my Norelco coffeemaker (Norelco. Yes, that's right. The same company that makes electric shavers, but, sure enough, they make a fine coffeemaker). My cousin Colin was asleep in the living room on the futon; I'd stay in the kitchen, at the kitchen table, waiting on the coffee, reading a little Homer and thinking about the gray sunshine of life. 

You'd show up sometime between 6:30 and 7, ringing the buzzer. I'd rush down the stairs, two big peanut-butter-jar glasses full of coffee and half & half in each fist (you dubbed 'em, "tank shells of mud"), and we'd scoot off towards Shattuck Avenue and the freeway and the workday. 

Oh, well, as Dylan says, "The past is gone," or, as Neil says, "What do you mean he had bullet holes in his mirror. He tried to do his best, but he could not." 

-- Give me a burlap Sun and I'll bury the Earth. But let's not stop to investigate the shark's teeth! 

Keep in touch, and don't let the bedbugs bite or the toilet give you any pepper.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #91

This weekend was devoted to filing of federal income taxes. Saturday and Sunday were burned in front of the laptop entering a lot of data from brokerage statements.

The letter below, like the one posted last week, is to my buddy Niall. I confide to him my love of reading philosophy and Jacques Derrida.

Autumn 1989

A fist full of fortune cookies. I just tossed a fist full of fortune cookies into the trash. They came individually wrapped in plastic and they looked fresh. But I tossed them unopened into the trash anyway. I figured that any future they could let me in on wasn't worth the trouble involved in prying the plastic wrapper apart with my fingertips and then spilling the shattered cookie crust onto the kitchen floor. I'll be honest with you though, it didn't feel good tossing them into the trash like that; it felt like spitting in the aisles of a church; it felt like driving a pickup truck off an ocean cliff. I don't know why. I wish I did.

I started a letter to you but I was too drunk to get past the second sentence. I had been drinking with the boys at work. I had had about six bourbons and who knows how many beers. But I made it home to Washington Heights safe and sound (sound enough to careen into the corner deli for a three-quart pick-me-up). The first thing I thought of when I sat myself down was that I owed you a letter. I don't why since I'm still waiting on your recapitulation of the quake drama. But like I said, I only made it to the second sentence (too much bourbon).

I'm starting to read a lot of philosophy again. I had never given up on reading the shit, I just diminished the importance of it in my life. It's a big responsibility. It takes a lot of energy to read; and even after you've done a nice thorough and clean job of underlining and making notations in the margins, there's no guarantee that you're going to remember anything 24 hours hence. It's not like reading a story -- as you know, having read your Plato and Nietzsche and Weber -- everything's conceptual; there's not a whole lot for your brain to sink its teeth into. Your best bet is to try to make it into mantra -- rehearse and talk to yourself of what you know of what you've read, and then keep on reading.

Right now I've got several pokers in the fire. I'm reading this compilation recently published by University of Minnesota Press called REDRAWING THE LINES. It's a bunch of essays talking about deconstruction's relationship to analytic philosophy during the recent (in the last ten years) prioritization of theory in literature departments. I'm about a third of the way through, and it seems good enough, though I did read a really excruciatingly piece on the superiority of Cavell's writings on the later Wittgenstein as a model for the reading and interpretation of literature as opposed to a deconstruction-based model. The motherfucker's 20 or so pages boil down to the idea that reading requires "commonsensicalness," and that since deconstruction is just skepticism made textually fastidious (hence not bald and unrigorous enough) Derrida should be left on the shelf. What a bunch of facile shit, huh? It's crap like that that makes you wonder why philosophy should be read at all; it makes you think that it's all just so much academic jigsaw puzzling chalked up to fear and avoidance of the 9-to-5.

I'm also reading Derrida's introduction to Edmund Husserl's ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY. It was the first thing Derrida published in book form (the introduction plus Derrida's translation of Husserl's little piece of some 30 pages runs 128 pages; so it definitely qualifies as book length). It first appeared in 1962. I bought it because it just came out softbound for the first time, published by University of Nebraska press, a Bison Book (which is a mighty fine book). I read a few pages of it in the Philosophy Library at UC Berkeley not more than two years ago. It was important for me at the time because I was working almost feverishly on my Kant/Frege/Derrida magnum oh. ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY is significant for Husserl because of Frege's criticism of Husserl's first published work, which had to do with the foundations of arithmetic. Anyway, there were other reasons besides the confluence of first works and mentorships that made Derrida's vestal publishing sublime and profound for the purpose of my magnum oh, but I won't confuse and bore by going into them here. Pushing all that muck to the side, Derrida's introduction to the ORIGIN OF GEOMETRY and his SPEECH AND PHENOMENA, which is also about Husserl, are the two best and easiest ways to figure out exactly where he's coming from and exactly what deconstruction is all about. It's all based on a true reading of phenomenology, which, in turn, owes itself to a true reading of Kant. Cut the cloth however you like, for me Derrida is always the right length, someone you know who will always be on the money. And, goddamnit, you can't say that about hardly anyone, short of your conception of the deity. So old brainiac Jacques is pretty special to me.

Even if I'm just pissing in the wind wasting my non-9-to-5 time reading writing philosophicus at least I'll be concentrating hard, and, happy, thinking about the future because I'm so locked up in the present -- a cogitating about the future that's free of constricting simple messages. I don't know, but I guess philosophy . . . at least it'll get me as far as fortune cookies in the trash.

Ta Da!

The Colt 45 Chronicle #54

I lived with my girlfriend almost my entire time as an undergraduate. 

I was a year ahead of her. My freshman year I spent living by myself off campus in the Elmwood neighborhood. As soon as she completed her senior year of high school, she pretty much arrived on my doorstep. Her application had been rejected by the university, and she had been offered admission to U.C. Santa Cruz instead. But she appealed the decision and won.

We quickly started looking for apartments. I was working at the Doe Library as well as the Bancroft Library. She managed to get work as a babysitter. We found a small one-bedroom, railroad apartment on Durant Avenue across from Edwards Stadium where my father had flamed out at the state high school championship track-and-field meet 25 years earlier.

And there we would stay for the next five years; or, I should say, I would live there for the next five years because my girlfriend, who would become my wife the following year, moved out the summer of 1987. This is what the little drunken germ of a letter that was never sent (and can be found below) refers to.

For me it was a wonderful time (see photo). It was as if a gigantic boulder that had been crushing the life out of me had been blasted free. The San Francisco Giants were winning and so too were the Oakland A's. I had lots of buddies to drink and eat with. We listened to music and guzzled beer and watched baseball. I worked as a laborer at a construction site in downtown Oakland close to the public library. I read what I wanted. That summer I read Robinson Crusoe (1719), Homer's Odyssey, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) and Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach and Max Black (1952, 1960).

It is hard to top that experience.

Autumn 1988

Old-time philosophy and construction and being young and the Odyssey and the girlfriend having moved out. Too much too perfect forever.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #46

I fiddled about on my undergraduate honors thesis for a couple of years before finally leaving the university the summer of 1988 without completing it. I shouldn't say "fiddled" because I worked quite long and hard on that thesis -- a discourse on Kant, Frege and Derrida that argued for the possibility of the analytic a posteriori (a type of statement Kant ruled out) -- though I would frequently say I was working on it when I was actually off drinking and copulating with one girlfriend or another who was not my wife-to-be.

Right before my betrothed and I left Berkeley in a VW bus bound for a quick Reno stopover in order to tie the knot on our way to the married-student housing offered by New York City's Columbia University Medical School, I inexplicably plucked from the fully-loaded bus a box containing the fruits of two years of research and writing -- countless days spent in branch libraries taking notes from academic journals and then spilling my musings into composition books while I drank coffee in Telegraph Avenue cafes -- and handed it to my father with instructions for him to mail it to me when we arrived in New York.

My father did what I asked of him, but the tomato box containing my honors thesis, my "magnum oh" that ingeniously (or so I imagined) bridged the gap between continental and analytic philosophy in au courant fashion, never made it to New York.

A cutout of the front portion of the box containing my father's return address was mailed back to him. My honors thesis had gone missing. The speculation was that the crack-and-peel label containing the address of our married-student apartment fell off the box. But if that were the case why not ship the whole box back to the return address which was still visible? The lid of the box must have become separated from the box itself.

My father was disconsolate; he felt responsible for the loss of the thesis. To this day he suspects some sort of foul play by the postal service. Just the other day he related to me that when he dropped off the box at the post office and was admonished by the woman working the counter for coming in so close to closing time with a such a heavy box that she was expected to lift.

Whatever it was, whether a label that had lost its adhesive or sabotage by a disgruntled clerk, my fate was sealed. I told myself I could recapitulate the pith of what was contained in all those boxed notes, and I made a half-hearted attempt evenings after work during the summer of 1989. But the jig was up. I used to be able to recite from memory the chapters of my thesis, how the argument moved from the analytic-synthetic distinction Kant makes at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); to Frege's logicist program in his Begriffsschrift (1879) and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and the ontological implications of defining arithmetic as analytic; to Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) and the possibilities for a new, more ethical pedagogy. Now, I can barely remember the barest of outlines. Hopefully, I still have notes somewhere from that weak summer of '89 attempt to capture what was lost in that missing tomato box.

Autumn 1988 

Gentlemen,

The parcel which I'm looking for is a box, approximately 8"x12"x10", with a lid (it's much like an IBM photocopy-paper box). It has air holes on either side (I believe it was originally a box for shipping tomatoes). It weighs about twenty-five pounds.

CONTENTS

The box contains l) books, 2) photocopies of books, and 3) loose-leaf handwritten pages (see next page for sample of hand writing). A list of the authors and titles of the books is as follows:

Saul Kripke, NAMING AND NECESSITY
Jacques Derrida, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
Immanuel Kant, GROUNDWORK . . .
Gottlob Frege,FOUNDATIONS OF ARITHMETIC
John Sallis, SPACINGS

The package was sent from Fairfield, CA to New York City (10032). My biggest concern is not with recouping any dollar value for the missing material, but with finding it. You see, the box, which I had my dad send to me, had a year and a half's work in it. Without it I can't write this paper; and without this paper, I can't get my bachelor's degree. (A real, honest-to-goodness, tearjerker.) So I would sincerely appreciate any kind of reply, no matter how brief. 

Thank you,

Remembering Jacques Derrida at the Holiday Inn

I did see Derrida. It was at the Holiday Inn in San Francisco. It was early 1988, a cold morning. I went with my buddy Matt. Before the conference began -- it was a big convention space, the American Philosophical Association was the sponsoring organization -- I was able to size up the great man in close proximity in the hallway outside. He was smallish in stature and well groomed and tailored, not in a foppish or dandy way, but in a formidable manner. He warmly greeted old lady Majorie Grene, a UC Davis professor who had written an early influential book in the U.S. on Existentialism, Introduction to Existentialism (1959), a copy of which I had at Berkeley and I think I have here somewhere.

Derrida was on a panel that morning in the big hall with a very nervous Rodolphe Gasche who almost melted down while speaking. Derrida was extremely kind to him up there in front of all the hostile American philosophers.

Derrida took the podium after Gasche, who had written a pro-Derrida book published in 1986, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, and in passing the red-faced Gasche who was on his way back to his seat at the table on the dais Derrida clasped him around the shoulders in a totally selfless act of benevolence. I always remembered that. That and Derrida's hostile reception from the majority of the audience who were obviously tenured old professors.

During the question and answer period (Matt took a crack with one about the etymology of genuflection and genius -- moving the seed up to the brain) Derrida responded to a hostile inquiry with what I thought was an incredible revelation for a professional philosopher and intellectual -- "More and more I cannot tell the difference between having read and not having read." Or something along those lines.

My project in my lost honors thesis was to place Derrida as a Kantian; that the Kantian nature of Deconstruction could be understood by looking at -- of all people -- the founder of analytic philosphy, Gottlob Frege. With this argument I would then bridge the divide between continental and analytic philosophy. My end point was to arrive at a new pedagogy, one Derrida points the way to in Of Grammatology (1967), but one that was more explicitly informed by Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788), his moral philosophy. Ambitious. Turned out to be too ambitious.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #22

Last Sunday I was on the road in the Bay Area running around Lake Merritt with my father and then later taking in an afternoon Giants game with my buddy Oliver. So there was no post from an archive of letters dating back to the end of the 1980s when I first arrived in New York City. We resume today with letter number 22, a thankfully brief note to my girlfriend Stacey. In this missive I self-indulgently compare our authorial aspirations to those of a young Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (At least Stacey realized some success. Today, she's a prize-winning author.)

At the end of my time at Berkeley when I was trying to finish my honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori, I figured out that what I was trying to say about understanding Kant filtered through Frege (logicism) and Derrida (grammatology) could be found in Fichte and his explanation of the I as thing-in-itself.

At our last dinner together in Oakland, I tried unsuccessfully to describe to Stacey what I had discovered reading Fichte. Hence, the letter below, written a few months later, after I had relocated to New York City with my wife.

Summer 1988 

I told you a story about Fichte once in a car on the way to dinner; I even tried to feed you the moral, about how there's no difference between things that change history. -- A little perfection on I-80 on our way to shitty food and shitty debauched, defeated jocks. And then there's beer, always beer, which is a vacant-lot heaven full of Egyptian-dead cats and dog-shit pyramids; we share it and love it and are alone in it. But the story about Fichte was designed to inspire, both of us: something about youth paying off in a mundane way; that we can do what we're doing and still make our name; all we have to do is take one fair-sized risk. Fichte gambled on writing something (he wrote AN ATTEMPT AT A CRITIQUE OF ALL REVELATION in about a month) and then abased himself at the feet of the master. He figured something out. I'm not pushing institutional prostitution; I'm saying, shit, pump something out. If it's shit, get rid of it. But if it's decent, fork it out to the master. Unfortunately, and hypocritically, I never listen to my own lessons. I could go into a sizable self-deprecating diatribe, but it would bore . . . Let it end by saying that I'm a shithead, an asshole, etc. . . And that I'm a shithead, an asshole, and on and on . . . for doing the Christ-ed, fuck-up, can't-do-it routine. My problem is that at twenty-three I feel I go all the way back to Moses. I feel that life is largely lusterless. I feel that my sword is always already beaten into a plowshare.