An Open Letter to Gertrude Stein.

An Open Letter to Gertrude Stein

by james bezerra

Oh Gertrude Stein you strange giant beast of a person you Nazi-collaborating tastemaker you who died decades before I managed to get to Paris who once upon reading the poetry of Picasso took him by the shoulders and proclaimed “Pablo go home and paint” you reminded me of something and in doing so made me happy immediately after having made me so unhappy you reminded me as I was sitting at the table where I do my writing you reminded me as I was reading you reminded me that I was reading like I read and that in so reading was failing to really read you. You. Gertrude. You strange giant.

Which is to say that I put the wrong hat on before I read you the other day. I guess I had forgotten what your deal is. It took me a page and a half of banging my face into the rough brick wall of “Composition as Explanation” before I took a step back and wiped the blood away and remembered that you were basically an anti-semitic Jewish lesbian before it was cool. When you wrote, “No one thinks these things when they are making when they are creating what is the composition, naturally no one thinks, that is no one formulates until what is to be formulated has been made” I jotted in the margin, “Can a brother get a comma?” and you (apparently) replied down through time: “No.”

But you reminded me of something Gertie, with your incoherent waterfall babble that at first pissed me off because when I sort the contents of my brain by effect I often place you Modernists at the same campsite as the Post-Structuralists whom I adore as one adores their own child but not other people’s, I blame the Deridian destruction of language as (one of) the philosophical underpinnings of the Neoliberalist resurgence that gave us Reaganite Doublespeak and made it possible for Connecticut-born millionaire and son of a President W to call himself “an outsider” I blame you because Patron Saint Stephen had to make the word “truthiness” just to keep the fuck up with the language of lying that you helped make possible when you turned the page into a swirling vortex of word gravy. Goddammit Gertie.

But you reminded me of something. You reminded me as I started marking the breath pauses in your sentences just so that I could keep up, you reminded me that you were basically writing poetry and I was notating it like music and you reminded me that together we had just invented jazz and you reminded me that Kerouac didn’t write about jazz he wrote in jazz and so why had I put on my reading hat to read you when I was sitting at my writing table and should have been reading you like I was writing you.

You reminded me to snap my fingers and to tap my foot along with your beat. You reminded me that when one seeks to manifesto on the virtue of the incomprehensibility of all things, that one need not do it in sentences that make even any small amount of sense. Basically.

You reminded me of my conflicted relationship with Donald Rumsfeld. You compelled me to watch that whole documentary again where Rummy mugs at the camera as he reads his memos the collected works of the greatest ever language poet of bureaucracy and in the silence on Errol Morris’s side of the camera you can hear him wanting to scream, “You’re a fucking maniac! But I just can’t quit you Donald.” Known knowns and unknown knowns and known unknowns. You did this to us Gertie. Somehow you made this possible from Paris a hundred years ago. Somehow with a bottle of wine and a chat with Hemingway and Woolf you made this possible Gertie and bombs and bombs and bombs from the sky fell. Awe. Shock. When you make things mean nothing you are stealing from the future because when you remove the inherency of meaning other people will always come along and fill the empty place with something else. We are a race of meaning hoarders Gertie it is our addiction and just because you have cleaned our home out and shown us how pretty it can be when it is empty does not mean we want it pretty and empty. We want things Gertie and maybe your thing is pretty but it is too pretty for us. We like carnival barkers and Apple watches and shit that is bad for us. We prefer even lies to the chilling existential dread of the meaninglessness that you are trying to show us. We don’t want to eat our vegetables Gertie. And so we get Donald.

We were fine Gertie with general mediocrity. When you take that away from us by showing us that it is mediocre we like bratty children or teenage daughters will always say to you, “Oh yeah? Well watch this!” and like a rebound relationship we overcorrect into a different kind of vacuousness one that at least is willing to claim to have meaning. Donald Trump is running for President Gertie and not sucking at it and that is okay because we all know that he is actually just a bunch of rats wearing a trenchcoat, but he like you is going to enable the lunatic psychopaths to seem like not craven lunatic wolf psychopaths. When you pull back the curtain and expose the lack of meaning in everything then you put us in a situation where we have to buy meaning from the pimps of fecal ideology (ie: Ted Cruz) because we just can’t stand for everything to be nothing. We are not all equipt to be nihilists Gertie. We don’t like knowing that the universe was started by an accidental explosion and that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Can you please just let us have some birthday cake and let us watch The Big Bang Theory in peace Gertie? And of course down through time you reply: “No.”

.

.

.

Describe a Dog.

I hesitate to call the thing below a story. More accurately it is a dramatization of my notes from class tonight where we were talking about a literary theory called Deconstruction. Deconstruction is probably my favorite theory because it is simultaneously ridiculous and undeniably profound. It is massively confusing and dense and if there was an easy way to explain it then I wouldn’t have spent the last two weeks of my life reading about it, but here I will do my best to sum it up:

In a language where everything is defined by what it is not (a dog is not a cat or a racoon or a chair or a horse) then the actual thing (a dog) doesn’t appear to have any inherent uniqueness wholeness or meaning on its own (Try to describe a dog to someone who doesn’t know what a dog is. Make sure your description is accurate to ALL dogs and that you do not describe ALL dogs by comparing them to things they aren’t).

Anyway, this crazy Frenchman came up with Deconstruction and he was both cool and a complete asshole in the way that only Bond villains are usually able to pull off.

.

.

.

The Deconstructed Detective.

The Deconstructed Detective

by james bezerra

The Epilogue: This is not a short story.

.

“Thank you,” he says as he breezes into your apartment through the front door and slips across to your kitchen table where he sits down and pours himself a glass of your wine and proceeds to eye your dinner, “for inviting me.”

“I didn’t invite you. Who are ...” you begin to say, but it is useless now because somehow you find that you’ve been inexplicably drawn to the table and that you’ve sat down with him at the table and now he’s offering you a glass of your own wine.

He pours you a glass and exactly half of the volume of the glass is occupied by wine.

“I have news,” he tells you. “I have made a discovery. You have been tricked! You have been the victim of a ruse de guerre. Of a crime. Of a con!”

This is, in fact, news to you.

“What do you mean?” you ask.

“Let me tell you. But first, how is your wine?”

“It’s fine.”

“Wine is made from dead grapes. Did you know that?”

“I’ve never thought of grapes that way. Of being alive or not.”

“What about raisins?” he asks you.

“What about them?”

“They’re dead grapes too. Do you think of them that way?”

“No,” you say, because you don’t.

“Of course not,” he laughs and howls and smacks your table, “because there’s no such thing as a ‘live raisin’ because then it wouldn’t be a raisin at all.”

You shake your head. “True. Fine. But tell me more about this con.”

“I will,” he shouts at you, “just as soon as you stop talking!”

This has offended you. “Don’t shout in here!” you shout at him, “The walls are very thin and everyone will hear you shouting. Any besides, I wasn’t even talking anymore.”

“But you are.”

“What?”

“Talking now.”

“No you are!”

“I am only talking when I am talking and not while you are accusing me of being the one who is talking. When you accuse me of talking, you are the one who is talking, because you talk in order to accuse me.”

“Fine,” you say - feeling all hrrmgh now, “I will stop.” So you do. You stop talking. You look at him. You wait for him. He is sipping your wine and seems far too content with himself right here in this moment right now. Sitting there happy and content with himself while right now - out there in the world somewhere - someone is conning you. When you can’t stand it anymore you finally say, “Well tell me about this con!”

“Yes,” he says. “I will,” he says, “but first: more wine!” He pours more wine into your glass, but mostly into his, then he asks to you, “Wonderful weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

“Tell me about this con job!”

“That. Yes. Well, you have been played you for a fool.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“You are a victim. Don’t be ashamed. It could happen to anyone.”

“I’m not,” you say. “Now how do you know I’m being conned?”

“It is just the most obvious thing really. More wine?”

“No!”

“Have you any snacks? Raisins perhaps?”

“Not again with the raisins. Tell me how I am being conned.”

“First you must think as a con artist would. Are you thinking that way?”

“I don’t know!” you yelp, and it is the only thing you have really been certain of during this whole conversation.

He begins to explain, “For a con to work, the one being conned must not know about it, would you agree?”

“Yes, of course.” You agree because that makes perfect sense.

“So the one being conned does not know that he or she is being conned, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And you did not know that you were the victim of a con, correct?”

“Y ……..,” you hesitate to fully commit yourself because you can see where this is going, “Yes,” you answer finally.

“Well there you have it! Had you known then you would not have been being conned.”

You hesitate much longer now because of the way he worded that last sentence … something about it … as though he had composed it in such a way as to deliberately confuse you. You sip some of your wine. Finally you say, “That does not prove I am being conned.”

“Ah, but it also does not prove that you aren’t. That is just logic my friend.”

You have to admit that you see his point. That you would never know. You have to admit that there is something logically compelling about his argument, but also, somehow, not. But it has enticed you. You must admit that there is something exciting in what he says. Your heart is thumping a little faster. Your skin is flushed just a little pink. You must admit that he certainly has rattled your cage.

“Who is conning me?” you ask him.

He shrugs, “Well, to determine that we must investigate. Luckily, I am a detective.”

“How do we go about investigating it?”

He pours himself more of your wine. He swirls it in his glass. He begins to say, “Wonderful weather we …”

“No!” you shout at him. “Let’s continue investigating.”

“But we have not yet begun our investigation.”

“What? Why not?!”

“Because you have not yet paid my detective’s fee.”

Frustrated, you tromp to your bedroom, take money from your sock drawer. You return and slap the money down on your table. “There is your fee, now let’s begin.”

“My god!” He shouts and points across the room, “What is THAT!”

You turn to look. You see nothing but the corner of the room. You turn back. “What?”

“I thought I saw something,” he says, “I must have been mistaken. Anyway, where were we?”

“Your fee.”

“Yes! My fee. Well as soon as you pay my fee we can begin investigating.”

“I just paid you your fee!” You point down at the table, but when you look down, you see that it is not there.

He chuckles to himself. He sets down the glass he has been drinking your wine out of. “Now be reasonable, if you had paid me my fee already then we would be investigating already and since we aren’t, then you clearly haven’t.”

You can not deny that what he says makes a kind of sense, but also, somehow, doesn’t? You tromp back to your bedroom, hrrmgh-ing all the way. You return with his fee, which you place directly into his hand while making eye contact with him and saying, “Here is your fee which I am paying to you.”

“Thank you,” he says as he takes it, stands, and begins to slip back toward the door.

“Where are you going?!” you holler at him.

“Well to investigate, of course.”

And with that, he is gone. There is nothing left of him but the sound of your front door closing and after a moment that is gone too. You’re not entirely certain what just happened, but you know that something just happened. Outside it is 9 October 2004.

.

The Prologue: Did Derrida die, or did he live?

.
.
.