Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something. And the biggest thing that I like about what’s going on, to be totally honest—and see, you’re being very good, ’cause now I’m starting to like you, and so I’m saying this stuff, and it may sound crazy. I really like that this doesn’t, that this isn’t that big a deal to me. That it like—it’s nice.

  But what I really remember is the times when working on that book was really hard. And I just gutted it out, you know? And I finished something. And I did it for the book, not trying to imagine whether David Lipsky would like it, or Michael Pietsch would like it. And that I feel like I’ve built some muscles inside me that I can now use for the rest of my life. And I feel like, “All right, like I’m a writer now.” Whether I’m a successful writer or not, I don’t know. But like, like this is who I am, this is what I do. And I know now how to live in such a way that I’m doing it for the work itself. Which I’m aware can kinda come off sounding very pretentious. And it’s also, it’s what everybody says: “Ah, that other stuff doesn’t matter.”

  What I’m trying to say to you is, I went through a period so bad, that that stuff had to stop mattering to me, or I think I would’ve blown my brains out. I came reasonably close. Or I could have at least tried in such a way that I would have damaged myself trying horribly.

  [Break]

  • • •

  ONLY SOLUTION: WE’RE DUE IN MINNEAPOLIS TONIGHT THE FLIGHTS FROM BLOOMINGTON ARE ALL BEING HELD, SO WE’RE GOING TO GO BACK IN MY RENTED GRAND AM, OVER THE SLICK ROADS, OFF TO CHICAGO/O’HARE

  [We’re finishing two more cigarettes in the automatic airport door now. Flexing our fingers, smoking—it’s cold in the outdoor breeze.]

  I suspect—I’m not saying I’ve been successful at it. But I think that if avant-garde stuff can do its job, it is tremendously difficult and not that accessible, and seduces the reader into making extraordinary efforts that he wouldn’t normally make. And that that’s the kind of magic that really great art can do.

  But the best thing is to show what TV can’t, to use the ways books are better than TV.

  Except of course the hard thing is to do both at the same time. Because a book has to teach a reader how to read it. So the structure stuff starts right at the beginning.

  We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading—when really all it’s done is given us the really precious gift of making our job harder. You know what I mean? And it seems to me like the harder it is to make a reader feel like it’s worthwhile to read your stuff, the better a chance you’ve got of making real art. Because it’s only real art that does that.

  But as it gets more complex, reader will feel they’ve wandered into a classroom where they missed the first few weeks of the course.

  You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart. And that there’s stuff that TV and movies—although they’re great at certain things—cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, you know, to get these other kinds of art. And I think you can see it in the visual arts, I think you can see it in music …

  Easier though, I’d think. Makes them realize it’s more fun faster.

  Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.

  [Later: hoped to shift attention from himself. Note in front of his ISU office: “D. F. Wallace is out of town on weird personal authorized emergencyish leave from 2/17/96 to 3/3/96 and from 3/5/96 to 3/10/96.”]

  The old tricks have been exploded, and I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader. And my personal belief is a lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life—that’s our opening, and that’s our gift. That’s a very personal deal, and here are seventeen ways to do it.

  [Later]

  There’s a thing in Lester Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, about certain music giving you an erection of the heart. And that term really resonates for me. “The Balloon” gave me an erection of the heart. [“The Balloon,” a Donald Barthelme short story.]

  For me a fair amount of aesthetic experience is—is erotic. And I think a certain amount of it has to do with this weird kind of intimacy with the person who made it.

  No other medium gives that to you?

  Yeah—although you feel a kind of weird intimacy with actors in drama, although it’s a bit different. That’s more I think an enabling of the fantasy that you are them, or getting you to desire them as a body or something. It’s interesting: I’ve never read really good essays about the different kinds of seduction in different kinds of art.

  Achievement?

  I have a more nebulous idea of achievement. I guess getting a really good review in The New York Times when I was twenty-five was what, what’d you say?—two and a quarter—would be when you were twenty-five. What’s interesting is that five years ago, I would have, I think I would have sneered at you and said, “Uh. How bourgeois.” When in fact, what I think I’ve realized now is that we’re basically exactly the same, we’ve all got our jungle gyms, you know? And because of the world you grew up in, it’s success. And the world I grew up in, my parents didn’t care that much about money, but they cared a whole lot about sort of professional prestige within their communities. If you write philosophy books, you’re basically worrying a whole lot about what other philosophers think, and that’s just about it.

  My mom is a painter: a different code from the world she was in …

  Did you admire her?

  I did. And I still do admire her. The pain of it was hard to be a part of. You know, it was in my house, do you know what I mean? So it was hard to …

  Sure. I bet she must have hurt real bad over it too.

  [Strange, warm, small-town counselor sound]

  She’s witty, and she reads Emerson and Nietzsche and all that, so I think she found something funny in it. But it was also really hard. To watch. I mean, you know …

  (Soft voice) Yeah. No, I know what you mean. It’ll be interesting—I’ll bet, I mean, I don’t know you, but I’ll bet there’ll come a time when you realize you’re always gonna have about as much success as you need, and that’s fine. Where you’ll just feel like you can draw a free breath about it. And maybe not for all time—it’s just, that’s sort of, that’s the best thing about what’s going on right now. Is I feel like, “You know what? This doesn’t run me.” And it’s flattering to have Rolling Stone send you out here. But it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean to me what it would have meant to me ten years ago. And I realize that that’s precious.

  Why?

  Because if it means that much to me, then I’m real fragile and real breakable. ’Cause what if you don’t come? Or what if you don’t like me? Or what if the next thing gets a bad review, you know what I mean? ’Cause then I’m like—what am I like? Well, then I’m like something made of glass, that has to be treated just a certain way or he breaks. Right? And I don’t mean, I mean, I’m not a guru, it’s not like I’m exempt from this stuff. I just remember real well how much it used to mean.

  What would it have meant ten years ago?

  I think it probably would have just hastened things. Because it would have been absolutely great, I would have tried incredibl
y hard to impress you, in about a thousand different ways. Would have put on a whole lot of faux stuff, you would have left, I would have waited on tenterhooks for the article, the article would have come out. And if it wasn’t savage, I would have had exactly an hour of a kind of greasy thrill about it. And then there would have been a feeling of utter emptiness. Which is the feeling of, “Now I’m back to being made of glass, what’s the next thing I’m going to find that’s gonna handle me just right?” You know what I mean?

  And it’s not like that I’m not like that at all, anymore. But I’m just like, I know that when all this is over—I know that the biggest part of me is looking forward to all this bein’ over, so I can get back to work. And that that’s the most important thing. And that that’s good because I can live that way. I can’t—if I depend on this, then I’m gonna be miserable except for once every five years? You know what I mean?

  [Screwing up his face]

  That’s well said.

  But it’s not just well said—I mean, it’s really truth, I mean I’m really telling you the truth.

  It’d be like being a sort of veteran courtesan who didn’t need to get paid exactly anymore …

  Yeah; that’s a good example. It’s being a really good whore but knowing that the clocks tickin’, and that various things are headin’ south.

  I’m worried about you calling Holly. [Holly, his publicist at Little, Brown, is set to issue a decision about our getting to Minneapolis.]

  [“Welcome to Bloomington-Normal,” an airport sign says. “We’re sold on Bloomington-Normal—Armstrong Realty.”

  We’re standing in the opening and shutting automatic door, talking about graduate school.]

  Fights—the professors’d say, Don’t use pop references (a) because they’re banal and stupid, and (b) because they date your piece. And it’s just sort of like, I mean I think, I don’t know about you, what kind of stuff you do. Me and a lot of the other young writers I know, we use these references sort of the way the romantic poets use lakes and trees. I mean, they’re just part of the mental furniture. That you carry around.

  Shakespeare used Greek myths the same way.

  Although I’m also aware—the culture has a whole weird, complicated relation to its pop self, or something like that. Because I know that, like, when I make that Gilligan reference in class, everybody laughs. And there’s a jagged edge to it. Because everybody’s a little uncomfortable with how familiar it is. I mean, so there’s this whole, there’s this very neurotic relation to it. But a lot of that stuff I don’t much think about in the writing. A lot of that stuff to me is just kind of like … describing a landscape or something.

  [I tell David I’m very interested in the married relationships question—how people maintain emotional and physical interest.]

  Is that why you’re not married at thirty? Is that kind of a chilling …?

  Why aren’t you married at thirty-four?

  You first.

  Um—I think it’s hard to fill that role … to cast it and to fill it when you know it’s for thirty or forty years … someone who, whatever mental landscape you’re in, they’re going to be in it too, you need someone who’ll fit any landscape you can imagine.

  I’m not that systematic about it. I’ve come close a few times, and each of those times that I came close involved, you know, a three- or four-year thing. And then when it didn’t work out—if a few of them don’t work out, then you’ve been sort of at large for nine or twelve years, and you haven’t gotten married. I think the larger thing is probably that I am … that I tend to be interested in women that I turn out not to get along very well with. And the ones that I get along very well with, I’m not interested in in a kind of romantic way. So that I’ve got a lot of really good women friends. But I tend to have a really hard time with girlfriends, because the ones I’m attracted to are a lot of fun you know for, in the standard ways, for like a couple of weeks. But in terms of the daily, let’s-go-shopping stuff, that we tend not to get along really well.

  Why not?

  I don’t know. And I have friends who say that this is something that would be worth looking into with someone that you pay. But a lot of it too is that—yeah, I don’t think of it, I can’t put it as well as you did about the mental landscapes, I just know I’m hard to be around. Because kind of when I want to be by myself, like to work, I really want to be myself. And I will just go away. And women don’t like that. Unless they themselves are writers, and then in which case I don’t want to watch them go away.

  Is that—not our taxi.

  That’s not for us. You were incorrect …

  [Car glazed over with ice. Like Batmobile. All contours smoothed. David gets the scraper out of the trunk, goes to work: windshield, chunks of spray, back window.]

  This is an adventure. Don’t lose the scraper. This is my good-luck scraper. A good Midwestern boy develops a relationship with his scraper.

  [We’re driving. Out from the tangle of the airport. David has brought a Savarin coffee can for his chewing tobacco.

  Savarin can falls over on hard turn.]

  You don’t want to do that after the spittoon is full.

  [We’re on I-55—slushy and crowded—driving to Chicago.]

  Why did movie idea, in Infinite Jest, attract you? I have a hard time turning off a TV.

  I would have a real hard time talking about it in any way that you would be able to get a paragraph—Jesus, what’s wrong with people today?

  [Road conditions, swervers jumping into our lane.]

  What the fuck is with him?

  Did you get movie idea first, or come to you later?

  How is it when you work?

  [We talk about Philip Roth …]

  Roth writes for two years, but mostly to get voice. Throws away all for eighteen months, writes book in last six.

  I think that’s sort of what happened to me. Except it was more like three years of doing other stuff that stank, that then sorta set me up to do this. This was a weird thing because this started on page one, and ended on the last page. I was working on it in order. It sort of …

  Written in the order it has now, more or less?

  Yeah—the changes are from Michael’s cuts, I had to move things around. It’s quite a bit shorter than it was.

  Twice as long before?

  No. It wasn’t that much longer. It was about five hundred pages longer. Of which four hundred unambiguously needed to go, and the other hundred was painful.

  That’s like losing a whole novel.

  It’s not really a novel; it’s not supposed to be a novel.

  The definition of novel is … I never thought of this as a novel, I thought of it as a long story.

  The whole time you were working on it?

  No actually—the original title was A Failed Entertainment. The idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work. Because what entertainment ultimately leads to, I think, is the movie Infinite Jest. I mean, that’s the star it’s steering by. Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise. And the tension of the book is try to make it at once extremely entertaining—and also sort of warped, and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment.

  Like what?

  Oh, Jesus.

  [Long pause: Clicking of turn signal, swabbing of wipers]

  Y’like candy?

  Yeah. Of course.

  What if you ate it all the time? What would be wrong with that?

  Bad for teeth and very fat very quick.

  Real pleasurable, but it dudn’t have any calories in it. There’s somethin’ really vital about food that candy’s missing, although to make up for what it’s missing, the pleasure of masticating and swallowing goes way up. There seems to me to be some analogy to what—I’m talking about very seductive commercial entertainment. There’s nothing sinister, the thing that’s sinister a
bout it is that the pleasure that it gives you to make up for what it’s missing is a kind of … addictive, self-consuming pleasure. And what saves us is that most entertainment isn’t very good. (Laughs)

  Addictive how? Like Die Hard—the best action, probably.

  The first Die Hard? I think it’s a great film.

  Brilliant, right? Sharp script, smarter than most art movies.

  But also very formulaic, and rather cynically reusing a lot of formulas.

  Terrence Rafferty’s line: “a formula action picture, but the extra-strength formula …” That film is about as good as an action film can get … consequences keep mounting up as they don’t usually in that sort of movie.

  Uh-huh.

  That kind of movie then? Or MTV? Or TV?

  I guess entertainment would describe a continuum—I guess what I’m talkin’ about is entertainment versus art, where the main job of entertainment is to separate you from your cash somehow. I mean that’s really what it is … And I’m not, there’s nothin’ per se wrong with that. And the compensation for that is it delivers value for the cash. It gives you a certain kind of pleasure that I would argue is fairly passive. There’s not a whole lot of thought involved, the thought is often fantasy, like “I am this guy, I’m having this adventure.” And it’s a way to take a vacation from myself for a while. And that’s fine—I think sort of the same way candy is fine.