Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  Braveheart’s got some pretty fucking good ones.

  … where Broderick’s a coward, he faints …

  And it gives him—and it also, it’s ingenious. Because otherwise there’s no motivation for the assault on Fort Wagner, you know? “Sir, give us the opportunity to die gloriously.” It’s like that would be—that would be nothing but surface, if we hadn’t seen how he’d been at Antietam.

  … intensely moving …

  Yeah, it really is.

  … music …

  Oh—[Hums it: he knows the Glory theme; impressive.] It’s a very intrusive soundtrack. But it works with this thing. I don’t know, there’s a whole real interesting essay to be written about the psychodynamics of melodrama in that movie, and why that movie allowed melodrama to work when—I mean, there’s never been a time in serious art more hostile to melodrama.

  … themes that deserve the most dramatic treatment.

  Yeah. And it was also very safely set in the far, far, far distant past, you know? A mythic American time.

  … Morgan Freeman … walking through Charleston … “That’s right. We run off slaves, but we come back fighting men …”

  He was great in that. I haven’t liked him in much else, but he was great in that.

  He was Easy Reader.

  On Electric Company? Yeah. Can we turn the heat up a tiny bit? I also—I wonder, we’ve got to be fairly close.

  … I’m worried about your dogs, too. Isn’t it funny, we’re two people who are used to working alone. And we speak more comfortably looking out the window in the dark as opposed to looking across the table. It’s not surprising, but it is funny.

  It is, it’s very interesting to me the ways, I don’t know, we sort of converge and differ. It’s real interesting just to hear what actors you like and don’t like, and all about reading. I don’t very often—there’s a couple writers that I know really well who I’ve known for years. But this is just weird ’cause I like only met you a couple days ago. It’s kind of intense. I’ll be following your career with great interest too. If only just because now I feel like I know what you’re like a little bit.

  Let’s talk about music for a second. What kind of music do you play …?

  I have the musical tastes of a thirteen-year-old girl.

  I mean, I will find one or two songs—I listened to “Strange Currencies” over and over again all summer. Right now I’m listening—

  Can we turn the light back on …?

  Sure. I knew this would come. Because of the Rolling Stone thing. I’m just—and now I’ve taped these two Bush songs off the radio. One’s “Glycerine,” and I don’t even know what the other one’s—it’s that one, “I don’t want to come back down from this cloud.” “Glycerine,” by the way, is a complete rip-off of Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship,” the entire bass line. Here, I’ll even, when we get back I’ll play “The Big Ship” for you and then “Glycerine.” And it’s just—it’s sort of like Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” is a total rip-off of a Tommy Bolin song called “Post Toastee.” Litigation. [I check; he’s absolutely right.]

  It’s weird, I know—I know little esoteric bits. I listened to a lot of fusion in high school, and listened to like an enormous amount of, like, Pink Floyd and weird psychedelic shit. And then I know a fair amount about like esoteric Australian music, ’cause my sister lived in Australia for two years and sent me these tapes. But I don’t have any kind of comprehensive, you know. … Like I’ll read Spin or another magazine’s record reviews. And I’ll be like, I won’t recognize three-quarters of the records they’re talking about.

  But then I’ll happen to hear Alanis Morissette. On the radio. And you know just for some reason—that squeaky orgasmic quality in her voice will just hit me. And so I’ll go like listen to nothing but Alanis Morissette for two months.

  Why? I saw her on the wall.

  [Left Alanis poster and Cosmo magazines out for me to find.]

  I don’t know what it is. She’s simultaneously so erotic and so human and she can’t sing all that well, and she’s got that squeaky quality. I don’t know what it is but there’s something—I can’t say anything interesting about it.

  Did you like that song?

  Which one? “I Want to Tell You”?

  No, that’s O.J. Simpson’s I’m-on-Trial book. … Would be great if O.J. had sung “You Oughta Know” …

  “I Want to Know,” yeah, that one was all right. You know what? I could—the one, the only one I really don’t like is that “I’m high but I’m grounded, I’m …” You know, that Gen-X anthem shit. But the new one—the one that, that’s, but here’s what’s weird. If it was anybody else, I wouldn’t forgive it. I like that she’s trying too hard. For instance, Sheryl Crow made me want to vomit, from the very beginning. And there’s not really a—they’re sort of functioning in the same kind of role. And you can see Joan Osborne on deck, swinging two baseball bats, ready to have her fifteen minutes after Alanis Morissette.

  What similar role are all of them playing …

  My guess is—my guess is it’s some kind of, there’s a ditsy overearnest quality, where we can sneer at them a little bit. Which allows—we can stand to hear things from them that we couldn’t stand to hear from a more hard-rock band. Because there’s a ditsy flaky granola-crunchy quality about like … Tch tch tch tchoo. … For instance: I mean a seriously political like halfway-deep singer-songwriter like, what’s her name, Natalie Merchant. Who used to be with 10,000 Maniacs. Is like—her career trajectory is entirely different. I mean she’s—she’s got sorta small solid hits time after time. But these are different figures. Let me see, first Sheryl Crow—well, first there was Joan Armatrading for a while—not Joan Armatrading. Tracy Chapman. And lately there’s been first Sheryl Crow and then Alanis Morissette and then you can see Joan Osborne—

  Edie Brickell, too.

  Well, see, here’s what’s weird: I’m really a bad person to ask about it. Because it just happens to be, like, you know, for a year I’ll listen to country on the radio, and then for a year I’ll listen to like shitty alt. And so now that I’m in the shitty alt phase a little bit, I’m a little more alive to the stuff. It’s more like—

  … more seasoned … What stuff can they say?

  I’m trying to think. I mean imagine if—I don’t know, the “God” song, “What If God Were One of Us.” Let’s try to imagine that being sung by, I don’t know, R.E.M. Not an unearnest or an unpretentious rock band. But there’s some sort of waifish quality about them. And we know the egg timer’s running on their career, we know that they’re like the 10 CC of 1996 or something like that. And that allows—it gives them a weird kind of freedom.

  What I would love, and there maybe have been articles like this. But I would love profiles of the men involved, and the decisions about who gets not just record contracts, but who gets serious radio play, you know? Because it’s real clear that Sheryl Crow with that “I Just Want to Live in L.A.”—and then Alanis—are in lots of ways media creations. And it’s probably five or six, I would imagine, guys in Ray-Bans and suits, have decided not just that they’re good, but that they’re sellable. And that there’s a market. Has there been stuff like that, that I’m just too ignorant to have seen?

  I don’t think so … But it’s not just those guys in suits … when “All I Wanna Do” came out … feel it in your belly somebody somewhere saying, “We’ve got a hit.” [Break] Thinking this way: What about on a series, what you see on TV is not the characters, but just the actors straining to get their own pilots and series. …

  That’s been what’s excruciating about Saturday Night Live.

  … Do you feel that ever listening to music? Like in Alanis Morissette …

  No, I don’t think so. And again—I’m very ignorant. My musical tastes are so eclectic and so involved, it’s like what students have given me. I mean I didn’t even, I hadn’t even heard of Nirvana until after that man died.

  What do you make of them?

&n
bsp; I think it’s absolutely incredible. But unbelievably painful. I mean if you, you know, all the stuff that I was groping in a sorta clumsy way to say about our generation? Cobain found, Cobain found incredibly powerful upsetting ways to say the same thing.

  You wrote a whole book about rap. Why?

  No, I—Mark and I wrote a book-length, a long essay that was originally going to go in a magazine called Antaeus. That turned, was turned into a book. [David’s third book, Signifying Rappers.] That was about—why we and a lot of other white people like us, found ourselves obsessed with listening to black, to serious black political rap. That was thoroughly suffused with hatred for all things white. And watching these bands then get captured by white labels, and watching the hip-hop phenomenon get digested by Madison Avenue. And it wasn’t—it wasn’t about rap. I don’t know that much about rap.

  Also, I was terrified to write fiction. And Mark thought he might want to try this with me. And I was so desperate to feel like a writer, and whenever I would try to write fiction it was just an incoherent mess. So I thought that we would try that.

  … more music stuff …

  Don’t get pissed off, though, about like I know next to nothing about this. I mean I am like a bonehead who listens to the radio.

  [Break]

  [About being a writer] … the attempt to track. I’m not sure we’re any better, but we’re able to describe the attempt to track our wandering in circles in a way that perhaps somebody else can identify with. I don’t think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

  … well said …

  And I’m structuring it as a sound bite, that’s—I think that’s closer to what I think.

  … You said being a regular guy was a great strength of yours as a writer; I thought it was smart, but what did you mean by that?

  I think—I had serious problems in my early twenties. I mean, I’d been a really good student. I was a really good logician and semantician and philosopher. And I really had this problem of thinking I was smarter than everybody else. [Reason for faux] And I think if you’re writing out of a place where you think that you’re smarter than everybody else, you’re either condescending to the reader, or talking down to ’im, or playing games, or you think the point is to show how smart you are.

  And all that happened to me was, I just had a bunch of shit happen in my twenties where I realized I wudn’t near as smart. Where I realized I wasn’t near as smart as I thought I was. And I realized that a lot of other people, including people without much education, were a fuck of a lot smarter than I thought they were. I got—what’s the word? Humbled, in a way, I think. And uh, and what the weird thing is, discovering—I mean if you see more heart, you know. … Or I don’t know, the prose is prettier or it’s less cold or whatever—I—

  I see more of a human person’s experience …

  I doubt I’m all that different from other like you know, seriously overeducated, intellectual kids. I really had this—I think I really had a very difficult time believing that anybody else, um, was at all like me. Or was anywhere as smart as me.

  And please, if you put this in, make it clear that I’m talking about really how I was, like twelve, fifteen years ago. That I mean I, that I’m real embarrassed by that, you know? And I’m saying it only ’cause I pray that other people will, like—that other people will have been the same way.

  Before I address that … In Harper’s pieces, you said you peel back your skull.

  Yeah. It’s basically, you know, welcome to my mind for twenty pages. See through my eyes, here’s pretty much all the French curls and crazy circles. And the trick about that stuff is to have it be honest, but also have it be a lot more interesting. I mean most of our thoughts aren’t all that interesting. They’re mostly just confused. That stuff’s rhetorically real interesting ’cause it’s about how to be honest with a motive, you know?

  … Only two more minutes to go before we change tapes. That’s really well said: how to be honest with a motive …

  Turn the tape off. [Break] … instead of is it true or not? You don’t even have to—I mean, just go, it’s in like the first twenty pages. The Screwtape Letters is really—it’s weird cause it’s a very childlike, simple book. But Lewis is incredibly smart.

  And it’s, it’s weird, it’s one of the things I noticed, I don’t notice that you argue by analogy or whatever. But it’s like, if somebody will say something to you, your reaction is very often to quote a line similar to it. Or to talk about whether that’s—whether that’s a good line or not. And I think the reason why it doesn’t irritate me, but I feel it and I notice it, is that there’s a similar component in me. It’s a writerly type thing.

  But I guess my only justification for saying this to you is that I’m like, I’m really—there’s something else. There’s something else besides that. There’s also this, is it true or not. That, does it feel true, does it taste true? And like whether it’s clever, or whether, whether it’s well said, or whether it’s fresh or not, is only part of it. It’s like—ah, I don’t know. It’s … I can’t quite nail down just what I’m saying.

  I think you would find that book intensely interesting. ’Cause it’s weird, I read it for the first time when I was thirty. I swear to God, I’ll read Renata Adler and Nabokov’s letters if you will check that out. I think you’d really like it.

  [The tape side runs out.]

  • • •

  CAR DRIVING HOME FROM AIRPORT

  AND MINNEAPOLIS/CHICAGO

  EN ROUTE TO ISU

  [Big build; big build plus bandanna. Like he’s going to ask you to play Hacky Sack, and if you say no he could be willing to beat you up.]

  Part of social strategy. There’s still something basically false about your approach here. To some degree. Which is this: that I think you still feel you’re smarter than other people. And you’re acting like someone—you’re acting like someone who’s about thirty-one or thirty-two, who’s playing in the kid’s softball game, and is trying to hold back his power hitting, to check his swing at the plate, more or less.

  You mean in the book?

  No, I mean in your social persona. And you’re someone who’s really trying—

  You’re a tough room.

  You make a point of holding back—there’s a point, there’s something obvious about you somehow in a gentle way holding back what you’re aware of as your intelligence to be with people who are somehow younger or …

  Boy, that would make me a real asshole, wouldn’t it?

  [He’s driving.]

  No it wouldn’t: It would make you a reformed person …

  The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

  I understand that.

  [What he has also is a Midwesterner’s shy unwillingness about standing out.]

  And I think it’s also, like, I think one of the true ways that I’ve gotten smarter is, I’ve realized that I’m not that much smarter than other people. Or that there are ways in which other people are a lot smarter than me. And uh, boy: but I am, like especially in Minneapolis, with like you and Julie and Betsy, there was no act going on. There was one part of me holdin’ back. Makin’ real sure I didn’t say catty shit about anybody like public, that you might write down. Or that if I asked Betsy or Julie personal shit that you might … and that was like it. And part of it is I was just so tired.

  But it, uh—I don’t know, it makes me feel kinda lonely that you think, that you think that I … In a weird way, it’s sort of like the lady from the Letterman show talking to her husband. [His story “My Appearance.”] Like there’s been certain stuff that I’ve told you that’s really true, and it’s been brave of me. Because if you want—and it’s also a gesture of trust, because if you want—I’ve written enough of these things, and I’m a good enough writer to know, that you could present that in a hundred ways. Ninety of which I’m really gonna com
e off as an asshole. But it seems like your read of them is, “Huh: what an interesting persona Dave is adopting for the purposes of this interview.” And it’s really just like, uh. There’s a couple of times I’ve tried to do it a little bit. And it seems like you’ve caught me every time, and then we’ve both just laughed. I forget what it was, but … [Flirting]

  I think there are different people on the page than in real life. I do six to eight drafts of everything that I do. Um, I am probably not the smartest writer going. But I also—and I know, OK, this is gonna fit right into the persona—I work really really hard. I’m really—you give me twenty-four hours? If we’d done this interview through the mail? I could be really really really smart. I’m not all that fast. And I’m really self-conscious. And I get confused really easily. When I’m in a room by myself alone, and have enough time, I can be really really smart. And people are different that way. You know what I mean? I may not—I don’t think I’m quite as smart, one-on-one, with people, when I’m self-conscious, and I’m really really confused. And it’s why like, My dream would be for you to write this up, and then to send it to me, and I get to rewrite all my quotes to you. Which of course you’ll never do …

  So yeah, I think I’m bright, and I think I’m talented. But I also know enough, like … it’s one reason I’m uneasy about these interviews. Is, I know that I’m a lot more talented alone, when I’ve got time. Than I am in the back and forth of this.

  Although I’m not an idiot. I mean I know, you know, I mean I can talk intelligently with you and stuff. But I can’t quite keep up with you. [Patronizing? Flattering?] Whereas if we did it through the mail, and I had access to a library, and I could go look up the stuff you’re talking to. That you and I would be equals. And that’s as clear and honest an explanation as I can give.