Free Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky Page A

Coppola, but at a certain point you get yanked and you end up as the Don Bruckheimer or the Sydney Pollack they bring in to finish the picture
.
    Uhh … Boy, I don’t know, you realize—
    You become the hired gun …
    I’ve worked on maybe four or five things—some short, some long—that became alive to me halfway through. And this came alive to me halfway through. And I would still hear the, “This is the bestthing ever written,” and “This is the
worst
thing ever written.” But it’s sort of like, you know how in movies there will be a conversation, and then that conversation gets quieter, and a different conversation fades in … I don’t know, there’s some technical word for it. Just, the volume gets turned down. Now there’s been other stuff where the volume hasn’t been turned down, and I
have
finished it. Just, I was a hack: “God damn it, I’m going to finish this thing.”
    This
thing, I got real interested in it. And I got real invested in it. And it’s one reason why the big part of me that’s pleased about all this fuss—other than, Perhaps I’ll get
laid
in like
Akron
or something—is that I’m proud of this. In a way that for instance I’m
not
proud of
Broom of the System
. Which I think shows some talent, but was in many ways a fuck-off enterprise. It was written very quickly, rewritten sloppily, sound editorial suggestions were met with a seventeen-page letter about literary theory that was really a not-very-interesting way … really a way for me to avoid doing hard work.
    And
this
I just, I didn’t fuck off on this, you know? I mean, this is absolutely the best I could do between like 1992 and 1995. And I also think though that if everybody’d hated it, I wouldn’t be thrilled, but I don’t think I’d be devastated, either. It’s—and that’s not about being a hack, that’s about that it got, it became
alive
for me.
    Maybe “hired gun” was too cynical
.
    It doesn’t sound cynical to me, but the ways that I would disagree with you I’m worried would sound occult. For me it has much more to do with, I feel like people are talking to me. I feel like this thing, this is a living thing. With whom, with which I have a relationship that needs to be tended. That I feel, not—that I feel un-lonely working on it. Which (mouth full) to be honest, I mean, there’ve been a few things that I’ve felt that way about, that ended up I don’t think being all that good. Or people didn’t like ’em all that much. But, um … I just think that it
hurts
. I think I have a really low pain threshold. I think the I’ll-show-people, or, People-are-really-gonna-like-this—thinkingthat way has hurt me
so
bad. That, um, that when I’m thinkin’ that way, I’m not writing.
    That that’s this thinking in me that’s gotta reach this kind of fever pitch, and then
break
. And in order for me to even start—not to get in the groove, but to get started—I’ve gotta find some way to turn the volume of that way down. And I think I’m more afraid—it sounds to me like you have a possibly cynical, possibly just very mature acceptance of the inevitability of that, that way of thinking. Whereas my experience has been, I think in certain ways I’m just emotionally kinda delicate, and it’s just
devastating
to me to think that way. And I’m willing to do enormous work—and enormous emotional and psychological gymnastics—to avoid thinking that way.
    Have you since read the seventeen-page letter about Broom?
    Oh sure. It talks about how the entire book is a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and presence versus absence. I mean, Gerry [Gerry Howard,
Broom’s
editor] didn’t want the book to end there. We have a cast of characters who are afraid their names don’t denote, word and referent are united in absence, which means Derrida … you know what? It’s a brilliant little theoretical document, unfortunately it resulted in a shitty and dissatisfying ending, right?
    And in