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

fact it was a very cynical argument, because there was a part of me—this was a year and a half after I wrote it, and I knew that that ending, there was good stuff about it, but it was way too clever. It was all about the
head
, you know? And Gerry kept saying to me, “Kid, you’ve got no idea.” Like, “We wouldn’t even be
having
this conversation if you hadn’t created this woman named Lenore who seems halfway appealing and alive.” And I couldn’t hear. I just couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear it. I was in … Dave Land.
    I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was. And so, as a result, for the rest of my life, I will walk around … You know, I will see thatbook occasionally at signings. And I will realize I was arrogant, and missed a chance to make that book better. And hopefully I won’t do it again. It’s why I will not run lit-crit on my own stuff. And don’t even want to talk about it.
    My tastes in reading lately have been way more realistic, because most experimental stuff is hellaciously unfun to read.
    Because ideas are primary? And then the writing goes bad?
    I’m not sure if it’s poorly written: It requires an amount of work on the part of the reader that’s grotesquely disproportionate to its payoff. And it seems—when I am a reader of that kind of stuff, and I’m talking like heavy-duty experimental stuff, some of which I have to read just because I do various stuff with experimental press. I feel like I am as a reader like a small child, and adults are having a conversation over my head; that this is really a book being written for other writers, theorists, and critics. And that any of that kind of stomach magic of, “God
damn
, it’s fun to read. I’d rather read right now than
eat,”
has been totally lost.
    So this was really one of the reasons I’m thrilled about the fuss about the book. Is: in this I wanted to do something that is real experimental and very strange, but it’s also
fun
. And that was also of course really scary. Because I thought maybe that couldn’t be done—or that it would come off just as a hellacious flop. But I’m sort of proud of it, because I think it was kind of a right-headed and brave thing to do. And I think, I think there’s a reason why a lot of avant-garde stuff gets neglected: I think that a lot of it deserves to be. Same with a lot of poetry. That’s written for other people that write poetry, and not for people that read. I don’t know. That’s kind of a whole rant.
    I agree. Lorrie Moore works for readers, not just writers. Martin Amis …
    But there’s also, there’s ways that experimental and avant-garde stuff can capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings, in a way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.
    I disagree. I’m a realism fan. You agree?
    It imposes an order and sense and ease of interpretation on experience that’s never there in real life. I’m talking about the stuff, you know, what’s hard or looks structurally strange—or formally weird—I mean some of that stuff can be very cool.
    But Tolstoy’s books come closer to the way life feels than anybody, and those books couldn’t be more conventional
.
    Yeah, but life now is completely different than the way it was then. Does your life
approach
anything like a linear narrative? I’m talking about the way it feels, how our nervous system feels.
    [Long pause]
    You mean like TV life and computer life?
    Some of it has to do with TV and fiction. You watch many videos? MTV videos? Lot of flash cuts in ’em. A lot of shit that looks incongruous but ends up having kind of a dream association with each other. I don’t know about you, but that’s sort of—I mean, Jesus. Um, you flew here. You drove down. Probably while you’re driving down you’re also doing work on another piece. You’re lugging your computer. You