I am thrilled to see that this book is almost entirely just long paragraphs of unrehearsed DFW conversation, I'm sure edited down though it reads as though it was unedited at all, and that everything he said was just transcribed from the tape recorder into this book. I am going to buy it, because the sheer number of the post-it notes that I have stuck to almost every page of my library copy means I probably should.
I can't help but read what he says as direct advice about how to be a creative person - "w/r/t" painting or writing or, at the risk of being too sincere and therefore sounding like a sap, the rest of my life. Anyway, he talks like this is a conversation, he talks about writing as a conversation with the reader, and I'm going to converse back.
38
"Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff -- this is gonna get very abstract -- but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So the reader feels less lonely."
This is exactly how I feel about you, DFW. That is exactly what I felt when I read you for the first time (and to a different degree, Dave Eggers but that's probably a true statement most of the time.) I have been trying to articulate that's how you made me feel since I read you, and there you go, saying it yourself.
You say "the way it feels on your nerve endings." Yes. That is exactly right too. That's what it is about you that is so true most the time -- especially the sad stuff that I can't even read. It feels way too much like how these things really feel.
41
"What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit--to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. . . . It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop . . . and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.
But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person."
Again, you have described what it is that you do so perfectly well. People keep describing you as an unusually awake person, a very aware person (probably to the point of too much self-awareness, or self-conscious self-awareness which I of course find so appealing). You DO make me feel smarter for having read what you say. You let me IN on the insights somehow. And all I wish I could do is be more AWAKE all the time. And I think the few times when I have felt connected to other human beings, and therefore alive by that connection, was when I felt like they and I were both equally perceiving what was going on around. Like, we are on pace with one another. People who make me feel smart and funny when I talk with them because we both get the jokes at the same time, both find the same things interesting or funny.
62FOOD PELLETS FROM THE UNIVERSE.
"'Cause see, by this time, my ego's all invested in writing, right? It's the only thing that I've gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for, to the extent that I wanted."
71
"Because a good book as to teach a reader how to read it." Were you the first one to say this? Who said this?
Later
"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."
I get the feeling that if I could live like this all the time, I'd be a better person. This is what I mean by that comment before about you possibly giving advice on how to live, as grandiose as that seems.
72
"There's a thing in Lester Bang's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, about certain music giving you an erection of the hart. 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."
I love that you get this - that you feel this way - and that it doesn't sound insane to say it. I have always had what amounts to crushes on people for this kind of thing, and always felt a little weird for it, for feeling this attraction to someone because of what they made or wrote or said. Like I am imagining too much between me, a nobody, unseen, at the receiving end of the work, and this person.
73
"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."
I love this. I love that way of seeing success. Seems awfully wise.
94
"I always feel that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me."
160
"I'm talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don't believe in politics, and don't believe in religion. And believe that civic movements or political activism are either a farce or some way to get pwoer for the people who are in control of it. Or who just . . . who don't believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific. ironists and pokers of holes. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just, it doesn't seem to me that there's just a whole lot else."
Pokers of holes.
174
"I mean, it was all -- and I was so arrogant. I would have this defense, that when the professors would say they didn't like the stuff, I would think it was because they didn't understand the grand conceptual schemes I'd laid on it. But I was not willing to realize that I'd laid the grand conceptual schemes on a substance that was essentially, "How will this enable me to show off in way X?""
180
"Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there's nothing like--there's no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older."
It's the same way with a crush, with "unrequited" love, I think. It is, to use your word, devastating to desire someone that doesn't desire you back, but the feeling of being desired by someone else in no way matches it in intensity.
215
"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 sayig it only 'cause I pray that other people will, like--that other people will have been the same way."
273
"And I remember in college, al ot of even the experimental stuff I was excited by, I was excited by because I found reproduced in the book certain feelings, or ways of thinking or perceptions that I had and the relief of knowing that I wasn't the only one, you know? Who felt this way. Who had, you know, worried that perhaps the reverse of paranoia was true: that nothing was connected to anything else. I remember that early on in Gravity's Rainbow and really getting an enormous charge out of it."
I looked for this at the library, by the way, and it is like an enormous book. I don't think I'm ready to commit to reading this just now. But someday I will. :) Because all this stuff is like laying out a curriculum, I feel like, so that I can see what it is that you saw when you read this stuff and understand this history and context that makes what you say so true. If that makes any sense at all. And sounds weird.
275
"I think with writing it's really feeling that, their brain voice for a while becomes your brain voice. And that you feel -- the Vulcan Mind Meld perhaps is a better analogy.
That just, they feel intimate with you, in a way. Or that you'd be, not just that you'd be somebody that id' be great to be friends with, but that they are your friend. And you know, one reason why I've got an unlisted number, and why I really try to hold down on the mail, is that, is that stuff is difficult to deal with. Because I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings. But it's also a delusion, and it's kind of an invasive one. But then I realize that I set up it by doing just what I did, and so it all gets very . . ."
293
"I think if you dedicate yourself to anything, um, one facet of that is that it makes you very very selfish. And that when you want to work, you're going to work. And you end up using people. Wanting people around when you want them around, but then sending them away. And you just can't afford to be that concerned about their feelings. And it's a fairly serious problem in my life. Because, I mean, I would like to have children. But I also think that sort of life that I live is a pretty selfish life. And it's a pretty impulsive life. And you know, I know there's writers I admire who have children. And i know there's some way to do it. I worry about it. I don't know that I want to say anything much more about it-- I mean, there's jokes about getting laid on tour and stuff."
305
"It'd be very interesting to talk to you in a few years. My own experience is that that's not so. That the more people think that you're really good, um, actually the stronger the fear of being a fraud is."
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