Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On Pedestrian v. "Serious" Art:

p. 198-200

Living in Bloomington: one of the things that I do, I mean, you have to listen to alot of shitty country music. 'Cause that's like pretty much all there is on the radio, when you're tired of like, listening to Green Day on the one college station.  And these country musics that are just so--you know, "Baby since you've left I can't live, I'm drinking all the time" and stuff.  And I remember just being real impatient with it.  Until I'd been living here about a year.  And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they're singing to is just a metaphor?  And what they're really singing to is to themselves, or to God, you know? "Since you've left I'm so empty I can't live, my life has no meaning."  That in a weird way, I mean they are incredibly existentialist songs.  That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable.  But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they're singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it.  Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something.



Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On the Avant-Garde and Expressing What it Means to be Alive:


p. 36-40

There’s ways that experimental avant-garde stuff can capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings, in that way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.

[Realism] imposes an order and sense of 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.

There’s really really shitty avant-garde, that’s coy and hard for its own sake. That I don’t think it’s a big accident that a lot of what, if you look at the history of fiction—sort of, if you look at the history of painting after the development of photography—that the history of fiction represents this continuing struggle to allow fiction to do that magical stuff. As the texture, as the cognitive texture, of our lives changes. And as, um, as the different media by which our lives are represented change. And it’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along. And that’s what’s precious about it.

And the reason that I’m angry at how shitty most of it is, and how much of it ignores the reader, is that I think its very very very very precious. Because it’s the stuff that’s about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief of what it feels like to live.

I’m talking about what it means to be alive. And how formal and structural stuff in avant-garde things I think can vibrate, can represent on a page, what it feels like to be alive right now. But that’s only one of the things that fiction is doing. I’m not saying it’s the only thing. I’m working hard here to try to make sense of what it is I’m saying to you. If your life makes linear sense to you, then you’re either very strange, or you might just be a neurologically healthy person—who’s automatically able to decot, organize, do triage on the amount of stuff that’s coming at you all the time.

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On Writing and Being a Social Creature:

p.16-17

DFW: There is an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something—much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it. So that you end up with this, uh…I think exhibitionists who aren’t shy end up being performers. End up playing their trade in the presence of other people.

Lipsky: There’s that John Updike quote: “Shyness, and a savage desire to hold another soul in thrall…”

DFW: But there’s also the shyness feed into some of the stuff that you need as a fiction writer. Like: Part of the shyness for me is, it’s very easy for me to play this game of: What do you want? What will the effect of this be on you? You know? It’s this kind of mental chess. Which in personal intercourse, makes things very difficult. But, in writing when I think a lot of what you’re doing—there are very few innocent sentences in writing. You gotta know not just how it looks and sounds to you. But you’ve got to be able plausibly to project what an alien consciousness will make of it. So there’s a kind of split consciousness that I think makes it difficult to deal with people in the real world. For a writer. But that actually comes in handy.

Of Course You End up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky