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

talented succeeding?
    [I’m trying to give the waitress a tip, which she is in the process of failing to understand and trying to hand back.]
    (To waitress) He’s attempting to tip you. Here. He wants to do it. It makes him happy.
    (To me) You’re not supposed to tip here, you get them in trouble. Here is this—this may piss you off or strike you as disingenuous. I don’t think I’m all that unusual. I don’t think in terms of “more talented” or “less talented.” There’s a kind of stuff that I vibrate sympathetically with, and a kind of stuff that I don’t. And I’ve seen a couple of books come out, that there was a whole lot of fuss about, I picked ’em up and read ’em. And I mean like literary, I don’t mean
shit
. You know, where you can see the gears working—and I just thought, “Man, there might be somethin’ here, but I just don’t get it. This is just not my cup of tea.”
    And then I really—I think the envy stuff just so
burned
me, that it’s just, idn’t there anymore.
    How did it burn?
    All the time that I wasn’t doing any publishable stuff, and I watched other people—you know, like, all of a sudden there was the new brat pack. You know, this lady Donna Tartt came? You know? And I read
Secret History
. And I thought it was, you know, it was pretty good. But feeling that, “Oh shit, now me and all these guys are displaced. And now there’s just a new crop.” And realizing how disposable, and that terrible … that terrible sense of, “I had something and now I don’t and somebody else has got it instead.” And then it’s just—talk about …
    [A cliffhanger; David stops.
    The waitress has returned with my tip after all. David retains his thought.]
    —just talk about a kind of mind-set that can get ravenous and that can tear you up. And I just—you know, I went through some of that. And I just, it’s weird: I just don’t wanna send any blood supply to that part of my
brain
anymore. Not because I’m this greatperson. But I just—then I’m really unhappy and I’m not doing any work.
    Plus
, the research on this thing. I’m serious, it took me out of the loop. I don’t even
know
90 percent of what’s been published. I didn’t even know Jayne Anne Phillips had a new book, like I told you. Until this escort in Chicago told me. I just missed like four years of this. And I’m not sorry not to be part of that world anymore. I just—there’s nothing but envy, and sort of puffery, and all that stuff in it. And it’s not like I’m above it. It’s just that it—the amount that it hurts me, outweighs whatever good feelings it gives me.
    Hemingway tapeworm quote: “Literary New York is like a bottle of tapeworms all trying to feed off each other.”
    Yeah: Or great white sharks fighting over a
bathtub
, you know? There’s so little—the amount of celebrity and money we’re talkin’ about is on the scale of like true entertainment so small. And the formidable intellect marshaled by these egos fighting over this small section of the pie, it’s just … yeah, it seems kind of absurd. But I’ll tell ya, I was in New York when the
Esquire
thing came out. [I think he means the 1987 Literary Cosmos thing: a map, with him on the horizon as one of the “approaching comets.” No, he means one of the book’s few mixed reviews, from
Esquire
’s literary editor Will Blythe.] And it hit that part of me, that writer-vanity part of me. And I was right in that: It’s like, I wanna go see him, how dare he? All that, like—whereas when I’m
here
, it’s just more like, “Huh, what an interesting storm, going on outside my window. I’m sure glad I’m inside.”
    How long a part of that world?
    I don’t know … I went through Tucson. Then I went to Yaddo. I was at Yaddo twice. And I would go to New York, and give these readings, go to these parties. There were some of these writer-guys at Yaddo with me when I was there. And they were like five years older than me, and they