Read Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself for Free Online

different than kids on the East Coast. I think
Time
and
Newsweek
are fairly inescapable. So I think they kinda know. I’m sort of so nasty when they start talking about that stuff in class that I think I’ve scared them into just leaving it alone.
    Why?
    Because it’s toxic to them and it’s toxic to me. That class is my uh—I’m there to learn, not to talk about my own stuff. And I’m there … when I’m teaching, I’m there as a reader, not a writer. And the more—it’s extremely unpleasant, the more, uh, the more I’m there in a kind of writerly persona …
    There’s this weird scam in creative writing workshops that somehow the teacher’s gonna teach you how—they’re gonna be able to teach you how to do exactly what it is they do. Which is why these programs try to pack themselves with the best-known and most-respected writers. (“Wraters”) As if how good a writer you are and how good a teacher you are have
anything
to do with each other. I don’t think so. I know too many really good writers who are shitty teachers, and vice versa, to think that. I think that the teaching … well, the teaching has helped my own writing a lot … So maybe I don’t think that anymore. But the writers are often interested in preserving as much of their own time as they can.
    [Hums while he plays chess: not tremendously good at chess; strong, however, at humming.]
    Well,
that
really didn’t do a whole heck of a lot for me, did it?
    Shit. All right, we’ve got time for one more move each and then we have to leave. I’ve got to brush my teeth.
    I took the job for the health insurance. [Illinois State University]
    [Bathroom cabinet: lots of tubes of Topol. (He’s a smoker.)
    Dogs: Drone is “A provisional dog, he just showed up once while we were jogging,” they took him on.]
    Some kind of weird, “I’ve made a terrible mistake with my life, I need to be selling insurance in Oshkosh” sort of feeling. [We’re talking about John Barth, and other writers who’ve gotten in trouble. A sudden in-the-wrong-place sense. An anxiety he felt before
Infinite Jest
.] I think that happens to a lot of writers.
    [Went to Arizona State University. Edward Abbey was there … Robert Boswell helped him more than anybody …]
    I was so in thrall to Barth I just knew it would be sort of a grotesque thing. [Why he couldn’t and didn’t go to Hopkins. He patterned the longest part of his second book after Barth.]

• • •
IN CAR, MY RENTED GRAND AM
EN ROUTE TO CLASS
    This is the thing—you’re gonna have to sit around, you can’t even be in the office, because I’m gonna have to yell at a lot of people. I have to cut it short: just because we’ve gotta get up at five in the morning. This is what’s fucked: it’s that, these poor kids, I haven’t been around for two weeks. And they all are gonna have various deals todiscuss. [So sensitive about all performance] I’m usually a much better teacher than this. I swear to God.
    Like doing readings?
    No.
    You were good
.
    Thanks
. Tower Books—that’s not one I was particularly pleased with. I get so nervous beforehand, and the nervousness is so unpleasant, that that’s what I dislike. And I don’t think my stuff reads out loud very well. And I think I come off looking like a maniac. Mainly I’m doing what they blew up to larger type size. I give like one or two readings in colleges a year. I gave ’em ten things and they blew up five of them.
    I read something (“sumpin’”) different at Tower just because this unbelievably cute girl from
Spin
magazine was there, and she didn’t want to hear the same thing twice, so I totally trashed the plan. (He laughs.) And I never saw her again.
    [The writer Elizabeth Wurtzel was at David’s KGB reading—a kind of Brezhnev-and-Pravda-themed bar in Lower Manhattan. She was standing right up front. We turn out to both know Elizabeth.]
    I don’t know how Elizabeth—Liz got like the best seat in the house, using skills I think