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

makes a flub, says quickly, “Brain fart.”
    He stops for a second. Holds steady. “Excuse me, I’m about to burp.”
    His delivery is darting and graceful: the Astaire quality of good teaching.
    On the campus romance story. “The great dread of creative writing professors: ‘Their eyes met over the keg …’”
    The key to writing is learning to differentiate private interest from public entertainment. One aid is, you’re supposed to get less self-interested as you age. But, “I think I am more self-absorbed at thirty-four than twenty-three. Because if it’s interesting to me, I automatically imagine it’s interesting to you. I could spend a halfhour telling you about my trip to the store, but that might not be as interesting to you as it is to me.”
    Reminds the class, as it breaks. Notebooks closing, bookbags rising from floor to desktop. Ruckle noises, kids standing. The week’s two lessons.
    D AVE: Never—don’t go there: “Their eyes met across the keg …” And “What’s interesting to me may not be to you.”
    Still in good, buzzed-up mood after. Brings me a water to drink.
    D AVE: Where would you be without me?
    I hope it’s not that same tobacco-Styrofoam cup.

• • •
ISU HALLWAY
TALKING TO COLLEAGUES AFTER CLASS
    “Was it a success?” [Colleagues ask about
Infinite Jest
tour.]
    No vegetables were thrown, so I consider it a success.
    I just made enough money to live off it for a couple of years, so that’s good.

• • •
WE HEAD FOR CAR
    I’m always going back and fucking with stuff. [Wrote two full novel drafts longhand] I did the last draft of the book on a computer, justbecause I needed it for the notes, I needed to be able to switch back and forth.

• • •
DINNER
MONICAL’S PIZZA
BLOOMINGTON
    You can smoke in here? I can see the ashtrays
. [The restaurant soundtrack, right now: Huey Lewis, “Heart of Rock n’ Roll.” Dave: “‘I Want a New Drug’ was more or less an anthem for me in the 1980s.”]
    I think towns under like a hundred thousand are the only places you
can
smoke anymore.
    I wrote
Broom of the System
when I was very young. I mean, the first draft of that was my college thesis. There are parts of it that I think are good. But it’s—I wince. Even at signings, when people bring it up to sign. I think that, “if it wasn’t for that brief, It’s-trendy-to-be-young thing …” You’re probably a little too young to have benefited from it, ’cause that was really like the mid-’80s.
    The paperbacks?
    And they did just enough hardcovers that they could
say
…
    Post Jay McInerney
.
    Yeah … It seems to me rather an odd thing to bring out again, that—because it was a totally different kind of fiction.
    Nice to watch you blossom from what was initially a marketing thing
.
    Yeah. Nice.
    You’re the most talked-about writer in the country
.
    [Embarrassing to hear myself talk that way.]
    There’s an important distinction between—I’ve actually gotten a lot saner about this. Some of this stuff is nice. But I also realize this is a big, difficult book. Whether the book is really any good, nobody’s gonna know for a couple of years. So a lot of this stuff, it’s
nice
, I would like to get laid out of it a couple of times, which has not in fact happened.
    I didn’t get laid on this tour. The thing about fame is interesting, although I would have liked to get laid on the tour and I did not.
    Rock stars, sports stars do; I don’t think Updike, Roth, or Barth do
.
    Only in
Rolling Stone
would I not worry about this. Just because I know that, the whole thing’s going to be
jaunty
. But um, there’s gotta be some—because it’s clear that, like, people come up, they kinda
slither
up during readings or whatever. But it seems like, what I want is not to have to take any action. I don’t want to have to say, “Would you like to come back to the hotel?” I want them to say, “I am coming back to the hotel. Where is your hotel?” None of ’em do