The finale.
Can you take 6 minutes.
You got it?
A 6 minute-- it's part of--
I think this is part of a novel, but it's
called "Early Writing."
And I think part of the thing about this story
is that I wrote about--
when I wrote it, the people were alive.
And since then, the people have died.
And it feels different and strange.
But there's a young writer in here, and she was alive--
and is alive.
So anyway, it's about writers writing
about each other, which we do.
"The thing about being written about that's a problem
is that nobody wants you to have the whole thing, to say it.
I don't want to be in your reality.
I want to be in my girlfriend's, and I want her to be in mine.
And I think about a space, which is this sweet overlap.
But for instance, I don't want to hear
how she talks about our relationship to her friends.
Every time I say something about her to my friend on the phone,
I think, why is it so easy here to describe what she does,
but facing her, my version melts?
Writing, however, is the place where
we are able to put them inside of our story.
And so they are like little, tiny people
in the palm of your hand.
I love when they were both writers,
and we could be in this big story together,
and nobody wrote it.
The inside was jagged, happy.
We could all allude to it in our poems.
And one time, he told us his fantasies,
and they were disgusting.
And hers was just like her poems and were
filled with compensations for the sparse pleasures
of her childhood.
And now, there was an abundance of people,
as opposed to the grim few in Brooklyn.
I enjoyed being a poet.
But even then, I wanted a house like the one I have now.
I was adamant that I needed to get famous then,
when I was young.
I mean, it's interesting because if that person had
got what they wanted, I can't even
imagine what that would look like.
It's easy to say I'd be dead, and it might be true.
When I think of Kurt's 27-year-old body sprawled
on the floor, it just gets weirder and weirder.
When I think of Will bleeding out in the bathtub,
when I think of Heather leaning forward to her bed
strangling herself, Christina doing
the same, Emma with a scarf in Italy, Tootsie,
some lonesome place turned blue.
I wouldn't have died like them because I
kept retracting my wishes, though I may have bumbled in.
So the house I would have bought keeps disappearing
with my dead body in it.
My dog walks towards the door and sees that it's a screen,
and shuffles back.
I've trained her to be like that.
I joke with friends that you break their spirit.
I'm thinking about the impossibility
of telling my young story while I was young.
If I wrote anything larger than a poem
or did a play again and again, if it was good,
or read the poem that brought the house down the second night
instead of needing to be different all the time,
no, I just thought reaching for success seemed fraudulent.
I thought a calculated arrival would never
work because my hand would vanish
as I was reaching, vanishing back into the mists
of my shifting dream.
I remember, I wanted to be a rake,
a large man in a leather jacket, irresistible
in his insouciance.
French.
I couldn't tell my lovers who I was at 31.
But in my dream, he grew large.
I would write a novel, a soft green story in which everyone
I knew had slightly altered names,
and I would declare at least there who I wanted to be.
And I sat down daily in my apartment at my desk,
and I deployed the results.
Not being satisfied with my house, I built another one.
And I could even build another one inside of that.
This is that.
By the time I was writing my novel about our relationship,
it was already losing its elasticity,
and there was a need for other projects.
I was bringing in the bread in my head.
Often, the paper I wrote on was used
and had some other typing on the other side.
My friends were all poets, making poetry magazines out
of rough, thick paper that received
the chemicals and the pounding of the keys
to produce magazines.
And there were too often too many copies of page 63.
I wrote on them.
And I think I even had extra pages from my own little book.
And I would write my novel on the other side
so that it indeed really felt like a draft.
That paper was too thick to go someplace else.
It wanted to be here.
I had a way to be away from them now, and not even me,
but a person in the future, writing
like this in a small apartment I made bigger
by the effort of returning every day.
And it was like building another room or a tunnel to the world.
Last winter, she showed me several passages from her novel
in which I appear from when she was obsessed with me.
I have become, in some ways, the person
I long ago planned to be, but I am not that person.
It just works that way, having badly, and then
repeatedly, and then successfully done that.
And now, here they, I, walk out into the world
to be pursued by her and rejecting her, and eventually
being depicted in print.
I read it.
First of all, she didn't use page numbers,
my total pet peeve, because I want everything
to be over all the time.
I'm waiting.
What is that relationship to pleasure?
Is there any?
I am releasing, and I am counting all the time.
I have a phone date in 11 minutes.
It's Sunday.
I write in little bursts.
So I appear in my friends' novel,
as I bluntly wrote myself, as I appear in the world,
and I'm not.
And therefore, I'm hiding happily
in the house inside the house inside the house,
but that's not it.
That would be too cute.
Her writing is very good.
And I even think she's learned from me, but not too much.
It's all her.
That's the thing that's weird about the people who
have taught you something, and you
dwell for a while in that teaching and that love.
And they declare, I taught you nothing.
But they tipped your hand and expanded your map,
if this doesn't sound like fundraising prose.
The horse was gifted with a number of jumps,
but it's still the horse.
And at first, you stop at the jump
and say, no, I don't do that.
And then you do.
And it's odd but occasionally brilliant.
And occasionally, it sticks.
Your love for a teacher enhances your game.
They were not my teachers.
They were my lovers.
I would go to my room, and I was in practice for my life.
I had a collarless shirt.
I wrote 58 pages.
I showed it to him.
She would not look.
Firstly, she was mad and ashamed that I depicted myself
as an arrogant and lazy preening man.
Putting him and his wife and his children inside my world
was the worst hot air.
What about me? he cried.
They were now in my little crystal ball,
and I was making those mesmerizing waving hands,
being a little swami.
And the power of my childhood, indeed the magic I saw,
had always been coming from the east.
I was nature boy.
He would not look inside my ball and see
the tiny family and his dream, which was merely patriarchal.
You are predictable, was even worse.
There was only one man in the family, and it was him.
But I was cute and 6 feet tall and lazy.
I wore a leather jacket.
I had bangs.
I was a mooch.
They were utterly charmed by me and that was my hustle.
No!
He screamed.
He sneered that the writing was bad, so terrible.
It's a miracle.
I realized that deep in my archive
is a folder that contains this very bad novel.
If I have a bad day here, most days
increasingly magic, and trippy, and not real,
I am growing my life.
I am growing another.
I want my writing to be transporting.
I want to take you away.
But on bad days, I am writing exactly
like that large, lazy, seductive man until he had to do a thing.
And my poorly named characters, ho ho,
were a beloved jumble by confused, hungover,
and amphetamine-driven--
I was hungry.
I was young.
I didn't even know how to sit down.
I watch a cat walking stealthily across my yard.
And they know a dog is living here,
who is sleeping right near me in a tiny writing house.
The bad writing is the sleeping dog
that just doesn't know what's swift and good,
is the smart tippy-toeing cat that
manages to make their way across the yard without a ruckus.
And here, all here now, here in my crystal ball,
even the kindness I feel now towards the one who sits down
writing badly, full of all their louche
and sexy desires, frankly offensive,
banging paper to make him a house that got them here.
I hope it will be magic."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.