Dream Log: Commercial Success as a Writer

Last night, while I was still awake, there were some noises just outside, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Then I fell asleep. I dreamed that I had suddenly become very successful, commercially, as writer. In the dream I was an adult, but I was living, by myself, in the house I lived in from the late 1960's to the mid-1970's, from age eight to fourteen, a large house with a very large front lawn. It was nighttime. Many people were coming to congratulate me. Many, who arrived in huge 1940's automobiles, identified themselves as distant cousins of mine. Typewriter copies of many things I had written pre-Internet were laying around here and there in the house, paper-clipped to handwritten comments by various people. I kept trying to read some of these comments, but the handwriting was hard to read, and I was constantly being interrupted by the many visitors.

In addition to the many visitors, many congratulatory gifts had been sent to me. The packages were piled high on the porch. I had received 300-pound

slam balls, gold and platinum watches, all sorts of hard-to-find books.

My distant cousins took me to a time machine. In real life, when I lived in this house, behind it were cornfields. In the dream, behind it was an urban residential area with narrow streets and small houses. The nearest small house was a time machine.

I went back into my house, went through a maze of hallways and stairways to reach a small room with a piano in it, with shelves on two walls crammed with sheet music. This room was crowded with people singing American songs from the early 20th century to piano accompaniment. Among these singers was Gore Vidal, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and the collar open. As soon as he saw me, Gore said, "They're going to turn you in to Langley!"

Langley, Virginia is the site of the headquarters of the CIA. Gore did not literally mean that, as soon as my distant cousins and I got to wherever we were going in the future, they were planning to hand me over to the CIA. What he meant was that these distant cousins of mine were right-wing reactionaries, and that I belonged with Leftists such as himself and the others singing in that small room.

I was going to start to try to explain to Gore that these distant cousins of mine were much more liberal than he thought, but instead I woke up.

Dream Log: Nashville

Last night I dreamed I was in Nashville. I've only been in Nashville once, just passing through, and I didn't go downtown, and last night night's dream was all in downtown Nashville, and I have no idea whether what I dreamed resembled the real downtown Nashville at all. In my dream there were a lot of new buildings and newly-built broad sidewalks which looked much like what is in many downtowns. In this city I dreamed, there was a lot of positive energy. I suppose this is because I've heard many people, by no means all of them hard-care country and western fans, say that they like Nashville.

In the beginning of the dream I was in a darkened conference room in the midst of a bunch of people in suits attending a PowerPoint presentation. I, too, had a suit, but my clothes were scattered over several chairs, and I was having some difficulty putting them on. I didn't look like myself, but like a small wiry man with a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses and a moustache. After I had finally gotten dressed, a women executive sitting behind me asked me how I, as a talented writer, would address the issues currently facing the world. I only knew one person at this meeting, and I assumed that he must have told some of the other that I was a writer. I answered the woman, saying that my writing contained many more questions than answers, and that I hoped at least that some of the questions were interesting.

After talking with several of the executives about my writing for a while, I was in a mall. There were several bookstores in this mall which concentrated on books about art. I looked at some of these books in several of these stores, until, in a very small bookstore, a shelf-load of these art books came crashing down to the floor, and I ran away because I was afraid someone might think the accident was my fault.

There was a chapel in the mall, which had stained-glass windows which reminded me of the art books.

I went from the mall to another building, in which I was afraid the building security might throw me out if they thought I didn't belong there. I went running up and down the halls and did a lot of calisthenics. In the dream, this made me think I would appear less suspicious to the building's security.

My brother appeared and we both did a bunch of crunches. Then we walked around a corner in the hallway and stood before a big mirror. My brother said that he had been just going and going for decades and that he was exhausted. I said, "So stop." I meant: take a little rest. The way anybody would say to anybody who'd said they were exhausted. Whatever my brother thought I meant, he got angry, cussed me out and left.

I went outside and stood on a broad sidewalk, surrounded by big glass skyscrapers on a cool cloudy day. Then I woke up.

Reputations

John Irving went a long way out of his way, in his novel The World According to Garp, to diss the Austrain writer Franz Grillparzer, 1792-1872, remembered today for dramas such as Das goldene Vlies. Actually, in den US today he's probably most famous for being the first famous writer better than whom the fictional novelist Garp, a thinly-disguised version of John Irving, was certain he could write. This was supposedly an important milestone in any developing writer's life: finding a writer to whom one feels superior -- as a writer, at least.

I don't know whether or not that makes any sense: that you have to find some famous writer whom you are certain you can outwrite in order to become a successful writer. Perhaps it makes sense only for kinds of writers I was never interested in being. I'm not sure whether anything that John Irving has ever asserted makes much sense for people like me: the implication that he is a better writer than Grillparzer is really rather silly; the implication that he even deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as someone like Grillparzer is rather silly. The assertion by Irving that he has read anything by Grillparzer in German and understood it strains my credulity. I think Irving thinks that the name Grillparzer sounds silly, and that that is about the extent of what Irving has to say about Grillparzer. Or consider the advice he gave at a writer's conference for dealing with writer's block. He called it the constipation method: wait as long as you possibly can, and then run to the typewriter. I am certain that another writer's retort was much wittier than anything Irving has ever written: she asked, what if you don't make it to the typewriter in time? I'm sorry that I don't remember her name.

I was sure, as a young squirt reading The World According to Garp, that I could outwrite Irving, but I already knew by then that I could outwrite many -- no, most writers of bestsellers: Crichton, Ludlum, Richard Adams (Author of Watership Down), Peter Benchley, son of Robert, author of Jaws, and so forth. That I could add one more to that list, Irving, who managed to fool some people for some time into thinking he was the sort of author who deserved awards, was no big deal.

The big deal was discovering writers like Gaddis, Gass, John Hawkes, Robert Musil, Pynchon, Yeats, Doeblin, writers who really challenged me and continue to do so, and learning how close to unknown some of them were during their lifetimes, and how far most of them were from bestseller lists for most or all of their lives.

My Opinion Of Myself And Some Others. An Advertisement For Myself

I feel pretty good about what I write. I think I'm a good writer.

And suddenly today that started to worry me, when I contrasted it with remarks about writing by two of my favorite writers. One is by Kurt Vonnegut,from the preface to one of his books. I don't remember it word-for-word but it went something like this: "How do I feel about this book? I feel lousy about it. I feel lousy about all my books." Seemed he felt somewhat embarrassed that he hadn't be able to do better. The other remark is by Samuel Beckettand is more concise: "To write is to fail."

That's what two writers whom I find to be excellent -- Beckett especially -- have to say for themselves. Pretty close to outright apologizing for doing what they did. What I'm worried about is that perhaps they were so good in significant part because they were profoundly dissatisfied with themselves, and therefore constantly striving mightily to do better, and that, conversely, my satisfaction with my own work keeps it relatively mediocre. But you know what? I still think I'm pretty good. And people whose opinions I value highly also have praised my work.

I wouldn't say that it's a widespread opinion that I'm a good writer, because I don't think enough people know anything at all about me for any opinion about me to legitimately be called widespread. I'm not good at marketing my work. I'm more sure about this negative opinion of my marketing skills than about my positive opinion of my writing, because marketing skills can be measured objectively, in terms of numbers, and the quality of writing cannot. I won't tell you how few clicks this blog gets, because 1) I don't want you to cry or feel sorry for me, and 2) it's basically nunya bidniss nohow. But I need an agent. I had an agent once, a good one, but I lost him again, because I never finished the novel which got him interested in working for me, and by the time I finished another novel he had moved on to another profession. I got that agent by the sheerest and dumbest of sheer dumb luck, and unfortunately for me, finding an agent, a skilled person to market one's work, is itself a kind of marketing. (*sigh*)

And because I am not (yet) so hugely successful that counting my money and turning down business offers occupies all of my free time, and also because I am a bit of a schmuck, let's face it, I spend some time commenting on articles on Huffingtom Post, where they keep us schmucks coming back and clicking on their site and making them money with dumb things including badges, yes badges, and what inspired me to write this post was that today I noticed that ________* had received the Community Pundit badge, which comes with the perk that some of yr comments are conspicuously placed above the others immediately below the text of an article. I'm pretty sure that the Pundits don't actually get PAID or anything, still it irks me mightily than an absolute dolt and moron like ________ has been named a Pundit, whilst I have not.

Then again, do I really want to be in a club which would have ________ as a member? And how are Pundits really chosen? HP says:

"HuffPost Pundits are our most engaged and thought-provoking commenters. Pundit Badges are awarded based on a strong history of insightful comments,"

which sounds as if HP would have us believe that some actual human beings working (as unpaid interns?) for HP found ________ to be insightful and thought-provoking. Can that really be? If that's true it would be quite discouraging, for it would mean that some real bozos are driving the bus over there. Or are Pundit badges actually awarded like the other badges: by a machine which counts clicks, counts things like fans and friends and faves? That too would be discouraging, but in a different way: it would be yet another indication that HP comments section is just another internet flame war trying to pass itself off as a moderated "community."

In any case, sad for me that my life's empty enough that I care. May that change soon, completely and forever. From your lips, gentle readers -- from both of you -- to Andrew Wylie's ears.

*I considered writing ________'s handle in this post, but why do that?