I’m a personality – like a George Plimpton who effectively plays himself in a bunch of different roles, or a Paul Lynde-type character.
I am not an Internet superstar. I am, ironically perhaps, the most old media superstar of all time. My fame is due to broadcast television.
Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.
I think that by the time I start writing the third book, of course, I will be President Of The United States, and that also will have something to do with it. I’ll probably have to acknowledge that somehow.
By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.
The reality is that if you want to be in a reality-based community, you’ve got to respect reality and that means calling it bad when you see the past ahead and it doesn’t look good and acknowledging when it’s going to work.
I’m an older, wall-eyed, overweight, tweedy writer who has been lucky enough to be asked to play various iterations of himself in a certain realm of popular cultutre. That gives me great joy and excitement, but I don’t go to the media saying, “And I’m also the world’s greatest actor.”
I don’t watch television. And certainly not ads; I loathe advertising.
So I am a product of the Internet, and to some degree a product of this sensibility of constant cultural reference.
This is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They’ll go between prepared material, then they’ll respond to what’s happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.
I’m not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it’s from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least.
When you’re sitting down and you’re blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you’re channeling something else.
So much of creativity is the feeling that you’re either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.
I really wouldn’t censor myself. But because it was on such a slower scale, I would throw things out, and I indulged the personal stuff as little flashes of truth. Little in-jokes for anyone who was paying particular attention.
Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.
I don’t wish to brag, but I’m very intelligent.
I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them.
I say, if you’re going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore’s burden.
Do not listen to the killjoys who tell you never to eat oysters in months that do not contain the letter R: May, June, July, August, Octoba. You know.
The fact is I’m very self-similar.