This Is The End / FAME

I wanted to relate to you (and you, and you, and you and you and you) the embarrassing, pleasurable (embarrassingly pleasurable) final fragment of my dream the other night. I was at a coffee shop, a sweet hippie-hipster spot somewhere rural-ish, almost a converted barn, and there was one other person at another table, a man, and a young woman serving. She called out "Rebecca" to deliver a cappuccino to whoever had ordered it, and I hadn't, so I said "I'm Rebecca, but I didn't order that," and she said "Rebecca Wolff?" and I said "yes," and then she and the man began blushing and twittering, kind of communing with each other in relation to me, and saying things like "Wow, I can't believe we have a famous writer in our coffee shop." And I said, loudly and distinctly, with sincere modesty but also blushing appreciation, "You jest!" And then the alarm went off and I woke.

It's been a long time since I've had a dream that wasn't a nightmare or at least an exercise in banal anxiety (first day teaching workshop and I am accosted by someone I didn't let in; reading on stage and I forgot to pick which poems and people start leaving).

Does everyone really want to be famous? I know I did, and when I think about it, my desire for fame was at its peak when I was about 14 or 15, in part activated by my avid reading of the Village Voice, especially Michael Musto's column, and my frequent attendance at New York City's then quite dingy and fun nightclubs, such as Danceteria and Nell's and the Roxy (my second appearance in print, at nineteen, was a letter to the Voice I wrote correcting Musto on a Danceteria doorman's name or something, smarty-pants), where I saw that people became famous in a vague way, for just being them. There was one famous young man in particular with shoulder-length, bleached hair and an aquiline, androgynous beauty who was practically glowing, he was so famous (bully for you, chilly for me). I wanted to be famous for just being me, too, and maybe this is why I didn't get into Wesleyan on my first try (I didn't get into Wesleyan on my second try, either, but that's another story), as I distinctly remember that my answer to the essay question about what I thought I would bring to campus, figuratively speaking, was answered existentially, something like "I'll just bring me, and there's no one else like me, so what I will bring is unparaphraseable." Can you fucking believe that?

They're bringing out the movie Fame again, which made me think about Talent. Those were some talented kids, no? That Irene Cara could really sing, and dance (wow, I had forgotten how ironically sad those lyrics are, for her: "you ain't seen the best of me yet" indeed). Does the concept or trope of talent apply to writing in the same way? In the performing arts "talent," at least in its everyday, Idolatry usage, such as "My daughter is so talented," often means that she can very effectively re-create an effect that she has seen, or heard, and that people will appreciate this ability. Whereas in writing this means the opposite of talent; talent in writing has something to do with the impulse to do something that not most people do, or would immediately grasp as advisable, or favorable. When I wanted to be famous it had nothing to do with desiring to be talented, and I shirked every duty or practice that might have wrought or stoked some recognizable talent in me. It never occurred to me that I ought to seek fame as a writer (though novelists have a better chance of getting famous, and I did finally sell my novel, The Beginners, to Riverhead Books), though I wrote continually, and now to find that I seek it in my dreams--and obtain it!--is deeply amusing. To me.

Farewell to speaking to you, and you, and you and you and you. And farewell to an era. I'm feeling SUPER fin de siecle atm, as Brandon Downing said to me the other day--he said "atm," not fin de siecle, and by it meant, which took me ages to work out, "At the Moment")--with this whole brouhaha at Triquarterly. It's just that weird moment where something that crept up on us disguised as sci-fi (we spend hours a day staring at monitors: Wall-E? It's not even sci-fi, it's a children's animated movie) (and there are many many people alive today who are so unused to eating real food that they become too fat to live and require surgery to remove parts of their stomachs), such as the inaudible transition of book-objects from use objects into artifact objects gets happening, whoosh. A different kind of blink from the Gladwell Blink. There must be a name for it?