When I read David Rakoff’s latest book, Half Empty, perhaps no passage stood out quite like the author’s description of a typical day’s writing. Suffice to say, it’s not a vocational endorsement that MFA programs will be tempted to cite in brochures.
A month or so later, during Wordstock, Rakoff sat down to talk. My first question arose naturally enough: Why do you write?
“Writing—I can only speak to writing here— always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food…. Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up….
“Funny thing about words. Regarded individually or encountered in newspapers or books (written by other people), they are as lovely and blameless as talcum-sweet babies. String them together into a sentence of your own, however, and these cooing infants become a savage gang straight out of Lord of the Flies. A sullen coven with neither conscience nor allegiance….
“The truest depiction of the writing life remains Nicholas Cage in the movie Adaptation, crippled by fear of inadequacy into near-complete inaction, opting to masturbate for the umpteenth time that day. His legs are the only thing visible on-screen, shaking, defeated, his off-camera body working its way to a sad and dribbling (anti)climax, the only thing he will produce the whole day.”
—from Half Empty
In Portland? Rakoff will read at Wordstock on Saturday, October 10th at 4:00pm.
Later that night, at 7:30pm, catch him at the Aladdin Theater on the special Wordstock edition of Live Wire! with Jonathan Lethem, Kristin Hersh, and Paul Provenza, among others.
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