the habit of being

A vast space for looking at. Openness. Light. In a wordless space, a poet comes to speak about silence. The gap between the original and the copy. The gap between the original and the translation. The intrique of words that stop themselves. In this vastness I am free and empty. I wish I could come here every day to write. To write, to write. Forcing myself to write I feel, for once, calm, free of blemishes.

It is steaming hot out, and I am on the train back from a factory which was translated into a contemporary art museum. Simple works, big experience. I’d like to curl up and sleep in the interior of a torqued elipse. I’d like to dream silent poems.

Every day, I remind myself of my own poverty. Such damaging lies, for I am not poor, I am only rich enough to live as I do. The way that I live isn’t so very bad, is it? I sleep late, I study. Yes, I have to work, but there are so many people who work and do nothing else. I complain that my work takes away time I could be spending on something else. But at least the concept of a something else exists for me.

I’ve always wished I could drive a car, but my terror of learning how is paralyzing. I grew up in the kind of town where driving is absolutely essential in establishing one’s freedom and independence. In Statesboro, Georgia, if you couldn’t drive, you couldn’t get anywhere. I stayed in my room all the way through high school, and fell in love over the Internet. By the time I moved to a city where you don’t need to drive to be free and independent, it was too late. Because I was in love, I was anything but free.

Now, four years later, I walk around New York City looking at all the wonderful places I could go and things I could do if only I weren’t alone. I can’t stand the idea of eating in a nice restaurant by myself. My insecurity about not having a date would ruin the food. Seeing a movie or visiting a museum alone is tolerable, but if there’s no one to share it with, I feel like I’m missing out on half of the experience.

Every few weeks I post an online personal ad. Every response I read makes me feel more and more like a prostitute. By the end of a day of this, I am sick to my stomach. I delete the ad. I delete all the responses - even the nice, not-creepy ones. The nauseated feeling doesn’t go away. I realize that I don’t actually want to meet anyone new. I hate being alone, but I hate the idea of having to perform a first-date routine even more. It’s the same problem I had with driving.

Yesterday, I went to hear David Sedaris read at Barnes & Noble in Union Square. I have seen some pretty famous writers read there before - Michael (”Hot Stuff”) Cunningham, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Safran Foer - and there are always a lot of people. They’ve got about half the top floor devoted to seating for readings, maybe 200 chairs, and some roped-off standing room area too. I heard it would be really crowded and that I should try to get there early, but I had a lab meeting so that wasn’t an option. I figured I’d have to stand.

I did not figure I’d have to stand on the opposite side of the room, between two rows of Fiction and Literature, facing in the wrong direction. Actually seeing him was not even an option. They had loudspeakers, and orange arm bands were required to get into the hours-long line for a book signing. This was the literary equivalent of a rock concert.

He read a couple stories, including one that’s going to be in next week’s New Yorker, and made us all laugh. Afterwards, instead of normal boring author questions, people asked him things like “How are your French lessons going?”, “Who is your favorite band?” and “Does Hugh get to censor what you write about him?” The closest thing he got to a typical after-reading question was “How many unpublished stories do you have sitting around in your apartment?”

It turns out he has about 25 finished unpublished stories lying around, and many more unfinished ones or ones he’s given up on. He mentioned that someone keeps approaching him about his papers (the rights to them, I guess), which makes him really nervous, because he doesn’t want people to read these failed stories and know “how bad [he] sucks,” though that is exactly the sort of thing he’d want to find if *he* were the one going through an author’s papers.

Anyway, he was completely endearing and I wish he were my friend.

How often to writers actually achieve celebrity? Especially good ones?