A Book Review... (Sort of)
Maybe you began to wonder why you hadn't received your super deluxe Lost Soul Companion newsletter yet this month.
(Or maybe you hadn't noticed that at all? Maybe no one reads this. Not even the postman...)
Well, in part you can blame Dave Eggers. He wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which, by the way, it is. After I read it, I felt terrible.
When I compared my abilities to Dave Eggers' I decided that I'd only been playing at writing and that I didn't have anything really important to say.
It got so bad that I even had a dream about him. He was lying on the floor of his home. Naked. Dripping candle wax on himself—his nipples mostly. It hurt me just watching him. And I couldn't see him very well. It was as if I were looking through the pinhole part of one of those pinhole cameras which is really just a box with a tiny hole poked in it. Inside the box would be my eyeball—the optic nerve all coiled up inside but still offering me some visual information nonetheless. I am telling my boyfriend that I have heard that Mr. Eggers is a very remote person. You know, ain't no one gettin' in there.
Mr. Eggers has also drawn little dashes and numbers all over his waistline with a black marker—kind of like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Like he's going to make pants out of himself while he's still in his own skin.
Anyway, my boyfriend says, are you interested in him? And I say to him, well, that would certainly be inappropriate. I'm with you! And he says, so you are interested! And I say, yeah, maybe a little—even though in real life I don't think of Mr. Eggers in this way, have never even met the guy.
I had no idea he was hanging around in my subconscious. How did he get in there? When had I let him in? Maybe it was all those jellybeans I'd had before bed. I had, after all, gone to sleep thinking only of quilts.
I realized then that sometimes it's hard to really understand the negative influence other artists' works can have on us. While some creative people feel very hopeful and inspired when they read a great book, or hear a new band, for instance, others are devastated that they didn't write that novel first or that their band doesn't have as incredible a sound. Not many people will admit to that, of course. After all, who wants to seem jealous and pathetic? Inconsequential or inept? I certainly don't want to, but sometimes I just feel like a glorious loser.
Anyway, this is something I've been thinking a lot about for the sequel to The Lost Soul Companion. If you ever get this way, maybe now you know you're not alone?...
(Oh, and Dave Eggers' book is really good too.)