prev U&I next
1999-10-22 | 17:23:49

I just spent the last hour and forty minutes trying to get Jasper down for a nap. Longer than the nap will last. Meanwhile, I am exhausted, but I cannot allow myself to take a nap. I have too much work to do. So I lie there, getting sleepier, refusing to sleep. Like Jasper. Every twenty minutes, the phone rings. It is never important. Important calls only come in the middle of the night, or very early in the morning.

Did I wake you?

I went through several stages while trying to get Jasper to go to sleep. The longest-lived stage was stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off. Then I returned to an old favorite, the I-want-to-be-like-Milton stage. (The idea is that Milton sat in his room and thought and wrote and read books, or had them read to him, and his wife brought him food and he watched the children playing outside his window.) This morphed into a new stage, or one that felt new, the why-can't-I-be-like-John-Updike stage. I was feeling sorry for myself because I have to watch over all these writers and contact publicists on their behalf and not read books so that they can read books, when what I really want to do is contact publicists on my own behalf and write intelligent reviews and other things that will make me seem intelligent and that will be the end of that. I realize there is a whole anti-Updike contingent who will say "but what about this?" and "what about that?" but it doesn't matter; I'm looking to appropriate form, not substance. Most of all I want everything to slow down and become bearable. MAKE IT STOP. Does John Updike sit in his study and feel like screaming?

prev archive next
0 comments