An Open Letter To Fran Lebowitz's Writer's Block
Dear Fran Lebowitz’s Writer’s Block,
I entreat you to leave Fran alone.
Originally, I was contemplating creating a YouTube video that would become an Internet sensation to present my plea for your abandonment of Fran’s body. Then I realized that such a video would be a wasted attempt: we both know Fran doesn’t “do” computers. Thus, I decided to write to you — yet another thing Fran doesn’t do.
It appears that you have established a powerful parasitic rapport with your host-organism. While it comes as no surprise that you don’t want to leave the sullen genius you call home, by extending your Lebowitz lease you are selfishly making the most acidic humorist of our time waste her poison. The woman knows everything, a fact her completely-based-on-reality role in Law & Order elucidates. She even knows that she knows everything. The person you are paralyzing, Fran Lebowitz’s Writer’s Block, has been a longtime inspiration for haters on a global scale. She is a cause célèbre not in spite of her petulant brilliance, but because of it.
Your landlord knows that the opposite of talking is not listening but waiting. I have been waiting with idiotic patience for years, ever since I read Metropolitan Life and first realized sullenness can become the veneration of wit. I realize that you could have been crueler. You could have caused her a moribund career on all fronts, without Scorsese-directed HBO specials or the sporadic expression of her frustration with everything and everyone you have allowed.
Isn’t it funny (not “funny-haha” but “funny-‘it’s like rain on your wedding day'”) that the mind you inhabit asserted that the ubiquitous pursuit of fame Andy Warhol introduced trampled on culture? How right she is, once again. Lebowitz’s insight is the best lens to understand her work ethic. Would she have any had she not attained dithyrambic reviews for her first book at 27? If success hadn’t arrived so brusquely, would you have infected Fran? The commercial triumph came with high responsibilities for her: taking care of Checker and — the most challenging — conversing with David Letterman when he pretended he had hair.
To be honest, I think you stay because of the fame. I might be naïve, stuck on the cultural nostalgia of an era I never witnessed, but Fran said everything used to be better. I know that she knows everything, therefore everything used to be better, indeed. You are addicted to fame and nostalgia. Trust me.
Move out, Fran Lebowitz’s Writer’s Block. Go squat in Ann Coulter’s head. It is time for me to see the interior of Exterior Signs of Wealth. I want the contempt, scorn and sneer on my bookshelf to be delivered before all I will be able to read will be The Pale Queen. It is time for someone to come forward and cajole all these “second-hand smoking kills” fanatics to see the light (of our cigarettes).
Leave Fran alone!
Her biggest fran,
Elias Tezapsidis