Letter

Long before K and I became an item a year ago, I was a fan of her writing. fifteen years ago, tried unsuccessfully to get my publisher to give her a book deal on the strength of a zine called Weirdo Du Jour. Now there’s a book.

She says it wouldn’t have happened without my pushing her but I don’t believe that. I helped any way I could but firmly believe this writing would’ve ended up in a book sooner or later. I had the same confusion and fatalist attitude before my first one came out too. It feels like there are miles of insurmountable barriers between a writer and a published book but at this late date most of them are smokescreens and mirages.

It has never been easier to get your words printed on paper, bound in cardstock, and made available to anyone anywhere. I doubt that the percentage of worthwhile writing has increased any since the days of more formidable gate-keepers, in fact, with such a large number of so-called books generated with no human involvement, the number worth bothering about has likely shrunk. And yet there are writers who deserve an audience who aren’t getting it.

K spent decades making zines. There’s an insular community devoted to that form that is not unlike the book crowd, but in miniature. It’s all school-age cliques anywhere you go. If I did anything to help this book along, it was to convince K that she belongs on the outside of the book club as much as she already knows she does outside the zine one. We have that in common. We’re not joiners.

I did some copyedits and suggested a few phrase changes but hardly had to change a thing to the manuscript she sent me a couple months ago. She’s been working up to this book a long time and now it’s here.

We recorded a talk the other afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table of her new place.

I’m proud to’ve played a part in getting this book out into the world. Order yours here.

Cleaning up the studio, I came across a bunch of stapled pages from an old spiral-bound notebook. They were my field notes from my time working for Lifeline in 1995. I transcribed them and posted them for you to read.

I have a bunch of art up at the bookstore but you can buy it without leaving your couch.

I don’t have that many personal connections to Evanston, Illinois. My friend, Bill, works at Northwestern University and my old friend, Tom, lived and died there, as did my friend, Tony, more recently. It’s a suburb connected to the city by public transportation which links it in my mind with Brookline, Massachusetts, where my parents still sometimes live.

I like the university’s art museum and I’ve seen some good shows at Space but I don’t really have a handle on the place.

Twice over the past month or so I’ve taken the train up to the Dempster stop and walked east a block to a coffeeshop to meet with an editor at Northwestern University Press about publishing a book. It looks like I’ll be signing a contract any day now, though the book won’t appear till the fall of 2028. University presses function on a different timeline than most of us. That’s okay. I know what I’m signing up for. My first book back in 2011 was through a university press situated roughly thirty miles south of this one. Maybe I’m feeling nostalgic for the glacial pace, but more likely it’s that at this point, after making books every which way myself, I’m ready for others to do more of the lifting.

It helps that the woman who’s acquiring the book and will be my editor is not a stranger. Megan and I were labelmates on a doomed local indie press whose demise came with lawsuits and a generous helping of bad feelings. I once illustrated something she wrote. She seems to have an inkling of where I’m coming from and what dealing with me entails. At this point, a little understanding and good will goes a very long way with me.

As part of my book deal, the press asked me not to sell my Book Hole zines publicly anymore. If you want some of those, drop me a line. I have a few each of issues #2-#5.

I wrote a review of John Knudsen’s show at Firecat. What I didn’t mention is that I also helped hang it. It went up the same day my show there came down.

I read my friend, Tim’s, book and it’s been rattling around my head pretty good. It’s up for preorder. I’d get it if I were you.

My friend, June’s, book about Chicago coffeehouses with my painting of Jinx Coffee on the cover is up for preorder as well. Strangely enough, Tim worked at that coffeeshop. In fact, his book is dedicated to his coworkers there.

I pulled an old paperback of William Gass’s first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, off the shelf at the bookstore one afternoon when I was done shelving and needed a break. It starts with an estate sale and an old man hanging around, talking at whoever will listen. I took the book home.

I’ve been avoiding Gass a long time. I’m all in with William Gaddis, whose name is so similar that they were often mistaken for one another. Both wrote long, difficult books throughout the second half of the 20th century. I might have tried The Tunnel once and given up pretty quickly. If I did, it was certainly before I tried to write myself. Since then, beautiful sentences have become a lot more important than narrative coherence or logical comprehension. The things I get the most out of now are often things I hardly even understand. It’s the sound of the phrases, the rhythms, that grab me.

Having recently worked on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury helped prime me for the amorphous, abstract atmosphere of this book. Faulkner is often cited as a big influence on Gass.

A plot summary of Omensetter wouldn’t do much to give a sense of what it’s like to read. There are passages that are so non sequitur that I forgot what I was even reading. It’s very much a stream of consciousness thing and that stream is an ugly, poisoned body of water indeed. The insides of the head of a corrupt pastor in a small Ohio town at the end of the 19th century is not a cosy place to be. And yet I read on.

…I remember there were rings in the pools of water by the road, and I thought how exciting for the boy to live by the river, to catch fish and keep frogs, you know; grow up with good excitement. Now he’s sick, Curtis, in this low place, and there’s no honest snow to cover it or cold to hold it coldly even, and the hill we came by is still a slippery yellow. The boy is going to die, Curtis. I just feel—I’m scared he’s going to die.

Occasionally, I put the book down and searched the availability of Gass’s other books online. I learned that Dalkey is publishing a new edition of The Tunnel on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Maybe I’ll work up to that one eventually. In the meantime, I checked Middle C out from the downtown library.

The preorder for The Sound and the Fury is up. Tell all your friends and relations.