Letter

I heard about the book a couple weeks ago on a British podcast called Backlisted. On the face of it this isn’t the kind of thing I usually go for. A future dystopia. Basically sci-fi. But then they read excerpts and I wanted to hear more. Because the book is written in a kind of mangled Middle English. The idea is that these apocalypse survivors have lost their literacy and regressed to a new Dark Age. Their speech is a phonetic approximation of the language we know. The current situation with emoji etc makes this feel of the moment.

I stopped into a couple stores looking for it, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, with no luck but it was sitting waiting for me Tangible in the Fiction section all along.

Here’s an excerpt I read aloud. A fairytale inside a fairytale but it’s about now too somehow.

I stop and start with this one. Partly because I’m still working on The Jungle, partly because I have four or five books started and having trouble committing to just one of them. It used to be that I’d stay faithful to one and either finish or abandon it before going on to another. Now these rules no longer feel that important.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe because I’m getting closer to wanting to write something book-shaped again.

Whether I end up finishing Riddley Walker or set it aside and return it to Tangible’s Fiction shelves I’m grateful to’ve spent time in its strange futureworld. I don’t expend much effort on looking forward in general. Not past what I’m working on or a movie or show coming up or a trip to see family. The news, which slips through despite my best efforts, is bleaker than ever, as you probably know. Maybe wandering around the wreckage is just around the corner.

I couldn’t say. I just read about it.

It started last summer. The former journalist came into K’s work and asked to interview her about a restaurant she used to work at that was up for sale. Seemed simple enough but that’s when the unpleasantness began in earnest.

I don’t blame a guy for having feelings or trying to make them known but an interview for a local color article in an online rag is not the time and place. He took to showing up at K’s work and peppering her with irrelevant questions. Phone calls to tell her he planned to email her and texts that he was about to call followed. All pretext and little substance.

It came to a head the day he asked to meet her at the restaurant for what he said would be the final interview for his article. She didn’t want to be alone with him so she asked me to join her.

They’d been there about half an hour when I showed up sweaty from biking across town after the bookstore closed. He smelled like he’d taken a bath in gasoline. He explained there’d been a problem with his car. That was the most normal part of his behavior. He wouldn’t make eye contact and acted like I was K’s mentor or acquaintance rather than what would have been plain to a blind man. It was like a National Geographic sequence on mating behavior among rival males. I did my best to stay neutral and under control.

Afterwards, having a drink at the Clipper, K and I tried to laugh the whole thing off. We took to calling him “Fun Guy” due to his penchant for Hawaiian shirts and something it said on his business card.

The article was published. It featured a photo of K and I looking as if we were the chicken shack’s new owners. Fun Guy receded into the shadows.

A couple months ago he resurfaced, pitching another article for a different local rag. This time it was to be about K’s writing. She was hesitant but I told her like a fool to indulge him since it might gain her some readers.

The awkward encounters resumed. I wasn’t invited to join in but heard lots of details. A couple weeks before the article was due, Fun Guy asked for my number and K gave it to him. He wanted to ask me about her work he said. A day later he called and was above board. Professional. I was pleasantly surprised.

A few days after, he called K to say he would email her. The email came filled with inappropriate and intrusive questions. She didn’t respond but told me about what he’d asked.

I made the mistake of texting him my feelings. It didn’t go well. I had to block his number before I said things I’d actually regret.

This is how things go sometimes out here in the wild.

Saw a great play. No Hawaiian-shirted creeps included.

Keith Lewis came into Tangible one day and pitched me an idea. He wanted me to illustrate a Chicago alphabet book that would serve as the first title of his new publishing imprint, Broken Nose Books.

I’ve known Keith over ten years. He was a regular at Hardboiled Coffee in Beverly, where I worked a couple afternoons a week. Then he took over a neighborhood bookstore called Bookie’s and turned it from a shabby place next to a 7-11 in a pocket strip mall to a nice, well-organized business. He had a second location in downtown Homewood for a time and I did book events at both locations.

All that to say that this was not someone who just said things. All too often in the book and art rackets people have good intentions and lofty aspirations; very few follow through. Boilerplate contracts, show dates, promised sales, and all manner of other good things have been dangled in front of my face over the decades. I used to get my hopes up but get burned enough times and you learn to become gunshy as self-preservation, if nothing else. Now, when someone floats something they want me to do, it’s just a thought-balloon until there’s money on the table.

I quoted Keith a price, saying I’d need half down to do anything and figured that would be the last I heard about it but there was a Venmo notification via email within a few days, so it’s been on since then. I’m about halfway done and it’s going pretty well. The book will be a sixty-page hardcover printed by the same people who did my art book.

I’m alternating days working on that with days on The Jungle. The prose is still a slog but there’s no shortage of images to work from. Between the two projects, it’s Chicago day in day out, which suits me just fine.

Got a few copies of the new paperback version of Old Style. If you order from me, the book is signed and hand-stamped with a custom bookplate. If you don’t want that personalized crap, pick one up from Bezos’ Bazaar or Deathstar Direct. They all come with an extra story that’s not in the hardcover.