Letter

Ten years ago, when my first book came out, it felt like there was a little momentum to my writing career. Perhaps it was smoke and mirrors——a side-effect of the efforts of the publicity department at University of Chicago Press——but for a short interval, I bought into the idea making books could be a legitimate chunk of how I’d pay my bills.

I knew nothing about the publishing industry then. My adventures mucking about the outskirts of that sphere have disabused me of any pipe-dream delusions about my prospects. My book career has gone bass-ackwords; I started as close to the top as I’d ever hope to be and have been hobbling and stumbling down down down ever since. The reasons for this are manifold. Lousy timing, my inability to play well with others, rapid technological advances, shortening attention spans, creeping illiteracy, bad actors, you name it. It’s been a bumpy ride.

Back in the hopeful early times, I was part of a new authors event at the Union League Club. It served as the launch of that year’s Printers Row Lit Fest. Gillian Flynn was one of the other new writers in that fancy hall. I hear she’s done alright for herself. I don’t know what I dreamed I’d be doing ten years later, but doubt it was paying for half a table in the Small Press tent at that same fair to sell books I wrote, designed, illustrated, and published on my own. I didn’t have a crystal ball then, just as I don’t have one now, but there’s no way I’d have predicted the utter collapse of all infrastructure to support what I do.

I know there’s still a publishing industry and it pumps out more titles than any other time in human history, but it feels totally divorced and untethered from many of the writers I know. We’re wandering an apocalyptic wilderness. Gleaning usable scraps amidst the ruins of a once-mighty edifice. It’s slim pickings for all concerned.

In the ten years that have passed, the only thing I’ve done as part of Printers Row was to stand and sign books a couple hours one time. No panels, no talks, no invites to participate in any way. Maybe I didn’t go to the right parties or make nice with people that mattered. I’ve never had good political instincts. It’s hurt me a million times over.

And yet, this year I felt an alien urge to be part of it again. Maybe it’s the plague or perhaps I’m just old and beaten down, but I wanted to swim with the current a couple minutes. I’d missed the registration for vendors. Hell, I didn’t even know when it was open. So I asked a couple acquaintances I knew would be part of it, if they could spare a few square feet of table. Jason wrote back someone had just canceled, so half a table was available.

I emailed every Chicagoan in my address book to invite them to come by, then set about making bookmarks. I write this the day before the fair. I don’t know how it’ll go. But I’m excited about it for some reason. Come Monday, I’ll likely be bitter about the whole thing, but I’ll try to remember this baffling hopefulness to keep the bitterness in check.

I ask Sam if he’s free Thursday and he says anytime after 4pm, when he gets off work. I price rental cars, but they’re through the roof these days. Zipcar turns out to be cheaper. Never took one for longer than three hours, nor left the city, much less the state in one before, but what the hell? I think back to when I drove my leased Yellow Cab all the way to Columbus just to see a band.

Off the interstate in Michigan an hour after leaving Chicago. I text Sam I’m close. He asks if I’m hungry. I say sure. I drive into his town and squint for the street number. There’s a garage/carwash where the house is supposed to be. I loop back around and get some suspicious looks from a couple guys not working on the cars. I call Sam and tell him I don’t see his place. He explains I have to keep going to the north side of town. Who knew a one-horse town would require north and south sides?

He’s standing by a truck in the parking lot. I get out and we shake hands. We’ve never met before. He says to hop in the passenger’s seat. We make a couple turns and pull into a grocery store lot. He walks straight to the meat counter and asks for four rib-eyes. The counter man tells him how much it’ll be, tries to talk him out of it, but Sam insists. Then asks if I want water. He gets a bag of charcoal and lighter fluid.

We turn off the road onto a gravel path. He takes it real slow, saying there were huge divots and potholes the last time. We park and carry the meat, paper towels, charcoal, lighter fluid, water, a small grill, and two folding chairs decorated in the stars & stripes down to the river’s edge. A couple fishermen cross paths with us, nod, then keep walking. This is Sam’s grill spot.

He says he never thought much about grilling until a friend gave him this little boxy number with fold-out legs. It looks like it was soldered together in someone’s garage. He says he comes out here all the time now as he stokes the coals. We talk about art and books as the steaks slowly turn from red to brown.

An official-looking SUV with a canoe on a hitch rolls down the boat-launch a few feet from us. The park ranger in the driver’s seat asks Sam a bunch of innocuous questions that Sam answers curtly. I can tell his attitude toward cops is about as good as mine. Satisfied for the moment, the ranger reverses back up the path and disappears.

——Guess I should’ve gotten some plates.

The rib-eyes cool on a piece of tin-foil on the grass. We each unroll a bunch of paper towel. There are no utensils, so we just gnaw at the meat like cave-dwellers, talking some more about the stupid racket we’ve devoted our lives to.

——It’s really good!

He nods agreement. The sun has set and we can barely see one another now. We talk more, but now there are more pauses, gaps. We lapse into silence. Neither of us is a chatterbox and it’s a wonder we kept batting the ball back and forth for as long as we have.

We pack up the gear and get in the truck. Back outside his place, I reach into the Zipcar, grab a book, and give it to Sam. We say goodbye and I drive back to the city.

(“Fakeboi”)

In Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem “Зеркало (Mirror)”, he appoints himself a guardian of timelessness and immortality. He counsels his reader not to fear death. He cleaves his fate to the saddle, the journey. There are another half-dozen word-images in there that I’m still turning about in my head. Good art does that to a person.

The poem is one of dozens my father sent me earlier this year. I’ve been slowly rereading them and typing out my favorites on a Smith-Corona portable. After I finish typing, I look up photos of the poet and make a quick sketch. I only have a couple poems left to type. Then I will assemble them and some art——maybe the portraits, maybe something else——into a book and print off twenty or thirty, then forget all about it.

Tarkovsky’s son, Andrey, made a movie called Mirror in 1975, that features his father reading poems. It’s been a few years since I saw it, so I don’t recall whether he reads “Mirror” in it or not. The first time I saw that movie, I was way too young. It was on at the house of my parents’ friends——fellow Soviet immigrants——and it made not a bit of sense to me. When I watched it in my forties, it felt completely straightforward and simple, though there’s no traditional narrative, but rather an associative visual dream-logic. Art can be amazing like that; it’ll wait patiently for you to be ready to receive it.

Its job is to show you to yourself, but you have to live through some shit before you’re able to recognize yourself in it. I had that experience with Moby Dick at thirty-three. I was going through a divorce at the time, so the profound feeling of failure in the story felt intimately familiar. Had I read that book as a high-school homework assignment, as so many kids in America did, I likely would’ve found it unbearably boring and unrelatable to my reality.

In my first three decades of drawing, I regularly made self-portraits. More often than not, it was just because I needed a human face to draw and nobody else’s was at hand, or I was too shy to ask. I admired the great self-portraitists——Rembrandt, Dürer, Hals, Schiele, Freud, Neel, et al——but never believed I was penetrating my own soul by staring at the fat pimpled mug in the reflection. I used to tell people there was only sawdust inside that head. The eyes and ears were first-class, but they were just tools to channel sounds and images through. I didn’t believe that I added much to what passed through me. Thought my job was just to stay the fuck out of the way, so the messages could be conveyed clearly.

Now, I know I’m definitely contributing something to the pictures and books I make. Not sure if it’s good or bad, but it’s not exactly an objective relay of what I take in. I’m still a ways off from Tarkovsky’s deathlessness and grandeur, but I’ve taken a couple steps away from the kitchen sink.