Letter

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.

When I was working on the Mallory Smart article for the Reader, I listened to a lot of book-scene podcasts and scanned a bunch of Twitter timelines for research. One show was hosted by a guy named Sean Thor Conroe. He seemed connected to many big fish in the indie-lit pond. When the publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano was found dead in a New York hotel room last spring, Conroe cried some of the biggest and loudest tears. I liked hearing some of the writers he interviewed, but was really put off by his affected way of talking.

These days, there’s a polite term for the way he speaks——blaccent——but to me, there’s no other way to describe it than whigger. I know there’s no controlling what art or culture one is influenced by and that imitation is the best form of flattery and all, but sometimes people just sound like phonies. Conroe calls lines he wrote bars and he doen’t record podcasts but rips them. It’s all silly and kind of annoying. It reminds me of Herbert Kornfeld.

One of Conroe’s heroes is the long-time indie-lit legend, Sam Pink. He was a guest on the show and a frequent subject of Conroe’s monologues. He repeatedly called Pink one of his key influences. I hadn’t read much of Pink’s stuff but what little I had made me think he was the real deal. The polar opposite of Conroe.

A couple weeks ago, Pink published a 6K-word essay about how Conroe basically ripped off his voice and parlayed it into a $200,000 advance for his debut novel. I read it and got really angry. I don’t know either of these guys, don’t give two shits about the publishing industry, and have no horse in the race/skin in the game/whatever, but artistic integrity is a big fucking sticking point with me. All a creative person has is their voice and this little weasel is trying to cash in on someone else’s.

The few writers I talked to about this mostly agreed with me. Few had heard of Conroe, but they will soon. When a corporation sinks a chunk of money into what they believe is the next big thing, the public will be notified. They don’t do this for art’s sake. To them, if there’s art involved, it’s just window-dressing for the sales job.

Pink wrote on social media that he wouldn’t discuss the essay on Twitter, but would do so via podcast or interview. I passed on my contact info through a mutual friend. No one listens to my podcast because I only publicize it here and half the time it’s just me reading poems in Russian, but if Pink needed a platform to talk about what was done to him, I was willing.

Conroe posted a rambling monologue response to Pink’s essay on his podcast. He argued that his book is a tribute to Pink or samples him the way hip-hop samples previously recorded music. He also went on and on about how Pink had insulted him. It was a classic example of alligator tears. Then, within a day or two, the podcast disappeared. I don’t know if his publishers made him remove it or he had a pang of conscience, but there’s no trace of the thing.

As a way of voicing support, I bought one of Pink’s books and devoured it in a couple days. I want to read more. So I thank Conroe for getting me into Pink.

I pitched some version of this post to a few publications and none were eager to do it. It’s a small industry and few want to piss off any of the big fish in it. If they go out on a limb and call the guy a thief and a fake, there may be consequences, whether it’s true or not. Because of the level of investment, I’m sure Conroe’s book will be a success. Meanwhile, Sam Pink is on social media selling his art, chapbooks, and asking about what it costs to print his own books. There’s clearly no corporation backing him. Needless to say, I’ll always be on the side of a guy like that.

The book I read is called Witch Piss. It takes place in a very well-rendered Chicago. It has a vivid first-hand quality that can’t be faked. If his other books are half as good, I’m eager to dive in.

(Listen to me read a Sam Pink story, then have a talk with him.)

I missed the six year anniversary of this newsletter. According to the archive, it began June 18th, 2015. That was when I signed up for a TinyLetter account and turned off Instagram——my last social media account. Of course, a compelling argument can be made that a weekly newsletter is social media as well. Then again, so is a postcard; I have to draw a line somewhere for the sake of semantics and/or sanity.

Besides not being big on annual celebrations, a reason I forgot about this milemarker is that I was writing newsletters long before the summer of 2015. I have no neat, organized archive of the first six or seven years of letters because I sent them haphazardly from my Gmail account whenever the spirit moved me. When I deGoogled myself two years ago, those missives evaporated along with many thousand others. I copied paragraphs here and there into word documents, but didn’t feel the entire run merited saving. Those early efforts weren’t the methodical and increasingly important part of my weekly work this thing has become.

What got me going with the form was the artist Tony Fitzpatrick. He insisted that artists must regularly put their work before collectors’ eyes (god, how I hate that word collectors. Not the idea, just the word. Makes me think of the kind of person who pulls legs off flies) and a newsletter is one of the many ways he did that. Relationships in the art racket are fickle so it’s no surprise that ours fizzled, but some lessons and methods of his stuck. So, credit where credit is due.

Six years is a healthy chunk of time. It’s a year longer than my longest romantic entanglement (which ended, incidentally, half a year before the formal newsletter’s run began). I didn’t know at the time how integral a part of the creative process it would become. Because I mostly organize my own days, setting projects aside as money gigs come in, it’s been nice to have a weekly constant, a rolling due date.

TinyLetter is a free service and pretty no-frills. I couldn’t, for instance, schedule the release of a letter. So I’d get up as early as I could Monday mornings after bartending Sunday nights and press ‘send’. As the years passed, I used the letter increasingly as a first draft/dry run testing ground for bits of whatever book I was working on. I still shilled whatever painting/review/podcast went live that week, but the greatest value of the whole thing was letting half-finished stuff out into the sunshine to see if it could breathe on its own.

I’ve always chafed at the commerce side of my job, but don’t for a moment believe I don’t deserve to get by on what I do, rather than making ends meet with side-hustles. I tried Patreon a few months and couldn’t wrap my head around what was expected of me. That’s how I ended up on Substack. It’s a structure I can understand: you give me money and I send you an extra letter. Send more money and I send you art and books. It’s been working okay.

Newsletters have become big business. Substack has recruited a bunch of famous people and paid them serious cash to share their insights. A friend quit the platform over some of the prominent personalities the company endorses by having on their roster. It took too much work for me to migrate and reformat my five year archive over from TinyLetter to start over again. If you have a paid subscription, you can read entries going back to June 2015. It’s only this week that I finally finished tweaking descriptions and settings on some of the older letters.

It would be nice to have a few more subscribers, but I don’t know how to get them aside from continuing to do my best composing these letters and hoping you all pass them on to others. Digging through the archive has made me feel like my newsletter is at least some minor type of accomplishment. I think I only missed one week this whole time.

Thanks so much for reading.