Letter

I tore through Abel Ferrara’s memoir in a few days. It’s one of the best artist books I’ve ever read. I’ve been watching or rewatching his movies one after another building up to writing something about him. The book definitely casts the movies in a new light. Like home videos from one guy’s life.

Just before that I was similarly consumed with Denis Johnson. The thing I wrote about him came out last week. The ratio or relationship between their books and movies are sort of inverted, of course, since Johnson was a writer not a filmmaker. Still, there’ve been enough movies made or proposed to make that medium a conduit for new readers for his books.

From what I know, Ferrara only ever wanted to make movies and Johnson just wanted to write, yet these other media play their part. In a smaller way, live readings are like that to writers. I did a reading last week and wondered not for the first time what, if any, effect the event had on the work.

In a very practical sense, since the thing I read was a work in progress and I had an imposed time limit, an hour before the reading I sat at the bar with a bottle of wine and my Parker Jotter, crossing out paragraph after paragraph, switching page sequences, ripping papers in half and crumpling discarded segments.

The next morning, I used the doctored sheets as reference for the digital file of the ongoing thing. A movie isn’t a book and a book isn’t a reading but sometimes each will play its part.

RIP Bela Tarr. One of my favorite filmmakers. Here’s an old review I wrote of a frustrating little book about him.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a page of some of my books and favorites by others purchasable directly from the Death Star (AKA Ingram).

Go see Jarmusch’s new one if you’ve ever had a father, mother, or siblings.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is the seventh public domain book I’ve worked on. It’s the first that I didn’t choose. This was Mallory’s choice. It seemed like a no-brainer. It’s set in Chicago. It’s angry about the state of the country. It’s about immigrants. The thing I didn’t take into account or forgot about was what a poor stylist Sinclair is.

Perhaps this shouldn’t matter so much in a book that was clearly meant as agitprop and succeeded as such. How many books can you name that changed government policies? But the way a book is written matters to me. I’ve quit on new books after a paragraph because I couldn’t see going on with a thing that contained this sentence or that phrase.

I first read The Jungle many years ago. Don’t ask how many because I couldn’t begin to guess. Definitely after I moved to Chicago, which narrows it down to the last thirty-five years. All I can recall is being interested in the description of the slaughterhouses and immigrant living conditions and put off by the Communist harangue at the end.

Working on it now, I find myself reading a sentence or two, then skipping ahead. I’m looking for images to render and luckily for me there are no shortage of them. Many include animals in living and dead states, in groups or in parts. I’m not worried about finding enough material to fill the book but don’t know how I feel about this half-reading strategy. With the previous six in the series, I read and re-read and often listened via audiobook. This time I’m engaging as little as I can. Just enough to do the work.

I’m currently at twenty drawings and expect to make at least twenty more. While drawing, I listen to podcasts and music. Nothing to do with The Jungle. To be fair, that was my approach with the other books as well. The immersion in the text stops the moment my pen or brush touches paper. It helps to have my mind on something completely different while making these images, strangely enough. It’s something like critical distance even as my goal is a kind of informal immediacy. This is difficult to explain but mostly true of my process, whether illustrating or making standalone art.

The juggling of near and far, aware and aloof, is the constant wrestling match of creating anything. So maybe the fact I can barely stand to read more than a couple of Sinclair’s paragraphs at a go will make the final result better? I have to hope so. All I know is that I will be through with it in the next month or so. Bill has promised to send me his intro soon, so, after that the thing will be formatted and filed away till its release next fall.

I’m also making painted illustrations for a Chicago calendar book that should come out at roughly the same time. It’s a good counterbalance to The Jungle. No bad feelings at all. Just image searches and painting.

Simple.

I’ll be reading something about the bookstore at Tuesday Funk tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see you there. A couple of the other readers have books that I’ve shelved in the past few weeks. I’ll have to tell them.

Sunday I tell Joe I have a great idea. What about breaking up the Biography section into subcategories? He gives the okay. I say I’ll come in Monday, a day off, and do it no problem. Figure it’ll take me a couple hours.

This is a section that takes up the entire wall of the back room, up to the ceiling. I decide to start with the A‘s and take anything that’s not to do with American history and politics, as a starting point. My whole aim with this project is to give literary bios their own section. Figure I’ll have that, world history, and America. No problem.

Within the first hour, half the table is filled with teetering stacks and it’s clear that there needs to be a memoir section, maybe a sports one too. Also: there are many actor, artist, musician, and trash celebrity bios that don’t fit into my scheme and will have to be moved to other parts of the store.

Joe comes back to check on my progress, scans the room, and stifles a laugh. The thing is that there’s no putting the toothpaste back in this tube. I can only keep going. He kindly sends out for gyros so I don’t keel over among my alphabet towers.

I text K I’m almost done about four hours in. I’m not almost done. The trouble and the thing I always forget when I undertake one of these reorgs is that there’s a lot of thinking and rethinking involved. It’s not just dumb labor. A good chunk of these books is sort of uncategorizable so I spend precious minutes staring off into space after scouring their back matter and publishing data. Still, I make progress. Now there’s a yawning gap in the middle of the wall. I’ve started some stacks here and there on the shelves temporarily as I’ve run out of room on the table and chairs.

Six hours in I finally make it to the Zs in my cull. America is all the way to the left now. Maybe we should rename this Fantasy. Whatever it is, I can start putting books back now. I decide to go back to front, starting with Literary Z‘s. It works, though I have to backtrack several times after shelving the wrong letter tower. The hazard of misalphebitizing never goes away, no matter how long I work here.

I pack up the pop, art, and film bios into boxes labeled “Dmitry’s little project” and make signs for the newly-created sections. What I thought would take two hours takes eight. I tell myself there was a reason to do this. That the madness will serve a purpose rather than just scratching an itch.

I have to believe that.

Happy to’ve contributed a cover for the inaugural issue of The Heckler—the magazine of revulsion & revolt. Print only. Contact pdesanex (at) proton (dot) me for yours.

In case you’re in the market for a stick-and-poke, I got a place.