Letter

I made a bookstamp for personalizing the books to be published next year. Feels weird not to have to sign and number boxes and boxes of them like I did before. This print-on-demand thing is very hard to wrap a head around.

On the publisher’s page of the new Old Style paperback, I wrote “Paperback edition of a theoretically infinite number“. The actual total will likely tally a few hundred, but who’s to say?

A lot of things are this way. K told me about a new breakfast spot around the corner from her work. She said the food was good but their website and decor were inscrutable. Apparently, it’s an “organic food concept”. Passing the place several times, I thought it was a dental studio or something. Walking into new businesses often feels like inhabiting holograms.

We’ve moved sections around enough lately that I felt it was time to update the bookstore map. This is the fourth time I’ve done so over the past three years. This space is a living, mutating organism. If there’s a “concept” or what have you, I couldn’t isolate or name it. It all depends on what people bring in through the door. The Film and Music sections keep expanding. I had to send Urban Fiction to the back room by the Mysteries to make room.

There is no inventory for what’s in the store, only the pricier books we list on eBay. No website could give any sense of what it’s like to be in these rooms. I think that’s true for any habitable space. It’s why places like that breakfast spot by K’s work are so puzzling. It doesn’t seem like they’re created to be in. They’re ideas. Imaginary. Often thought up by machines. That’s what the newer Barnes & Nobles are like. Feels like you could put your hand through every perfect tidy display. Try that at Tangible and you’ll end up with splinters and bruises.

This is how I prefer it.

When the copies of Winesburg, Ohio arrive at Mallory and Bulent’s Chicagoland abode, I’ll take the Metra out and stamp and sign as many copies as they need. It’s all I know to do to make them feel real.

Go see The Secret Agent. Might restore your faith in movies if it’s been wavering.

I’ve been avoiding it for years but last Saturday I went to poetry night at Tangible. It’s been a mainstay of the event calendar since the place opened, a holdover from Joe’s Myopic Books days. Everything he’s told me about it has made me stay away: the wrecked toilets, knocked-over bookshelves, the endless absurd requests, the complaints about changes in store policies that regular attendees can’t abide, the disaster-area left of the Poetry section after every first Saturday of the month. I’ve dealt with the aftermath a long time. It all sounds like a nightmare I don’t care to survive. Then Mallory asks me to go and I say yes.

I’ve been trying to get some handle on poetry the last few years. Writers like Denis Johnson, Philip Levine, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mark Turcotte, and Damian Rogers have helped but I still feel like a novice. But liking a thing and subjecting yourself to a roomful of people who make it are two very different things. I’ve dedicated most of my life to painting but more often than not I’d rather eat a gun than be trapped in a room of painters. And, as I said, this lot’s reputation precedes it. I suppose curiosity got the best of me.

We meet at the coffeeshop an hour before and I ask Mallory whether she’s planning to write up the reading for Zona. She says she is. I’m a little surprised as this will not be the typical scene she covers. It’s not in Logan Square and she’ll likely be the only millennial present. She says she’s tired of always writing about events at The Whistler and I assure her it will not resemble one of those. I share a few of the horror stories from what I’ve seen on Sundays following these Saturdays. Now she’s getting intrigued.

We get to the store early so Mallory and Bulent can buy some nonsense book for her family’s Secret Santa, then get seats in the back room. I encourage her to sign up to read and she does. Most of the seats are filled with aging disheveled types; I fit in better than I’d like to admit. They all know each other and gab together amiably, continuing through the host’s introduction and throughout the night. I’m glad I’ve got my sketchbook because otherwise I’d be telling this or that one to shut their pieholes over and over. I just don’t understand this type of rudeness. This lot, of all people, should know better, but they don’t.

The quantity and quality of the work oscillates wildly from overlong political screeds to witty limericks. It’s a real grab-bag. A couple old duffers have to be asked to cut it short, while a few run back to their seats before even finishing their last couplet. I’m surprised to enjoy a good amount of it for the chutzpah alone if not for any literary flair. It’s clear that most of them are lifers, engaged with wrestling their precious sentences, reaching for some transcendence the best they can. The effort and hope in it is touching if nothing else.

I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly committed a poem. I wouldn’t know where to start. I work at phrases and sentences with intention and sometimes come up with ones that ring, but to let them stand apart in the middle of a page, with all that blank space above, below, and between? I’m not ready yet.

Tangible no longer has a public bathroom and the bookshelves were all in their places when I left. The poetry section next day is a hellscape.

I wrote about a biography of Margaret Anderson and the maintenance of literary community in Chicago and elsewhere.

Listen to K tell Mallory things.

There’s a page for the paperback of Old Style in my store now. They love this one on Goodreads!

People don’t believe me or laugh it off when I say I don’t like cats. It goes back to childhood. I don’t like the way they look at me. Makes me wonder why anyone would invite one into their home. But this is not what most people I know think or feel.

I wouldn’t let my college girlfriend have one when we lived together but I’ve cohabitated with a couple since then. A roommate had one when I moved back to Chicago in 1997. He didn’t take very good care of it, letting it wander into the painting studio/living room at the front of the apartment. It ran around with a streak of cadmium yellow in its coat for a time. He would sometimes forget to feed it, so I did. He moved out after a few months so I don’t know that cat’s fate.

The other cat I lived with was very old. I dug a hole and buried him in my girlfriend’s backyard after he passed. She asked me to dig another hole for her friend’s dead cat, so I did that too.

Now I’m involved with a woman who’s very attached to cats. She takes care of ferals in her neighborhood and laughs at my attitude towards her favorite animal. She say I’m like a cat. When I tell her this is just her way of saying she likes me, she refuses to concede the point.

Last week I watched Skyler and Alicia’s recently-adopted stray. I mostly agreed to do it so K could go over there and play with him. The first time she came with me we couldn’t find him. The second time, she spotted him but he disappeared back behind the bed seconds later. The third time, he came out and played. He never appeared once when I was there solo. This didn’t bother me. I wasn’t there to make friends. I was only doing a favor for people, not cats.

I was going to write about these new t-shirt designs based on images from James Hogg’s The Suicide’s Grave but decided that was stupid and self-serving. Anyhow, there’s one of skulls, another of weapons raining from the sky, and a third of the skulls from before but in white on dark shirts. Get a couple for that special someone. They’re sure to love you even more than they do already.

Got to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts.

In case you use Bezos’ Bazaar and want a paperback of Old Style, the preorder is there for you. I’ll have copies in a few weeks…