Letter

Where does a city end and the surrounding sprawl begin? Is it right at the municipal boundary, or is there seepage on either side of the divide? This has been on my mind because of what I’ve been reading and watching the past week. The Reader accepted pitches for reviews of the new John Wayne Gacy miniseries and Avner Landes’s Meiselman on the same day. So I got to work on both straight away.

I didn’t intentionally pair a TV show about an infamous serial killer and a debut novel about a put-upon young Orthodox Jew. It was only afterwards that I noticed both stories are set in the near Chicago suburbs. Gacy could’ve very plausibly done rehab work on buildings in New Niles (were it a real town), due to its proximity to his all-too-real Norwood Park home. And Meiselman——or his parents, given the timeline——might easily have passed many of Gacy’s favorite haunts on the way to O’Hare Airport, or even have hired him to entertain children at a birthday party as Pogo the Clown.

I know the difference between fact and fiction (on a good day). But the nearby geographical locations common to the true-crime show and the novel encourage the blurring of boundaries that have hovered around the outskirts of my mind as I’ve watched and read.

I told my friend, Frank, about the Gacy show when I realized he grew up just up the street from the murder house. He wrote back that he used to ride his bike down there when they were digging up the bodies in 1978.

My landlady grew up in the likely model for New Niles, Skokie, Illinois. I’ll probably give her my copy of Meiselmannow that I’ve finished it. There’s a shelf outside my back door where we leave each other food, holiday cards, misdelivered mail, etc.

This city and its environs is fertile soil for all kinds of stories, from the horrific to the hilarious, and everything in between.

—Two final excerpts from the new book were posted this week: “Ask for Rose” in Vol.1 Brooklyn and “Casanova at the Corner Bar” in the Chicago Reader. Was hoping to have the book here this week, but the printer says next week. To all who’ve ordered them, hang tight, I’ll get them to you ASAP.

My students are drawing still lifes. There are books and boxes, a tipped over porcelain cup, a soccer ball sitting in an urn in place of flowers. They graph out 18×24 inch paper, then use a viewfinder to make a composition. They use rulers and protractors, because they think this will make their drawings accurate. They couldn’t be more wrong. But I don’t tell them that.

I took over this class five weeks in, so I have to stay within the parameters their real teacher set. I’ve never graphed a drawing or even used a ruler to draw. Not sure I ever had a viewfinder. They make a pencil line drawing, then use charcoal for light and dark. I suggest they start with a middle tone for the brown paper covering the wall in back of the vases, cups, etc, then figure out light and dark from there. Some do, others stubbornly draw each thing to completion before going on to the next.

I’m not much interested in telling them to draw like me. I walk around from easel to easel and try to see what they’re trying to do and say something helpful. A couple students have headphones in, so I have to pantomime taking them out and turning them off before speaking. I’m not their mother or babysitter, so I don’t tell them to put their music away. Besides, I know from experience that music makes drawing better. They’re all beginners, so anything that helps shouldn’t be discouraged.

The thing I get a kick out of is how different each drawing is. If I didn’t know what the subject was and saw them hung on a wall next to one another, I’d guess each was from a different setup. Will any of them ever pick up a pencil after this class ends? I hope nothing I’ve said over the last month-plus discourages them.

This week we start on one point perspective. We’ll be using rulers for everything. The students who believe rulers help them make things “right” will be thrilled. It will be like pulling teeth for me. I haven’t thought about one point perspective in nearly forty years. It’s an idea from many centuries ago, that has only tangential relation to how we actually see. Basically, it would help to be a cyclops to see under this system. Also, a statue. The tiniest tilt of the head or flick of an eye throws the vanishing point and disappearing parallel lines all to hell.

Maybe it’ll be my turn to put on headphones. It will be hard to explain something I don’t believe in. The kids who are worried about getting a good grade will be happy, while the ones who actually enjoy drawing will be bored out of their skulls.

We’ll slog through the straight straight lines together.

I found some slides in a drawer. They were mixed in with ones of old artwork, but I’d never seen them before. From God’s Own Graveyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape was typed on labels affixed to the plastic mounts.

No attribution, aside from Anon. American. 20th c and plate numbers. Judging by the cars, the pictures are from the 50s or 60s. My guess is they were part of an art school lecture. The overkill title of the series screams art school. But I don’t know that for sure.

I don’t even know how they ended up in my drawer. All the other slides in there were of my own work, plus a few early 90s photos of me with classmates or my girlfriend. I threw away most of them, but kept these anonymous ones.

They tell a kind of story, even without the burdensome title. They show a place all about selling rather than living. If the photographer had stood at a different corner of the commercial strip, the glut of billboards might look less concentrated, less pervasive.

But this is what every writer, artist, or self-styled myth-monger does. They point their gaze, their attention this way rather than that. Inevitably, every choice jettisons countless others.

Slides themselves are as obsolete as much of the world in these pictures. Yet they show the roots and precedents of our everyday. We still throw trash on the ground, still erect giant roadside signs to market products, still rely on gas-burning automobiles.

I know this long-ago black-and-white world. I’m of it. It’s not a pretty place, but it looks like home.

—I illustrated another essay for The Rumpus.