Letter

I was working on some watercolor illustrations for The Rumpus, when something——the same something that often compels me to take on time-suck high-labor/low-reward tasks like moving many thousands of files from one cloud storage space to another——makes me count up how many pictures I’ve made for that magazine and decide all those pictures should live on the same page.

It takes a couple hours to get this done, but now the portal to that wing of the lunatic asylum has been opened, demanding further action. I take a look at the Illustrations menu page and it becomes clear that it must be redesigned. There’s a small voice screaming for me not to do it, that nobody cares about how some page on an art website is configured, that nobody even uses websites anymore, that it’s all apps all the time these days. I ignore these urgent but reasonable pleas, because reason has little to do with the way I operate.

When the site started seventeen years ago, there wasn’t even an illustration page, but over the years, as I got more and more work making art for others and needing art for my own writing, this page metastasized into a dozen pages with a several hundred images. I’d split the main page thematically before, but now the leftovers spilled across four overstuffed pages.

I’d started rewatching The Larry Sanders Show a few days before this reorg mania overtook me. It became my soundtrack as I coded and coded and coded. Now there’s a sports page and one for Chicago writers and the lit scene. I moved some portraits to the Portrait section. Pet portraits are out of the Illustration ghetto and up there with top-tier categories like Books, Tabletops, and Cityscapes. My reasoning before was that anything not done from direct observation was illustration rather than art. I can’t be that strict about it anymore, especially since diving into collages. This tedious sorting exercise has some value in helping me rethink the way I define my work. At least that’s what I tell myself to justify where these last days disappeared.

It took over four seasons of Shandling’s neurotic brilliance to get to a stopping point I could live with. I say stopping point, because there’s no end to it. I’ll keep futzing, paring, and rethinking as long as the site exists. Whether anyone but me cares about it has little to do with it.

I just have to.

I cracked up when I saw the name of the show. I wonder who thought it up. Makes me happy there are Millennials into Marvin Gaye. I thought back to taping “Sexual Healing” off FM radio, not knowing what it was about, but getting a clue when I heard it was my classmate’s mom’s favorite song.

Textual Healing is a podcast for writers talk to about books and music. I listened to a few episodes, then wrote to the host. All the guests were young and their music tastes didn’t necessarily jibe with mine, but I felt some kinship with their overall attitude. They had few illusions about lit world success. Most paid their rent some way other than selling books. I could relate.

To my surprise, Mallory wrote back within a day, saying she’d love to have me on sometime. A couple weeks later, she came by to pick up some books. The walls were covered in the collages I’d been making and she and her boyfriend, Bulent, seemed to be into them, even asked about buying one. They were nice people. They made me glad I’d reached out.

Mallory sounded shocked at my age. Said I was more like what she thought thirty is supposed to be like. She’s thirty, but said she feels a lot younger. Does anyone ever truly feel their age? I’ve felt like a fortysomething my whole life.

Mallory runs an online magazine and indie publishing concern called Maudlin House. By reading a few things there and following a few author and social media links, I got to know a whole community of young writers and artists. They do it all themselves, kind of like I do.

We recorded our talk in January. The conversation was easy, digressive in the way friends’ talk often is. That was a surprise, since we barely know each other. I asked about the name of her show. She said a friend came up with it and that I was the first to ask about it. I wondered how many guests or listeners knew what it was a pun on.

Absent a return to social media or hiring a publicist, podcasts and lit mags are my best chance to get word out about my books and art. Maudlin House ran a chapter from the new book this week.

Maybe the kids are alright after all. They’ve been really nice to me in any case.

p.s. There’s a recording of a very early version of what would become Old Style. It was recorded in 2013 at the Butcher Shop by John Forbes, with Bill MacKay on guitar, Charles Rumback on drums, and Daniel Thatcher on bass. I still have a couple CDs of the full recording, with unique drawn or painted covers, should you be interested.

p.p.s. I made another collage book.

It’s almost baseball season, so I made a book about baseball. Actually, the book this used to be——of which, only the covers and a few pages remain, though most are covered by drawing and collage——is about baseball, whereas what I made is not about anything I could tell you in words.

After months of having to try to make sentences make sense, to have them add up to something narratively in a book, it’s a relief to make something that functions almost entirely via intuition. There’s an internal logic to the way each page interacts with the ones before and after it, but I don’t have to verbalize it, either to myself or to others.

The Three-two Pitch was a book I picked up at a rummage sale. I liked the drawing of the pitcher on the cover with the old-school high leg kick wind-up. I flipped through the pages and was disappointed not to find any more illustrations inside. It’s one of those aspirational sports books marketed to young boys, from the few sentences I bothered to read. I put it on the shelf face out and forgot about it for a couple years.

Since I started on the collages sometime last year, unread unused books look like possible material for art. I’ve got five or six that I won’t ever read and can’t imagine anyone else wanting to read. They’ll become the ground or under-painting for new compositions. I assemble them page-to-page, trying to catch what one suggests for the next, echoing or counterpointing, keeping a rhythm going.

I think I can keep going this way for a bit, not having to make sense to anyone, because it feels right, even though I can’t say how or why.

p.s. Look at all the spreads in The Three-two Pitch here.