Letter

Everything’s wrong,

Days are too long,

Sunshine’s too hot,

Wind is too strong.

Clouds are too fluffy,

Grass is too green,

Ground is too dusty,

Sheets are too clean.

Stars are too twinkly,

Moon is too high,

Water’s too drippy,

Sand is too dry.

Rocks are too heavy,

Feathers too light,

Kids are too noisy,

Shoes are too tight.

Folks are too happy,

Singin’ their songs.

Why can’t they see it?

Everything’s wrong!

(source)

Like all the best writers, Shel Silverstein could share complex ideas with simple words. He also knew how not to drone on or overstay his welcome. He didn’t waste time or space when he didn’t have to. This is one of the many reasons why his work continues to be loved by so many of us.

I was seven years old when my family moved to this country from the Soviet Union, so I didn’t grow up with Silverstein’s pictures and words. Those first few years I was just learning the language rather than enjoying its more nimble practitioners. The bedtime stories that were read to me were in Russian. Nevertheless I was predisposed to appreciate Silverstein’s type of poetry because in the Soviet Union many of the best writers found their only means of expression through children’s literature. His wit, playfulness and melancholy were felt instantly familiar. As if I’d always known them. Like Kharms, Marshak, and so many other writers both here and in the USSR, Silverstein never set out to write for children. He worked for Playboy and wrote raunchy songs for rock bands. He only turned to art and writing at all once it became clear he wouldn’t be in the starting lineup for his beloved White Sox. Though he did sell hotdogs at Comiskey for a time.

A couple months ago, in a bar on the North Side, I heard an essay read offer yet another interpretation of The Giving Tree. I’d be willing to wager that the number of interpretations of that book now outnumber its total word-count. That’s as telling a tribute to Silverstein’s genius as any. His few precise words inspire thousands from his millions of readers.

He’s one of the ones that told us most eloquently what it’s like to be a person. To be unlike anyone else.

My skin is kind of sort of brownish

Pinkish yellowish white.

My eyes are greyish blueish green,

But I’m told they look orange in the night.

My hair is reddish blondish brown,

But it’s silver when it’s wet.

And all the colors I am inside

Have not been invented yet.

(source)

* This was written to induct Shel Silverstein into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2014.

I’ve been living in InDesign the past week or two. It’s not my favorite neighborhood but it’s where I have to go to make my book. This is the fourth one I’ve made soup-to-nuts and the repetition has helped. I still make a lot of mistakes but correct much faster. there’s muscle memory now. Still, I haven’t developed much love for this program or for the company which makes it.

Half the dread of using InDesign is turning it on. Because you can no longer just buy the damn thing, no, you have to “subscribe” to it. Adobe insists you pay monthly or yearly. Why does book-design software have to be sold like a newspaper? Is there a new tool or updated every day, week, month? Maybe there is but I sure as hell don’t need it and will likely never use it. I just want to cut-and-paste words and pictures onto a couple hundred pages so the printer knows what goes where.

There are hundreds of features in the program that I don’t know, can’t use, and can rarely even locate. At the bottom of the window, for instance, is a red dot which counts up all the mistakes I make as I go. There’s a dropdown tab next to it but it doesn’t detail these errors. In fact, I’ve never been able to locate where the explanations of my mistakes are. I do notice I make fewer with each new book. I’m down to single digits with Old Style.

This part of book assemblage scratches the same itch that maintaining a website or making a playlist or deleting email does. It’s tedious organizing busy-work. It turns off the part of me that’s engaged when I paint or write. It’s a break from creativity necessary to recharge whatever the battery is that powers the real work.

The program is staggeringly unintuitive. Four books in I still can’t figure out how to set the font so it doesn’t revert to some bizarre default every time I go to paste in a new paragraph. I know a tech native will roll their eyes at my ineptitude. Remember, I don’t even know how to use Word. I’m still using work-arounds from my days at Kinko’s literally cut-and-pasting manually-typed fragments around ink drawings.

But somehow I’ve ended up with another actual whole real-seeming book. It’s been bittersweet this time around because it feels like the end of something. It is definitely the last book I’ll make in this 5×7 inch hardcover, foil-stamped format. It might be the last book for awhile. I have no big next idea. And the prospect of filling up my place with fifty more boxes of books which will likely sit gathering dust for years is already filling me with a measure of dread.

There has to be some other way but I don’t know what it is. If you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

I made these drawings for a story set during the Iran-Iraq War in the 80s. I scrolled through pages and pages of wreckage and injury for reference photos.

They stop being specific after thirtieth bombed out street, the fiftieth bloody bandaged body. My mind goes to other wars in other times. I’ve never been to Abadan or seen the Karun River. The setting of these horrors is unknown to me.

So much of our current lives are this way. We’re bombarded with images that have no context. They may as well be backgrounds for video-games. They often are. The pain conveyed is blunted by becoming a speck among a million other specks.

I choose pictures set in the places mentioned in the story but because I’m not tied to the places like the writer is my mind wanders. I do what I can to illustrate his words but I rarely know whether I succeed.

Once his story leaves the immediate world of a child and his family amid a war zone, I’m completely lost. He moves on to a time-travel realm which I have no access to. I have little imagination on my best days. The day-to-day of another country in another decade is fantasy enough for me.

I know what crumbled buildings and injured people look like, more or less. But once characters start aging decades sentence to sentence I throw up my hands. I guess he had to wrap up his story some way and chose magic. Maybe the reality was best forgotten.