Letter

They say not to judge a book by its cover, but we all do. And why not? What else do we have to go by? I’d heard about Breece D’J Pancake’s stories for years, but didn’t read one till last week. He’s one of those legendary cult writers, more influential than known, his stature and mystery ballooning after an early suicide.

I avoided reading him all this time because of that name. Seems like a put-on. Turns out only the D’J is made up, the result of a misprint of his two middle names, Dexter John. He didn’t correct it, but kept it instead. I wonder why. Maybe he thought it made him sound more strange or mysterious. What it did for me is to keep me from reading his stories.

Whatever I imagined a person with a phony name would write is not what I found. His sense of place and language is so precise. His people are farmers and miners and deckhands. Their days are spent dreaming of escape, but not having the means or know-how to achieving it. They’re mournful stories, but neither maudlin, nor self-pitying.

He has a story about a hunt, in which parts are told from the animals’ point of view, but he somehow avoids all the landmines this literary trope comes saddled with. No cutesy talking Disney critters, just matter-of-fact rendering of landscape and conditions from ground level.

I’m grateful I got past my prejudice and thank Mr. & Mrs. Pancake for making such a beautiful flapjack, er, writer.

I walk up Irving Park to wait for the Ashland bus back home. There’s a guy at the stop. He’s in coveralls, standing a foot off the curb, looking east, then west, his breath visible in every cold puff. His mask is under his chin like a kerchief.

The bus comes and he starts yammering at the driver before even sitting down. He spreads his bags on the seat next to him and makes himself at home. He doesn’t bother to put his mask on.

I have headphones in so I don’t catch much of what he says. No passenger who gets on meets his eye or even looks his way. They edge as far as they can away as they pass, pretending to look down or out the opposite window. He’s our proverbial elephant in the room.

During a lull in the podcast I’m listening to, I hear him saying that there are microchips in the coronavirus vaccine, that it’s a plot against black people. My show comes back on and I look out the window, not wanting to hear the pretzel logic that got him to this conspiracy theory. After five years of daily statements of fantasy as fact, I have no more capacity to humor it.

I wonder why the bus driver encourages him. I understand it’s dangerous to confront fools in public. People are getting beat up for asking others to even put a mask on. Maybe the driver is bored. Maybe he believes the same ravings. I don’t know or care. I text a friend about what I’m seeing and she answers that maybe he’ll die soon. That’s where we’re at.

It feels like a Tower of Babel moment. People all yelling past one another in their own languages, each completely convinced of their righteousness. A good rule of thumb, I think, is to ask whether what a person says is geared toward anything but self-interest. If there’s at least an acknowledgment of the wider world, there’s a better chance that it might actually be true.

The guy gets off the bus and I try to forget about him. No one says anything else about it. Then another guy with no mask gets on.

—I’ve always been a small-picture guy. I can describe what’s in front of my face, but I’m wary of larger statements. So I’m always impressed when others do it well. Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland is a pretty accurate snapshot of this country right now. And Adam Curtis’s epic new Can’t Get You Out of My Head connects many disparate strands into a portrait of the last seventy years, leading to the present moment. He introduced me to Arkady Severny, whose songs I listened to for hours (ending up with the playlist above). Curtis’s essay-films are what I imagine George Orwell would be doing if he lived in this era.

—I wrote about the painter Amy Sillman’s great essay book.

I’ve never met Ike, but I just painted his portrait. His owner had heard me on a radio show and decided to drop me a line. It felt strangely backwards, because the order and payment came through before I knew anything about him or his dog. So much of the virtual world is this way; you get fragments out of order, then assemble them with whatever adhesive/logic you’ve got.

I got an email notification about a $200 order. I wrote to the attached address, asking for photos of the pet, then waited. I received a message asking how to proceed. He had not seen my query. I texted him to check his inbox. This kind of broken telephone thing happens all the time. People get used to one technology and forget about others, so a lot of communication is wasted on communicating, on setting the venue and terms. Makes me think of the Tower of Babel, languages being generated all the time that drive us further apart.

Once we iron all that out, things proceed smoothly. I like finding out how my work gets on people’s radar. The guy tells me he used to hear me on Nick Digilio’s radio show. Nick was a friend I made when I was driving cab. His late-night show kept me company while I worked. He was fired sometime last year. Ike’s dad and I commiserated about how Nick’s show was one of the very few reasons to tune into that radio station.

I used to listen to the radio all the time when I drove. Since I quit driving, I hardly ever do. I listen to podcasts and music, but never live radio, except for baseball games. For some reason, that medium is tied to automobiles for me. Rarely occurs to me as an option at home.

Turns out Ike lives a few blocks away. So when the portrait is finished, I walk it over. Sometimes when I deliver a pet portrait, I get to meet its subject. But I don’t get to meet Ike. Maybe when it gets warmer I’ll see him getting walked in the neighborhood.