Letter

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is the seventh public domain book I’ve worked on. It’s the first that I didn’t choose. This was Mallory’s choice. It seemed like a no-brainer. It’s set in Chicago. It’s angry about the state of the country. It’s about immigrants. The thing I didn’t take into account or forgot about was what a poor stylist Sinclair is.

Perhaps this shouldn’t matter so much in a book that was clearly meant as agitprop and succeeded as such. How many books can you name that changed government policies? But the way a book is written matters to me. I’ve quit on new books after a paragraph because I couldn’t see going on with a thing that contained this sentence or that phrase.

I first read The Jungle many years ago. Don’t ask how many because I couldn’t begin to guess. Definitely after I moved to Chicago, which narrows it down to the last thirty-five years. All I can recall is being interested in the description of the slaughterhouses and immigrant living conditions and put off by the Communist harangue at the end.

Working on it now, I find myself reading a sentence or two, then skipping ahead. I’m looking for images to render and luckily for me there are no shortage of them. Many include animals in living and dead states, in groups or in parts. I’m not worried about finding enough material to fill the book but don’t know how I feel about this half-reading strategy. With the previous six in the series, I read and re-read and often listened via audiobook. This time I’m engaging as little as I can. Just enough to do the work.

I’m currently at twenty drawings and expect to make at least twenty more. While drawing, I listen to podcasts and music. Nothing to do with The Jungle. To be fair, that was my approach with the other books as well. The immersion in the text stops the moment my pen or brush touches paper. It helps to have my mind on something completely different while making these images, strangely enough. It’s something like critical distance even as my goal is a kind of informal immediacy. This is difficult to explain but mostly true of my process, whether illustrating or making standalone art.

The juggling of near and far, aware and aloof, is the constant wrestling match of creating anything. So maybe the fact I can barely stand to read more than a couple of Sinclair’s paragraphs at a go will make the final result better? I have to hope so. All I know is that I will be through with it in the next month or so. Bill has promised to send me his intro soon, so, after that the thing will be formatted and filed away till its release next fall.

I’m also making painted illustrations for a Chicago calendar book that should come out at roughly the same time. It’s a good counterbalance to The Jungle. No bad feelings at all. Just image searches and painting.

Simple.

I’ll be reading something about the bookstore at Tuesday Funk tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see you there. A couple of the other readers have books that I’ve shelved in the past few weeks. I’ll have to tell them.

Sunday I tell Joe I have a great idea. What about breaking up the Biography section into subcategories? He gives the okay. I say I’ll come in Monday, a day off, and do it no problem. Figure it’ll take me a couple hours.

This is a section that takes up the entire wall of the back room, up to the ceiling. I decide to start with the A‘s and take anything that’s not to do with American history and politics, as a starting point. My whole aim with this project is to give literary bios their own section. Figure I’ll have that, world history, and America. No problem.

Within the first hour, half the table is filled with teetering stacks and it’s clear that there needs to be a memoir section, maybe a sports one too. Also: there are many actor, artist, musician, and trash celebrity bios that don’t fit into my scheme and will have to be moved to other parts of the store.

Joe comes back to check on my progress, scans the room, and stifles a laugh. The thing is that there’s no putting the toothpaste back in this tube. I can only keep going. He kindly sends out for gyros so I don’t keel over among my alphabet towers.

I text K I’m almost done about four hours in. I’m not almost done. The trouble and the thing I always forget when I undertake one of these reorgs is that there’s a lot of thinking and rethinking involved. It’s not just dumb labor. A good chunk of these books is sort of uncategorizable so I spend precious minutes staring off into space after scouring their back matter and publishing data. Still, I make progress. Now there’s a yawning gap in the middle of the wall. I’ve started some stacks here and there on the shelves temporarily as I’ve run out of room on the table and chairs.

Six hours in I finally make it to the Zs in my cull. America is all the way to the left now. Maybe we should rename this Fantasy. Whatever it is, I can start putting books back now. I decide to go back to front, starting with Literary Z‘s. It works, though I have to backtrack several times after shelving the wrong letter tower. The hazard of misalphebitizing never goes away, no matter how long I work here.

I pack up the pop, art, and film bios into boxes labeled “Dmitry’s little project” and make signs for the newly-created sections. What I thought would take two hours takes eight. I tell myself there was a reason to do this. That the madness will serve a purpose rather than just scratching an itch.

I have to believe that.

Happy to’ve contributed a cover for the inaugural issue of The Heckler—the magazine of revulsion & revolt. Print only. Contact pdesanex (at) proton (dot) me for yours.

In case you’re in the market for a stick-and-poke, I got a place.

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.