Letter

I don’t remember much about when I first read Don DeLillo’s Underworld. At dinner the other day my friend Frank, who was my roommate back then, said I read it just before reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand. That puts it sometime in 2001. While rereading Underworld these past couple months I thought it was earlier. The book came out in 1997.

Pinning it down precisely isn’t that important. This year I’ve been trying to track changes over the decades of my life. A simple way to do that is to reread books that made an impact to see how they hit me now. Tropic of Cancer was a revelation and Suttree was a hoot but I really disappeared into Underworld. It was the perfect book for my project because one of its big themes is how the characters “talk” to all the versions of themselves as they age. It’s a fluid conversation which time-travels and crisscrosses over fifty years. That’s just the span I’ve been investigating myself.

The relationship between personal and world history is the main theme of the book. Tracking a baseball which may or may not have been Bobby Thomson’s shot heard ‘round the world is less about solving a mystery or proving authenticity than about the desperate need to have tangible evidence that our lives matter. As in fairy tales, every hand the ball passes through is transformed for good or ill. For its last owner, Nick Shay, the hero of this whole epic book, the ball is a symbol of failure. He was a Dodgers fan after all. Not long after that fateful home run his team left Brooklyn for LA. Nick leaves New York as well. Decades later he’s at a ballgame with coworkers and it’s revealed that he owns the famous ball. He can’t or won’t articulate why he bought it, nor how much he paid.

I moved a couple months into lockdown. Packing makes you reconsider all your possessions. I threw away a lot. It was a time to think about why I keep what I keep since it was literally about to weigh me down. Did I want to keep carrying it into in my new place? I didn’t throw away everything but I’ve become committed since May not to hold onto things once I’ve gotten what I need out of them.

This means mailing books out as soon as I’ve read or abandoned them. They’re of no use gathering dust on my shelves. I pick a friend who I think might get something out of it and bike to the post office.

I trashed over half of my artwork before moving but still have hundreds of drawings and paintings which need to be dealt with. This is another motif of Underworld—waste and the problem of how to dispose of it. One of DeLillo’s great images is a ghostly garbage barge which can’t find a port. No one knows what it’s carrying nor wants to find out. A pretty good snapshot of Western civilization.

I work from life so this year has narrowed the vista. Loitering in public was a sizable part of where work work was generated. Enforced isolation has made me burrow inward. I might have gotten to collage eventually by natural evolution but staying in has made it into a kind of refuge. I need new things in front of my eyes and old scraps from the past have provided that. It helps that my memory is so lousy. It all looks new to me—whether I made it, saw it, or read it.

That’s the thing about the rereading I’ve been doing this year. I wanted to learn something about how I’ve changed but I can barely summon anything from the past if it’s not manifested physically. Like a book or a drawing or a high school homework assignment. There’s a trace or ghost image of something connected to me in these things but for the most part I take them in as if for the first time. They must have left a mark but I can’t track it.

When I finished Underworld it was equal parts relief and regret. I’d scaled this mountain of a book and come down the other side. It was sometimes a slog but mostly entrancing. Reading it made everything else disappear but also revealed connections which made me put the doorstop of a book down and look this or that up. Other times it made me start a new picture. Now that I’m done with it where will I go?

Maybe next year will be about looking forward. We have so much to forget.

—I made a third collage book. Thanks to Rocktober for the nice review of my cab book. Thought Eureka was a mesmerizing movie.

My Russian is a fragmented work in progress. I read my first book in my mother tongue since childhood last year. I seek out Russian movies with no subtitles. But I miss whole chunks of dialogue and reference. I can’t spell. It’s not quite a vestigial tail but close.

My father often sends me links to Russian poetry. Poems are easier for me than stories or books. He can recite many from memory. I can’t recite anything in any language. Rote learning was on its way out by the time I got to school. I envy my father this sometimes.

Boris Ryzhy’s life looked like it was coming up aces but he killed himself at twenty-six. Ryzhy means red in Russian. Like redhead rather than traffic light or Communist or Republican. Tumblr is a pretty outmoded site but I keep my account for a couple Brutalist architecture blogs and a few devoted to Russian memes and Soviet ephemera. It had to be one of the latter which posted one of his poems. I went into the rabbithole pretty hard. For a week or two this summer it was all Boris Ryzhy all the time around here.

I took a book of his poems to read on the patio of a restaurant down the street. It’s a place I know well. Back when I was a bartender the staff came in to see me after closing their place every Sunday. But now I didn’t know every server and bartender. Half didn’t return after lockdown so they had to hire new ones.

I didn’t even know what Lizzy’s face looked like since she was always masked. She asked what I was reading. I told her about Ryzhy. We’d talk books every time I came in. She was working on a play but was stuck. I offered to give it a read.

We met at a coffeeshop a few days later and I got to see her face. She liked what I had to say and the conversation was easy. I asked her over to sit for a portrait.

She’d never sat for a drawing before and said she enjoyed it. We made plans for her to come back. She’d been couch-surfing after a recent breakup so pinning her down to a day and time was a problem. Everything in her life sounded up in the air.

I didn’t hear from her a few weeks. Then she wrote to say she was in the Bay Area. Maybe she’ll pick up a little Russian out there and we can talk about Ryzhy when she returns to Chicago.

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks/Had I from old and young!

Instead of the cross, the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung.

Samuel Coleridge

The albatross isn’t a beautiful bird. From some angles it appears neckless, like a middle-aged balding man who’s put on some pounds he can’t get rid of. The downward hook of its beak reminds me of the dodo. A swan it ain’t. In flight it looks assembled from mismatched parts—the amazing wingspan especially looks like it came from a more graceful bird. As if a minivan got souped up with a turbo engine. But whatever it looks like it obviously works. It stays aloft for years at a time, seeming not to need land. So why have we saddled it with representing burdensome weight?

We make other animals carry water for us metaphorically and otherwise. It’s what we do. Impose our traits on creatures who have no knowledge or need of our neuroses. For instance, I keep calling the president a pig but I like pigs and hate the president. So why do I smear them by linking them to a thing like that? I’d apologize to pigs but they don’t care about apologies. They have lives to live.

I started reading up on what the albatross stood for because the fictional bar in my book is named after it.

A few years ago the couple who run my neighborhood coffeeshop planned to open a bar called The Salty Albatross. They asked friends to suggest names. I gave them a few but the one they chose wasn’t one of them. They did say they wanted me to work there. It was to be a casual neighborhood spot with a maritime theme. I was excited to have a gig blocks from where I live. They found a storefront and started rehabbing it but eventually their plans fell through. But that name lingered.

I didn’t care for “Salty” because it suggested a theme-restaurant. I could picture being required to wear an eyepatch. But “The Albatross” was a solid name for a tavern. I knew early on I’d have to change names and timelines in order to tell the bar stories I wanted to tell. One of the places my Albatross is based on also has a bird name. Moreover, having a bar stuck in the past called the name of an animal which represents something one is saddled with was hard to resist.

In Coleridge’s poem the sailor has to wear the bird’s carcass as penance for killing it. It’s the way that many bar patron’s carry their pasts. But it’s not entirely negative, because to many their memories, even if they’re no good, are preferable to the present. They wear their albatrosses voluntarily.

From what I read we’ve given the bird a bad rap but I don’t know enough not to keep piling on. I posted a rough draft of a new chapter from the book for paid subscribers of this newsletter a couple weeks ago. A reader wrote that he googled The Albatross because he’d wanted to go there for a drink. I hated to break the bad news that the place was made up but took it as a compliment.