I made a book out of scraps. Starting with a notebook from fourth grade, I filled the pages with fragments of homework assignments, doodles, portraits of heroes, and bits of colored paper.
Some pages start with a drawings, others with text or Color-aid paper. It’s all intuitive, following an internal logic I couldn’t and wouldn’t put in words. Though the medium is different it’s pretty much the way I’ve always worked. No ideas or plans. Just the materials at hand.
The difference is that the source or starting point of each picture is not the room I’m in or the bookshelf or the view out the window but rather a fragment from the past. I’m still working from life though. Taking an old drawing and gluing it into the notebook, then making it talk to a scrap of text or pure color feels a lot like trying to make marks in reaction to what I see with my eyes. The tension between what’s out there and what I’m composing on the paper is the same.
Each bit is meaningful in some way. It isn’t random. Even if I couldn’t tell you what it means, there’s a kind of story that unfolds from page to page. The form dictates the content. Because these collages are in a book they have to talk to each other in ways that stand-alone collages or paintings don’t. Perhaps after I’ve made a few more of these I’ll be able to say what it all adds up to. But maybe I’m not supposed to know.
I worked on the book all week. When it was finished I put it under the eye of the scanner and recorded a rambling commentary while flipping pages. I thought when I started talking that it would last five minutes or less but when I closed the back page the counter read over twenty-five minutes. If you have the time to spare have a look.
Three little boys run around the countryside playing war. They draw lots. The loser puts on the German helmet. The other two chase him, pretend-firing their block wood weapons. Then it’s a free-for-all. They roll around on the ground. The “German” wrestles a gun away and shoots his enemies. Then they’re called in for dinner. Maurice Pialat‘s The House in the Woods is set in rural France during World War I. A middle-aged gameskeeper and his wife take in the children of Parisians gone off to war. It’s a bucolic life for the boys but there are sinister overtones and the worst is yet to come. Their war games remind me of Philip Guston’s early painting Martial Memory. His boys use trashcan lids as shields, paper bags and folded newspaper for helmets, discarded wood as weapons.
Pialat started as a painter. He made my favorite movie about Van Gogh. I’m not big on calling movies painterly but I see paintings I want to make watching his movies. Of course, I see paintings in everything. Lately I notice myself making associations across media a lot. Watching Carlos Reygadas’ great first film Japon the Mexican landscape reminded me of Cormac McCarthy. I haven’t read a book of his in over twenty years. Back then I had no idea I’d go on to write my own books. I picked up Suttree which was my favorite back then.
Reading McCarthy’s quasi-biblical sentences and anachronistic compound words prepared me well to enjoy Pete Beatty’s tall tale, Cuyahoga (I’ll share a link to my review in next week’s letter after the review is published). I can’t always track connections and influences this way so it’s gratifying when the stitches and seams are so visible.
I made an ink painting looking at my desk, bookshelves, and bedroom doorway. It came out kind of rough, unrendered. I’m okay with that. Getting a likeness or verisimilitude doesn’t interest me much these days. I tacked it up on the wall next to collages in progress. It looks like it’s speaking the same language, if, perhaps, a slightly different dialect.
I wonder what Pialat’s paintings looked like? Why did he quit painting and switch to film? I doubt I’ll ever quit. Even if I cut up all my old work and glue it back together into what I believe is something new. It’ll be a continuation of that one same thing. The medium doesn’t matter. You say what you have to say any way you can.
p.s. I’ve started to type out pages of the new book on my Smith-Corona. Maybe I’ll cut out printing altogether. How many copies do there really need to be anyway?
I get a strange letter in the mail. It’s from Marquis Who’s Who. The envelope looks like something from Publishers Clearing House minus Ed McMahon’s cheerful visage. IMPORTANT INFORMATION ENCLOSED from the Editorial Department. The letter within congratulates me on my nomination and approval to join the ranks of the most successful and the most famous. There’s a link to an online questionnaire where I can list my accomplishments to cement my place among the créme de la créme. No purchase necessary. What do I have to lose?
I like a good scam as much as the next guy. A while back I kept up communications with someone claiming to be from England who pretended to be buying artwork from me long enough to get their phony money order. I tried to cash it a currency exchange to confirm it as fake, then reported them to the FBI. I know that this was an exercise in futility but there was that tiny bit of satisfaction in catching on in time not to be taken. Nobody wants to be a mark, do they?
But what if the people trying to shake you down aren’t in a boiler room in Nigeria or the former Eastern Bloc? What if they’ve been selling their success snake oil on Main Street since 1898? Before typing the link to their online questionnaire, I look them up. The company was established by Albert Marquis at the end of the nineteenth century and has been publishing their directories of “accomplished” people ever since. There’s a recent CEO with the last name Marks. Surprisingly, no references of PT Barnum’s involvement. But on their website, a ringing endorsement from Warren Buffett is featured repeatedly. Seems the Oracle of Omaha attributes much of his success to his inclusion in Who’s Who. Who’d’ve thunk? And no purchase necessary. I’d be a fool not to join.
I’m charmed by the idea that an antiquated thing like Who’s Who still exists. A fat dictionary-like thing that lists prominent people lives in a universe of rotary phones, typewriters, and citizens who can read the face of a clock AKA most of my life. There’s a part of me that wants to believe even a fraction of their con is the real McCoy.
I fill out the form and wait for the sure windfall. What I get instead is a ringing phone. I don’t answer the first three times they call because I don’t recognize the number. Aside from my parents the only calls I get are from spambots, but the same number keeps coming up so one day I pick up. The woman on the other line has an accent I can’t place. It takes her repeating it several times for me to understand that she’s with Marquis. She needs to interview me for fifteen minutes to iron out the details of my inclusion in “the most exclusive country club in the world.” She says their book is one of the few included in a time capsule to Mars and among the select, rarefied number of tomes on display in the Oval Office. She knows how to wow a guy like me.
It’s clear that this woman hasn’t read the form I’d submitted because she wants to know about my accomplishments, how I got started in my “field” (she has no inkling in even the vaguest terms). It’s kind of like being on an ersatz blind date with someone reading boilerplate “personal” questions. She details the many benefits sure to come my way once the press-release and bio they’re preparing is complete. I will be in rare air among others of the highest echelons.
I wonder how much longer it will take until she gets to the ask. When it comes, her bedside manner remains blasé and clinical—a Premier membership was $900; a Standard, $600. When I repeat for the third or fourth time that I will not be sending any money, she asks if I want to take just the plaque for $199? I wonder how much Buffett was charged to have his life changed in this way? I would have asked her but she doesn’t give me the chance. She can’t get off the line fast enough. Not even a goodbye.
Marquis claims in their literature that you have to be nominated to be in their book. So who nominated me and, if someone actually did, why? As great a privilege as it might be to throw $900 away, I’m not worthy.
Who am I if I’m not in Who’s Who? My interviewer wanted to know at one point if I had a motto, words I lived by. To what did I attribute all my success? I replied that I’d leave it to Marquis to sum it all up since they were the experts.
