Letter

I wake Saturday morning to find a UPS box by the back door to the side of the bikes. It must have arrived sometime Friday. This is where the landlords leave my mail when it is delivered to them.

I’m not expecting a package but judging by size and weight I have a suspicion about what it might be. Squinting at the label, spotting ISBN numbers, confirms it.

I wrote here in late summer about the bad turn my dealings with Arcade Publishing took. I’ve done a pretty good job of not fixating on the way a thing I had high hopes for going all to shit. There are plenty of other things for me to get obsessed with besides this one particular failure. But a box on a doorstep will snap one’s attention right back to what was far from mind.

When I effectively ceased communications with the editor in New York, I told him the only thing I expected out of his company going forward was the back half of my advance. I suppose somewhere in the back of my skull I knew they’d send the books anyway. Now they’re here. I can’t throw the box in the trash. I have to open it.

I flip through one, then the other. There’s nothing glaringly wrong. They didn’t put the author’s name and book title on every page like they did in the horrible excerpt they’d shared in August. The books look approximately the way I intended them to. I won’t pick over them too carefully because that just begs for disappointment and anger.

It’s a relief that they’re acceptable. I still have no intention of working with this publisher again but I won’t pretend these books don’t exist like I’d planned.

If you’d like a copy of Suicide’s Grave or Marvel Universe, just follow the breadcrumb trail. Both will be officially published November 4th.

A couple people I know died on a day K and I were in Western Massachusetts. She wanted to look at old cemeteries that day. Something must’ve been in the air. She’d looked up one about an hour away in an old guide book but my brother said there were a couple little ones in his town.

I don’t have any special attachment to boneyards. Maybe it’s because I know so few people buried in them. The youngest person lying in this one had arrived in 1909 or so. The first death news of the day was an old friend of my parents’ back in Russia. I have no memories of this man except his frequent mention when my folks talk of friends in the old country. They came to the graveyard with us and I assume they were thinking of him while looking over the field of weathered stones.

The other guy who died was someone I knew. I got the news via text and didn’t say much in response. I knew he’d been sick.

They say if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I got a couple more texts about his passing in the following hours. I made a few snide remarks to K and kept it to that for the most part. There’s little to be gained from sharing my thoughts sometimes. I found the first tribute posted online right away. There will likely be many more.

We went to a second little cemetery. In the first we were looking for faces with wings; there were none of those in the second. Instead, many stones featured hands, most pointing upward. My favorite, though, was holding a set of interlocked rings, the last one broken off. I’m guessing it’s an Oddfellows or Quaker thing.

There will be more frequent cemetery visits to come. Perhaps I’ll form more personal attachments to these places then. It’s the most natural thing I can think of.

K had a book of Philip Levine poems and gave it to me after she finished it. It’s really good. Stayed with me enough that I read one out loud into a microphone.

I spent a bunch of time thinking about Elaine May the past few weeks because of the bio by Carrie Courogen. I rewatched all her feature films, watched some Nichols & May clips, and wrote a thing about it.

A couple days before my birthday, K and I took in P.T. Anderson’s latest in 70mm at the Music Box. Everybody’s calling it the greatest film of the last thousand years but I was mostly bored by it. Except Sean Penn doing some kind of demented G.I. Joe Popeye thing. Sorry, but liking this toothless spectacle won’t end fascism in America.

I’m happy I live in a town where on a given night I can go with a friend to a place that looks like a converted Central-European social club to see a band like Brokeback.