Letter

My fourth book was supposed to be my third. I thought I’d finished it in 2015, after going away to a Minnesota artists’ retreat near the boundary waters, the birthplace of every mosquito that ever was. I sent it to agents and publishers and none of them wanted it. I kept trying for a time, but then shelved it.

In the following couple years, I had four or five other book ideas meet similar fates; though I didn’t get nearly as deep into them as this one. It kept eating at me. Last year, Jerry at Tortoise accepted Music to My Eyes so I put most of my energy into getting that book together. Then, sometime this year, Soviet Stamps started tugging at my sleeve again.

I reread it and decided to dive back in. I asked one of the editors of my first book to take a crack at it, then, when she didn’t discourage me from going on, incorporated her suggestions. The experience of making the music book basically soup to nuts made it a lot easier conceive of completing this thing myself. I decided not to sit around waiting for another round of rejections and made up my own book imprint. I’m calling it Pictures & Blather, just like this newsletter. 

I’ve realized while trying to get the music book out there that I’m peddling a print with some words in it, more or less. Thinking of books as art objects brings them closer to what I’ve been doing my whole life. Before that, I was dealing with an impenetrable monolith called the book world. My few inroads were mainly as a reviewer, but I rarely felt part of any sort of community. Now that no one is paying me to review books, I can disengage more completely.

In many ways it feels like I’m back where I was after graduating art school. I take jobs to get by and I do my artwork. The two are often not connected. I can live with that. The silver lining of no one giving a fuck is that you can do whatever you want.

The format of Soviet Stamps will be similar to that of Music to My Eyes. Limited-edition hardcover, foil-stamped. I’m sending it to the printers in Michigan this week. Shooting for a release in late-December/early-January. I’ll tell you more when I know more.

—The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook is now available. I wrote about the Heart of Chicago, where I lived for seven years.

I came home home a couple weeks ago to a children’s birthday party underway in the paved-over back yard of my building. I’d seen a sign on the door a few weeks before about some sort of block party and made sure to be away most of the day, but the street was open and there was no more than the usual noise from the idiot neighbors from across the way.

Daniel and Cindy, who live on the first floor, offered me a piece of chocolate cake before I could make my way upstairs. While I waited for Cindy to cut me piece, Daniel started asking me about my artwork. I’ve never said more than a few words to the guy. He always seemed like a meathead. Also, he hangs out with the cretins from the inbred rabbit warren across the way. They have lawn chairs on the sidewalk and are out there day and night, drinking and screaming at each other. One time I was awakened by a screaming match between Daniel and a couple cops at 5am, right under my window. I steer clear of him and his crowd as a matter of course.

But that night I couldn’t just nod and keep moving as usual; I’d accepted that piece of cake, so I had to make nice and talk to the guy. Before I knew it, he beckoned me into his living room to show me a budget-motel-grade painting of a Parisian café. He wanted to know if I could make him a sketch of the Eiffel Tower. Then, to my amazement I replied that I would. For $100. The amount gave him pause, but then he agreed. Just make sure and sign it, he insisted. “That way I know it’s real. So when you get famous, it’ll be worth money,” he said, with a goofy grin on his face. Just then, Cindy came back with my cake and I said goodbye and went upstairs.

The next day I knocked out the Eiffel Tower picture, popped it in a frame, and left it by Daniel’s door. A few days later, an envelope with a hundred dollar bill was left under my door, with a note from Daniel and Cindy, saying they loved the painting.

All those years of never turning down chocolate cake (or dessert of any kind, for that matter) finally paid off. 

I hadn’t read a book in Russian for thirty-five years until last week. A couple months ago, my father sent me a link to an hour-long documentary about a writer named Sasha Sokolov. I have an email folder full of links from my parents. I can’t say I’ll ever get to reading, watching, and listening to all of it, but now and again something in there grabs me. That’s what happened with the Sokolov doc. It’s called something like The Last Russian Writer and I can’t remember if there are English subtitles. Lately I’ve been trying to watch Russian movies more and it’s a big help if there are no subtitles because it forces me to just listen to the talking rather than reading the invariably limited and inferior English translation.

I’d heard of Sokolov before, probably for his first and best-known book, A School For Fools, which was handed around as samizdat in the 60s, then published in Russian in the 70s by a press in Michigan. There are several English translations, but I’ve been itching to see if I could get through a book in my mother tongue, so I took a copy out from the library. From the first sentence, it felt like taking a gulp of water after wandering in the desert for decades. It was something I’d missed without even knowing it. That said, it’s been very slow going and the edition I got has illustrations I dislike and is oversized, making it cumbersome. I called up my father to see if he had a copy lying around, but he couldn’t find one, so I went online and found one at Russian site for about six dollars. It’ll be good to have my own, because getting to the end of the book will probably take months.

I started the painting above the day after David Berman died. Because the sleepless night before inspired it, I was gonna name the painting in his honor. But as I worked on it I changed my mind. Center-left in the picture is a light blue-green rectangle with some yellow marks in the middle. It is the cover of a book of art from Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik. Joseph Lada’s illustrations were done after Hašek’s death in 1923 but are inseparable in my mind from the text of the story. They are also the basis for Jiri Trnka’s great 1955 animated film. I flip through this book every now and then and remember listening to Schweik’s adventures as my father or mother read them aloud when I was small.

Schweik was a fool who revealed the folly of those running his world. We could use a fool like that today because we’re so far through the looking glass there may be no way back without some serious outside help. Sokolov’s book, so far, is an attempt to render a different kind of lunacy. I don’t know that I’m getting it all yet but am thoroughly enjoying the music of his stream-of-consciousness phrasing. It’s pretty out-there stuff, but it makes a lot more sense to me than what I read in my adoptive language every day in the New York Times.

It’s a welcome reprieve.

—I went to see Jeff Parker perform his amazing album, The New Breed, and, not unlike with Sokolov and Schweik, it felt like that music made it easier to breathe. I’ve listened to the record dozens of times, but having it played in real time was very special.