Letter

I never thought much about Walt Whitman or poetry on the written page of any kind for that matter. Of course I’ve heard the famous bits and pieces over the years, they’re almost unavoidable, but I have to admit I’d never sat down and read an entire poem of Whitman’s until a couple Saturdays ago in the basement of a beautiful, art-filled home in Evanston, crowded in with about fifty others, all taking turns reading verses of “Song of Myself”.

Tony Adler, who assigns me plays to review at the Reader, invited me to the 33rd annual Whitmanstide, where as many guests as are willing take two or so hours to read Whitman’s famous poem in its entirety. As a rule, I tend to ignore party invitations. The reasons are many, tedious, pitiful, and not really worth going into. Suffice it to say that I don’t do well at social gatherings. But I wanted to go to this one because I wanted to put some faces to some names. It’s bizarre to work with people for a year or more and never spend time in the same room. It’s commonplace these days, of course, but I’ve never gotten used to it. So, unlike most parties, I could explain attending to myself with the argument that it was important to actually meet a few people I felt like I’d started to know.

Tony greeted me at the door as a total stranger until I told him my name. Then there was a smile of surprise and a handshake. Apparently, few Reader freelancers who get his invite actually bother to show up. But many, many other people did. Every room of the house was full of them. Talking, laughing, drinking, eating people. I squeezed my way to the bar and got a double whiskey.

Tal and his wife Tayler were the only ones I recognized among this throng. Tal’s my main conduit at the Reader. After working together a couple years we have a pretty good rapport. After saying hello to them I drifted around, looking at the art on the walls, the books on the shelves, soaking in the sound of dozens of conversations going at once. A guy named Hank asked me how I knew Tony, then asked if I’d seen Tracy Letts’ latest. I told him I had and also that Tony and I had had diametrically opposite reactions to it. It’s a play about a small-town city council which turns into Children of the Corn. (Tony loved the horror-movie twist; I did not.) Then Hank and I talked about Letts’ recent movie appearances. We both agreed he’s cornered the market on world-weary, put-upon-dad-with-mental-issues roles.

Then Tony announced that anyone who wanted to read should make their way to the basement. The long narrow room quickly filled, with late stragglers finding no place to sit, crowding the doorway. Tal and Taylor ended up sitting on the floor near me. Everyone who hadn’t brought their own copy of Leaves of Grass picked up a photocopy of “Song of Myself” from the coffee table and settled in. Tony read the first of its fifty-two sections, then we continued clockwise around the room. I instantly regretted leaving my sketchbook upstairs. I rarely get the chance to watch this many people sit together in a confined space for a protracted length of time like this. It was kind of like being in a train car, except that no one was allowed to get off and leave for two hours. A captive audience and I blew it.

I followed along as the stanzas crept closer and closer to me. Poetry hardly ever moves me sitting on the page, but hearing it read is another matter. When it’s good it floats through the air, in and around the reader and the listeners. I can’t say I caught every line or even most of the nuances, but throughout the two hours in that basement there were many, many beautiful moments. The fact that so many different voices took their turns definitely added to the experience. This poem, attempting as it states to contain multitudes, benefits by being recited by many rather than just one.

The poem struck me overall as incredibly American in its optimism, openness, and bluster. Its faith in the basic goodness of the world reminded me not for the first time that I’m not from this country. Were I ever to compose myself it would doubtless sound very different. Still, there was much that hooked me anyway.

It’s unavoidable to connect the past to the present, so the nervous laughter anytime Whitman mentioned politics or presidents was no surprise. If I’m thankful to Tony and to Walt Whitman for anything it is for lifting the ever-present malaise of the past year for a couple hours. A gathering like this is the polar opposite of the daily end-times horrorshow of life in 2017 America.

It all came creeping back into my head as I left that cheerful house. I see little to look forward to in the coming year but an invite back to Whitmanstide would be more than welcome. If the kleptocratic thugs running this country leave the path from my house to Evanston passable next December, I’ll be there.

I make a not insignificant chunk of my living painting pet portraits. I can’t recall how I got into that racket but it’s been good to me. There are many more people out there who want their dog immortalized than people who want to look at pictures of somebody else’s cluttered bookshelves. I’m not happy about that but I’ve made my peace with it; I have no other choice if I want to survive. I can knock out most of these commissions in a few days. The pet owners are happy; I get paid; everybody wins. I’ve rarely had any trouble completing or delivering these pictures. They’re usually gouache, watercolor, or ink on paper, and rarely larger than 15×20 inches. Most customers live in town so I hand deliver and thus don’t have to deal with the perils of the post office.

I know Heather from back when I was on Twitter. She came to my reading in Massachusetts a few years back. She wrote to me a month or two ago about ordering a painting of Cabiria, her cat. But unlike the many who came before her, Heather wanted an oil painting, and a good-sized one at that. We settled on a price and I got to work. A couple weeks later it was done. I packed the 22×30 inch painting carefully into the box my flatscreen TV had come in and walked it to the UPS Store.

Because Heather had had trouble with USPS deliveries just like I had, she gave me a p.o. box as her address. But, in a bit of cruel irony, this meant that I had to use USPS to ship her painting because UPS doesn’t deliver to p.o. boxes. To add insult to injury, it wound up costing more than double what I’d quoted her. I offered to knock a bit off the grand total and sent her the tracking number. Then we settled in to wait and hope.

Three days after I’d dropped the painting off the USPS site still indicated that only the shipping label had been printed and it was waiting to be picked up. I went back to the store and was assured that it had been taken the same evening I’d come in. This meant that the postal worker hadn’t bothered scanning it and the painting could be anywhere or nowhere by now. I’d mailed it on a Monday and the ETA was Friday, but Friday passed with no change in status. Heather and I emailed back and forth about it a few times but there was nothing either of us could do but wait.

Monday came with no changes, so I filled out a missing mail form on the USPS site. I have yet to get confirmation that they’ve received that either, but I guess I should know that’s par for the course. I kept checking the tracking status several times a day. I know the adage about insanity being to do the same thing over and over expecting a different result but I have a one-track mind, so until whatever’s obsessing me is resolved or crashes and burns I will keep banging my head against that wall. This is a good attribute for art, less so for life, as I’m continually taught.

I started forming contingency plans. Heather had sent me a downpayment which didn’t quite cover what I’d payed to ship the lost painting. Would she accept a smaller painting on paper as a replacement? Should I just send her back the deposit and call the whole thing off so I could battle USPS full-time? But these and another half dozen options dissipated from my mind when, late Tuesday night, I looked up the tracking (for about the sixth time that day) and saw it changed to IN TRANSIT. After wandering for eight days, my painting had arrived at a regional facility in Springfield, MA before being dispatched north to Heather’s town in New Hampshire.

A couple days later it was marked delivered, so I could stop obsessively checking the USPS site and move on to wondering whether the painting arrived in one piece and whether Heather likes it.

For the entire eleven days of this ordeal the thought of Cabiria’s painting lost somewhere out there ate at the edges of everything else that was going on in my life. But now it’s time to switch gears, get a buck up my ass about something else. It shouldn’t be long.

It was great to hear Chris Brokaw play in Janet Bean’s living room last Friday. You should go buy all his records if you have any sense of decency at all.

Nobody at the Trib had answered an email in about a year, so it came as quite a surprise when they asked me to write a review of The Hunting Accident. I took a quick look at the synopsis and wrote back I’d do it. If nothing else, getting hired to write a review is good motivation to read a book I might not have otherwise. They asked if there was any conflict of interest—if I knew the authors, publishers, etc.—but I couldn’t think of any, so it was a go.  

The Hunting Accident is a book-length (over 400 pages) comic about Matt Rizzo, who was blinded during a botched armed robbery, roomed with Nathan Leopold, then devoted the rest of his life to writing an epic text on a brailler in the style of Dante Alighieri. It is also the story of his son, Charlie, who came to live with him in Chicago at age 10.

As I flipped page after page over the two days it took me to get through this sizable tome, I wondered why I was assigned to review it. Was it because I write about Chicago and also make art? I didn’t grow up with comics and often have a hard time even knowing how to read them. I love Chris Ware, R. Crumb, and Ben Katchor’s work, but they are by no means traditional practitioners of the form. Often over my time with The Hunting Accident I couldn’t decide whether to look at the pictures or read the words, because more often than not the two didn’t cohere.

Approaching the last few pages, I flipped to the credits at the end and a lightbulb went on: a few years back, I had a meeting with an agent representing Charlie Rizzo. She thought I might be the one to write his father’s story. But I never even met Charlie and the agent stopped answering follow-up queries. They had moved on and this thing I was now about to write a review of was the result.

The book is a mess. The drawing is incompetent and the writing is disorganized. I’m surprised it was even published. I was convinced of this before realizing my very tangential connection, but, knowing it, would my harsh judgement be seen as sour grapes? I turned in my review over a week ago and haven’t heard back yet. I have a feeling it won’t be published. The only other negative review I wrote for the Trib was killed. There aren’t many reviews of The Hunting Accident to be found online but the ones I’ve read are damn near rapturous, so mine would be an outlier. We’ll see what happens.

Knowing that in an alternate universe this might’ve been my book is an odd thing to think about. I would’ve done it very differently. Of that I’m certain. The best example of this kind of thing which comes to mind is Jodorowsky’s Dune. I don’t mean to imply I was born to tell Matt Rizzo’s story the way Jodorowsky certainly was to tell Herbert’s, but in a very small way what I experienced after reading this comic was a similar glimpse of what might’ve been.