Letter

I’d never heard of the Highland Clearances when June Sawyers asked me to illustrate her play about them. That play, along with Sawyers’ book on the subject, Bearing the People Away, proved to be invaluable resources as I worked away at the twenty-seven watercolor and Sumi ink paintings that comprise my contribution to her project.

Along with the written record, Sawyers shared many period photographs and illustrations. I based my paintings on these and many other images I found online on my own. I’m not an artist who trusts or is much interested in his imagination. I need to be looking at something in order to make marks on paper. It has to be pegged to something I believe to be real. That said, photography is a fraught and suspect medium to me. It’s always a wrestling match to wring some life out of those frozen frames; but, lacking a time machine, I made do.

My goal whenever I illustrate a book—be it my own or someone else’s—is not necessarily to dramatize key scenes but rather to enhance or accentuate the reading experience, sometimes to even provide a bit of counterpoint. I think of what I do as somewhat related to illuminating a manuscript rather than illustrating it like a children’s book or a comic. The pictures should provide pauses to reflect or daydream rather than do the work of the words.

I hope the paintings I made help tell Sawyers’ harrowing tale. Reading it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of how there seems to be no end to the ways people will find to torment one another. Still, painting sheep, grass-covered vistas, and groups of men and women in antiquated garb was a joy. Doing this work is the only way I know to come to grips with the sorrow and despair that inspires it.

I talked to Alex Sorondo about his epic profiles of William Vollmann and Mark Danielewski, as well as Substack and other things.

I wrote about David Cronenberg’s new film, hoping it’s not his last and talked to Mallory about the delightful Horrors of the Black Museum.

Watch Adam Curtis’s Shifty. It’s about England at the end of the 20th century but even more so about now.

I’m not an exhibitionist. I’ve never been to a nude beach or nudist colony. But my place has always been clothing-optional. Especially through miserable Chicago summers, the idea of having anything on inside feels absurd.

Now that K spends time here, this way of being means something else too, but mostly, it’s still just a matter of comfort.

The first time she came over she got worried about the street-facing windows. They are below sidewalk level, and, I assured her, during daytime, the light reflects off them such that we see out but can’t be gawked at.

One night, while waiting on the sidewalk for her car, she looked back at the house and pointed at how clearly the armchair inside was illuminated by the lamp. But we’re never naked in the front room at night, I answered.

Twenty five years ago, I worked at a restaurant with a tall, mean brunette. She and her boyfriend/husband had a band called Sin Ropas. My dead friend Rachel did their first CD cover. She worked at the restaurant too. I’m listening to that CD as I write this. Well, not the CD—I don’t own a copy, never did—but its virtual equivalent. The music’s not doing much for me. Certainly doesn’t give me the feeling of being unclothed.

Alone, or otherwise.

Here’s an article about a different restaurant. Clothing not optional.

So short is the life of a flower Yet so many hardships it suffers

Ever since Chicago Film Society screened When A Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), I’ve been down a Mikio Naruse funnel. That movie was relentlessly brutal but seductive at the same time. I’ve watched a bunch of others and the man is a connoisseur of human suffering. Every way one person can torment another is explored in delicious detail with multiple variants and permutations. I just can’t get enough!

Wikipedia says Naruse made shōshimin-eiga (“common people drama”). I guess that’s fair as far as it goes. There aren’t any kings or fairies or anyone very unusual in the movies I’ve seen so far. It’s kitchen-sink stuff which is catnip for me. Yet he makes the everyday trials of his little people excruciatingly sensuous somehow.

In Woman Ascends, a saintly bar hostess is put through a Job-worthy series of setbacks yet she just keeps smiling and plugging along. Like many of Naruse’s heroines, she’s resigned to her fate and sees no real way out. When these women permit themselves a moment of hope or dream the world slams the door twice as hard in their faces.

In Sound of the Mountain (1954), a young woman is trapped in a loveless marriage to a philandering shit, her only solace the relationship with her father-in-law. She wants children badly but has an abortion knowing that giving birth will bind her for good to a man she’s grown to despise but the love of the older man has arguably enslaved her even more than her husband’s neglect. There are layers and layers of complications throughout these films that never permit any of the characters an easy out.

In Scattered Clouds (1967), Naruse’s last, a pregnant newlywed on the verge of traveling abroad for her husband’s promotion, instead spends the ensuing decade mourning his death in a traffic accident, living on money from the man who ran him over, and eventually falling for that man. Everything and everyone in this story is cursed or doomed and in others’ hands this would be a ludicrous soap-opera but Naruse manages to wring tragic emotion out of it somehow.

Perhaps the bleakest in his pantheon of misery is Floating Clouds (1955), in which yet another young woman indentures herself to an older man. They meet in Indonesia and have an affair during the war, but when they come back to Japan to a ruined country, she obsesses over him though he clearly doesn’t want her anymore. Naruse keeps twisting the knife as she prostitutes herself just to remain near him, even paying for his wife’s funeral and paying for a lawyer for a jealous husband who kills the young wife the man had a fling with. When he gets a job in a remote mountain region she robs a grifter who’d raped her in her youth so she can make the journey with her beloved, only to die when they reach their destination.

I plan to keep watching more. I don’t know exactly why these movies work so well for me. Maybe it’s best I don’t know.

Just can’t look away.

According to WordPress, this is my 600th newsletter. There were many more going back the six or seven years prior to 2015, sent out whenever the mood struck me, before I signed up for Tinyletter but this is as far back as my archive goes. I want to thank everyone who’s stuck it out any fraction of these last ten years. In honor of this milestone, here is Newsletter #1:

Hello, 

So, I’ve caved in and signed up for this newsletter service. The main reason, of course, is convenience and ease of use. The programmers that design these things are miles ahead of anything I could ever even begin to learn so why fool myself, right? You have to pick your battles so sometimes it’s best to leave some of the minutiae to the professionals. I can’t imagine that there will be any substantive difference from my regular newsletter aside from your being able to unsubscribe easily and the formatting being better. But if you for some reason have a strong opinion on this please don’t hesitate to let me know. 

Best,

Dmitry