Last Monday, Bill asked me to dust off my old Chicago Sewer design for a t-shirt. I spent some time cleaning it up and here it is.
The next day raw sewage ran throughout the streets of the land. There’s no manhole cover ever made that will contain it.
I unsubscribed from the newspaper and canceled all upcoming public readings and sales events. I don’t know how to keep going except to burrow down as deep as I can. Just work, read, eat, and sleep. Keep my head down.
I was born in an authoritarian kleptocracy and I guess I’ll be dying in one.
It’s too horrible for any words I could ever imagine.
I remember playing Erudit—Russian-language Scrabble—the first few years in America. Can’t recall whether we brought it with or was sent to us after we arrived but have a clear sense memory of the board and letter tiles. It was black Bakelite with no writing on the board, just different colored squares. Minimalist like a Mondrian or Malevich.
Don’t know if I was any good at it but know I didn’t play long. Switched to the American version soon after and didn’t look back for decades. It was my favorite game for many years. I got good enough that people didn’t want to play with me. Then, after a time, that led to me abandoning it.
There was a brief reprise online but those people were geniuses or bots. I couldn’t keep up.
Every now and then someone would post a picture of Erudit on eBay or Etsy. It would stop me for a moment or two but I never pulled the trigger. Then, a couple months ago, my favorite Soviet crap vendor posted a travel set for sale and I bit.
It looks nothing like my childhood one—I’ve never seen a photo of one that corresponds exactly with my memory, making me think maybe it’s at least partly imagined or augmented—but the weight of the little set, the yellowing plastic cover, the little Cyrillic magnets, all hold an ancestral charge. These rudimentary components of my mother tongue, manufactured in the country of my birth, mean something to me.
There’s anxiety connected to opening the little case. I still speak and read the language but spelling’s a problem. It’s a big helpless insecurity that I make so many mistakes when I try to write. There’s this gut feeling that I should be able to do it without thinking about it, without effort. This is ridiculous, of course. I went to part of first grade in the old country. I have no Russian-speaking friends. The fact any fragment of the language stays with me is a minor miracle.
And yet I can’t help but feel embarrassed.
I’ve only played one game so far. I had the dictionary open and still made a ton of mistakes. It took hours and I was exhausted by the end. I quit before all the tiles were used; a thing I would have never allowed myself playing the English-language version.
The set sits just to the left of this armchair taunting me. I’ll play again. I have to.
The new layout of my bookshelf stars Buratino. It’s completely transformed since I began selling off much of my library. There are few enough that I can face the ones with the best covers.
The bookshelf paintings have always had a stage-like aspect to them. The strong horizontals of the wooden (or particle board) slats suggest a floor and the multi-colored verticals of paperbacks and hardcovers are either set-decoration or characters, depending on how you want to see it.
The newly-emptied and partly-refilled shelves are a chance for me to write a new play. Of course the players and background workers are the same they’ve always been. I haven’t entirely started over and can only use the tools and methods I know. Still, there are definitely differences.
For instance, the piece below started as two separate paintings that I realized, after looking at them on the wall for weeks, were each missing something. Cut up a bit and taped together they make a new whole that’s greater than its two parts. This kind of editing/reworking would not have been possible had I not been making collages the last four years.
Buratino is of course the Soviet reworking of Pinocchio. There’s only so many stories that people have. Everyone cribs from somewhere else. The hope is to add some new wrinkle or at least a different perspective that will distinguish your thing from whatever helped inspire it.
This current return to the bookshelf makes me think of other old motifs to re-plunder. But there’s no way back up some roadways. I have an ink painting of my 24th Street apartment up in my bedroom at the moment. It was made almost twenty years ago. I study it out of the corner of my eye while watching TV sometimes. I try to imagine attempting something similar now and just can’t see that I could pull it off.
