Letter

The sketchbook goes everywhere with me. Sometimes it’s a hiding place, a way to assuage social anxiety, other times just a way to pass hours I don’t know what to do with. Because I’ve never kept a diary, it’s the closest thing to a record of my days. Unlike many artists, I’ve never used a sketchbook to work up ideas for more finished work, or for any ideas at all for that matter. What I draw in there is what I see of where I’ve been. More often than not it’s faces of singers, readers, and sitters on public transportation which make me take the book out. I hardly ever know these people but drawing them establishes a tenuous connection (whether they know it or not). 

The last couple of sketches in the book I just finished were of the singer/songwriter Will Oldham and the electronic combo Bitchin’ Bajas. I don’t know any of them personally and likely never will, but for the 15 or 20 minutes when I was making marks as they played, I was engaged more actively with their music and for that, no matter what I end up with, these drawings matter.

I have a stack of about 15 finished sketchbook teetering on my studio book case. I don’t look at them that often but when I do there’s an occasional drawing which doesn’t seem so bad and, as a whole, each book does remind me of specific blocks of time. Remembering with pictures isn’t the same as remembering with words. It feels sturdier to me, less prone to sugarcoating or other revision after the fact. But that’s probably because drawing has been how I’ve talked with the world for over 30 years and I just trust it more. 

In the meantime, I started a new book. The first sketch is of a glass, wine bottle, and water carafe at Rootstock on Saturday night. Nothing profound here, but when I look at it later I’ll remember the porkbelly salad, mushroom tagliatelle, and two very different glasses of wine I had that night, the people I talked to and eavesdropped on, and it’ll happen without a single word jotted down anywhere.

I reviewed Svetlana Alexievich’s fascinating and galling oral history of the end of the Soviet Union this week and it got me thinking—not for the first time—about what a dangerous thing nostalgia is. In that book, dozens of people, from all strata of society, recall one of the bloodiest eras in human history fondly and long for its return. I miss people who aren’t around and occasionally think back to this or that thing which has happened in my life, but I never long to go back or return and replace the present. It’s unthinkable to me to live at any moment but now. Whether it used to be better or may be better some time in the future rarely figures into my thinking.

I spent a lot of last year writing about my childhood, but never in any of those many days and hours did that exercise of burrowing into my own past make me ache to be seven or thirteen or twenty-two. I hear people at the bar and elsewhere talking about what amounts to “the good old days” but in nearly forty-six years of drawing breath I have yet to be drawn to that sunny glow of yesterday. Election politics traffics in this sort of thing too. That’s what “Make America Great” is about. We should be careful what we wish for or we’ll be reliving Germany in the ’30s or Russia in much of the 20th century. My crystal ball is pretty cloudy but I truly hope we don’t voluntarily start going backwards.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a massive portrait project. It’s not the one of my friends, which I’ve shared with you before, but, what will eventually be about a hundred sketched likeness of writers and artists. They will be used to illustrate the contributors’ page of a literary journal called The Scofield. I got the job because a reader of this newsletter emailed to tell me that they needed somebody, so, aside from a way to get things off my chest, this thing can occasionally be a means for new opportunities. I’m thankful for that. Sometimes the stars just align. I was already doing portraits when this gig came along and now I’m about two thirds of the way through. The ones of my friends will be displayed at Rogers Park Social in August, but now I’m thinking I’ll include some of these ones as well. The Scofield calls their contributors ‘Dramatis Personae’ and that seems a good a name as any for my show as well. I wrote a few more short movie reviews and was a guest on WLUW’s Live From the Heartland along with theater legend Rich Catovsky. It was a fun talk.