Letter

People don’t believe me or laugh it off when I say I don’t like cats. It goes back to childhood. I don’t like the way they look at me. Makes me wonder why anyone would invite one into their home. But this is not what most people I know think or feel.

I wouldn’t let my college girlfriend have one when we lived together but I’ve cohabitated with a couple since then. A roommate had one when I moved back to Chicago in 1997. He didn’t take very good care of it, letting it wander into the painting studio/living room at the front of the apartment. It ran around with a streak of cadmium yellow in its coat for a time. He would sometimes forget to feed it, so I did. He moved out after a few months so I don’t know that cat’s fate.

The other cat I lived with was very old. I dug a hole and buried him in my girlfriend’s backyard after he passed. She asked me to dig another hole for her friend’s dead cat, so I did that too.

Now I’m involved with a woman who’s very attached to cats. She takes care of ferals in her neighborhood and laughs at my attitude towards her favorite animal. She say I’m like a cat. When I tell her this is just her way of saying she likes me, she refuses to concede the point.

Last week I watched Skyler and Alicia’s recently-adopted stray. I mostly agreed to do it so K could go over there and play with him. The first time she came with me we couldn’t find him. The second time, she spotted him but he disappeared back behind the bed seconds later. The third time, he came out and played. He never appeared once when I was there solo. This didn’t bother me. I wasn’t there to make friends. I was only doing a favor for people, not cats.

I was going to write about these new t-shirt designs based on images from James Hogg’s The Suicide’s Grave but decided that was stupid and self-serving. Anyhow, there’s one of skulls, another of weapons raining from the sky, and a third of the skulls from before but in white on dark shirts. Get a couple for that special someone. They’re sure to love you even more than they do already.

Got to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts.

In case you use Bezos’ Bazaar and want a paperback of Old Style, the preorder is there for you. I’ll have copies in a few weeks…

I started illustrations for The Jungle. A bird’s eye view of the stockyards with countless cattle corrals and smokestacks in the distance. Portraits of Sinclair and the other contributors. The first of what will likely be many pictures of men posing with ripped-open carcasses. This is the sixth book I’ve undertaken in the public domain series. I wonder how many there will be when I’m done. Thinking about Melville’s The Confidence Man or maybe Tristram Shandy next. But four are already queued up for next year. Who knows? Maybe I should take a break. But what would that even mean? How would I spend the hours, days, and weeks?

The hardcover of Old Style is gone but for a couple copies at Tangible. Should I make a paperback? Would anyone even want it without that foil-stamped blue cover? The thing with each of the four hardcovers I made is that many people who pick them up are disappointed that there’s text and pictures inside. They want them to be blank books with a cool cover that they can fill with their own important thoughts.

I recorded a talk with John Tottenham. As soon as we were done I jumped on the bike and raced downtown to the Siskel to catch Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear. He made it for German TV in 1975 and there’s still not much on TV like it. Right between Polanski’s Repulsion and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. So painful, but I couldn’t look away.

Thursday and Friday, K and I started a new Thanksgiving tradition of watching the entire run of Horace and Pete. Hadn’t seen it since the awful year it came out but it’s lost none of its despairing power. Notwithstanding its creator’s fall from grace or the horrific political era it anticipated, as great art is wont to do.

The preorder’s up for Winesburg. Buy early and often.

Trying a different t-shirt company. Here’s the Chicago Sewer shirt.

Ben asked for a cover design for his new zine, then for an ad for my own things to be placed inside. I put something together without a second thought. That’s strange because I come from a time when artistic integrity was put in opposition to commerce. Getting called a sell-out carried some meaning and consequence. It’s laughable to look back on now, when every scrap, actual or virtual, is up for sale to the lowest bidder.

I’m reading a book about Margaret Anderson, founder of The Little Review, which started in Chicago and is best known as the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. The lengths and depths to which she and her colleagues had to scramble for funds to keep the lights on is equal parts familiar and depressing. Has there ever been a time or place where artist were valued and just allowed to do their thing in peace? Does the practical difficulty of getting the work done necessarily give it value?

Every creative person I’ve ever known or heard of serves at the pleasure and whim of some master or other. Either they have independent means or they bend their craft to a patron’s will. I tend to romanticize anonymous or barely known artists like Andrei Rublev or Albert York; guys about whom little is known, who functioned according to somewhat mysterious or unknowable rules. But the first could only operate at the pleasure of church and state and the latter was free to spout commercial chores because of family money.

I work my ass off putting the work out there but often fall short of meeting my meager financial obligations. I’m fortunate to have a family to help when needed. There are also longtime supporters of my work who step up over and over. I have little to complain about. I just can’t help wonder if there’s some better way to fund the work of people like me, whose work doesn’t easily fit into market slots.

I recently published an essay/review on a comic strip compilation about indie movie theater employees who foment a revolution. It’s a funny/untenable fantasy but I don’t have any brighter ideas for a way forward. The publication in which this article appears is on Substack, a platform that started as a paid newsletter service but has more recently expanded to include more social media features. I’m grateful to the people who run the publication and wish I could do more to help them grow their readership but don’t have the slightest clue how to do that.

I’ve tried to figure out how to use the subscription thing any number of ways with very mixed results. I hate quantifying my work in any way as it prompts dark thinking and stifles any kind of creativity but there’s just no way of getting around the fact that day-to-day life costs in units not measured by brushstrokes or word-count.

This newsletter, which I’ve kept up in various formats and on numerous platforms for over fifteen years, has lately been losing readers. I don’t know why and don’t want to know. Nothing good could come of hearing the answer.

My persistent fantasy of a government (or whatever other colossal entity) sending a truck to my front door every month and taking away what I made in exchange for chits or allowance keeps not coming true.

If you have any bright ideas about any of this, I’d love to hear them.