Letter

Dumplings of All Nations is an annual event that takes place at an undisclosed location in Little Village. I learned about it a few years ago when the hosts invited me to read an essay about food to the audience. I chose a thing about the Egg Palace, a gone and, blessedly, mostly forgotten diner on Cermak.

On Wikipedia there’s an impressive alphabetized list of dumplings which I’m sure is incomplete.

When I get this year’s invite I ask whether I can read again in lieu of cooking. No dice; they don’t like having repeat readers. The host suggests I just pick up some takeout from a favorite spot. That sounds like a copout. I could skip it this year or actually make something.

I’ve loved pelmeni since I was little. It’s a foundational Russian dish, like pad thai or meatballs & spaghetti.

I have a memory of visiting family friends in NYC and watching the woman of the house roll out dough on the kitchen table and cut out circles with a drinking glass. There’s flour all over the place. When I call my mother she says the memory’s right but it was Montreal rather than New York. I ask her about making pelmeni and she tells me her recipe.

The three or four recipes I look over online all recommend using a Kitchen Aid or such but I’m not about to invest hundreds of dollars for a one-off. I do get a rolling pin and a couple mixing bowls from the thrift store. Then I spend most of the rest of the day turning my kitchen into a flour- and dough-covered disaster area.

I add chili oil to the filling but otherwise mostly go by the recipe. I put three or four pelmeni in a boiling pot of water and stow the rest in the freezer for Saturday. They taste alright. Better than what I expected in the hours of their assembly.

On the day, I go back to the thrift store and buy a cheap porcelain serving dish. I’m one of the first guests to arrive and spend the next half hour waiting for water to boil while people squeeze by to get drinks or put away their coats. It’s kind of stressful and by the time I put the steaming dish out on the living-room table among all the other dumplings of the world I’m ready to go home.

I think the people who tried them liked them but next year I’ll make something different if they invite me back. It’s one of those things where the payoff isn’t nearly as satisfying as the build-up.

But maybe that’s always the way.

I talked to writer/podcaster/lover of remote locales Tyler Dempsey about many things.

My aunt sent me back an old sketchbook of mine that I’d given to my grandmother. I spent an entire day photographing and formatting for my site. It’s from a pretty crucial time. Covers my first stint as a cabbie, my move back to Chicago, and records traces of many long-gone places and people. I’ve never kept diaries so sketchbooks help me to remember.

There’s a drawing in there that’s the first thing I made towards what became Hack. Before I’d written a single word.

A shame this comment on a previous letter is spam:

“Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you. But, I have a question, can you help me?”

I’m working on the things that will go up on the walls of the bar in June. It’s still primarily student-time paintings altered/improved with gesso, acrylic, tape, marker, and bits of ephemera but it’s slowly changing.

I don’t know that I can pinpoint how these are different than the ones I made a year or two ago but they are. Maybe a little denser, less direct, more hermetic. I don’t know.

What I know is that I will run out of these old paintings and drawings to mangle this year or next. Then, it will be curious to find out what part of this remix/collage thing remains in how I make pictures. I can’t imagine it will ever entirely go away but can see it going more subterranean, internal. Already, new drawings I’m unsatisfied with get cycled into the new pieces rather than just discarded.

Those two skulls in the painting at the top of the letter are fragments from drawings I made in my portrait class at Dominican. They hung on the studio wall a couple weeks, then got cut up for the cause.

It’s spring break this week and rather than go rage in Fort Lauderdale I’m going to take part in a reading series. Tuesday Funk has been going over a decade and I’ve read there three or four times before. It’s a receptive audience in a welcoming room. I can’t say that for most lit world events.

Many never restarted after lockdown, so I’m grateful that Andrew and Eden got their ship sailing again.

If you’re reading this Monday, come hear me read from my last couple books tomorrow at the Hopleaf.

Talked with Mallory about Nadja. Read a few more pages from Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual into a microphone.

Made some recommendations at the bookstore.

Frank writes me Wednesday morning to say Olivia called in sick and he’s trying to find a new model for that day’s class. I write back that we’ll manage. Not to worry about it. I pack my book along with the Bluetooth speaker I always bring and start the ride west.

Three years ago when I first taught out in River Forest, I tried a half dozen bike routes. This time around I’ve mostly avoided Lake Street, favoring Madison or Division for most of the trip.

My least favorite part of the route—the same for most trips north—is the mile or so along Ashland Avenue between Archer and Cermak. It’s a bleak industrial stretch with plenty of broken glass and few traffic lights. Cars gun it like it’s a speedway along this stretch and I don’t feel safe in the roadway at any hour except 3am returning from bar shifts.

The trouble is it’s the most direct way to get me to every other place I’m going. Every other option adds time and distance and I’m not about riding for the sake riding ever. It’s always a means to an end.

I get to Dominican with about half an hour to spare. I like to take my time setting up the easels and the model’s chair. Normally, I plop my bag and coat in the far corner of the room but this time all of it goes in the middle of the room. I get a pillow from the top of the equipment closet and place it on the seat of the chair I’ve chosen. I sit down and open The Books of Jacob in my lap to see how I have to hold it to be able to read both pages without moving my head. Then I sip from the Styrofoam cup of cafeteria coffee and wait for the kids to arrive.

A couple weeks ago Diego asked half-jokingly when I’d be posing for the class. I think I said when Hell freezes over. Be careful what you wish for, Diego.

For the hundreds of times I’ve drawn and painted posed people, I’ve rarely returned the favor. There’s nothing about attempting to sit still for someone else’s art and/or education that is at all appealing. Time stands still and previously unknown parts of the body ache and otherwise call attention to themselves the longer you do it. It’s a miserable experience.

When everyone who will show up shows up, I break the news to the class. I tell them if they make me ugly they’ll flunk. No one looks too worried one way or the other.

I open my book and start reading.

I’ve been chipping away at Olga Tokarczuk’s epic for over three years now. I’m around two-thirds done. In the two hours of posing, I read about forty-five pages. A good clip for me. Jacob and his followers make deals with Polish officials, wife-swap, drink, and feud with traditional Jewish sects. My legs fall asleep. My neck hurts. There are itches all over. I call it around 3pm.

In the hallway the kids put up their portraits of me next to their homework—self-portraits drawn lefthanded. Seems like most of them had a good time. I tell them about the crit when I was in art school when our teacher’s girlfriend put up a big painting of him shirtless stretched out on a couch like a beached whale watching TV. No one knew what to say then.

This was less embarrassing than that.

Wrote a bit about my time on the East Side.