Letter

I wake at 6am, make a cup of tea to go, and drive west. It’s my second time taking part in Paper Plains Zine Fest in Lawrence, Kansas. Two years ago, I mostly went to hang out at Adam and Elizabeth’s farm and to meet a bunch of their friends. This time feels like a long-delayed return. I skipped last year because I was over-extended with concurrent art shows, a new book that was being printed badly by a disturbed person, and events piling on top of events. I regretted missing it anyway. This year feels a bit calmer, pace-wise, so I’m happy to spend time with my friends out in the endless plains.

The big complication this time is a nagging head cold I can’t shake. It begins the day before I leave and lets up just enough for me to handle a day of tabling and a night reading the last day of my trip. My head feels like an aquarium filled three-quarters-full of tepid guck. I’m never incapacitated to the point of being bedridden but never well enough to enjoy much of anything.

I listen to Ananda Lima’s Craft—Stories I Wrote for the Devil on the way out and Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth on the way back. Neither are books I would have necessarily picked up to read but both surprise me in how they get away with magical/speculative elements that normally take me out of a story. The Lima book—with The Master and Margarita hanging over it like an approving ghost—nimbly incorporates myth into up-to-the-moment reality in a completely seamless way.

I get to the farm late afternoon. Adam is running around the house, finishing last-minute chores before a bunch of other out-of-towners arrive. They’re hosting five or six here. Andrew arrived from England already. He and Adam maintain a continual shit-talking banter throughout the weekend. It is borne of prior book/music tours. The reading I’m part of Sunday is the launch of their upcoming jaunt west.

After a time, Elizabeth arrives with Trace. They’ve been running around buying bedding for the guests. I’m wiped out from the drive and the nagging congestion, so I drive with Trace to Jessie’s in Lawrence. It’s where we’re both staying. At her house, everyone else soon goes out to drink; I lie on a thin mattress, tucked into an office/pantry nook, trying to sleep or breathe. Only intermittent success at either.

Day two is a bunch of events I mostly skip. I sit at the house finishing American Skin, blowing my nose, drinking tea, napping. This is not how I meant to spend this visit. I can read a book and be sick much better in Chicago.

I rally enough to go see Jon Nix’s Justin Pearson doc at ECM. There are drinks after in the patio of bar where a woman is doing her best Sheryl Crow/Tracy Chapman impression to the cheerful annoyance of all in our group of snobs. Jessie’s exhausted from running around, so I offer to drive to KC to pick up Rich from the airport at midnight.

Rich is a bread baker in San Francisco. He’s coming just to reconnect with his old San Diego friends Adam and Jessie. He has nothing to promote or sell. I mention the only restaurant people I know in his city and of course he knows them. That Steven Wright line obtains, as always.

I rise before anyone else the next morning. I will myself into the shower with the false belief my head is clearing. The day before I toyed with the idea of just going home, but today I’m determined to power through. I leave the house and get breakfast at a happening spot on the main drag. My server has the ironic mustache and cool band shirt of a thousand recent college grads. Probably in a band, still dreaming rockstar dreams, though too cool to say it.

I’m greeted at the zine fest venue by Elizabeth and immediately put to work cutting out P A P E R P L A I N S Z I N E F E S T from multi-colored printer paper.

Andy sits next to me. He’s here from Plymouth. We talk shit about Boston and he tells me about his podcast. Jessie is publishing his forthcoming book.

The day trudges along the way every day tabling does. My face hurts from false smiling and my voice starts going from repeating variations on an identical spiel. The only positive is a bunch of book sales. It’s almost always the only positive. Afterwards, I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.

At ECM, I put out the books I’d packed up an hour before. There’s a buffet dinner of vegan hot dogs, sloppy joes, and rice. A group photo on the lawn for which Jessie asks to sit on my shoulders for reasons only she knows. Then a reading upstairs in a large hall of the deconsecrated church that now houses this community center. The rest of the readers will go on to do it again in Topeka and points west but my duties to literature, art, and promotion are done for a few days.

In an odd confluence, Deborah is about to move to Manhattan, Kansas, a couple hours down the road from Lawrence. This means I’ll likely be out this way in the future. She says they call her new town “The Little Apple.” I don’t know whether to find that funny, sad, or both.

I drop Andy off at the KC airport, then drive east, back to Chicago. My head is now clear, mostly rid of phlegm, just in time to resume my regular routine. It makes me think of the time I hid a serious ear infection when I was ten so the family trip to Disney World wouldn’t be canceled. The moral is always to stay home.

I’m glad I went to Kansas anyway.

Mallory and I tackle The Bride and The Bride of Frankenstein.

I’m driving to Kansas in a couple days. There’s a zine fest and some readings happening. I hope to sell some books. I’m looking forward to seeing Adam, Elizabeth, and Jessie, perhaps meeting a few new people. I’ll probably write about how it went next week.

I realized after last week’s letter went out that I forgot to mention Kansas. When you read this, I will be driving back to Chicago. Things get away from me sometimes. Had I mentioned it, maybe you’d have canceled your weekend plans and driven, flown, or walked to Kansas to see me. I’ll miss you but that’s my fault.

Irvine woke me with a text at 6am last week, saying he’s coming to town for a tribute to our friend Don at the Metro. I go but don’t stay too long. Don’s funeral was a couple months ago. It’s very hard to process his passing and being in a room of people I mostly don’t know to grieve communally is not my bag.

The next day I meet Irvine at a coffeeshop in his old neighborhood. Then we go to lunch where he insists the waitress snaps a picture of us. I look like I’m catching flies. It’s good to catch up with him. He remains a machine of productivity and good cheer. It’s unbearably hot but he’s happy as a clam. Don’t know how he does it.

I’m reading American Skin for the first time since it came out with Don’s memorial photo card as a bookmark.

My book-release went well, I think. Here’s a passable recording of it.

Pete wrote some of the most touching words I’ve ever read about my work this week in his newsletter.

I was a guest on Framed & Bound to talk about Can You Ever Forgive Me.

Will be at Printers Row Lit Fest this weekend sharing table space with Maudlin House (AKA Mallory) in the Small Press Tent. Come say hello and buy a book or three.

Since returning from California, I’ve spent most free moments researching, photographing, and posting books for sale or donation. The time spent in a newly-bought mostly empty house changed something in my head. Or, more precisely, pushed it through a threshold it had been milling about the last few years.

It’s about my relationship to objects of value. I slashed the prices of my artwork as low as I can a few years ago and have had few regrets about it. Now it’s time to apply a similar strategy to things in my home that I no longer need.

I started with electronics a couple months ago. I had pretty good success unloading old cellphones, a camera, and a projector. I moved on to gig posters and have now settled in on the books. It’s what I have most of by far.

A couple years back I did a pretty significant cull, then removed the dust jackets from the ones I aimed to keep. Thankfully, I didn’t throw those away. Because now that I’m trying to sell the books, these extraneous appendages improbably add value. I dig out the crate from below my work table and set about redressing the tomes, one by one.

This process is an outgrowth or side effect of my time at Tangible. Learning the used-book racket from one of the masters has reconfigured my relationship to books. I like helping people find what they’re looking for or introducing them to things they may not know about, but the desire to keep anything for myself has almost entirely vanished. Joe talks about once having an entire library at home and gradually feeding it all back into the store. A similar thing is happening to me.

It’s not entirely about raising funds, though the extra money doesn’t hurt. It’s more about making passive objects active again, about giving them a purpose they no longer serve here.

I invite nobody over so there’s nobody to impress with the treasures I’ve gathered over decades. I used to be reluctant about parting with art books, thinking I’d return to them for reference or inspiration. But at this point, most sit on the bookshelf gathering dust, unopened, for years at a stretch.

As soon as I began taking them out and piling them in stacks by my armchair, queued to be looked up, it’s as if they woke from their slumbers. Now there’s a reason and direction. They will all hopefully find new homes in which they’ll be loved and appreciated.

And I’ll have empty shelves and a pile of cash.

I talked to novelist Eugene Marten, then to Mallory about two versions of The Wicker Man, and sat through a completely unnecessary stage adaptation of Network.