Letter

Keith Lewis came into Tangible one day and pitched me an idea. He wanted me to illustrate a Chicago alphabet book that would serve as the first title of his new publishing imprint, Broken Nose Books.

I’ve known Keith over ten years. He was a regular at Hardboiled Coffee in Beverly, where I worked a couple afternoons a week. Then he took over a neighborhood bookstore called Bookie’s and turned it from a shabby place next to a 7-11 in a pocket strip mall to a nice, well-organized business. He had a second location in downtown Homewood for a time and I did book events at both locations.

All that to say that this was not someone who just said things. All too often in the book and art rackets people have good intentions and lofty aspirations; very few follow through. Boilerplate contracts, show dates, promised sales, and all manner of other good things have been dangled in front of my face over the decades. I used to get my hopes up but get burned enough times and you learn to become gunshy as self-preservation, if nothing else. Now, when someone floats something they want me to do, it’s just a thought-balloon until there’s money on the table.

I quoted Keith a price, saying I’d need half down to do anything and figured that would be the last I heard about it but there was a Venmo notification via email within a few days, so it’s been on since then. I’m about halfway done and it’s going pretty well. The book will be a sixty-page hardcover printed by the same people who did my art book.

I’m alternating days working on that with days on The Jungle. The prose is still a slog but there’s no shortage of images to work from. Between the two projects, it’s Chicago day in day out, which suits me just fine.

Got a few copies of the new paperback version of Old Style. If you order from me, the book is signed and hand-stamped with a custom bookplate. If you don’t want that personalized crap, pick one up from Bezos’ Bazaar or Deathstar Direct. They all come with an extra story that’s not in the hardcover.

I tore through Abel Ferrara’s memoir in a few days. It’s one of the best artist books I’ve ever read. I’ve been watching or rewatching his movies one after another building up to writing something about him. The book definitely casts the movies in a new light. Like home videos from one guy’s life.

Just before that I was similarly consumed with Denis Johnson. The thing I wrote about him came out last week. The ratio or relationship between their books and movies are sort of inverted, of course, since Johnson was a writer not a filmmaker. Still, there’ve been enough movies made or proposed to make that medium a conduit for new readers for his books.

From what I know, Ferrara only ever wanted to make movies and Johnson just wanted to write, yet these other media play their part. In a smaller way, live readings are like that to writers. I did a reading last week and wondered not for the first time what, if any, effect the event had on the work.

In a very practical sense, since the thing I read was a work in progress and I had an imposed time limit, an hour before the reading I sat at the bar with a bottle of wine and my Parker Jotter, crossing out paragraph after paragraph, switching page sequences, ripping papers in half and crumpling discarded segments.

The next morning, I used the doctored sheets as reference for the digital file of the ongoing thing. A movie isn’t a book and a book isn’t a reading but sometimes each will play its part.

RIP Bela Tarr. One of my favorite filmmakers. Here’s an old review I wrote of a frustrating little book about him.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a page of some of my books and favorites by others purchasable directly from the Death Star (AKA Ingram).

Go see Jarmusch’s new one if you’ve ever had a father, mother, or siblings.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is the seventh public domain book I’ve worked on. It’s the first that I didn’t choose. This was Mallory’s choice. It seemed like a no-brainer. It’s set in Chicago. It’s angry about the state of the country. It’s about immigrants. The thing I didn’t take into account or forgot about was what a poor stylist Sinclair is.

Perhaps this shouldn’t matter so much in a book that was clearly meant as agitprop and succeeded as such. How many books can you name that changed government policies? But the way a book is written matters to me. I’ve quit on new books after a paragraph because I couldn’t see going on with a thing that contained this sentence or that phrase.

I first read The Jungle many years ago. Don’t ask how many because I couldn’t begin to guess. Definitely after I moved to Chicago, which narrows it down to the last thirty-five years. All I can recall is being interested in the description of the slaughterhouses and immigrant living conditions and put off by the Communist harangue at the end.

Working on it now, I find myself reading a sentence or two, then skipping ahead. I’m looking for images to render and luckily for me there are no shortage of them. Many include animals in living and dead states, in groups or in parts. I’m not worried about finding enough material to fill the book but don’t know how I feel about this half-reading strategy. With the previous six in the series, I read and re-read and often listened via audiobook. This time I’m engaging as little as I can. Just enough to do the work.

I’m currently at twenty drawings and expect to make at least twenty more. While drawing, I listen to podcasts and music. Nothing to do with The Jungle. To be fair, that was my approach with the other books as well. The immersion in the text stops the moment my pen or brush touches paper. It helps to have my mind on something completely different while making these images, strangely enough. It’s something like critical distance even as my goal is a kind of informal immediacy. This is difficult to explain but mostly true of my process, whether illustrating or making standalone art.

The juggling of near and far, aware and aloof, is the constant wrestling match of creating anything. So maybe the fact I can barely stand to read more than a couple of Sinclair’s paragraphs at a go will make the final result better? I have to hope so. All I know is that I will be through with it in the next month or so. Bill has promised to send me his intro soon, so, after that the thing will be formatted and filed away till its release next fall.

I’m also making painted illustrations for a Chicago calendar book that should come out at roughly the same time. It’s a good counterbalance to The Jungle. No bad feelings at all. Just image searches and painting.

Simple.

I’ll be reading something about the bookstore at Tuesday Funk tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see you there. A couple of the other readers have books that I’ve shelved in the past few weeks. I’ll have to tell them.