Letter

Not long after my ex Deborah and my brother Boris built my website in late 2003, I found out about Statcounter. It was a program that counted how many people looked at the things you put online. It told you which pages people looked at the most and how long they spent looking at them. It told where they lived. It showed pie charts in different colors depending on what was being measured. I was hooked almost instantly.

The first place that hosted my site was run by a couple of artist/entrepreneurs. I remember the guy’s name was Mason Dixon. Guess he was into US history or borders or conflicts maybe. I think I traded a year or two of hosting time for a painting. We made the deal at Jinx Coffee on Division Street. I don’t recall how it worked when I needed something changed or fixed on the site because Mr. Dixon and associates were hard to reach. I moved the site to a couple other hosts before settling it in the Hong Kong domicile in which it has resided since 2008. My new hosts could answer any dumb technical question I could come up with. They were the ones who showed me how to add code to every page on my site so Statcounter could measure even more precisely whose eyeballs were on my work at any given moment.

I spent days cut-and-pasting that code into what was by then hundreds of unique html pages, each connected to a photo of a painting or drawing. Then, each morning, I’d log into the control panel, and over my morning coffee and cigarette, scrutinize the numbers. I did this every day for several years. Not once after one of these sessions did I alter a brushstroke or pen mark in response to that morning’s data. Yet I kept checking. Sometimes in the afternoons too. What was I hoping to find? Was there a figure or sum that would prove I was on the right track? A number that equaled success or accomplishment? 

A few years into this hollow ritual, I decided to scrap it. That meant going through now over a thousand pages and deleting the Statcounter code. It took days. The mindless motion of opening a file, highlighting code, pressing ‘delete’, then ‘save’, then uploading a batch of fifty or a hundred updated files to the server, was somehow satisfying. It was the opposite of what I did with a brush or a pen, a kind of time-out for my brain and my heart, whatever other appendages and organs I used for art.

It’s the same impulse that makes me decide to redesign my podcast site or change this newsletter. Each time it’s like coming upon a mountain in my path, feeling both dread and the inevitable. Because I know the only way past is through it. And I know I can’t stop myself and take an easier route. It always builds and builds until I have no choice.

But ever since I learned how to turn on a computer, this stat thing has been the bane of my existence. One of the healthiest decisions I ever made was quitting social media in 2015. That eliminated a ton of numbers and metrics from my everyday. Now I didn’t have to ‘like’ anything ever again. By then I had no idea how many visitors my art site had. Unless someone took the time to write me an email or say something in person, I didn’t know if anyone was looking at it and that brought me peace of mind. Every new service or app I try comes with some kind of stat component. The internet makes it very difficult not to quantify your every move.

When I moved my newsletter—which I’d been sending sporadically from my Gmail account—to Tinyletter, I had a weekly breakdown of ‘opens’ and other reader data. Each Monday I could look at a page that compared that day’s performance to previous weeks. I couldn’t not look at it even when I knew full well the knowledge gleaned was doing nothing good for my mental health. At Substack there were even more granular figures. I could practically find out what the reader was wearing and what room of their house they were in while reading my letter. The more information I got the more I longed to know nothing about any of it.

It wasn’t until the newsletter moved here to Ghost that I found a way to disable the stats. As of a couple months ago, I don’t know how many people open a letter or reread it. I have a ballpark figure of how many subscribers there are but only know for sure about the ones who pay monthly or yearly. I’m grateful for those but I don’t plan on doing anything specific to increase their cohort.

The new podcast setup gives me even less data. I know nothing about my listeners or even if I have any. A few times every week I catch myself opening the page that used to have the numbers only to recall I’d wiped it clean. Then I forget all about it and go work on actually making something.

I feel lighter. I know I have to keep consciously away from the numbers to feel even remotely sane. It’s the opposite of everything this thing is built for.

—Wednesday I talk to musician Matt Lux. But you can listen to the one with Tom Shannon or the one where I read from some books or some others while you wait.

This may surprise you but I don’t like saying bad things. Going negative doesn’t make me happy. I never turn on a movie or open a book hoping to hate it. I may be a masochist sometimes but I don’t go looking for pain. That’s why reading Adam Levin’s horrible Mount Chicago opened such a can of worms.

The reviews I write these days primarily run in the Chicago Reader. The way it works is I look through lists and reviews of upcoming books, then pitch ones I’m interested in writing about to my editor. It’s a lot easier to get her to bite if the book has a local connection. Almost a slam-dunk if it actually has the word ‘Chicago’ in its title. This may smack of parochial homerism but I didn’t set these ground rules. I’ve just learned the hard way to live by them. The paper I write for is for locavores, so I must keep our toddling town front-of-mind if I want my byline to keep running.

Fortunately for my editor, any mention of Chicago is blood in the water to me. I’ll read or watch or listen to pretty much anything that mentions this city. It’s as close to home as I’ve ever had and I will never stop being grateful. There are times though when this blind love blows up in my face. Like this Levin book. I don’t know what possessed me to pitch a review other than that ‘Chicago’ in its title. I haven’t read Levin’s previous two novels and the short stories I did read left no impression one way or the other. What made me think I’d like this new one?

It went bad from the start. After my editor gave the green light, I spent a fruitless month trying to get anyone at Penguin Random House to answer an email, much less send a copy of the book to read. I’d given up and moved on when my editor forwarded a pdf she managed to pry loose from that monolith. So I was now stuck having to read and write about the book after thinking I’d been spared.

The first thing that struck me was a weird typographical flaw. Every few pages a word would have one or two letters missing. These could be in the beginning, middle, or end of the word and occurred in no discernible pattern. I thought perhaps it was some intentional avant-garde experimental technique, but when I forwarded the file to a writer friend who’s close with Levin, he was as puzzled as me. He assured me Levin would be horrified to know a marred copy of his manuscript had gotten out into the world. The more pages I read, the more I began to wish many more letters were missing.

Back when I wrote for the Trib, I had a couple reviews killed. The first, because the editor decided, after assigning me the book, that I had a conflict of interest by sharing its publisher with one of my own books; a second, because she judged it unnecessarily negative. I’ve never gotten pushback like that from any editor at the Reader. I’ve had the occasional disagreement and/or wrestling match over phrasing or reasoning, but that’s as it should be. The only two pieces of writing I’ve written for the paper that didn’t run were killed by me. The first, because of a threatened lawsuit from a lunatic; the second, because I hated the book and didn’t see any merit in shitting on a thing that was clearly a misguided labor of love put out by a tiny press and written by a debut author. There are so few venues left for book reviews of any kind that publishing a negative one has to be thought through carefully.

A hundred pages into this six-hundred-page atrocity I wanted out in the worst way. But I knew my editor had allocated space for the review in a forthcoming issue and I didn’t want her thinking I was a spoiled baby or a flake. I take the job of reviewing seriously. I can’t skim through books or skip ahead because I know what it takes to write the damn things. What kept me going was the knowledge that a major press paid a sum of money I won’t speculate about to put this thing out into the world and I’d been hired—for an infinitesimal fraction of said sum—to judge it.

I took the iPad to restaurants and coffeeshops, complaining to anyone who made the mistake of asking what I was reading. When they asked what was so bad about the book, I mentioned the riddle about why a dog sucks its own dick. This book is like a dog that grew seven dicks and seven mouths to suck each one dry. The unfortunate asker would laugh and carefully back away.

The thing that haunted me the whole time is not what I knew I’d write once I got through reading but what that mutual friend I asked about the weird typos would think. He’s a faithful friend and took exception to a bad review Levin’s first book got years ago. Is sharing an honest opinion worth losing a friend over?

The thing I wrote is out there now. We’ll see if there’s any fallout. I’m just glad not to be reading that damn book anymore.

Saturday’s the last day for my show at the Rainbo Club. It’s the second time I’ve shown the collages that’ve occupied much of my free time the last two years, but the first that felt right. It marks a new direction I plan to follow for awhile and thus seems more significant than some other shows I’ve had.

This is not to say that I’m disowning all the old work or plan to reuse and cut it all up (though now that I’ve typed that, it’s tempting.) For all the ways that it’s new, when I squint at it, the compositions are familiar. It’s like ripping up a deck of cards, then taping them back together and putting them back in their box. Still fifty-two cards, with all the same elements; just a little beat up with more seams showing.

When you do a thing for forty-plus years, it’s important to find ways to reset and renew it. The last thing any artist wants to do is repeat himself or go through the motions. That’s what the collage thing is for me: a way out of rote repetition.

People seem to like them, which is not necessarily a reason to keep going but doesn’t hurt. Talking about the collages is weird. They’re often made up of a lot of cut up autobiography. I wonder what a viewer that doesn’t get the references and doesn’t get answers when they ask the artist sees in them. Not that they are a puzzle that has one answer. That’s not how pictures work, at least as I see them or make them. A lot of times I’ve found artists’ explanations ruin my enjoyment or reaction. Art’s not for answers but for questions, I think. 

I’ll be at the Rainbo this Saturday (7/30/22) from 4 to 8pm to see the show out. Come by if you’re free.

—The printers tell me the new book should be ready sometime in September. Want one?

—Wednesday, my talk with Tom Shannon of the Cheater Slicks goes up. Before then you can listen to the one with Laura Park or a bunch of others. I’ve reposted most of the older ones now that got wiped out when I moved podcast hosts. I redid some of the descriptions and combined some of the pieces of audio. Hoping this can be their forever home but there’s no telling what I’ll get into my fool head week to week.

—Mallory and I talked about The Mist and reeled off a bunch of movies others like that we don’t.

—Listen to Ni un minuto más de dolor and you won’t be sad.