Letter

You keep writing even though I don’t write back. Aren’t you making friends in school? There’s gotta be a guy nearer than five thousand miles that you can lavish attention on. This sounds ungrateful. I’m flattered that I made an impression. We had so little time together. I waited till my last day to kiss you.

I replay it in my head a lot. All the ways I should’ve done it different. How much time I wasted with family when I could’ve been with you. Maybe that’s why I don’t write. There’s a lot of regret that comes up front and center whenever I read your name on the return address of an envelope in my P.O. box. They’ve been stealing my mail the last couple places I lived so I don’t take any more chances. Pay $30 a month to improve the odds of getting letters from lost causes and failures from my past. Like you. That didn’t come out right. You’re not the failure; I am. Your name just reminds me is all. Not your fault.

Maybe you’re an optimist. Or so desperately lonely in that godforsaken country that you send letters to a man halfway across the world who you have little hope of ever seeing in person again. I told you I’m never going back there, didn’t I? You’re the only good memory I have of the place. I’m including blood relations. Would you consider leaving? I know you love your mother and she needs you but are you willing to sacrifice your happiness for an old woman’s material comfort? Again, I know, selfish, insensitive. It’s what you love about me, no?

It’s weird to fall for an art historian. Like a cockroach falling for an entomologist. If we got together for real would you spend our years together studying me? Taking samples? Squinting to determine their substance under a microscope? Would you convince yourself you know what my paintings mean because you read a library full of books on the subject? Would I start to hate you for your theories and interpretations? They way you apply what your professors taught you to our life together? Would I cheat on you with your GAs at the university? Become an embarrassment to you professionally? A financial burden?

I know these are daydreams because we’ll never see each other again. You might write another letter or two, but you’ll eventually give up. I’m not worth it. Plus, one day on campus, a younger transfer student will catch your eye. You’ll stay semi-faithful to me——at least emotionally——for another month or two, but his excited and insistent way of fucking you will leave my one fumbling kiss a feint memory to make fun of as your heart returns to its resting rate, the sweat drying salty on you upper lip, in the small of your back, as you watch him drift off to sleep.

You’ll come back to mind at odd intervals. When more recent crushes fade. I won’t compare you to them. You’ll always have your own alcove, however remote, poorly-lit, or modest in square footage.

I have a book mostly finished. I’d like to have some help putting it out. Somebody else to market and distribute it. I’m terrible at those tasks and hate doing them. It would be nice to partner with someone who values what I do, who has more of a knack for the business. Odds are, I’ll put the thing out myself, but there’s no harm daydreaming. Especially when great writers are resorting to some out-there tactics to get their work to readers nowadays.

Bruce Wagner’s publisher wouldn’t put out his book, so he released it into the public domain instead. Anyone can print, copy, or do whatever they want with it, according to Wagner. It’s an extreme solution, but an intriguing one. According to the writer, his publisher told him that they couldn’t release a book with a character that calls herself fat (much less, one in which someone else says she is); the woman in question starts out at 500lb with a goal of getting to 1000lb. She calls herself the Fat Joan—a riff on a pop culture figure named the Fat Jew. This same woman later loses so much weight she basically vanishes. Joan and how she thinks about and labels her weight is probably the least likely reason that a censor should consider banning Wagner’s book.

One character turns into a bird, another’s so guilt-ridden by the suicide of a long-ago mistress he dedicates his career to women’s causes, only to get MeToo’d by what turns out to be a scam artist. There’s a lot of ugliness in this book, but its not there for its own sake—this isn’t a Tarrantino flick. The grotesquery is related to the current media moment. I wonder how it will read in a decade or two when Twitter and TikTok are as quaint as kerosene lamps.

Most of the main characters in The Marvel Universe are sick to a greater or lesser degree. Some have made careers of their maladies. They perform their illness on social media, hold fundraisers, and join forces with sufferers of other ailments to promote one another’s brands. Sickness is a marketing gimmick, a way to get ahead in their world. Addictions, scams, and even murder are common in this environment. Each is a bargaining chip of shifting value.

In the two books and one movie based on his writing that I’ve taken in, Wagner’s theme is always the outsize fame-mongers that dominate Hollywood, and, by extension, American culture. He freely mingles the likes of Kanye West, the Kardashians, land artist James Turell, Patricia Arquette, and untold other “influencers” in with his own characters. Limits of taste wobble, but it’s not prurient. Wagner’s no Marquis de Sade, he’s not even a Russ Meyer. There’s a sturdy moral framework undergirding his wildest flights through the gutter. There’s never any confusion about what the author thinks about the monsters he’s fashioned. The outsized absurdities in his writing don’t cloud his judgment. He’s a moralist like Swift or Moliére rather than any sort of libertine.

I got a kick out of this book but don’t know who else would. Not readers concerned with others’ judgments. We’re in a very straight-line moment right now. Everybody wants to be sure beyond the shadow of doubt they’re on the side of the angels. 

That’s not Bruce Wagner’s universe, nor ours. 

I don’t write anything as outrageous as he does but wonder if maybe there’s no place for what I did write in the current media climate. Wagner is resorting to publishing his next book with Skyhorse, I think. I wouldn’t do that. It’s a move borne of either desperation or a belief in free-speech absolutism. A look through that publisher’s backlist doesn’t inspire any good feelings. It’s a kind of lepers’ colony. I wouldn’t mix with Blake Bailey and Woody Allen, but Wagner must have other considerations. In the same interview I found out about The Marvel Universe he talks about recording an audio book for that antivax member of the Kennedys. Maybe his moral compass isn’t as ship-shape as it appears on the page. 

That’s where the best of us is always left. Downtime/private life is often a disaster. I never met the guy. Maybe he’s happy as a clam, but I don’t think so. Art always costs. 

He might be a monster but he made a beautiful thing.

—I interviewed musician Chris Brokaw in print and writer Kathleen Rooney on tape, and answered a few questionsmyself. My talk with writer Gint Aras goes up Wednesday. Listen to more talks here.

It’s intimidating and kind of pointless for a painter to write about Paul Cézanne. It’s like trying to describe or explain God. Why bother? No words suffice. It just is and what I do couldn’t exist without what this guy did over a hundred years ago. It’s not a debt that can be repaid or even adequately grasped.

A Cézanne retrospective opened the day before I returned from my East Coast drive. I made it in on the last day of members-only previews, before the unwashed masses were to be let in. I made that joke to a guy I recognized in the galleries from going to movies and he wanted to debate who exactly these unwashed masses were and whether we were washed in comparison. Glad I didn’t go into comedy.

There are some entities and influences we take for granted. Like they were always there and it’s impossible to conceive of a world without them. I felt that way at the Chicago Theatre over a decade ago listening to Leonard Cohen. The idea that the old man in the sharp suit on stage wrote all those songs was a circle I had trouble squaring. Same with Cézanne. For anyone involved with perceptual painting, he’s like a giant boulder blocking the path. No way to ignore it, pretend it’s not there. No turning back either, unless you’re content playacting an alternate reality. What he did was figure out how to render the act of looking.

It’s a vision that centers subjectivity, motion, and change, rather than stability, hierarchy, or order. Probably no coincidence that he worked out his methods the same time when Nietzsche was killing God. Nobody who believes in a benevolent creator fashioning and guiding the universe could see their surroundings in the slippery, undependable way Cézanne saw his.

And yet he was also very flawed as an artist. His figures—especially when unclothed—are hopelessly clunky and wooden. They rarely relate in any convincing way to their environment. The bathers are the worst. It’s some sort of ersatz Eden that he keeps trying to evoke, but what comes out is more like the cheapo decor of a Greek eatery. 

Like many of the innovators of his time, Cézanne came up in the French academic system and utterly failed its dogmatic, leaden course of study. Had he excelled, he’d likely be forgotten. It was his inability to make bacchanales, formal portraits, or history paintings that forced him into finding another way. Yet the remnants of that staid education reverbrate throughout his career. The Art Institute has chosen to reproduce the lousy epic last bathers painting across three flags attached to its façade. I left the show to get an iced coffee at Starbucks across the street and noticed them and was really disappointed. What draws art professionals to those lumpy ladies? They’re featureless and often have two left legs. They look like they were cut-and-pasted into a fantasy forest without much bother about reconciling figure and ground.

It’s reassuring that Cézanne was such a bad figure painter. Makes him almost human. When people are clothed and he knows them well, he does much better. There’s one really good self-portrait in the show that underscores what a taciturn, disagreeable man he must have been. The expression on his mug wonders why the viewer has intruded on the man’s privacy, except that he himself is also the viewer! Not a guy I would ever want to meet. Best to leave him alone to paint his mountains, trees, fruit, and bottles and marvel at the results.

Despite the members-only restriction, the galleries are packed. I go back and forth through the rooms a few times, noting the four or five pictures I know I’ll return to on future visits. The only major series I miss is his card players. Only one sketch of a single card player is included. The biggest surprise is an earth tone picture of Paris rooftops. It feels like the kind of composition I’ve attempted many times. I didn’t know Cézanne had tried it too. He’s mainly a village and nature guy, rather than a city creature. This one almost looks like a Marquet. Marquet is a big influence, but much more manageable and human-scale than Cézanne. Strolling through, I remember what Barnet Newman said about Cézanne’s apples. That they were like super-apples, that they oppressed him. Newman was a blowhard and a mediocre painter, but he had a point. There’s this ascetic remove in the best Cézannes. Like they were assembled by a being either beyond or incapable of everyday emotions. It can be offputting sometimes. But when these pictures connect, they alter the way you see the world with your own eyes. 

The shifting perspectives, the jagged horizon line, the endless retries to capture the same motifs that will always elude him. Cézanne’s whole thing is about conveying how it is to be, day to day. hour to hour, moment to moment. It’s often not a comforting or welcoming world that he shows, but it’s one I recognize all too well.