Letter

When I lived in the Heart of Chicago (2004-2011), there was a cafe round the corner that kept very odd hours. It would be open very early in the morning and then be closed all day and reopen at night. The days that even these hours were kept could be random and unpredictable.

The cafe’s namesake and proprietor was a man named Bill Duvall. I became a regular at his place and attempted to get to know him, which wasn’t easy. Still, there were memorable evenings, like a screening of Murnau’s Sunrise—A Song of Two Humans, accompanied by an improvised electronic music score, and, of course, the mostly-weekly tango classes. Like every coffeeshop I’ve ever haunted, I had an art show there too.

Bill always had grand plans, like having a fully-functional kitchen, which was never built out. Some mornings I’d find him passed out at one of the little tables.

One day I walked up and found the picture window covered in brown paper taped from the inside. I never saw the place open again, nor ran across Bill. I still have no clue what happened nearly twenty years later.

I do know the man loved to dance to tango music just like his very famous uncle, who passed away the other day.

After I finished writing the above and posted it to Substack, I read a notice of Frederick Wiseman’s passing. I don’t know that I ever wrote much about the experience of watching his unique nonfiction films. It’s an insult to call them documentaries.

I made a few drawings from freezeframes of Titticut Follies during COVID lockdown when I had no access to living models. They did the trick even as frozen black-and-white shades of people long gone.

Yesterday, I came home to a package with international postage left by my landlord’s gate. It was a book of Solomon Yudovin’s Jewish folk ornament designs. Yudovin was big interest of my grandmother’s. She collected and championed his work. Now her daughter has put out a handsome art book which will serve as a tribute to her mother. The introduction is a transcription of a speech my grandmother gave at the opening of an exhibition of the artist’s work in Israel, where my grandmother spent her last years.

There’s no cheating the actuarial table. It’s truly the only thing we can completely depend on. Still, how to react, what to say or do when it happens to someone you know or care about has never been simple or obvious.

Just because I don’t know what to disappear into doesn’t mean I stop. There are still concerts to draw at. Sometimes there doesn’t need to be any larger aim behind putting pen to paper. Not to say that it’s an exercise but whatever underlying meaning there might be to catching a couple musicians doing their thing with a few marks isn’t very obvious. The sketchbook in which this drawing is just a couple pages may add up to something when it’s filled. Then this fifteen minute sketch will become part of a bigger whole.

But none of that is in my head while it’s happening. I’m just trying to listen.

In the past couple months we’ve processed about a hundred and fifty boxes of books at the store. Many have been sitting waiting for two years since we moved from next door. Roughly a third went back out the door to a bottom-feeder who takes the books we don’t need. The second third was priced and shelved. The third went back into boxes scrawled with ‘TBPU’ on top and sides and stacked in the newly-emptied back closet. This area, formed by walls on two sides and the backs of bookcases on the other two, with a narrow opening on its northwest tip, had been inaccessible since our move.

The ‘To Be Put Up’ boxes are full of books to be photographed, described, and put up for sale on eBay. We don’t have enough display cases in the store to sell expensive books here. Even if we did, I doubt our clientele would fork over $50 or $200 or more for some rare or out-of-print volume. It’s not that kind of store. Not yet anyhow.

As I carted the sixty ‘TBPU’ boxes to the back, I thought of Sisyphus and of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I wondered not for the first time if all the efforts I’ve expended here add up to anything except marking time.

At least there are occasionally weird castoffs like a set of oversized US president portraits that I can take home and ‘improve.’

Most Fridays K poses for a drawing or painting. It’s become part of our routine. I look forward to it and I think she does too. There are nearly thirty of these now. About a dozen will go up on the walls of the Rainbo Club in September.

I’ve started writing out the fragments I’ve gathered about the bookstore over the past five years in an old ledger I found in one of those dusty boxes. There were a couple notations about expenses circa 1981 but otherwise the pages are clean. I want to fill it with my scrawl, editing and adding here and there as I go, to see if it can become a book.

I’m not all the way convinced yet but it beats staring at a wall or watching TV or whatever else I would do if I wasn’t doing this.

I talked to Sam Bodrojan about her writing, movies, the internet, and more. Juliet Escoria interviewed me and Mallory about our Maudlin Classics project and then I recorded the book-release at Tangible Books.

It’s in-between time again. The two things I’d been devoting most of my time to are mostly done so I have to fall or dive or stumble into something else. I’ve tried just stopping for a while but that leads to nothing except darkness. So it’s on to the next thing.

Last week an excerpt of a thing I’ve been playing around with for months was published. It’s about the bookstore but also about the relationship to possessions and about my version of the art life. There might be enough there to grow into a book.

I think I will put aside the public domain project for a bit. The publication schedule for the last four now stretches to next February. Maybe I should let those attempt to find an audience before gumming up the works with more. Am I capable of this kind of restraint and future-thinking? Watch this space. Maybe I’ll surprise us both.

I quit on Riddley Walker, the book I wrote about last week. Not because it wasn’t good but because it felt like I’d gotten the gist and didn’t need to keep going. I’m not a plot guy. Don’t really care how things end, only the feeling of being there, and I got what I needed. I have four or five other books going that deserve some attention.

I did finish Martha Grover’s essay collection The End of My Career and enjoyed it for the most part though it felt like something was missing in it the whole time. Can’t put my finger on it. Now back to Philip Levine’s and David Niven’s memoirs and Raymond Carver’s and Denis Johnson’s poems.

There are a couple public things this week that will kill a little time and that you could come to.

Thursday from 8pm to maybe 11ish, I’ll be playing some of my records from home at Charis Listening Bar and Saturday at 7pm I’ll be celebrating the release of my illustrated edition of Winesburg, Ohio with publisher Mallory Smart at Tangible Books.

Maybe I’ll see you there.

Thanks to Don Evans for his generous mention of my illustrations in his essay on Winesburg, Ohio.