Letter

I was commissioned to make a couple illustrations for a terrible piece of writing. This happens. It’s part of the deal. I don’t have to endorse or approve or even tolerate the word salad that accompanies my pictures. Sometimes I’m even the author of said salad.

There are ways to make the process worthwhile that have nothing to do with the original intent of the thing. Maybe a geographical location that can spur an image search. Some photos of a river in Oregon and test out a watercolor set I got from the house of an older artist who’d passed away. The resulting painting has little to do with the overwrought essay it’s meant to enhance but feels like it was worth doing in a modest way anyhow. When I send it in, the editor who hired me seems happy, so I’ve done my job and can put the whole thing out of my mind.

I listen to interviews with writers or true-crime stories as I work. Oftentimes, I completely forget what the thing I’m making is even for. Good thing that there’s no pop quiz on the nominal reason for doing what I’m doing. I’d flunk for sure. In many cases, I don’t even have any text to reference. Just names of people and places. Maybe some reference photos. A lot of flying blind involved.

Another recently completed job is thirty-five portraits of characters in a forthcoming book I haven’t read. The writer sent me their names——all Russian——and some lo-res reference photos. Drawing faces comes so naturally now that I don’t have to question much about the owners of those faces. I recognized a couple of the people in the photos but when I asked the writer whether it was important to get a good likeness of them, he said they were just archetypes. I’ll share those with you once that book is published. I’m curious how my work will be used.

I used charcoal for the first time in awhile to design a poster featuring more portraits. Chicago writers this time. Unlike the Russian portraits or the landscape watercolors, I’m in charge of most of the elements of the poster composition. I just have to include the verbiage given by the organization that hired me and make it more or less legible. They trust me to handle the rest. This frees me to rummage in the cobwebby corners of the toolbox for long-neglected implements. A box of vine and compressed charcoal, in this case.

But rather than doing the whole thing on one piece of paper as I would have even a few years ago, I drew the portraits separately, then took a couple more big pieces of paper to draw out the text. I scanned them all in, then played around in Photoshop until they looked wrong together in just the right way. The collage thing has invaded almost everything I do now.

It’s a load off to do work for other people because it’s so much less responsibility. They get me to make a record cover or poster or book illustration for their thing and, if they’re satisfied with what I’ve done, I rarely think of it again. I don’t have to sell it, store it, or wonder what people will think of it. It’s rarely that clean and simple when it’s something no one else asked for.

I can never be free of it the way I can when it’s for someone else.

[I previewed some films in this week’s Chicago European Union Festival——including one of the best movies about childhood I’ve ever seen——and Mallory and I talk about The Box.]

I hate dust jackets.

They’re like wrapping paper that for some reason we’ve decided not to throw away after buying the book. Shiny and covered with ad-copy. Embarrassing and wrong like a dog in a sweater. Thousands of empty calories. Can you imagine trying to preserve the structural integrity of shrink wrap on something from the grocery store after ripping it open to get at what’s inside?

When I get a hardcover, the first thing I do is remove its jacket and throw it in some corner where it’s no longer in my field of vision. No blurbs, no bios, nothing the writer didn’t intend to be there. Now I can read the book in peace.

A couple years ago, when I decided to reread Delillo’s Underworld, I made a big decision. Rather than put the jacket back on once I was done, I cut it up and used fragments for a collage. This accomplished a couple things at once. It made a useless thing potentially useful and it guaranteed I wouldn’t be able to sell this book back to a secondhand store.

Unlike me, resellers of books think dust jackets add value, so lacking one decreases the already negligible amount they offer when I bring books in. My history with these stores is long. I discovered them as an eleven or twelve year old when me and my only friend would raid our parents’ bookshelves for product that could be traded in for videogame and pizza money.

I can usually afford pizza by less involved means these days and quit videogames after punctuating the end of my grad-school career with a week-long binge twenty-eight years ago. But the practice of trading in old books and records for new ones has remained a constant. These days I almost always take store credit rather than cash. I want the things I no longer need to circulate.

Removing a dust jacket changes the commercial relationship of the book as a product. Without it, the book stops looking like what fills most bookstores and online portals. Now it’s a one or two color block in muted tones made of cardboard and cloth with some words on the spine and maybe a small embossed design on the front. It looks like something from another age because that’s what it now is. Without the garish camouflage, it’s a quiet relic that gives away the fact that reading is nothing like TV or billboards. That dumb jacket is like the thrift-store tuxedo a shy kid is forced to wear to be let into the prom.

Last week I took a good look at my bookshelf for the first time in some months. I was thinking of culling the collection a bit but couldn’t come up with more than one or two candidates. Instead, I started stripping the big art books of their jackets. Almost immediately, I liked the whole look of the shelf better. The more jackets I piled on the floor, the better it became. I gathered all the jackets and stuffed them roughly into one of the bins of collage fodder. I understand that now the store will likely no longer accept these if I bring them in. I can and likely will eventually give all of them away, but the commercial concerns will not be a part of that.

Without the party clothes, books can just be valued as a gift from one person to another.

I get amazing fan letters from time to time. It puts me at a disadvantage. Most times I know nothing about the sender. Aside from thanking them, there’s not much else I can do.

I can’t take a compliment. Can anybody? What do you do with it? Somebody says something nice and it just sits there. No way to adequately reciprocate because the complimenter has put themselves out past the breakwaters of what’s expected and accepted. It’s a vulnerable no man’s land. I’m touched of course because something I made inspired them to go to this extreme but I’m also profoundly uncomfortable.

I hardly ever hear from writers whose books I’ve written about. But about a year ago, I got a mysterious email from a woman writing on behalf of an author whose book I’d written about some months before. She wrote that this writer was blown away by what I’d written, that it was something like life-changing, that it was one of the best things to’ve ever happened to him.

That’s a lot to lay on 800-some words in an alt-weekly. I’d liked the man’s book very much. It was a collection of stories set in Chicago’s now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes. The stories followed several characters as they negotiated the many racial and economic boundaries of the city. What got me were the vivid descriptions of places I knew well. Setting can get a story almost all the way where it needs to go. Each story in the book nailed the sense of where as well as anything I’d read in a long time.

I wrote back the woman to thank her and the writer for their flattering words. Then typed his name into a search engine and found virtually nothing. Aside from the publisher’s book page and a few reviews——the book had gotten on my radar due to a Times review——I could find no Twitter handle, no Facebook page, none of the expected platforms for the contemporary author. It was really impressive. How had he managed to steer clear of the social media shitshow so completely?

Some time passed, then the woman wrote again asking for my address. A couple weeks later a paperback arrived inscribed with the most flattering, over-the-top message I’ve ever received in my life. Because of my review, this writer now considered me his brother.

What was I to do with that? Because I had no phone number or email for the guy, I couldn’t even thank him for his words. I put the book on the shelf reserved for signed and inscribed books and tried to forget about it.

But then I got an email from the man himself. I’d half thought that the woman was an alter ego, a way to preserve his privacy, but it was not so. She was a real person, as was he. He messaged me at random intervals. What he said was interesting enough to respond to. Eventually, I offered to meet him for coffee. He seemed hesitant but promised it would happen sometime soon.

In a time when the average person publicizes every meal they consume as well as most bowel movements, the barriers he put up were a breath of fresh air. My new friend barely even let a photo of himself online. I’m familiar with enforcing boundaries, so I respected what he was doing.

We met last Wednesday at a coffeeshop in my neighborhood. Turns out two taciturn strangers can sit and talk for three hours without a problem. He asked me to make the cover for his next book.

I never expect to have much in common with anyone, so when it happens, it’s hard to reconcile. Not unlike receiving a compliment. I don’t know what to do with it aside from saying thank you.

Which I do.