COLUMN: Art in its Own Terms #9: Maybe I’ll build a time machine

An excerpt from a work in progress

I go to Tangible Books, intending to spend a couple hours shelving and completely lose track of time. It’s nearing 7pm and Joe is turning off the lights as I’m moving the last of the Horror section next to Paranormal—the place it should have always been. Before that, I alphabetize Parenting, move Myth next to Occult and put Chicago in Myth’s place in order to make more room in the Fiction area. Those newly-free shelves before the A’s prompt a snail’s pace shifting of the letters that follow. I run out of shelf somewhere in L’s but now there’s a lot more room to maneuver.

I walk out of the store exhausted. A few hours later I’m home with the computer open, trying to remember what books I read and when I read them.

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The more I give away, throw in the trash, repurpose, the more stuff there seems to be. No matter what I do, it just keeps piling up.

Instead of thinning it out or organizing it, I just want to toss it.

There’s not much room for storage at my place. I think carefully before dragging anything in from the outside world and routinely get rid of objects that have worn out their usefulness or welcome. This chiefly applies to records and books. I go through the shelves every few months and haul stacks to Pinwheel or Tangible. This is not garbage, but at a given moment it has lost whatever connective magic made me bring it inside in the first place. The good thing is I know each book or record is likely to still hold that charge for someone else. Just not me.

The personal ephemera archive is different. When I’m gone I don’t want anyone else to dig through my effects and happen upon anything I don’t want found. This is why, in the end, rather than putting any of the pile back in the drawers or bins, I fill two large trashbags to overflowing and drag them to the alley.

I don’t remember much about when I first read Don DeLillo’s Underworld. At dinner the other day, my friend Frank, who was my roommate back then, said I read it just before reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand. That puts it sometime in 2001. While rereading Underworld these past couple months I thought it was earlier. The book came out in 1997.

Pinning it down precisely isn’t that important. I’ve been trying to track changes over the decades of my life. A simple way to do that is to reread books that made an impact to see how they hit me now. Tropic of Cancer was a revelation and Suttree was a hoot but I really disappeared into Underworld. It was the perfect book for my project because one of its big themes is how the characters “talk” to all the versions of themselves as they age. It’s a fluid conversation which time-travels and crisscrosses over fifty years. That’s just the span I’ve been investigating myself.

The relationship between personal and world history is the main theme of the book. Tracking a baseball which may or may not have been Bobby Thomson’s ‘shot heard ‘round the world’ is less about solving a mystery or proving authenticity than about the desperate need to have tangible evidence that our lives matter. As in fairy tales, every hand the ball passes through is transformed for good or ill. For its last owner, Nick Shay, the ball is a symbol of failure. He’s a Dodgers fan after all. Not long after that fateful home run, his team left Brooklyn for LA. Nick leaves New York as well. Decades later he’s at a ballgame with coworkers and it’s revealed that he owns the famous ball. He can’t or won’t articulate why he bought it, nor how much he paid.

I used to love the messiness of Wite-Out. The way it created gloppy uneven ridges on previously pristine paper. I would never have thought to go back and retype papers when all you had to do was brush over the mistakes and wait for it to dry. The results were usually kind of craggy but I always believed it added character and personality to my half-assed homework.

I never graduated to electric typewriters or word-processors with the more sophisticated technology to attack typos. I leapt straight from manual machines to the laptop age. The collage thing has brought a version of Wite-Out back into my life.

I slather acrylic gesso over sections of old pictures that I think need correcting. These marks leave unique impressions and textures on the canvas. It’s a record of a decision to pivot or change what’s beneath it. A new layer that obscures but doesn’t completely nullify what was there before. I like there to be evidence of process and struggle in a picture. It indicates a history rather than the idea that an image was hatched all at once out of nothing and nowhere.

I move apartments a couple months into lockdown.

I trash over half of my artwork before moving, but still have hundreds of drawings and paintings that need to be dealt with. This is another motif of Underworld—waste and the problem of how to dispose of it. One of DeLillo’s great images is a ghostly garbage barge which can’t find a port. No one knows what it’s carrying nor wants to find out. A pretty good analog to Western civilization.

I want to learn something about how I’ve changed but I can barely summon anything from the past if it’s not manifested physically. Like a book or a drawing or a high school homework assignment. There’s a trace or ghost image of something connected to me in these things but for the most part I take them in as if for the first time. They must have left a mark but I can’t track it.

When I finish Underworld it’s equal parts relief and regret. I’ve scaled this mountain of a book and come down the other side. It was sometimes a slog but mostly entrancing. Reading it made everything else disappear but also revealed connections which made me put the doorstop of a book down from time to time and look this or that up. Other times it made me start a new picture. Now that I’m done with it where will I go?

A photobooth is an anachronism. In a time when every digital device we carry in our pockets is capable of shooting a feature-length movie, a box with a seat inside and a privacy curtain, which produces four black-and-white shots of variable quality and takes five minutes to do it, would seem obsolete. And yet, the Rainbo Club and the Skylark both have them, and in both bars they are used many times nightly.

A few weeks ago, I was a guest critic at a final thesis show at a local college. One of the kids displayed a wall of Fuji Instax snapshots with his messy scrawl underneath to indicate the date and subject. Some of the pictures were blurry, others looked barely composed, but all together they presented some sort of visual diary. In his talk before his classmates and teachers, the kid talked about how permanent and unalterable these pictures were. In a time when every image can be ceaselessly altered and manipulated, these crappy little snaps felt like reality to him.

I think it’s a similar thing that keeps drinkers coming back to the photobooth. They feel as if the wet, curling, chemical-smelling strips of photo paper capture an actual moment of their lives. Then they lay out all the finished pictures on the table next to their drinks, take out their iPhones, and take pictures of their pictures so they can share those frozen moments with all their friends who are probably at other bars, where there isn’t a photobooth.

All the time I’ve spent packing and shelving books lately may finally break me of wanting to publish any more myself. Maybe there are enough already. Yet, every day, people come through the front door to bring us boxes and bags full of paperbacks and hardcovers to free up room in their basements and garages. They empty out their dead relatives’ shelves. Forests have been felled for these things that are so quickly forgotten. I think about that as I go up with full stacks of milk crates and back down with empty ones.

It takes most of a week to recreate the Mystery section in the new space. It’s still mostly wide open but won’t stay so for long. In a month or so, 60,000 books will have made the move from 3324 to 3326 South Halsted.

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Jon Cwiok, a longtime worker at Myopic Books, used to call that store “the book hole.” It’s always stayed with me. Now I’m in my own book hole. Well, it’s not really mine, but I’m alone in it for three days in a row. Joe is taking time off because he’s about to build ten bookshelves next door and I’m minding the till in his stead.

Sometime during the first day, I experience something similar to the burst-balloon feeling I had during a shift at Bernice’s. Then, I’d had a several-week-long daydream about owning my own bar. It came crashing down once I was in the place alone and could imagine a decade or two like it into the future. I felt trapped and just wanted to walk out the door.

Second day, I spend doing overstock. This entails climbing a ladder, taking photos of shelves up near the ceiling, then climbing back down and comparing the lower shelves with my photos to see whether any titles are missing below. I repeat this sequence half a dozen times, yielding about forty books. I used to enjoy being at Myopic when they did this. There, one worker was on the ladder calling out names to another below, getting a bunch of no’s and the occasional yes. My version is silent save for whatever I have playing on the stereo.

A guy buys a fancy Folio Society boxed set of Greek myths for $75. It’s a big deal considering most books in the store are $6.95 or less. Kevin from the Duck comes in with a bag full of books to donate and buys a bunch of cookbooks. Preston brings a friend. She buys Paul Beatty’s The Sellout on my recommendation.

On day three, a young woman walks in, looks around, and asks if this is a bookstore. A little later, another asks whether the books are for sale. She thought maybe you had to have a subscription.

I don’t think I’m built to be a business owner. Joe’s excited about all the possibilities of doubling the space next door; all I see is schlepping boxes. It doesn’t mean I won’t do it or that I won’t get some satisfaction out of it, but the dream of expansion and unseen possibilities is not my dream.

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I spend most of Thursday and Friday in the basement. First I cull all the doubles in Suspense. Joe has decided there’s no need to keep hardcovers of endless series when we have paperbacks. That frees up a whole case for what I’ve come to think of as “cozy crime” books. Clearly marketed to women of a certain age, they feature homely covers and groaner pun titles like Once Upon a Crepe, about food, knitting, or crossword puzzles, or cats. Another shelf is free for boxes and boxes of literary criticism that Joe had hidden behind the bookcases.

I want to make a painting of the basement but I run out of time. Done shelving the last of the poetry analyses and Shakespeare explainers, I’m running late to catch the new four-hour Holocaust travelogue essay film at the Siskel.

The painting will have to wait.