6th
Paperback Novels
Last night I saw this Richard Baker painting on the shelf, behind the front desk at a gallery where another artist was the main dish. (Gregory Lind Gallery, SF) I’ve seen Baker’s work before, it’s pitch perfect and New Yorkishly dry but last night it struck me harder as this tiny little lighthouse of sanity, modesty and reverence for things that actually matter in a world thigh deep in shit.
I was having a born-again experience with fiction last night, reading the excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s unpublished novel, and then the giant piece on the same by D.T. Max in The New Yorker. At about 2 AM I found phrases like “Messiah of Fiction” lurking around my skull, uninvited. I know that’s inappropriate, and gross, it’s just what I was thinking. Read the piece, see if it doesn’t happen to you. By 3 AM I was hoping I would find about $1500.00 under the couch so I could buy a small devotional work for my new Church of Fiction, by Richard Baker.
The thing about Baker’s little paintings of book covers (apparently inspired by the grander and more annoying Kitaj series, “In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library, After the Life for the Most Part” from the 70’s) is that they are about slightness and sentimentality, but they aren’t slight at all.
The books he chooses to paint are ones he was in love with when he was young, and claims to “to be unable to return to” in the same way as an adult. He renders the iconic covers in all their beat-up-ness just the way your desk drawer snapshots of ex-boyfriends get creased and messy but you aren’t going to either throw them out or take a fresh one any time soon.
Looking through the list, though, I was thinking, Gosh, Mr. Baker, you are already over Joan Didion, Gertrude Stein, AND Dashiell Hammett? What have you moved on to, math?? What would it be like if one of those in the series was receipt-used-as-bookmark-new? Would that mean you’re still in the grip of it? Is it okay to always be looking back to a safely over past? Is he like one of those people who ONLY ever wears vintage clothes because he thinks it insulates him from the ugliness of everything new, which (ugliness) is sure to get in anyway and cause the vintage clothes wearer to always feel itchy and pissy?
I do think these can be read as actively bittersweet, not just world-weary. He’s not really over his paperback loves, he’s just reminding us you just can never quite read as an adult the way you did when you were 16 and had never seen an idea before in your life. Like first kisses.
I still think it’s most important (for me, right now, in craptastic 2009, in America) that Baker painted something that isn’t shiny, isn’t expensive, and reminds you that at you always get to keep at least part of what you love.
