Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "readercon"

You know that scene in the book HANNIBAL--the one Martin Amis so rightly pegged as the exact point where Thomas Harris lost track of the rest of us, because suddenly he assumed we were sympathizing WITH the serial killer?--where Lecter is on a plane, and a single mom sits down in the seat next to him with her kid, and commences continually checking the kid's diaper (ultimately by plunging in a finger)? And we're supposed to be grossed out BY THE MOM?

I...I think I maybe understand that moment a little better now. Or else I've become Lecter. Or...

See, given the nature of my life, the wall-to-wall parenting-teaching-writing-doing, I spend at least twice as long as any plane trip I'm going to take will actually take on picking what I'm going to read on that trip. It's a little, rare ritual. a tiny gift of four or five straight, almost unimaginable hours. A mirage in my world. A treasured one.

Yesterday, on the flight to Readercon, I hadn't even gotten my ripped little backpack open before He came.

Yes, He was...big. Flowed majestically over armrests. But he's allowed. On the other hand, I'd like to have asked him--if, you know, I'd been able to get a word in, at any point--whether he really couldn't feel, didn't notice, that the point of his elbow had found a spot pretty much dead center in my chest, just right of my heart, pinning me upright in my seat as though with the spike of an iron maiden, or just thought that's where elbows belonged.

I'd also brought a wrap for lunch. Tuna, I think. I can't say, because I can't remember, because as He and his elbow were getting themselves settled, he looked down, noted my just unwrapped wrap, and said, "Hey, that looks good, what is it?" And then stuck his finger under the wrappy part, into the tuna, to see.

Then he commenced speaking.

I will not repeat the conversation. Sorry, lecture. I literally am not sure I spoke beyond "Uh, well--" before the elbow issued a warning dig--suggested that I might break the fellow's flow--and silenced me again.

I think my favorite bit was when he leaned over to the guy on the other side of him, who'd been watching the Netherlands-Argentina penalty shootout, and asked the score. The guy glanced up very briefly, answered in German. Lifted his hands in apparent incomprehension.

I guess that guy picked up English during the game, as he was having a lovely phone conversation with his wife at the baggage claim a few hours later. When he saw me staring--rubbing the sore spot in my chest--he gave me a single, sheepish, proud-of-his-not-German-self smile...

The writing life always, always finds a way to make it clear exactly where one stands (or, in this case, rates as far as rides back to the hotel in Paul Tremblay's car)...

Having escaped Paul Tremblay's trunk when he was busy snapping illicit photos of the writers in the car that had pulled up alongside us,

I crept back to my room, scraped the bits of...no, I don't even want to know who else Paul Tremblay keeps in his trunk, or what happened to them...anyway, I changed, steeled myself, and reemerged for one last glorious day at Readercon: Peter Straub

waxing eloquent and magnanimous over a long, quiet breakfast conversation,
Mary Rickert delivering a deceptively gentle excerpt from The Memory Garden (and then passing out Forget-Me-Not seeds), John Langan surprising us all with a deft and disturbing action sequence from a new story. Then standing up, as the night's last reader, and letting Good Girls rip for the first time.

Getting a response from a readinged-out crowd that felt absurdly generous and tremendously reassuring. Then bad mousse

and great conversation with Langan, a light-hearted and laughing Ellen Datlow (full of good projects, as ever), Daryl Gregory (whose work I have recently discovered, and think is most decidedly worth YOUR discovering), and the charming Liza Trombi of Locus, before stumbling upstairs into the sauna--wait, that was someone's ROOM??--where maybe 80 writers, editors, conversationalists, friends, saw the CON out the way it came in: with clever chatter, whiskey way too strong for little hobbit Hirshbergs to touch, book recs, movie recs, genuine mutual admiration, and friendship. Sean Moreland, great last chat, looking forward to more next week. So good seeing everyone. More, please...

T.R.U.E., Week of 7/15, Post #2:

Dean Young "Romanticism 101" (excerpt)

A benediction, of sorts, for all my Readercon friends new and not-new.

And also a manifesto. Another one. I do seem to collect them. I'm that sort of Man. Fest o'Man(i). This ones comes from the jittery, skittering, leaping pen of
Dean Young, one of my very favorite contemporary poets. I found it on the first page of the most recent issue of Poetry:

"If I had to pick between shadows
and essences, I'd pick shadows.
They're better dancers.
They always sing their telegrams.
Their old gods do not die."