Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "tour"

And you will know be by my trail of cheese curds I bought from the Iranian guy's cheese shop, across the street from the Romanian grandmotherly type who took time out from chastising and giggling with a Scandinavian woman who can not possibly have been her daughter to sell me Ontario Empire summer apples, as I wound from the Portuguese district, through Little Italy and Kensington market, paused on the Fiko patio for my coffee fix and sat out back in the trees and listened to the Brazilian Birkenstock-Jewish guy in sandals expounding to the pretty Canadian Jew in better sandals about Kabbalah and possession ("Have you ever been possessed? It's inTENSE..."), and then east toward the AGO, in this city so dizzyingly internationalized, it makes Amsterdam feel like Indianapolis...

Stumbled out of the AGO reeling, after less than two hours, already full. The Henry Moore-Francis Bacon exhibit, so stunning, which works so hard to underscore the (very real) similarities in their work and concerns, but for me even more vividly underscores their differences, Moore's figures always reclining or collapsing, seeking relief or release from suffering, Bacon's almost bursting open--blooming, in a terrifying way--from it.


--Bacon; Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953

The long walk through the Group of Seven rooms with their snowscapes, their shadowed, not-quite-peopleless woods, half-identifying/half-inventing a specific, Canadian somewhere out of the great Canadian nowhere, so much gorgeous work we never get to see Stateside. J.E.H. Macdonald, my god! Hello, J.W. Morrice and your snowlit, Impressionist Quebec, welcome to my permanent collection;


--Morrice; Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, 1897

Tom Thomson, I know those shadows. Or I want to. Emily Carr with your trees winding to heaven. Bacon--crushed, heartbroken, devastated Bacon--said it best, said it on the walls of the AGO exhibit: "Painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation in me which return me to life more violently." Pretty much why I think I'm here. Why I'm anywhere.

New favorite Humble Canadians sign (replacing the Ottawa deli menu with the "Try our famous sandwiches; they're quite tall" legend), this one outside a foot massage place at the edge of Toronto's Chinatown: "Recommended by one of the American travel magazines!"

T.R.U.E. (Tuesday Round-up of Everything), Week of 7/22, Post #1

In between Ian Rogers' superb reading and mine last week at the ChiZine event in Toronto, Kari Maaren and her ukelele popped up onstage and delivered a ripping, rousing version of this song. Having just heard it again, I've decided that it's even funnier and smarter than I thought. It doesn't just skewer the entire Canadian literary establishment; it pretty much nails the rampant snobbery among that substantial garrison of the entire English-speaking literary world hellbent on keeping Literature safe from anyone with an imagination. Best, funniest piece of litcrit I've sung all year:
CanLit

Sweet, strange day. Saw my first hometown Tigers game in 34 years, and my first with my son, sitting in the upper deck with Detroit framed so beautifully in the sunlight streaming past all that green beyond the outfield fence, it seemed almost possible to believe there was still a city out there. Or will be again someday. Then back to the 'burbs, to show my boy the little yard on the tight, grassy corner where I used to play whiffle-ball hockey with my Uncle Jeff, and hide-and-seek with everyone, in the company of one of the brothers we used to play there with (and HIS sons). After that, to the house we moved to later, with the birch trees and the evergreens, the bus stop at the end of a driveway at the end of the block, the basketball hoops in driveways, the house through the trees up the little hill which I would one day transform into Theresa Daughrety's The Snowman's Children house,



the weedy, reedy lake where we swam, with the deck off the scraggle of beach that my dad built for the whole neighborhood to use. Still there. The roads not dirt anymore. The place not the one in my memory. At least not sunlit like that. Then back to a nightlong dinner and gabfest with almost the entire family from that house behind ours, plus all of their families, the stories we always retell being retold once more, riper and older, sweeter and funnier. And sadder. Or maybe I'm just aware of being away from the home that is my home now for a little too long...

Final Motherless Child East/Midwest Tour Stats:



Read to: I don't know, maybe 400 people?

Sold: didn't keep track. Decent number of books. Would have sold more if there had actually BEEN books at Readercon or in Toronto. But it's a long game...

Met: At least thirty people I did not previously know (at least not personally) who will add color and kindness and stories and new light to my life.



Reconnected: With approximately ten people who already add all of the above to my life, and whom I haven't seen in way too long.

Wrote: Every single day. In hotels. In a train station. In a coffee shop.

Spent: It's a good sign, right, that I typed this word intending to comment on the six sweet days with my son, walking everywhere, talking when he felt like talking, presenting obscure tomes to each other, inventing personal Monty Python skits, communing with fishes and horror writers. And only then realized the word could also apply to the money.

I suppose I could also comment on the money. That line would read: Less than I could have. More than I'm comfortable with. Enough that I'll notice. Not enough that I'd trade one second of these days to get it back.

Bottom line: Met people. Got Sid time. Read stories. Listened to stories. Walked cities. Made friends. Remade friends. Saw the Tigers. Ate nanaimos. Ate cheese curds. Wrote to within 10 pages of the end of Good Girls . Missed my wife and my girl. Lived hard. Lived well. Went home grateful.

The Art of Fear at Comic-Con

Comic-Con bound, to moderate this puppy, alongside these gifted people: Mira Grant (Parasite), G. Michael Hopf (The New World Series), Katherine Howe (Conversion), April Genevieve Tucholke (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea), Brenna Yovanoff (Fiendish), and James Rollins (The 6th Extinction).

Room 8 2:30-3:30

Signing afterward from 4-5. Come find me.

Lit out from easily my grimiest hotel of the summer--Berkeley, it's sort of good to see you're still you--to make my usual Moe's Books/Amoeba round late last night. But the Berkeley Amoeba is a shadow, and Telegraph Avenue remains full of people, still awash in college kids and nattily dressed potential-student families and the homeless and clove smoke, and it hasn't exactly gentrified, the energy's still there, it's just missing...I don't know. A sense of collective political unrest or opposition? Art and artists? It's got everything but a reason for being the way it is, now. Or maybe it's just summer.

But right as I was leaving, I found...this.



This exists? This is a thing? I didn't dream this? And...I didn't MAKE this?

Borderlands this afternoon. Then a valedictory Zachary's spinach-and-mushroom stuffed pizza, on my own. Then the last, long drive home. To sit on my patio and read this.

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