Belated Posts

There are so many missing posts it is hard to even know where to begin.  I might as well start with the more recent events and go backwards.  I actually stumbled across several folders of old photos, quite a few of which need to be backed up onto a second hard drive.  Now I don't have time at the moment to upload photos from the L.A. trip (or the other museum trips), but I will see if I have some time over the weekend.

One interesting fact is that I was riding home and realized that this small food court area on Parliament (near Queen) actually had a name, which is "Hangout Street"!

I suppose this means I really will need to eat there once.  I've tried a couple of times to get tamales at Tamalmex, but one time they didn't have any tamales without meat (shades of my recent bad experience at the Cuban sandwich window), one time the woman seemed incapable of taking my order when she was talking with someone else hanging around by the stall and then one time I didn't have any cash.  But probably one day the stars will align.  I'm not really sure if this is a "permanent" food court or if it is planned to be wiped away by condo development as soon as the market comes back.

The other photos in the LACMA folder are from the Griffin poetry prize reading a few weeks back.  I have written about this at some length but only in longhand and not on the blog.  In short, it was a fairly disappointing event.  Or rather the ending of the evening really colored the overall experience in a negative way.  The main draw was that Margaret Atwood was being given a lifetime achievement award, and probably half the books for sale were by her (more on that later).  I had brought along my copy of her selected poems with the cool UK cover.  

I did, however, spring for a couple of books by Diane Seuss, who was also reading.  She was basically the only poet there I was familiar with, aside from Atwood of course.

I realized something was a bit off when Seuss made a point of saying when she removed her mask to read that this was the first time anyone had seen her mouth since the pandemic!  She was very wary of being around strangers with her presumably compromised immune system.  I suppose this was a bit of a game-time decision, but in the end she didn't come out to do any signings.  Neither did the young poet who had won for best first book.  But I found it pretty inexcusable that Atwood didn't do any signings.  They could have put some rules in place, like she'll only sign two items or whatever, but it just felt wrong to me.  To top it off, it was complete chaos for 30 minutes after the event ended, and staff could definitely have come around saying that Atwood and Seuss weren't going to be signing, so that only the people wanting the remaining poets to sign their books would have stuck around and the rest of us could leave right away.  As I said, it really spoiled what was a generally entertaining evening.  (In some ways, I am still annoyed that Sharon Olds didn't make the cut a couple of years back.  I will definitely never commit to going to the Griffin awards until I know who is on the short list!)