The Blog in Twitter part 1- Sept 13-Nov 13

As precursor to learning to use Twitter, here is a recap of the tour blog, in shortened summary form:

Sept 12 – “gala” for book festival takes place in the lunchroom of a college. Run into Evan Hughes, bibliophile extraordinaire.

Sept 13 - Museum Legs debuts at the Brooklyn Book Festival.  Greg Albers, the publisher, in from Tucson, sitting behind the signature pink tablecloth.

Favorite comment one: “You write very well, but I would never read a book on this topic.”

Favorite comment two: “I want to read this but I don’t want to pay for it. . .”

My all-star mother walks around the festival with Museum Legs, facing out, and Hol shirt button.

Thirty minutes later, my mother has replaced the Hol button with a Paris Review one: “I thought it was a little obvious.”

Lovely visits from friends – reason enough to write a book.

Sept 14 - It’s nice enough to host a book party, even nicer when you have to leave the US Open finals in the second set to do it.  Thank you, Rory!

Margaret left the US Open finals in the fifth set.  Thank you too. . .

Gracious host Rory: “I should host a party once a quarter so I have to clear out all my books.”

Sept 15 – pack up and move out of NYC.  Arrive in Valley Forge, PA, a place you are not nervous to ask a man in a jacked up 4x4 for directions at the gas station at 1am.

While you are doing this, a police officer comes to the parking lot to figure out what to do with a maimed hawk.  Omen for book tour – maimed predator?

Sept 16 –West Collection, of SEI Investments. People work in open-plan offices around contemporary art: fiberglass mushrooms, giant licorice wingtips, and a hand-sewn, life-size Hummer.

Reading 1: me, the bookstore owner, my friend Grey, a woman named Myna with an encyclopedic knowledge of labor relations with Philadelphia art teachers.

Sept 17 – art history class with Mrs. Nelson at the Hill School.  At whole-school lunch, students got up at the end of the “amen” with Jeopardy-buzzer quickness.

Mrs. Nelson is a reminder of work that makes you happy making you look vibrant and young.

Sept 18 – Charlottesville reading.  Me, my friend Jen, two bookstore workers. Met with student entrepreneurs at the Batten Institute, UVA.

Sept 20 – Chapel Hill.  My aunt, a retired professor of performance studies, is an amazing publicist and audience member. 

Ann Hull, who worked with my father in the 80s, read about the reading in the paper and came.  Her husband Wendell “won” the Q+A with, “What if people had to pay to leave museums?”  A bit like the Holland Tunnel.

Sept 23 – Charlotte, NC.  If the book tour doubles as a ‘where to live’ project, you can judge a town by its radio station.  Into the land of Phil Collins, easy listening, and half-and-half.

Drinks with Joe Gaines and the inimitable Judy (Joe’s mom).  Breakfast with Cynthia, a sorority sister from high school (crazy phrase but true), at The Flying Biscuit.  Not a place I would ask for skim milk.

Sept 24 – Museum binge in Charlotte: the Mint, the Mint downtown, the Museum of the New South, and the McColl Center, founded by Hugh McColl of Bank of America – amazing artist studio space downtown.  

Nice sign for the Rustic Martini.

Drive-by of the Greenville, SC art museum.  Lovely Wyeth paintings.  The problem of being a “museum writer”: lovely Tom of the bookshop notices that you are legging it (read: almost jogging) through the museum, having gotten lost and arrived eight minutes before closing.

Sept 25 – Milledgeville, GA, my mother’s hometown.  Have the first shocking experience of not only my picture on the door (event there that night) but on the wall of the ladies’ room (same reason).

Met some really nice people – Michael Packard, student who organized a reading at the Blackbird Coffee (go there if ever in Mville!), Chrissy of the public affairs office, and the first person to defend the word “homunculus” (see Museum Legs, chapter 5)

Sept 26 – reading at the Flannery O’Connor Foundation, a high point.  I met Flannery’s cousin Louise Fleurincourt who said she should have been an artist but was an attorney. 

My mother told me later that Mrs. Fleurincourt was in the first class of women at Harvard Law School.

And I thought she was an artist, through and through.  Sample: “I would have made a wonderful only child.”  While having me sign a book to her sister.

Sometimes you meet someone and think, that is one of the best things I have ever done.  It was like that.

Weird Flannery O’Connor fact: when she was six, she was on national television for teaching a chicken to walk backwards.

Weird but true FO fact 2: Flannery’s mother’s response (paraphrasing): “Flannery didn’t teach that chicken to walk backwards.  That chicken walked backwards because it was constipated.”

Flannery apparently said everything in her life after the chicken had been anticlimax.

The director of the O’Connor Foundation is a PR genius and we were shocked to see the top of the local paper, unbeknownst to me, say “Hope in the Face of Art” before the title, story page 3.

Went to the donut shoppe south of town where I watched my mother explain the plot of Fahrenheit 451 to a woman who had been making donuts since 4am.  Part of “The Big Read.”

Sept 27 – Birmingham – wine and cheese with museum trustees and staff.  Fascinating conversation.  Felt like an oscillating fan sitting in the middle of a long porch on the first sunny day after weeks of rain.  Thanks to Gail and Dick for hosting.

Amazing to watch people so busy running museums take the time to be philosophical about them.

Sept 28 – spoke with Gail Andrews, director of the BMA, in art history class at my old high school.  Could have coffee from the teacher’s lounge (!).  Was the same class that launched me into studying art.

Book signing at the Little Professor.  Another of those amazing gatherings of people that is reason alone to write a book.  Especially touching to watch my parents’ friends and old colleagues turn out in force (the neurosurgeons, the English professors, the Haskells).

Non-book-tour trip to Nashville.  Bedford's daughter was studying numbers for math homework, asked me the book's print run, sales, etc.  

Memphis feels like home.  Read at children's story hour at Davis Kidd.  Allison's niece crawled into my lap as I started to read.  Miss Marjorie warmed up the crowd with Wheels on the Bus and Hokey Pokey.  

Miss Marjorie's loyal followers later realized the arts and crafts project with Miss Amy was a substitute for, rather than a complement to, the usual giveaway of lollipops. Mutiny neatly avoided by Miss Marjorie's Zen calm.

Museum Legs in the board room of the Brooks Museum of Art.  First time reading a story in the place it occurs, to people in the story "perfectly coiffed hair going up and down in genteel knowingness."

Went with Martha and Allison to the Pink Palace Craft Fair, where I hadn't been since I was young enough to fish change out of a wallet to but something like a piece of fur that curls up when you pet it.

Met Winston Eggleston, William Eggleston's son, a gentle wonderful person.  Spent time looking at books of Bill Christenberry photos.

Oct 3 -- Returned to New York for an engagement party and to DC to visit Scott and Porter who were hosting a Museum Legs party.

Scott shares my school of hosting: cook for eighty if you have invited twenty.  When in doubt, buy too much booze.  We also bought snacks for Mac's class.  Scott was trying to repeat the previous year's "good snack!" commendation.

Oct 5 -- Scott and Canon came to the Baltimore book fair the next day as my PR and assistant.  Canon helped us meet people by climbing on all unstable surfaces in the lunch restaurant.


Booksellers want you to sign books but not to anyone in particular.  Reminds me of my friend Darby buying a copy of his friend's book, before it came out, from a street stand near Columbia, PR letter still neatly tucked inside.

Went to the office in New York for the day.  Visited the op-ed project to give away a copy of the book.

Nearly blew past the op-ed project appointment time.  Regrouped with TV: on American religious freedom “All people are welcome to worship Jesus in their own way.” Stephen Colbert

Flew back to Memphis.  Lunch with Crabtree and Fones.  A visit to Stax, my childhood home, and over to Arkansas flat farmland, my comfort food of landscape.  Cousins Dewey and Teresa took me to catfish dinner.

Drove through Harrisburg, my father's hometown, where a housekeeper at the local high school's art center gave me directions to my grandmother's house.  My grandmother (the longtime music teacher) died in 1993.

Long call with Bruce the PR who considered taking on the ML project but decided he was too busy with other things.  In fairness, Food Inc., and Half the Sky.

The open road to Dallas.  One billboard reads: Billboards are the Art Gallery of the Public.


Chez Rosie and Dick, patron saints of the Museum Legs book tour, my sister's in-laws, art aficionados (including the living arts of wine, food, and fashion), and champion museum-going partners in crime.

We stand fascinated in the gift shop of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth looking at the stuffed animals of Frida Kahlo and Frank Lloyd Wright, who have a perfectly stitched unibrow and oddly lecherous expression, respectively.


Rosie took me to book group and to meetings at the DMA and the Nasher.  All in, an amazing art trip, hopefully to be followed by speaking there another time.  We loved the Philip Haas riff on Tiepolo: http://www.kimbellart.org/haas/

Oct 13 -- A second return trip to New York for a work meeting, seeing the project I have worked on since it was a hare-brained scheme (i.e., just an idea) start to become a company.


Back to Dallas by way of a failed PR meeting in the DC airport, scheduled with great inconvenience, only to have the guy wait til I was there to negotiate salary.  When people in the arts sound more capitalistic than people in business.


See the Gutmans for tragically short period before they leave for France and I drive westward.  Finish Rain Gods book on tape, about serial killers in west Texas, mercifully before further into west Texas.  Visit Cousin Hazel Doris in Odessa.


Take Doris to see Whip It.  Doris, is that the worst film you've ever seen?  Smiling, "I've probably seen two or three worse."  At one point in the film they said one of the rudest things I have ever heard and Doris leaned over, "I can't hear everything they are saying."


She could hear.  She is just very gracious.  Also very gifted with a motorized cart in the grocery store, though hops up to get tomatoes with more spunk that someone a quarter her age.


We watched Fox News and discussed the separation of church and state and I said bye to drive further west.

In Wal Mart in Deming New Mexico behind man buying Pride and Prejudice DVD, then getting on motorcycle in the parking lot.  I was buying San Pelligrino.

Oct 19-20 Arrive in Tucson at the home of Greg and Kate, my publisher and his wife a photography professor.  They host a fun party, including fellow Hol author Frank Gohlke.  I meet Laura Adams, who becomes the book's PR (yaaaayyy!!!)


The next day, I guest lecture in Kate's museum studies class. Topic: the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum.  I realize how many British artists I learn about osmotically living in England. Greg and I debrief the project.

Vacation time in Palm Springs, an impossible landscape of manicured lawns, palm trees, craggy mountains, and roads named after Bob Hope.  Man at hotel gives me directions coming from LA. I get lost for an hour.

Palm Springs has not one but two Muzak stations.  A man behind me at the Starbucks drive-thru is in a convertible Rolls Royce.  A woman lawyer at the other Starbucks offers astrological advice, and is also an art dealer.

Brits populate the resort, as it is a Mr and Mrs Smith property.  The first night, I trip theatrically on my way to dinner, enough so the waiter keeps checking on my health, but really seems to be making sure I am not a litigious soul.


Totally unpack and repack the car.


Oct 23 - Perfect sunlit day for the full drive from Palm Springs, through LA with some stops, all the way up to Big Sur.  I love LA when I am not driving into the sun.  I love the music and the sense the city is a big swimming pool.  I love Book Soup.

I stop at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and happen to leave a book for someone on her birthday.  

I stop at Equator Books in Venice.  A few days later I get an email from Smith Glover from college who asks why I was there.  He lives three blocks away.  I still don't know how he knows I visited. Was my card on the counter?

Sometimes people with inelastic abortion views also have faulty math: a man in monk robes on the way into LA had this bumper sticker: Of all the women who go into abortion clinics, only half come out alive."


Only two-third come out alive.  All the mothers are women.  Each has one baby.  Half the babies are, probabilistically, female.  (No accounting for twins.)  Mothers outnumber female babies 2:1. Mothers are therefore two-thirds of the women going into abortion clinics.


To say nothing of any other part of the argument.  The monk had seemed so nice until he peeled out just slowly enough to read the sticker.


Big Sur, Pacific Coast Highway, listening to the Dalai Lama in the dark, feeling afraid of nature through knowledge yet no visual orientation that the left side of the road drops off into darkness and into the Pacific Ocean.

Luckily avoid skunks checking into Big Sur State Park, as warned to do.  Key is taped to my door. Crawl into bed in my clothes and sleep like a rock.  Gorgeous hike the next morning.  Except cell phone tower at trail lookout.

Oct 24 - Drive up to San Francisco, stopping at artichoke farm and getting produce for dinner.  Big visit with Sabrina and Julian, and fun drinks out with Dan.

Reading at Green Apple the next day.  Shopping with Sabrina, who is expecting twins.  Dinner with J and S who, coincidentally, take me to the same place Dan and I have frequented the day before for drinks.


Oct 26-27 - Blue Bottle Coffee and Jeremy's (magic clothing store) and drive to Menlo Park to visit Claire and Jesse.  Talk at Google the next day.  See Eric Schmidt make himself a panini in the cafeteria afterwards.


If you can tell a lot about a place by the mood of law enforcement, in Menlo Park, I got a "courtesy notice: for parking on the street overnight.


Back to SF, see British Airways planes on landing pattern and feel a pang for that great distance.  Meet with Nathan Shedroff who runs a Design MBA at California College of Arts and Crafts, which has dreamy amounts of natural light, to say nothing of its curriculum.

Flight of the Concords and corn chowder with J and S.  F of the C soundtrack sample: "She's so hot.  I want to tell her she's so hot.  But she'll think I'm sexist.  She's so hot she's making me sexist.  Bitch."


Long, long driving day.  Bay Bridge closed.  Up over the Golden Gate into Marin.  Sonoma County looks like France.  Mad dash through the WinCo hypermarche and arrive at Carrie Bader's in Portland.


Oct 29 - Teach healthy cooking classes the next day as Carrie's guest speaker.  Of 25 in each class, 24 buy bottled salad dressing.  Cooking is one of the few daily art forms most people have access to.  The plate is a canvas, food the color.  I teach them to make vinaigrette.

We run into my sister's friend Tammy at the local coffee shop.  I will return to Portland but head to Seattle for a Halloween reading.


Stay with Katy Thomas, age old Birmingham friend whose son Zach is a natural charmer.  Keeps putting his hand on my knee to say my name and show me his John Deere truck.  Stay up late making a Museum Legs Halloween costume.

Oct 31 - The costume is made out of Burger King crowns, neoclassical in the front, modernist in the back (museum mullet).  The back crowns are covered in foil, the front crowns in construction paper banners, e.g., "Cezanne".

I add a beret for good measure and feel like I am wearing a barrel.  Miraculously, there is turnout for a Halloween reading at Elliot Bay Books, including my brother's freshman year across the hall roommate and his wife.

Venture north to Bellingham to visit Darby's mom and read the next day at Village Books.  Dana, Darby's grandmother, and our friend Lisa anchor the front row of a huge and energetic crowd.

Nov 1 - Dana shows me how to use walking sticks on our morning hike.  I get a lot of great book recommendations, Lisa and Ben and I have smoked salmon pizza, and I enjoy a few days in the Jack family writers retreat cabin.


Back down to Seattle I stay with Matt's parents.  Cannot say how fun this is.  Lively, fascinating conversation with people who are lifelong political animals, in the purist, public intellectual/sense of citizenship way.


They also entrust me with their amazing, technicolor slinky keychain.


Nov 4 - Meet the next morning with Pam, the director of the Gage Academy, an atelier-model art school devoted to long training in the craft of painting.  You only draw the first year.


Speak that night to the Seattle Art Museum docents.  Love meeting them but at times can't tell if they are interested, confused, or offended.  Later get feedback.  Remember my tendency to be a level of abstraction above where always needed.


Back to Portland for a few days writing time.  Stay with my sister's friend Tammy, who takes me on movie and farmers' market adventures.  We get caught in a truly torrential downpour.  


Going to Nordstrom Rack soaked from rain is like going to the grocery store hungry.  I left with jeans, boots, a sweater, and socks.  And an umbrella.  


Torrential downpours help you run into long lost college classmates, such as Matt Abrams, now an anesthesiologist.


A Seattle detour, Alsdorfs part two, to visit the Microsoft Art Collection.  Have lunch with college friend AJ Brush who works in research at Microsoft.  Art lady cancels on me on five minutes notice.  I get a speeding ticket on the way home.

Nov 10 - Off to Sylvia Beach hotel, on the Oregon coast, where all the rooms are decorated after famous writers, and the owner Goody has an all-encompassing art practice, part of which is getting people together for conversation.

I have a Scrabble personal best of 307 in the Sylvia Beach kitchen, just off the third floor library with panoramic views of the ocean.  

Goody is collecting stories for every country in the world so her grandsons can point at one on a globe and she can tell the story.  As she says, "I want them to know more than Sarah Palin by the time they are seven."


Nov 12 - Turn the car eastward for the first time.  Through McMinneville where I check out the remaining Harry Potter books on tape at the local bookstore and stock up on Oregon wine.


Head to the Portland Airport to get a new rental car.  Meet IP lawyers in the Hertz line, on a boondoggle trip.  Ask if they know about Bilski, currently before the Supreme Court.


Accidentally get in another man's rental car and return it to its spot just as the man walks up.  This is somehow extremely funny.


It takes me more than an hour to transfer my things to the new car.  Back at Tammy's I stay up very late and post the blog for the first time.  


Nov 13 - The drive back starts.