Paul Lisson: One career down — four to go
Champion of the local arts scene still has plenty on the go as he retires
Paul Lisson backed into his library career in typically quirky fashion on a moving van in 1980, loading the central branch up with books, not checking them out like most people.
It was a summer job, working for pricelessly named Borisko Brothers Moving. Central branch, brand new to York Boulevard at the time, was ribbon-cutting ready; but, of course, they couldn’t open without — oh, details — books (remember books?).
Times and technologies have changed, ever so slightly. Now Paul, a little snowier on the roof, as they say (I’m one to talk), a little more laurelled around the temples with honours, is retiring as special collections archivist, HPL Central.
It’s been 30 odd years, and if the place won’t be the same without him, he won’t be the same without it. But whatever vacuum of spare time retirement opens up in his day, it will quickly be abhorred by the nature of his life, with its four or five other careers.
Paul, familiar to so many here, in many different spheres, is a published writer, a galleried (is that a word?) artist, honorary typewriter salesman (remember typewriters?), co-founder, co-editor with Fiona Kinsella of one of the most attractive, erudite online publications there is — Hamilton Arts & Letters magazine, affectionately known as HAL.
(Typewriters? He sometimes helps out mother Pat in Tucker Plus, her charming store at 159 John St. S. — they sell typewriters, fountain pens, rubber stamps, old books and such.)
On Tuesday, the library threw him a going-away bash. This month, David Brace, owner of B Contemporary Fine Art gallery, 226 James St. N., installed a 30-year retrospective of Paul’s distinctive, idiosyncratic art.
There’s an event Thursday at 7:30 p.m., at the gallery, celebrating retirement, near-end of show, and launch of HAL magazine’s latest issue, Asylum.
Paul recently learned that in 2019 his poem cycle, The PERFECT aRCHVIE is being published by Montreal’s Guernica Editions.
All this comes on top of winning in the Arts Management category at the Hamilton Arts Awards in early June (his third win, in three categories). Paul’s also won the Rand Memorial Prize, McMaster U, for accomplishment in print, and International Merit Award for poetry, The Atlanta Review, 2007. So why retire? “The numbers were right,” he says. He’s had a great run doing what he loves, library science and archives (“I have the greatest coworkers”), but also he has worsening back pain, and sedentary work doesn’t always help.
“Goodbye to all that,” says Paul, with an elegiac laugh. “I’ll be confronting my mortality.” He’s been doing that all his artistic life.
Much of his work in the show has a memento mori (“remember you have to die”) quality with skull imagery, cobwebby, ghostly exhalations, requiem marble, bones, dominoes, dice, Tarot. But it vibrates with play and humour.
“We would visit my grandfather when I was a child,” Paul says. “He had a walking stick with a skull handle on top of his dresser. ‘Why is that there?’ I asked myself. It scared the s--- out of me. When he died, they gave me the cane.”
David Brace says that going through Paul’s attic space to harvest work for the show “was like unpacking 35 years of Paul’s mind. Non-linear, cross-referencing, making connections.”
Part of Paul’s art is arts activism. He has always championed area culture. He staged hundreds of shows at the library. And he organized some large collective undertakings, like Red October in the 1990s. He knew how to work the phones, calling back until he got everyone; I said at the time, when he played telephone tag, he left welts.
This week, one chapter ends in the book of Paul but there’s still lots of library in him. In that voice. You notice it. Custom-made for a librarian — hushed and naturally dulcet.
Destiny, I guess. When he was moving those books in, all those years ago, he didn’t know they were moving him in with them. Now it’s time to move on.