Thursday was an amazing day: We started with coffee and an almond croissant at the fancy coffee place in our hotel. The croissant was filled with marzipan--sublime.
Then a breakfast sandwich at a real NYC working people's cafe on the way to an exhibit on Imaginary Books at the Grolier.
I've been there before--was it with you, Hopkins and Stearns, to see miniature books in 2007? Was that when we saw the Cocktail Party?
The exhibit is hard to explain. I'll tell you a lot about it, which is totally self-indulgent, but what is a blog if not self-indulgent?
So this one anonymous book collector made the physical item (not the words) or books that existed and were lost or books that never existed except in the mind of an author, in the words of another book, or something like that.
The exhibit was charming and funny--the line between truth and falsehood shamelessly transgressed. It is the only exhibit I've been to where I and others snickered from time to time.
Just great fun! I loved this P.G. Wodehouse (story, I think) below:
There was tons of Dorothy Sayers stuff, above. Below--the funding information.
Next, we walked to the Neue to see an exhibit on Egon Schiele's landscapes, which was great. And the Klimts are lovely, too.
But before the art, we waited in line for the cafe, where we had Viennese treats.
A picture from the Neue, before I remembered that there are no pictures.
We had a rest at home in the afternoon--and dinner from the Whole Foods buffet across the street--before our play.
There wasn't much small theater going on due to the holiday, but at the last minute I found a very entertaining play about Hannah Arendt. I didn't know she was briefly imprisoned and talked her way out of it. This play tells (imagines?) that story. We loved it. It was a little bit didactic, bringing all of her oeuvre into that one event--all held in one room, tracing her conversation with the Nazi officer who arrested her (with a brief discussion with a lawyer who offered to defend her). Anyway, it was great.
Before the play started, in the row in front of us, a grandmother told her college-age grandson a bit about Arendt. "She wrote her dissertation on St. Augustine!" the grandmother said. The grandson obviously hadn't heard of Augustine: "What is he the saint of?" A look of confusion flickered over the grandmother's face. And then she lit on it: "He loved animals and was kind to them!" Francisco and I exchanged glances--she had mistaken St. Francis for Augustine. The grandmother's confidence returned: "He lived outside of Assisi!" She continued, "St. Francis of Assisi!" And then her face fell again, "No, that isn't right."
Is this funny to you? For some reason, this was delightfully funny to me. It gave me the first belly laugh I've had in a while; don't worry, I was discrete.
