NYC

Sadly, this was the only picture I took (except for in the Emily Dickinson exhibit) on our day in New York this weekend. Our day was jam packed with goodness: We left our car on Staten Island and took the ferry over. We got in line at 9 am for rush tickets to see Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. Our dear friend brought us coffee and stood in line with us, which made that far more entertaining. Then we joined him and his wife for coffee and a bit of breakfast, before meeting my childhood Latvian pen-pal for brunch.

I didn't have high hopes for meeting my Latvian pen-pal--we had barely corresponded, except facebook birthday greetings, since I was 14. Plus, she chose to meet at Dean and Deluca's over the Cuban hole-in-the-wall or the diner with great architecture that I'd proposed. So Francisco and I were pretty nervous to meet her and her boyfriend. It turns out they were wonderful and kind and open and it was fun to reminisce about how we were when we were kids and used to write letters.

After meeting them, we went to our play--it was fun to see Ian McKellen and Patrick Steward in person. I've never seen an absurdist play in the theater, but I found it odd that the audience was continually cracking up. I found the play funny, but in an ironic, poignant, clever way; not haha funny.

There were lots of references to Eliot--the line "Now and in England" from the Four Quartets was picked up very obviously. There was another direct quote, but I forget it now. I need to look it up.

(Update: Terry Teachout's review of the plays links to the 1978 telecast of No Man's Land with the actors who originally played the part. Another line from Eliot: "I often hand about Hampstead Heath myself, expecting nothing. I am too old for any kind of expectation." (Which is reminiscent of The Waste Land's "My people humble people who expect / Nothing." And the Four Quartets' "wait without hope" and Prufrock's meditation on growing old.)

Afterward, our friends met up with us again and we headed down to the Emily Dickinson exhibit at The Drawing Center before dinner and heading home. Emily Dickinson's writing was a tiny portion of a small exhibit that was set at the intersection of drawing and writing. But it was wonderful. It was great just to see her real live handwriting.

She wrote on loads of scraps of envelopes--actually, it seems like she just wrote poetry on every piece of available paper.

The description on this candy wrapper said that Joseph Cornell was inspired by it and included some candy wrappers in his boxes. I had no idea. Here's one of his boxes that was inspired by Emily Dickinson's room (and poetry), but sans candy wrappers:

This fascinating--a poem that Dickinson writes on the edge of a flyer about foot health can be read differently, given its context. Particularly since I'm interested in thinking more about Emily Dickinson in the context of disability.

Sometimes there was a bit of impromptu art--one small sketch; a scrap of paper attached to another scrap; this collage of a stamp, a printed "George Sand" and "Mauprat" (the name of her novel) included in the middle of a letter.