My stepdaughter, A., is visiting for ten days. This weekend Max and I took her to French Book Art/Livres d’Artistes: Artists and Poets in Dialogue, an NYPL exhibition that runs through August 19. Magritte’s giraffe in a wine glass impressed us all. And Paul Eluard’s accompanying Dadaist poem, “Musicien,” was weirdly intelligible even to our French-illiterate party. (A. is the . . .
I finally got out to the Pierpont Morgan Library on Sunday. It’s a weird jumble of ancient and modern texts and artifacts collected by J.P. Morgan’s tycoon father and displayed under glass in airy rooms or inside locked cabinets in musty ones. Mary Shelley’s own annotated copy of Frankenstein (at right; larger version here) sits alongside the only intact Caxton . . .
When I started to run out of Mark Twain’s nonfiction earlier this year, I turned to a fellow Twain maniac* for help. He sent me off in search of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday (1981). The book opens with some hilarious rants on censorship — “There is never any shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though . . .
In my mind, I’m the one in the Western who takes a bullet in the arm and then gets back up on his horse and rides into the desert to hunt down the guy who shot him. And who knows? Hot-tempered and vindictive as I can be, if somebody pissed me off enough, it could happen. Where more commonplace pain . . .