At Georgetown University in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. at the moment and overlooking some beautiful trees while I'm posting this. We're staying in Georgetown and it's a great area...very village-like with lots of neat shops, restaurants, small galleries, antique shops, and row housing that's very reminicent of the UK ...probablly dating from late 1800's I would say. Jim is doing is usual library thing...found some great Graham Greene letters yesterday that he will be able to use in his introduction to the the new novella by Greene he is publishing that I'm sure the publisher will be very excited about. We met the publisher/owner of Hesperus Press in NYC just before we left as he was there briefly. A really neat guy and they are very excited about publishing the Greene story and also the unpublished first novel if that works out. Jim had a quick look at it yesterday and he feels it's pretty good.

I went to the National Gallery of Washington and it was wonderful for all the works there as well as the buildings themselves...very impressive even after the Metropolitan Art Gallery of NYC which we also just visited. It's free to everyone and they don't even have a donation box (that I could see anyway) so a wonderful facility for everyone. In addition to loads of impressionist and modern paintings (and of course everything else but you've got to focus on your real interests in these places since I'm going non-stop these days) they had a wonderful Mayan special exhibition with great supporting materials including a really neat guide for children and also around 30 very interesting and impressive cubist paintings of Diego Rivera. He only produced such paintings during a two year period when he was in Paris around WWI. I just loved these paintings!

I think we'll do some sort of tour of Washington later this afternoon since we are very short of time here since we leave tomorrow and Jim really hasn't seen much except Georgetown.

Guess I haven't posted for a while. After Greenwich Village we walked along the Hudson River embankment walk...a wonderful decompressing area for New Yorkers and walked up the the 9/ll site and the winter garden (14 palm trees) in the World Financial Centre. Talking to a woman in Greenwich who really wanted us to see that as apparently they rushed this redevelopment through around the 9/11 site and it meant a lot to New Yorkers to have something beautiful again around that devastation. It's very moving to hear people talk about that experience.

The New York Public Library is also just amazing and I loved the park beside it which is the "Bryant Park Reading Room" where they have all sorts of bistro type tables and chairs along with movable shelves of books that people can temporarily borrow while they're there and even a rack of newspapers on rolls. I took a lot of pictures of that and think I'll try to paint that scene.

With all the frenzy of NYC there are many areas of oasis. We walked to the Frick Collection (wow...more wonderful stuff!)from our apartment via Central Park...another wonderful place where people can relax. Then walked to Zabar's food emporium on 80th and Broadway...can't believe the variety of stuff they manage to sell there from a relatively small space...a foody's delight...just bought a bag there for a souvenir to add to my collection of book/ shopping bags since we were leaving fairly soon.