Keeping it rollin'

My primary goal of the day was to visit and explore the Morgan Library & Museum which just so happens to be located near a number of other New York City landmarks.  So I took the subway to Grand Central (landmark #1) and wandered from there to the New York Public Library (#2) which wasn't open due to the holiday weekend, but I figured the facade is enough of a landmark to count.  I continued west past Bryant Park (#3) to Times Square (#4) mostly just to say I'd been there - being a dreary Sunday, there wasn't much going on outdoors.  And speaking of the dreary weather, I've found that New York City weather has somehow figured out a way to be both cool and disgustingly humid at the same time, which makes for difficult decisions in the attire department.

But anyway, I finally made it to the Morgan Library & Museum which was fantastic.  This is another small museum like yesterday's Frick Collection which I quite like.  There were a number of things I took note of while there.  First, in the Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands exhibition, there is one illustration described as "Saint Julian accidentally kills his parents."  Now, I don't know about you, but at this point I'm thinking, "This kid accidentally murdered his parents and he still became a saint?  Really, Catholic Church, really?"  I did some investigation and found that the story of Saint Julian the Hospitaller is somewhat similar to that of Oedipus.  That being said, I still don't quite understand what got him sainted.

The next item that sparked my interest was in the Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art exhibition.  One of the lists was written by one Robert Smithson with notes for his Spiral Jetty piece.  And why might this have caught my attention, you ask dear reader?  Well, both Robert Smithson and his Spiral Jetty are mentioned in a song by one of my favorite bands, Vampire Weekend.  The song I reference was not officially released except on the internet so you may not recognize it, even if you are a Vampire Weekend fan as well.  It's called "Giant" and you can listen to here (you can ignore the accompanying slide show/visuals). 

Finally, once I made it to the library portion of the collection, I spent quite some time browsing the shelves for titles that I recognized or seemed interesting.  The books are beautiful, or their spines are at least - everything is behind glass so it's not like I could actually look at anything.  But anyway, one book that made me chuckle a bit read "Heywood History of Women 1657" on the spine.  After a bit of research (I am almost a librarian, after all), I found that the book's title is actually The generall history of women: containing the lives of the most holy and prophane, the most famous and infamous in all ages [sic].  Sounds interesting, does it not?

Today's mileage: 2.89 mi