I didn't make as much progress as I intended to make with the sequence of the book that I'm working on right now, but today was still lovely. It started earlier than I planned, which threw off my energy for the day; I was still asleep at 9:30 when our housekeeper knocked on my bedroom door. She had apparently been downstairs, and while I thought I heard something, I hadn't bothered to wake up and check. She comes every other week and usually comes in the afternoons, so I had planned to vacate before she showed up, but that plan failed. So I spend some time checking my email, etc., while she cleaned up, and then after she left, I made myself a late breakfast/early lunch, showered, got dressed (with my cute new boots, despite the fact that my plans involved some walking), and drove over to the northwest point of the city to visit the Legion of Honor.
The Legion of Honor is an arts museum, housed in a building originally intended to honor California's WWI casualties. The setting couldn't be more gorgeous -- it's on a cliff overlooking the cold depths of the Pacific, surrounded by trees and hills. I can't believe I have never been there before, given how long I've lived out here; I will hit up every museum I run across when I'm traveling, but I haven't been to any of the museums in San Francisco except for the SFMoMA (ironic, since I am not really into modern art, and yet I've been there many times). I wouldn't have gone today, but I had to go; I've been waiting for a year and a half to see a traveling exhibit that was coming here, and while it started in August, I'd never gotten around to going. It ends on the 31st, so if I didn't see it now, it wouldn't happen.
I'm so glad I went. The exhibit was 'The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures From the Court of Burgundy' -- and from the fact that it's tomb sculptures, you should bet your money on this being a research trip for the gargoyle book, not anything related to Malcolm and Amelia. The first two dukes of Burgundy had these fantastically elaborate tombs constructed within a Carthusian monastery they sponsored solely for the purpose of holding their tombs (if I were to die in my sleep tonight, I can guess where I would be buried, but even though I know the approximate location of the plot, it's a far cry from a tomb that would take twenty years to carve within a sprawling monastic community built to pray for my soul). Under the tomb of each duke (father and son, btw, with their wives), there are dozens of intricately carved alabaster figures, all in mourning for the bodies lying above them.
While the mourners usually live in Dijon, home of the former Burgundian court (but not in their original location, thanks to the damned French peasants who destroyed tons of stuff back in the 1790s), that museum is currently being renovated, and so the mourners went on tour in the US. It was actually way cooler to see them here than it would be to see them in the tomb itself -- in the San Francisco exhibit space, each of them were displayed apart from each other with enough room to get up close, see them from all angles, and appreciate the artistry of each piece rather than seeing it all in aggregate. If you want to see what I'm talking about, the mourners site is here.
Anyway, I got tons of good ideas, and I bought the exhibit book so that I can refresh my memory later. I wrote some notes in the museum cafe, then wandered around a bit more and spent half an hour in the porcelain gallery, where I was basically undisturbed since no one seems to care about porcelain even though this was one of the most amazing collections of late 1700s English and French porcelain I've ever seen. Yeah, I'm that much of a dork.
Post-porcelain, I came home, knowing that I couldn't do the rest of the museum justice in the time I had left, so I'll have to return someday. Once home, I did some writing, although not as much (or, more importantly, as well) as I would have liked -- so when Terry came home, I was super eager for a distraction, and so watched tv the rest of the night. And now I'm going to go to bed at the insanely early hour of midnight so that I can get up and write before meeting with Alyssa. Goodnight!
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