Is it a compulsion, or obsession? I can’t visit New York without diving into the museums. Today I visited the Met and the Whitney. The draw at the Met was   the John Baldessari retrospective. One of those godfathers-of-conceptual-art I’ve encountered in bits and pieces, but it was wonderful to take it his entire oeuvre in about an hour. Favorite piece: a 10-photo montage in which he took a map of California and photographed the actual location that each letter covered on the map. The final “A,” for example, was located in Joshua Tree. (It looks more clever than it sounds; which is practically a definition of conceptual art.)

The last few times I’ve visited the Whitney it’s been a disappointment. Either old stuff I’ve stared at to exhaustion (i.e, Edward Hopper) or new work that does nothing for me. Right now there’s a retrospective of the indefinable Paul Thek (1933-1988, of AIDS). Much of the work is nightmarish: sculptural representations of hunks of bloody flesh. But the title piece, The Diver, really spoke to me. A  painting of a pink figure, diving into translucent blue. Thek, like me, was fascinated by the unknown perils and possibilities contained within lakes and oceans. His artistic perspective originated from above; in Snake Lake, I take the view from below.

Did a reading tonight at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, one of my favorite places in Manhattan. A modest gathering; most of the people who entered the museum were there to hear a talk by film director Mike Nichols. But I gave it up for my attentive little group, and as always found myself totally immersed in the rarefied world of storytelling – which, paradoxically, seems a transit beyond the ego, an almost divinely guided ascent into a jet stream of urgent communication. (One does wish, afterwards, that more people had been there to enjoy it.) Only six people left with snakes—and they were very lucky people.