National Art Gallery

this is the National Art Gallery in Ottawa as seen from the bench just outside the Nicholas Hoare book store on Sussex Drive. You can sort of see the spider just to the right of center.

So, the Nicholas Hoare bookstore is one of those bookstores that just has all the good stuff and NONE of the filler...the opposite of Chapters, which has 90% filler and a bit of the good stuff.

I bought Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red (it's okay, Steve, I bought it in paperback, so it wasn't so expensive).

And Betty, as I wandered through the NAG, I kept making myself aware of the smells I was smelling. I have to admit, mostly I detected the odor of soap, but in the George Clutesi room, I smelled the scent of fresh paper.

I saw one exhibit, Betty, in which this woman takes personal objects that are worn or carried close to the human body, and puts them outside, inserting a bee hive into them. Over the years, honey comb accumulates on and around the objects, and her piece on display was a dress almost completely covered with honeycomb. The blurb that accompanied the piece talked about "inter-species collaboration" in art. For some reason, I thought of you and thought you'd like that.

So, I apologize for this photograph. It's pretty lame compared to the ones I saw on the racks in the Byward Market (on my way back to Home Sweetland Home, the B&B I'm staying at in Sandy Hill), which somehow managed to insert a field of tulips between the gallery and the road...how do they do that? I didn't see any flippin' tulips!