Modern churches have no real sense of art. When I go to a Traditional Latin Mass on Sunday the church there is full of wonderful works of art; stained-glass windows, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, Renaissance-style paintings, etc.

The local church in my own hometown however has no real beauty but is simply ugly and looks like a college classroom.

He is loved by the world because he was so horrible …

I suppose that that's one way of looking at it.

It's at least thirty years now since the Museum of Modern Art here in New York mounted a famous ceiling-to-basement exhibit of Picasso's opera omnia. On the day I went to see it, I happened to run into a pair of old friends (we were older than most habitués of this site even then!). They went through the exhibit, which was organized chronologically, in the orthodox way: from the bottom up (i.e., starting with the earliest stuff). Not being charmed by the presence of a large crowd down there, I went to the top and worked my way down. Somewhere in the middle, I again encountered my friends, one of whom remarked rhetorically to me, "Has anyone in history ever painted as much merde as Picasso?" (He used the usual English word, however.)

The plain truth is that it was hard to disagree with his assessment. There was an astonishing amount of stuff there that ranged from the routine and forgettable to the just plain dreadful. Yet I also knew that my friend (who was working in the production end of the advertising racket at that time and hence was making money faster than it could be spent) owned one or two Picasso sketches that he'd picked up somewhere in Europe a few years back. They were rudimentary things, as one might expect, but really quite beautiful.

A big event for me at the Picasso show was running across La casserole émaillée (1945), a cubist still life of a kitchen table with a pitcher, a candle, and an enamel saucepan sitting on it. In the early to mid-sixties, while I was in college, I picked up a canvas reproduction of it in a now long-gone bookstore on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. Readers (appalled or otherwise) can get an idea of my affection for this painting from the fact that that very reproduction (now protected by a properly glassed frame that I had custom-made for it during one of the few brief prosperous periods of my life) still hangs over my kitchen table. The only time I haven't had the reproduction up on the wall since the sixties was for a roughly five-year period after the MOMA Picasso show. Seeing the original made me realize that the colors in my reproduction were about as far off the mark as it was possible to be without utterly losing the sense of any connection whatsoever between my reproduction (price: circa six bucks) and the original (price: ????; give the nice folks at the Centre Pompidou a ring and ask them if you're curious). What's more, even the relative sizes of the objects on the table are misrepresented in the reproduction. Once I got over my five-year pout, however, my down-market version of the enamel pot and company went back on the wall.

Incidentally, there's another reproduction of La casserole émaillée, one virtually identical to mine (save that the color of the table is a bit closer to the deep brown of the original than the sadly ocherish red of mine), now on sale at the Bay of E. I suppose that, accounting for fifty years of inflation, the current asking price might actually be a bit more of a bargain than what I paid. Of course, if you agree with Elizabeth and others, even a dime would seem like an overcharge.

I will bet you that my dad visited that bookstore in the Village when he wasn't drinking at the White Horse Tavern (if that was its name).

The last time we were in NYC a visit to MoMA was out of the question because of the steep admission price. We are fortunate in DC to have all of the free museums.

The White Horse became a hangout for, first, the literati, then the glitterati, then—worst of all—students from NYU and Lord knows where else because Dylan Thomas used to drink there when he was in New York (he liked it because it was still a workingman's bar in the early fifties). It was the scene of his final massive binge. Hours later, he was dead in his Chelsea hotel room. He was due to board a plane the next morning to Los Angeles, where he was going to meet Igor Stravinsky and begin drafting the scenario for an opera with him.

I never drank at the White Horse—too full of other college students for my taste!—nor indeed at any "literary" watering holes, with just one exception. Once and once only I had a beer at McSorley's, but I was there in the summer, not on the sort of snowy winter's day that cuмmings wrote about. Otherwise I confined my drinking to familiar places where I was surrounded by other people who took drinking as seriously as I did then.