Lyon day 5

Does everyone feel deflated and anti-climactic after giving a paper?  I certainly sunk after mine (it went perfectly fine - it's just the aftermath after the build up) so I went to admire the bees in the park opposite, busy at work pollinating, and then for a walk round the lake, in what was nearly 90 degree heat, and cloudy, so extreme humidity.  Needless to say, that rendered it a lot less idyllic than the other day.

 I came upon two weird and apparently deserted witchy structures - well, a witch's house and a bird house - inexplicably in the middle of a small but dense thicket.

And then, after other talks, parties, etc, time for a reception in the Museum of Modern Art - an impressive and entirely idiosyncratic 140 meter long (that's nearly 460 feet) curving canvas by Sylvie Selig called River of No Return - full of artistic and literary quotations, and a kind of anti-heroic quest.  Some parts were so funny that I laughed aloud (the images carried inscriptions floating along on the surface - often alliterative, certainly allusive, often wry (at men's expense).  But somehow I felt depressed and emptied out at the end: it worked as an anti-quest - or, really, there's just disaster at the end of everything.

That was nothing to the exhibition on the second floor, which contained some of the most macabre, depressing, unsettling sculptures, photos, and mixed-media stuff that I'd seen for a long time.  This was about the only art work that I could bear to look at for long.  It was meant to disturb, but ... (I'm sparing you the images).

So at the end of all of this, I escaped the party with four DJs, etc, after realizing that everyone there seemed to be about 30, and was glad to see the tail end of a sunset from my room ...