But the more impressive thing about this museum is what’s below it. Barcelona, like a lot of cities in Europe, was once a Roman settlement. You can see bits of the Roman walls around town and the city stands on layer after layer of older buildings. From the ground level of the museum, you take an elevator down to this fantastic subterranean world of Roman ruins. Raised walkways go along Roman walls, into a sentry tower, through a dye shop, past a pool from a public bath, over a garum factory (more on garum later), past the remains of early Christian buildings, and through a huge winery.

This is a storefront along a real Roman road. Behind it is the dye factory, where the Romans did, oh, laundry and stuff. And dying fabric. The museum had a great audio tour, which was excellent at the time but means I couldn’t take pictures of wall text to remind myself what I was seeing. (Could I have taken notes? Yes. Did I? No.)

Here’s one thing I do remember: They used urine in the dye process, so they would have had big jars to collect contributions from passersby. I know, ew. Roman cities must have smelled awful. I just read something that pointed out how little bathing would have helped, too–I mean, it’s not like they had chlorination then. Everybody brought whatever bodily fluids, dirt, and bugs they had encountered since their last bath and shared them with the whole town through the excellent dispersal medium of nice warm water.

Speaking of things that are smelly, Roman food depended on something called garum. Garum is what happens when you mush up fish and let them ferment in these tanks.

Garum is required if you’re going to pull off any ancient Roman recipes. Imagine if you were 2000 years in the future and trying to make a recipe that called for ketchup or Worcestershire sauce. I mean, where would you start? Garum is like that.

One more thing from that museum. They had mounted a series of funeral portraits, dug up when archaeologists were excavating the Roman walls in the 1960s and 1970s. The whole point of these portraits was to make sure the memory of these people lives on forever, and, as the label points out, they did it! Here they are, 2000 years later, looking you right in the eye.

Way to go, citizens.

The other day I visited Casa Batlló. I wasn’t planning to blog about it. But then the audio tour was so annoying that I couldn’t keep it to myself.

If you were visiting an apartment building designed by a famous architect, and you were listening to the audio tour, which is the only source of information – there’s no wall text – wouldn’t you think that one of the first things you’d want to know was that it’s an apartment building? Somehow, that piece of information didn’t make it into the audio tour until pretty late, when they sort of mentioned the apartments in passing. If you, like me, didn’t already know that this wasn’t just the Batlló family’s house, you would be very confused about why the tour of their house wrapped up after one floor.

You might also be interested in learning things like where the Batlló family got their money, or why they thought it was a good idea to hire this architect, or the fact that it wasn’t new construction but actually a renovation of an older building, or what the neighbors thought about the absolutely insane facade.

See what I mean about the insane facade? I wonder what the neighbors thought about this on Barcelona’s most fashionable street in the first decade of the 1900′s.

Anyway, if you’re looking to the audio guide to tell you these things, you’d be looking at the wrong place. It started with a defense of the extremely high entrance fee and kind of went downhill from there, with a lot of description of what we’re looking at–which, you know, I can see for myself–and very little context.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing that made me roll my eyes. In one room, the guide told me: “In this part of the attic…, there is an unforgettable experience waiting for you. Once this commentary has finished, why not let yourself be carried away by the music and projected images.” That’s some overblown silliness for you right there, especially considering that the thing that was supposed to carry you away was video clips of bits of Gaudí buildings accompanied by excitable piano music. Forgive me for not being transported. The guide kept doing that, telling me what to feel and what opinions I should have.

Bad communication really gets on my nerves. There are a lot of people who have thought about how best to communicate. They could all tell you that, say, if you have a room on a roof where the water tanks used to be installed, and you use sound effects and light projections to evoke the feeling of running water, you don’t have to also tell people that you are using sound and visuals to evoke the feeling of water. You let the experience stand on its own. On the other hand, here are some things that might be worth telling your visitors when they’re visiting the water tank room: Was running water new? What were the tanks made of? Where did the water come from?

Oh, and for a touch of commercialism, the last recording on the audio tour was about the exhibition of chairs designed by Gaudí, including some “exquisite flower-inspired carvings”–how about letting me decide if they’re exquisite or not–and how you should go into the shop and order one, which they would deliver to your house with the utmost of care.

My crankiness about the audio tour aside, the house is fantastic. Gaudí was a creative guy. But if you go, take a guidebook.

Entrance to this historic building is €18.15, which is $23, and it is full of visitors. Perhaps the owners of Casa Batlló should take some of that cash and give it to someone who knows how to write an audio tour.

The website has several regular features, including one where they interview a writer about how he or she pulled off some fantastic story, and a new one about where writers work. (The first installment featured my friend Cassie Willyard’s super cute Brooklyn apartment.)

I’m in the latest edition of Ask TON, in which they ask three editors and me about using quotes. I love quotes. And yes, you can quote me on that.

I wrote about the links between smell and memory for the April issue of the APS Observer, the magazine of the Association for Psychology Science. Now, before you go read it, let me warn you: the formatting of the page is kind of weird, so when it refers you to a sidebar in the second paragraph, it’s actually talking about the two slightly offset paragraphs at the bottom of the text, about Proust and the madeleine. If you don’t know about Proust and the madeleine, I recommend reading that before you read the rest of the story, “Fragrant Flashbacks.”

Fun fact: Multiple sources mentioned Proust. When you’re talking about smell and memory, that’s pretty much the go-to cultural reference. Although I also really like the scene in Ratatouille when the cranky old food critic eats a bite of Remy’s ratatouille and is transported to his childhood, coming in sad from the outdoors and sitting down with his mom’s ratatouille. That scene makes me kind of teary.

Yeah, call me a philistine, but I’d take Pixar over Proust anytime. (Well, I say that, but really all the Proust I’ve ever read is this one passage. He’s probably pretty good.) (You like how I just described one of the most important French novelists ever as “probably pretty good”?)

That’s the same David Koch whose name is on the human origins hall that opened a few years ago.

I also resent a little bit the fact that I always have to look up the spelling. Hirschorn or Hirschhorn or Hirshorn just seem more likely to me.

I still haven’t broken my streak, but earlier this week I went down to the outside of the Hirshhorn to enjoy a moving piece of art. It’s “Song 1,” a multimedia installation by artist Doug Aitken. It’s a video, projected on all 360 degrees of the cylindrical museum’s exterior, with big speakers playing various people singing “I Only Have Eyes For You,” a song from the 30′s that I didn’t recognize but which has been drifting through my mind ever since Tuesday night.

It’s running every night from sunset to midnight, through May 13–definitely worth a visit. The closest metro is L’Enfant Plaza, but in this nice weather you could turn it into a walk from Gallery Place or just about anywhere downtown.

If you know anyone in or near Appleton, tell them to come! Here’s the information.

So on a trip to Ann Arbor recently, of course I had to check on the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, formerly–and less eloquently–known as the Exhibit Museum of Natural History, I suppose to emphasize that they were actually showing things off, instead of just doing research. Research is the point of university natural history museums (and is the reason I haven’t gotten around to blogging about Berkeley–they have hardly anything on display).

Let’s look at some rocks and bones.

Does that look like any old rock? Well, it’s not. For one thing, look how pretty! For another, it’s a piece of the Acasta Gneiss, a rock formation in northern Canada. That’s some of the oldest rock on Earth, about 4 billion years old. The Earth only started to form about 4.6 billion years ago. Of course, almost everything on Earth has been here for something like four and a half billion years. It’s just that most of it has been melted down and turned into something else in the last 4 billion years, and this rock hasn’t.

The museum’s main room is about the history of life, with old-fashioned display cases around the edges and some nicely redone skeletons in the middle. I particularly enjoyed the mastodons.

This old girl was found in the 1960′s on a farm in Michigan. Mastodon bones are pretty common in Michigan, and I like that the museum features local fossils so prominently. Like mammoths, mastodons are extinct elephant relatives. You can tell them apart by their teeth and the slope of their foreheads. (Learn more from the Field Museum’s online exhibit about mammoths and mastodons.)

Skeletons of animals from 10,000 years ago are rarely complete, and this one needed some filling in. But you don’t have to guess which bits are real and which aren’t. The museum lays it out for you.

Yes, the tusks are fake, but don’t worry, the museum didn’t make up this mastodon’s differently-sized tusks; she really did break one during her lifetime. The real pieces of ancient ivory are safe in the collection.

One last thing: a little section of the carving around the door to the museum.

Recently I’ve been feeling a bit down about writing and this book kept wandering by me. People were mentioning it on freelance listservs. So I decided it was time to reread it.

You never know what will happen when you reread books. If you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice since your early 20s, I recommend it–it is a completely different book now. I was surprised to learn when I read it last year that Mr. Bennet is kind of a jerk, and an awful lot of the characters are very immature young people. It’s still a very good book, it’s just different.

Bird by Bird hasn’t changed that much in the last 10 years. It still makes me laugh out loud and the chapter entitled “Shitty First Drafts” is still totally inspirational. Here’s an excerpt from that chapter:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

Anne Lamott. She’s a funny lady.

The main surprise is that the book is mostly about writing fiction–I’d forgotten that. But fortunately a lot of the principles are the same. In fact, nonfiction seems a little easier. I don’t have to clear my mind so I can listen to my characters and figure out what they want to say. I already know what they said, because they are real people who said it to me, and if I need to I can call them back and get them to say more things.

I haven’t finished my reread, but I’m already feeling better. I’ve been surprised how many of my writer friends haven’t read this one–you should really pick it up.

Amazon link (Or go to a bookstore. Sigh. Remember bookstores?)