Holy &@^&@#  $%!*

I spent Sunday in New York, sightseeing as it were, but since this is the week of the first anniversary of "9/11" -- as it's now being referred to in shorthand by almost everyone -- many of the sights and activities have to do with that day. I did three things today, and all of them referred directly to Sept. 11.

First I rode the train into Manhattan and walked a few blocks to St. Bart's Episcopal Church, a big ritzy edifice hard by the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. As part of their remembrance, they had a children's choir singing Britten's Missa Brevis, and the rector preached on St. Paul's exhortation to love your enemies.

Then it was off to Queens to the American Museum of the Moving Image, where they were showing a series of documentaries about, what else, Sept. 11. I saw part of a film called Circling Zero: We See Absence and then the entire HBO documentary In Memoriam: New York City 9/11/01.Despite its over-reliance on the perspective of then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, it not only tells the story of the day very well but has an extraordinary collection of footage from every perspective. It doesn't shy away from anything; you hear every utterance of "Holy shit!!" and see bodies falling from the towers.

But the most heartbreaking images, curiously, were still photographs of people holding up MISSING fliers, their faces contorted in anguish, still trying to deal with the obvious fact that nobody was coming back from that hellhole. The film will air again this week on HBO. I found it very good.

Then it was back to Manhattan and Lexington Ave., where I attended a church service that was expressly a memorial for Sept. 11. held in St. Peter's Lutheran, a hyper-modern space in the basement of the Citicorp Center. I must say that the Episcopalians beat the Lutherans today; Midwestern-tinged earnestness was less appropriate than a bit of distance, a tiny smidgen of irony, and Benjamin Britten.

But at the (literal) end of the day, I have to say that I found the experience of going to a museum and watching a documentary about Sept. 11 a more effective way of dealing with my memories of that day than going to church. Of course, I experienced the fateful day itself entirely on television from San Francisco. If I'd been here in NYC, maybe I'd prefer to be in church. And I will be in church again, on the day itself, when I'll go to a Greenwich Village church near the Zone.

That's my exciting day of sightseeing. One thing about yesterday -- I spent the whole day in my hotel room trying to work on my novel, and I have to say I had a lousy day of writing. I wrote 2000 words of notes but only 400 words of fiction, and in the latter made no progress at all, but merely added on to an existing chapter. I'm forced to face the fact that I'm at a turning point in the writing of this novel, where I really have to work out some issues with one of the main characters. I won't be making much progress til I do.