My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Blogging (9)

Another short post today (I'm leaving tomorrow; have not finished paper, etc. etc.). A year ago my parents moved to Melbourne. It's taken them a good year to feel settled, I think. But we've just had the delight of being able to walk up to visit them for afternoon tea towards the end of a working-at-home day. My mother had made a cake; we chatted; and then came back to our desks. I'm so glad they live so close now.

Moving was tough, because of leaving good friends behind (about an 80 minute drive away), and because it meant downsizing. But they have done very well. My dad enclosed one end of the garage, too, so he has a study that looks out onto the little landscaped garden; and my mum has her sewing room as before.

In the garden there has been a massive job of landscaping, bringing up huge bluestone boulders from the Merri Creek (we are so close that one day I ran into my father on the creek path: that was a good day!).

Here are the enormous boulders, and the ubiquitous spider plants. The garden is easy to care for (that's another reason why they moved). But I mostly like this garden because the bluestone links our houses, at two points along the Merri Creek.

I'm not sure I'll blog while I'm away. But will definitely be back in two weeks time. 

My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Day (8)

I started Friday House day blogging in the back corner of garden, in the chook shed, and have gradually been moving forward towards the front of the house (though I have sometimes skipped the Friday blog).

But today we go even further backwards, to the bluestone laneway behind the house. It's a gorgeous Melbourne autumn day, and it's very quiet, even close to our main road, because it's Good Friday.  I went round to the laneway to take photos of Joel for an upcoming gig in June (first outing of his new piano trio: a big milestone for a jazz pianist). Like countless other bluestone lanes, this one is used more as a thoroughfare between streets than for access to back gardens. It also has blocks of flats at either end, one with the obligatory "tenants ears only" sign.

So here's the musician in the family, blessedly choosing a bluestone laneway for his promo stills...

My Year with Bluestone: Three Churches

Last week,  we went to my parents' new church. They moved from Grovedale to Northcote a year ago, and soon found a ready welcome at this church. It is a composite. There was originally a bluestone church, but when this became too small, a brick one was built next door, without knocking over the bluestone one. Then, as these things happen, the congregation diminished, while another church half a suburb away was growing in numbers, but without having a suitable building. So one Palm Sunday in  2005, the congregation from the smaller building literally walked together into this brick church and the two congregations merged. It's a very active community.

We went to a special service to celebrate the 60th year of my father's ordination as a minister. The service was one of thanksgiving and celebration. People spoke briefly and well. My father spoke a little about leaving school very young to go and work on the farm with his father and brothers, but then being accepted into ministry training, and then going back to finish high school at evening college, and then going to university. But mostly he spoke about my mother (who is facing some long term health difficulties now). Here he is, more or less I think at the age he and my mother met, when she was doing her deaconess training.

And here he is, making his lovely acceptance speech. 

It was followed by what can only be described as a magnificent afternoon tea. To describe all the food would be impossible, but every delicious thing you would expect at a church tea was there. I was particularly impressed by real hot tea and plunger coffee, and then the way the committee members would subtly rationalise the groaning tables as people emptied the plates and started to leave. So first there were two large rectangular tables, and then there was one in the middle of the room, and then there was but a square table; and all the plates were magically kept looking full and fresh. This is just the very last little tableful...

So I have veered a little from bluestone. But what struck me so deeply, on this important day for him, was my father being so attentive to my mother, and remembering my bluestone project, and reminding me to get out and take photographs.

My Year with Bluestone: bluestone and wool

Last week I went into the city to do the kind of work you sometimes do with lawyers, just putting things in place for the future. My sister reminded me to look out for this big bluestone building in William St. It's the Goldsborough Mort building, built in 1862 as a wool warehouse, and later converted into offices. http://vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/search/nattrust_result_detail/64372

It's an extremely imposing building. I didn't take a photo as I was with my parents and know from experience how hard is to get a big building into a picture close up. And frankly I was preoccupied with my family. And, I thought, I can always go back. But now the significance of the meeting and the moment of registering this building in my mind are knitted very closely together.

I had not anticipated how My Year with Bluestone might become linked in my mind with other milestones. All this is a bit too personal for details here though, so let's focus on the building. I quite like this photo of the corner (from Wikimedia), with the astonishing chimney and the network of tram cables.

But then I thought: what does this building remind me of? And lo and behold: the Medici palace in Florence. Different colour stone, but similar square shape, height, layers of arches, textures of stone. And of course, the Medici were wool merchants, too. Wonder if architect John Gill had this in mind?

My Year With Bluestone: Guest Post, in which Grace finds bluestone everywhere

My colleague Grace Moore discovers the wonders of bluestone...

The Ground Beneath My Feet

In my memory, there’s not a lot of bluestone by the beach.  I may be wrong, of course.  I now know that other beaches in the Melbourne area boast plenty of it—Stephanie has blogged about Williamstown in a previous post [Ed. here and here], while the walls that run between Brighton and Beaumaris contain bluestone that may once have rested on top of Ned Kelly and his gang of outlaws.  Probably, I should go back to ‘my’ beach to check, but I’m not quite ready to do that.

Until a few months ago, I’m not sure that I’d ever really given much thought to bluestone, but infectious collegial enthusiasm can change these things very swiftly.  While my younger self wouldn’t have described it in this way, I’ve probably always had an affective relationship with stone.  My father was a keen amateur geologist and my happiest memories of him involve sitting by the hearth, while he proudly displayed and described a variety of rocks that he’d dug up here, there and everywhere. 

There was a piece of volcanic rock, which may have come from Pompeii, although I may also, through the distance of time, be romanticizing its origins.  I remember being intrigued by the little grey piece, with its small bubbles and extraordinary texture.  As a child, I was fascinated by the idea that it had one been molten lava, spewed out of the ground.   As a teenager I was rather less respectful, surreptitiously borrowing it from time to time to smooth my feet.  It’s probably my closest childhood connection to bluestone, and decades later I can feel the memory of its contours on my fingertips as I think back to how it felt.    There was probably more than one piece of basalt in the collection, but it’s on the other side of the world and there is no way for me to check—a single specimen made it to the Antipodes with me, and that’s a flint axe, which sits in my office and occasionally serves as a prop in class. 

In my twenties, I lived for a couple of years in the beautiful volcanic landscape of the Palouse (http://idahoptv.org/outdoors/shows/palouseparadise/geology.cfm  ) not too far away from Mount St Helens in neighbouring Washington State and with a basalt rock formation which I imagine is similar to that which underlies Melbourne.  Beyond the occasional anecdote from residents who’d lived in the region during the major eruption of 1980, I still didn’t think that much about what lay beneath the ground.   The soil was rich and if I’d dug down, I’m likely to have found rock similar to that which I would discover in my back yard today, were I to dig deeply.

Having grown up on the coast, I disliked being landlocked in Idaho and was thrilled to move to Melbourne where, although I never took to the long commute, I loved living by the beach.  For nearly a decade my enormous American dog and I pounded along the sand between Carrum and Seaford twice a day, usually racking up several miles.  If there was bluestone around us, I was never conscious of it, and the outer suburbs tend not to contain the cobbled stone laneways that were built close to Melbourne during the nineteenth century.  Then, just over a year ago, I moved much closer to the city, leaving behind both my beloved beach and Seaford’s glorious wetlands.  Having been spoiled by the great open space by the bay, we struggled a little with the park-based dog culture in the inner north--appreciating it, but still yearning for the sense of intrepid expedition which had been such a feature of our twice-daily jaunts.

At around the time Stephanie began her ‘Year of Bluestone’ blogging, a series of curious bluestone coincidences began to emerge in my own work, and I also discovered the Moonee Ponds Trail.  I’m primarily a Victorian scholar who works with ecocriticism, so it’s unusual for my research to intersect with Stephanie’s, but suddenly there was bluestone everywhere.  As I wrote up a piece on Ned Kelly and fire in the sweltering heat of early January, I was amazed by the number of fleeting references, both in contemporary accounts and modern histories of the outlaw and his gang.  For instance, in 1871, sixteen-year-old Kelly—serving time in the hulks for horse theft—was part of a gang of convicts who built the bluestone sea wall by the beach at Williamstown.  His family home at Beveridge (built by his father when Ned was four) included a bluestone chimney which one recent report describes as having ‘dominated the house’.  I could keep going, but you get the idea.

While I was reading about bluestone, I was also encountering it more and more in my daily life.  In West Brunswick, where I now live, that’s not a particularly remarkable observation.   Bluestone is very much a local material.  One of the first industries in the East of the suburb was the quarrying of bluestone, although by the early 1850s there was little left in the ground, so great was the demand.  Yet bluestone is everywhere and I walk on it every single day.  It forms the gutters and roundabouts, the rickety cobbled side streets are fashioned from it, and one local park even boasts a bluestone barbecue.  These days it comes from quarries far beyond the city limits, perhaps brought in as a tribute to Brunswick’s less metropolitan past.

   

It’s the Moonee Ponds Trail, though, which has consolidated by new-found enthusiasm for the stone, partly because it offers a space for the serious dog-walker and partly because it is trying so hard to bring the country to the city.  The pathway runs alongside what locals call a creek, but what I think of as a canal, and it extends from the northern suburbs to Docklands.  Stretches of it are relentlessly concrete, while other parts (including my own entry point) are quite beautiful, reflecting concerted efforts at (re)vegetation, through the planting of grasses and native trees.  At times, the expanse of cement is almost blinding, yet every so often small patches of bluestone offer relief from the brutalism.

To date, I have no idea whether the bluestone is embedded in the canal walls for structural reasons or aesthetic ones.  My suspicion is that it’s probably a combination of those two things.  In West Brunswick, for instance, the perimeter to the canal is framed by a delicate but sturdy edging strip of the stone, reflecting great care and attention to detail.  Further down the track, though, things look rather more industrial.  While the huge side walls lend themselves to graffiti, for the most part urban artists leave the bluestone alone.  Possibly, this is through respect, although it probably also makes a much rougher canvas than the smooth expanse of concrete that seems to go on for miles.

Noticing bluestone is about learning to appreciate it, and also to love it.  My son, who is eight, and who often accompanies me on dog walks—whizzing along on his scooter—now has an expert eye and will often stop to show me a new piece, or to ask if what he has found is the right stuff.  We peer into people’s gardens, stop outside civic buildings, and occasionally pin down startled neighbours to ask them about their stone.  As I try to intellectualize this process, it seems to offer a thread back to my childhood, whereby I talk to my little boy about rocks, just as my father did to me.  But it’s more than that.  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes at the beginning of Prismatic Ecology that ‘an ecosystem is an oikosystem, a dwelling system’ and that’s what bluestone and the long, dog-friendly pathway are offering to me.  An often un-lovely area, where nature and artifice come into direct confrontation, this path is bridging my move from the country to the city and helping me find a new space to love.   Dwelling isn’t always about the four walls of the immediate home—sometimes it’s about the ground beneath our feet and the emotions that environment can foster.

Gow

It's nearly three years since I blogged about my gorgeous ex-brother-in-law, Gow. I mentioned there his having come through a major health scare. Alas, there is every sign that his disease has returned.

Two days after I arrived in London, I met my sister after work at Green Park tube station (she works in a small investment bank in Mayfair) and we travelled north to Belsize Park, where he was in hospice care. It was a balmy spring evening, and it was a pleasure to be out of my usual Bloomsbury haunts and out into the leafier suburbs.

Gow was thin, and being medicated for pain relief, but his usual good humour and grace were shining through, though there were a few moments, I have to say, when we were all conscious of the gravity of his situation. His room was full of flowers, and he was having lots of visitors. He'd been out in the garden that afternoon, too. The hospice was clean and bright, and his room was lovely, but he had been there for a couple of months, while the doctors worked out what the next steps might be, and while he gathered strength for the next round.

He showed us these extraordinary collages he'd made, images of his internal organs and the weird eruptions the body produces: really, the art therapists must have fallen all over themselves when they met him...
















 
 A close-up, to show you how he made these assemblages from rolled threads and twists of fabric:

 
 And my favourite, which I'm calling "self-portrait with giant medications."  In this one you can particularly see the influence of the blue and white Japanese textiles amongst which he has been living and working...
 
 And here he is, smiling through...



Gow is keen to go back to Japan, if he can, but at least the first step of that journey is complete, as I heard last week he had checked out of the hospice and gone back to his own flat in London. And his brother is moving back to London to New York to help care for him.

It was wonderful to see him, and to see how strong the friendship between him and my sister still is, after all these years. We are now facebook friends, and I said I would load up my pics onto facebook as well, which I'll do now, too. Keep on shining through, darling.

Friday night is pizza night

Most Friday nights, for the past sixteen or so years, we have got together with our dear friends: our mirror family, as I call them. Two academic parents, one blond child, and a bunch of similar interests, politics and lives. When various family members are away, we meet anyway. We eat pizza (or sometimes cook), we drink an extra glass of red wine, we eat chocolates and lollies. We argue, we laugh, we tell jokes. We look forward to it from Thursday evening, sometimes. Joel has his last lesson (piano) at 5.30 on a Friday. Once we pick him up, the weekend begins as he starts to relax, too. And when visiting scholars come through town, we love to welcome them along and induct them into Friday night pizza.

Last night was a mega-version of this ritual. The six of us were there, plus two of Paul's research partners and their partners, plus our neighbour, plus a visiting Candian, her partner and their twin daughters. There's a head missing from this photo, but this was fifteen people sitting down to eat pizzas from Al Albero (tiny pizza bar down the road: ring ahead and given them plenty of time, and pick up from the shop; ask for thinner base than usual, if you don't like a light but turkish bread-style base; recommendation? slow cooked lamb, or marinara with giant prawns and scallops). We had the twins on the old piano stool at the end, and you can see Joel and Eva, his Friday night sibling, on the left. Friday night bliss!

Looking for America

After Italian class, popped into La Latteria for burrata and squaquerno cheese, olive oil from Gippsland, then Dench for grain loaf. After lunch, washing up with Joel playing Simon and Garfunkel's "America" which he's hoping to sing in his music class on Thursday (honestly, that class sometimes sounds like something from Glee) and the two of us singing along and harmonising as we went. Reminded me of harmonising Methodist hymns with my family over the kitchen sink, years ago.  I'm supposed to be working on my essay on Magna Carta; and he's supposed to be doing piano practice before we visit Paul's parents. But here am I searching versions of the song on YouTube, while I can hear him trying out the chords to the song on the piano — and now the guitar (which he can barely play). It's enough to make a fond mother weep.

Not really a video here; but lovely music for a rainy Saturday afternoon.

bedding down

If things have been quiet around humanities researcher lately, it's not because I recently joined facebook (I can see how it might be addictive, but I hope I'm not going to be sucked in too deeply), but for these reasons:

(a) there is not much research being done around here lately. It's the pointy end of the teaching year for me, with two new subjects to bed down and a bunch of additional lectures; plus the whole getting-used-to-being-head thing and the business of bedding down our teaching for next year.

(b) there has been a lot of fussing (much of it on my part) about our large Centre of Excellence application (actually based at UWA). I have some excellence in some areas: budgets are not one of them. But finally the draft letter and draft budget of the Melbourne end of it are completed. It seems they all may have to be done again, but at least, now, there are some senior people in some senior research offices at two ends of the continent working together. It's working with an inadequate sense of what might be required that is very difficult.

(c) Finally, about two hours, on Wednesday, after the very successful inaugural recite-the-first-18-lines-of-the-General-Prologue competition (with appropriately Easter Lindten rewards [there's a good joke in there somewhere trying to get out], with first prize going to a beautiful solo rendition from memory; and second to a team effort, acted out with sun, winds, plants and birds, ending in a tableau of poor St Thomas with pilgrims kneeling at his side), I picked up a telephone message from my boy, rather apologetically saying he thought he had hurt his arm when he went over the top of the handlebars of his bike when braking suddenly, and might need an x-ray.

Thus began a two-day saga: I took him to emergency and after a couple of hours he was x-rayed; and then began the question of admitting him, and finding him a bed. Too young, really, for adult hospital, but unwanted by the Children's, he was in limbo (another incipient joke: if only I wasn't so tired) for several hours. It was becoming a political question, which would be resolved only by measuring the extent to which particular bones had finished growing. After P arrived, I left to attend my student's graduation: the hospital said they would send him home and admit him the next day. But because I went straight from hospital, after riding home, I was still in jeans, flat riding shoes; no make-up, and not even a hairbrush. I felt decidedly undistinguished sitting on the stage of Wilson Hall as a procession of beautiful shoes paraded in front of me to take out their degrees. I was very glad of my long robes. I was home by 10, but there was a note from P saying they had admitted Joel to St Vincent's, but because he was under 16, an adult had to spend the night with him.

I turned up at 8 the next morning to relieve P, who had an all-day meeting about his Centre of Excellence application (alas, we are rivals). They hadn't been admitted till 11 the night before; and had to wait and wait for a bed for P to sleep on. J was fasting since 6.00 am and was scheduled for surgery after 1.00. Well. He was bumped several times down the list as the afternoon went on (it's just a wrist fracture, but needed to be pinned), and so then it was my turn to stay overnight. At 3.00 this morning they were still planning to operate, so he had to remain fasting, while they put in a drip. At 5.30 am they wheeled him off to surgery, and nearly twelve hours later we are finally home. Everything went well enough, and apart from some nausea after the anaesthetic, he's feeling fine.

Oh. I forgot to say that the night before all this happened, I stayed up too late finishing the second Song of Roland lecture; and then after the graduation, came home to wrestle with the grant budget. I emailed it at 1.00 in the morning, and got a lovely personal message back from someone in the research office. The Perth people were up and on the case, too, but it was three hours earlier, there.

So while the doctors and medical staff lead odd hours (the orthopedic surgeon in particular often has to wait and wait for a free surgery while road trauma patients and knife victims are being treated), so too do scholars applying for research grants, and the research administrators who support them.

After three late nights and early mornings, then, I am just about counting the hours till I can go to bed again.

In which I wear a hat to a wedding

Sunday was very hot, with a vile blustery northerly wind that would send a branch of our eucalyptus citriodora crashing down onto the clothes line. But our minds weren't on the weather: rather, a wedding between D and A, a woman from Timor l'Este who's bravely marrying an Australian and moving, mostly, to Australia.

The service was held in a little catholic church in Rosanna. Everything about it was perfect, modest and thoughtful. No grand organ; no grandiose flowers; no strings of bridesmaids in stupid dresses. A handsome dark suit with silvery grey tie; a delicate and sleek white gown with a simple train that could be looped up around A's wrist: a veil that D himself lifted. It was just impossible for any of A's family to be here; and they will hold a second, traditional Timorese wedding with her family in a few weeks time. A's long dark hair was caught up in a simple knot; the veil held by just the right amount of sparkliness to match her necklace.

They had been planning this wedding with the priest for a long time, and he was so discreet, generous and welcoming with the largely non-Catholic congregation: explaining about the responses, and inviting us all to join in, as witnesses to D and A, and as part of our well-wishing to them. They walked slowly down the very short aisle (the church was circular), but I was so struck by the difficulty they had when M invited them to take their seats in front of us. They were both so nervous, and so caught up in the momentousness of everything, and the formality of their ritual clothes, that it took them a long time to turn their bodies into the right position for sitting down; and then to sit down. Not that there was fuss or discomfort; just a sense of ceremonial weight sitting heavily, perhaps especially on A's shoulders.

The Old Testament reading? Rebecca, of course, who leaves her family and homeland to marry Isaac. For the record, yes, I found it hard not to cry as they walked down the aisle, as they took their seats, as they recited their vows. And how lovely: D repeated his vows, phrase by phrase, after the priest. A, who is still learning English, spoke hers softly, but without prompting.

Palpable relief as they left the church to Pachelbel's Canon and headed out into the wind. Storm clouds gathered as we drove to D's house afterwards, and they decided to have the speeches first, before the rain came. D's mother spoke so warmly of A, and her love for her, and her pride in her son. D translated into rapid Tetum for the video cameras, then A read her beautiful warm speech in careful English. It was starting to rain, then, so D thanked us all for coming and they agreed to do the Tetum versions inside.

Everything then gradually transitioned into a casual family-and-friends party in the backyard: D's brother did the roasts and salads; and *his* daughter had made the cake, complemented by an extraordinary pavlova. D and A changed out of their formal clothes; some of the guests who live close by did the same; some of the family were already in shorts. I took off my hat - and shoes, at one point — and Joel removed his tie and braces.

The rain came pouring down, and at one point all the little kids were out it in, happily getting soaked to the skin. One boy stood under the tarpaulin, where the rain was dripping down, utterly mystified by the sensation of rain and water dripping down so luxuriously, holding out his tongue, looking up in wonderment, not really minding at all that a bunch of adults with cameras were taking his photo.

I think A and D are going to be very happy together: but it is not going to be easy. I'm not going to bang on and on about the cultural gaps between their worlds, though they are truly immense. But if their wedding was any indication of the thoughtfulness between them and the loving support of their friends, it augurs well.

Twelve days later

Goodness! I wonder if being head of programme will mean I don't have time to blog... I can already see my days and weeks are going to be taking on a different rhythm from last year's leave, as you'd expect. So what have I been up to?

• wrote and delivered my paper for the Wollongong symposium, which (the latter) was truly amazing. 15 papers over 2.5 days, with maybe 24 people attending, all engaging, talking furiously and convivially. Papers on medievalism, medieval literature and its teaching and reception, papers by romanticists and Australianists and children's literature experts, all working together to set up some wonderful new lines of connection and inquiry. We hope to publish most of these papers in the next year and a bit. Watch this space!
• completed an Italian intensive course ("lower intermediate") and graduated into livello cinque, starting in a week or two.
• travelled to Sydney for a day with John and Bea before we went down to Wollongong. Highlights? Seeing Frank Woodley as Candide in a new production for the Sydney Theatre Company as part of the Sydney festival. We booked late, and got late-release front-row seats in the Opera House theatre. This is what you really want to do with visiting scholars: place them so they get to take part in a little audience participation in the theatre: how many visiting scholars can you say you have given the chance to yodel — solo, into the microphone — in the Sydney Opera House with Barry Otto (father of Miranda/Eowyn)? We followed this up with dinner in Potts Point and a stroll through the Cross.
• travelled to Geelong to see my boy perform in the grand concert that concluded his stay at the Geelong Summer Music Camp. He had five nights with his grandparents while I was away. It turned out to be more like an intensive training course than a camp. He had to practise and practise when he got home each day after a full day's playing, just to learn the parts and keep up. But the 250 kids who took part put on an amazing concert. Highlights? Seeing J playing in Sibelius' Finlandia, and, in the string ensemble, parts of Elgar's Serenade for Strings and the last two movements of Holst's St Paul's suite (sweeping renditions of Greensleeves against the sprightly Dargason, parts swapped around between cellos and violins). Maternal pride in buckets; though mostly because the whole camp was so much harder and more demanding than we thought, and he just stuck with it, and came through in the end.
• saw Nadal down Kohlscreiber last night at Rod Laver Arena, from the pleasant comfort of a corporate box (courtesy P's associate). Really very pleasant to be served a lovely dinner (esp. the crab salad), chilled drinks with ice, etc. It was a very hot night, but after dinner was served, our hosts opened up the spotless glass windows between us and the back row just in front, so we could cheer the players on and take part in the action (while still feeling the comfort of the air-conditioning, the freshly-brewed coffee and more chilled drinks with ice, etc.). An utterly sybaritic way to watch other people play sport, I must say. We are going again on Tuesday, and fully expect to be seated in the back row, just in front of such a corporate box. We will have to carry our own drinks up the stairs: can you imagine?
  

More scarily — and in a way that is completely inappropriate for a list of things that have been finished or completed — I'm starting to see just how many emails are starting to flood my in-box, and how many things there are to do in my job, in addition to the writing of books and the teaching of students.  I'm making lots of resolutions about how to manage it all. We'll see.

The old locked trunk in the attic

How will it get there? Take a boy, a messy bedroom, and a friend who is having a clear-out as she moves house. She gives the old trunk to the boy, and he fills it with toys and games he no longer uses: old note books, perhaps, and comics? Intrigued to have something that locks, he locks it. Several years later, as he is, himself, having a clear-out of sorts, he realises he has (a) lost the key, and (b) forgotten exactly what's in the trunk.

I'm reluctant to force open the lock: it's a beautiful old trunk. It's just possible we will move it upstairs to the storage space in the roof behind our bedroom. It will go nicely with the boxes and boxes of Lego that have recently been moved up there, boxes into which J has tucked a note to his future self: a kind of time capsule.

And there — voilà! — we will have our very own old locked trunk in the attic.

Son of Humanities Researcher Has (Yet) Another Blog

As my family approaches a great festival — my mother's 80th birthday party on Saturday — and as my sister has travelled from London to join the celebrations, we are thinking about generations and families in this household.

Non-Melbourne residents may have heard about our big horse race tomorrow: the highlight of the spring racing carnival that goes on forever (if I see another stupid bit of black tulle perched on the head of some simpering WAG ...), and whose madness has taken over the city so completely that school today, the day before the race-day holiday, was declared "optional" and the main street on which we live is carrying what seems like only Sunday traffic.

Anyway, Joel and I are having a quiet "pyjama day", only showering just before lunch, and talking about what my sisters and I did when we were young, and so forth. What he has been doing is starting a new blog: it's at least the fourth I know about, and perhaps there have been more.

Scroll down for a sight of the piano, and yours truly lounging on the sofa.

'58 babies

Of the three famous '58 babies — Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson — it's Prince who's always had my heart. It's Prince whose music I've bought most often; and it's Prince whom I've actually seen in concert.

But I grew up listening to the Jackson Five, and that sweet clear voice out front.

Last night there were three other '58 babies, one a few years older, and two '95 babies in the house. We didn't watch the Italian movie as planned; instead, we alternated between So You Think You Can Dance, and the Essendon-Carlton game (which was meant to be a blockbuster between the two evenly-matched old rivals, except that my Bombers blitzed Paul's Carlton, doubling their score in front of 83,000 at the MCG: good work, lads!), and then a stupid doco on Jackson, so terrible we turned it off.

It says something about Michael Jackson, though, that all six of us then started practising the moonwalk, with the help of socks on floorboards, as our mirror family slowly edged (backwards) towards the front door. And something about the capacity of this death to mirror our own mortality and frighten us into laughter, when Peter made a wicked joke about how Jackson's pallbearers might also moonwalk backwards. Surrounded by our loved ones, all I could do was laugh myself to tears.

Shadows and clouds

It's a dark, rainy Sunday morning in NYC. We are far from home. We learned last night that Paul's mother is in hospital, so we are going to phone every day. He, or all three of us, may go home early. So there is a shadow over us.

As I write, Joel is having his first shaving lesson. I can hear the twinned voices of my partner and child, just working away on the same wavelength of reason and instruction; question and answer. The timbres of their voices are completely distinctive, but also similar.

Before Joel disappeared into the bathroom, I ran my hand over his cheek and could feel that, yes, the down was no longer quite so downy; and indeed, the shadow of the moustache that has been growing for a few months now was starting to look a bit untidy.

For the first three or four years of his life, Joel's two grandmothers would each come and spend a day with him once a week. When it was Jean's turn, she would bring books, musical instruments, a tape recorder and tapes, and different selections of toys and games. They would have boiled eggs for lunch, and kept collections of "egg people", the upside-down shells of the eggs, decorated with different faces and hair, in the egg cartons on the window sill. She would also bring her camera; we have wonderful photos of those days they spent together.

When Paul and his brother and sister were still very young, she trained as a kindergarten, then a primary school teacher, and by the time of her first heart attack in 1990, she was the principal of the large junior school in one of Melbourne's most elite private schools.

The years Jean would come to care for Joel were in the times before we re-built the back half of our house. I am not exaggerating when I say the bare concrete floor was cracked and uneven; that the elm trees at the front of the house were sending up suckers where the floor boards ended and the concrete began; that the ceiling of the kitchen was covered in specks of plaster; that many of the walls were bare lathe and plaster. Jean would sweep and sweep, and one day discovered the reason why she could never finish getting the floor under the cupboards (themselves sitting on piles of bricks) truly clean was because there was a gap between floor and wall: she was actually sweeping the garden into the house. It was brutally cold in winter, though not unpleasant in the little sun-drenched area next to the laundry. On sunny summer afternoons, that area was unbearable.

She and Joel would sing and laugh and play music much of the day. Of her six grandchildren, Joel is the one who carries that music in his body. Not only does he play and sing; he plays in the air, with his hands, even when he makes no sound.

Eight or nine years ago, after Jean had recovered from two more smaller heart attacks, she said to Joel that she hoped, if he married, she would be able to come to his wedding. "Of course, Nan", he said, not understanding why she wouldn't.

He has emerged from the bathroom, quietly pleased, the smooth contours of his face more precisely defined. Without the shadow of that moustache, he looks, in one sense, younger. But there is no doubt that today, he has also grown up a little more. In these shadows, in these clouds, we are all growing up a little more.

New York, New York!

Oh how I am coming to love this city! This is not my first visit, but it is the first time I've genuinely enjoyed being here. It's such a luxury living right in the heart of the action, with, for once, a reasonable travel budget plus my family, so the pleasures are doubled or tripled every time we go out. Walking along the streets, if you are a fast walker, is not an unmitigated pleasure, as it's crowded, and the blocks are so short you have to keep stopping, but then on the other hand, in five short blocks we are in Central Park...

Lovely things we have done in the last few days:

• travelled to Summit, New Jersey, to visit with Paul's American brother, his contemporary from his year as an AFS exchange student in 1975. We had Thanksgiving with Rick, Sue and their daughters in 2005, and it was like just picking up again after a few weeks. How odd, though, to discover that Sue and I were born within about an hour of each other: a weird synchronicity there.
  
• attend high, high church at St Thomas's on Sunday, on what, if we were attentive to our liturgical calendars, we would have realised was his feast day. For someone brought up to sing harmonies on Methodist hymns, Anglican hymns are pretty anaemic, but the choir was spectacular, with an anthem from William Byrd, and a splendid organ voluntary by Bach, played on the second, obviously brand-new organ.
  
• visit the Met, and follow Joel's progress from the fourteenth through to the early twentieth century, stopping only for coffee and coconut cup cakes in the cafe overlooking the great hall. Wonderful to look down and see five enormous urns filled with nothing but huge clouds of pink and white dogwood. The same tree we planted in the garden when Joel was born, but each vase held sprays taller than his tree.
• walk home from the Met through Central Park on a sunny warm spring afternoon, dodging bikes, roller blades, and dogs.
• and on Friday, attending a wonderful conference on Practical Knowledges at NYU:
  

• For me, two highlights: the second paper I've heard in five months by the wonderful Seeta Chaganti; and realising not only the talent among the speakers, but also in the audience. If I'm lucky enough to be in the same room as people like Carolyn Dinshaw or Mary Carruthers, it's usually because they are plenary speakers on whirlwind tours of Australia, but here they were, just popping in for occasional sessions or chairing talks. How amazing it must be to work in a city where there are this many medievalists. (OK, I'm marking, but now putting aside my community-of-medieval-scholars envy now...)
• 
  

In spite of all this gadding about, I'm still getting some work done. Today I've worked at both the NYU library, and the New York Public Library on the next phase of a formal book proposal with my collaborator, and have sent it off to him to work on next: we are hoping to have some discussions with a prospective publisher at Kalamazoo. Next task is to revise my paper for DC. It's the same topic I spoke on at NYU a few weeks ago, but questions and comments there made me want to re-think bits of it.

Together again

Oh, the ease and bliss of travelling with family! Look, I was just fine in Philadelphia, but we are now all together in our apartment in New York, and every hour, as we establish our little routines here, and catch up on what we have all been doing over the last month, and as Joel makes me a cup of tea, and Paul cooks our dinner, I can just feel the pressure of travelling, and doing everything for oneself, easing.

I came up by train yesterday: enormous heavy suitcase, travel bag and shoulder bag that all had to be lugged everywhere when you go and buy a salad for lunch or a bottle of water at the station. From now on, all my travels on this trip will be much easier. P and J arrived from JFK around 7.30, and we sat a bit, then went out and had a Mexican dinner.

This morning, we walked for couple of hours in Central Park, checked out the beautiful gothic church of St Thomas (and even made plans to go to a service on Sunday: apparently their choir is wonderful), and booked tickets for tonight to see Waiting for Godot, with Nathan Lane and John Goodman. The theatre is two blocks from our apartment.

And our apartment looks a lot like this:


These photos are from the Oakwood website, but it really does look like this. I thought these might be photos from a larger 2 bedroom place, but these fittings are almost exactly as we have them. Against expectations, this one bedroom place is even bigger than the Philadelphia version (so funny, though, to see the same teatowels and cutlery, even the water jug). Joel has a comfy sofa bed in the lounge. Normally, of course, this kind of place would be well above our means, but in these troubled times, hotels and apartment companies are desperate to fill their rooms, and so specials abound. The day after we are booked to leave here, for example, the price is set to double...

Tomorrow, perhaps a jaunt to the Strand bookstore.

One day to go

Just taking a moment after another day's scattered running around: just time enough to start the usual pre-flight routine of wondering of why I would leave my loved ones and my home and my files and my books, let alone why I would submit myself to the horrors of a long-distance flight.

There are good reasons, I have to remind myself. A sabbatical from a workplace is a good idea, both for those going away, and for the ones you leave behind. And even though I increasingly get homesick, I do usually work very productively when I am away, and there will be fewer distractions than at home. I will also get to give talks in some fantastic university communities, and I know I'll get really helpful feedback and lots of ideas as I pull the book together. Leaving all my archives and specific Garter material behind will help, I hope, in the process of looking past these wonderful, seductive trees to see the wood, getting past the weird and wonderful anecdotes to pull an argument together. I'm going to read and read. I'm going to contact my publisher soon and arrange a meeting in the next few weeks. I'm going to do some work with Tom on the medievalism book as well (I spent the morning sketching out the first part of our talk for Penn). I'm going to hang out with David's graduate Chaucer class at Penn; I'm going to see friends in Philadelphia, New York, Boulder, Washington and Kalamazoo. And then for the second month I'm away, I'm going to be doing all these things with my beloved man and boy, including a trip to Amelia Island in Florida, we hope, to see Paul's "American father" from his AFS year, when he was 16 (goodness, just two years older than Joel will be in a week's time).

Given all this richness, it seems silly to be fretting about what coat to pack, or how terrible I'll feel on the Dallas-Philadelphia flight after 19 hours in planes or airports. I have a new ipod (blue, if you must know), and think I might read Sense and Sensibility on the plane, while thinking about how Samuel Dundas was such a compelling Don Giovanni last night in one sense (devilishly attractive in his white boots and silk shirt and long white brocade coat), but strangely weak in the final scene. The first time I saw this opera — I think it was an Australian Opera production — the final scene showed the progressive degeneration of Giovanni's household, as one of the attendants lazily smoked a cigarette, his arm describing a slow arc, up and down, with the smoke and the little red dot. This production did a similar thing with red curtains and cushions, but couldn't muster the same horror of the final descent. Must see the Joseph Losey film again before too long.

Anyway, one day to go, then I will be blogging from Philadelphia...

Son of Humanities Researcher ...

... hath a New Blog: Jive for Java, complete with an initially rather sweet but quickly rather disturbing opening comic for Valentine's Day.

Taking Refuge from the Heat ...

... in a cinema is a good idea. Meeting our friends to see Revolutionary Road at 4.45 was also a good idea, as were the iced drinks and ice creams we devoured. And given that a bit of a cool change arrived while we were inside, our timing was also perfect. The only problem was the enormous blackout that plunged the cinema into silent darkness about ten minutes before the end of the movie, just after Leonardo has eaten his scrambled eggs.

But people were pretty calm and resigned. We picked up our refund (not that it was really the cinema's fault), argued about the possible endings on the way home, then sat outside in the breeze, drank home-made ginger beer, then some Little Creatures, then some sauvignon blanc, and then, with pizza, because it was Friday night, a little cabernet merlot as well. We played Scrabble in three teams, but were too lazy to move around the table, so it was the two fathers, a mother and a goddaughter, and a mother and a godson. Much hilarity. But I hate the new little book of stupid Scrabble words like Qi, whose meaning no one can ever remember. But worse, my brain was so addled by the heat I only realised three moves later that IQ is an abbreviation, and therefore not allowed. Rats!

When our friends had gone, we moved in on the Verdasco-Nadal match, coming in at the third set, and staying on till the end. It was completely and utterly absorbing, to see each player pushing and extending each other, each with immense respect for each other's game. And now there's an additional thrill to any such event: will the power hold out till the end of the match? Either at Rod Laver arena, or on our little bit of the grid? I turned off every single light in the house, while we were outside...

Admittedly, these are exceptional circumstances: the hottest week on record for Melbourne. But it does seem as if the infrastructure is very fragile indeed. Refrigeration, trains, power are all vulnerable. And what is worst of all: it's our children who are really going to bear the brunt of climate change and failing systems in twenty or thirty years time. And it will be our fault.