Last days

I never really blogged properly about Kalamazoo. It was an odd conference for me, because I spent a lot of time at meetings of various kinds, rather than going to sessions all day, as I do at NCS. Moreover, many of the sessions I did go to, including the two where I spoke, were really meta-sessions, talking about the way we do scholarship, rather than the scholarship itself. Which it is very important, sometimes, to do, perhaps especially at times of crisis. But it’s also very pleasant to contemplate a return to my two book projects, and the larger research project that will soon start demanding my attention too. The meetings I had, with collaborators, editors and publishers, were all very productive. Ideas for books are becoming plans for books; book manuscripts now have proper deadlines for delivery, and one of the presses with which I work is re-thinking some of its conventional expectations about the kinds of work they will publish. So in that sense, the conference was a great success for me, though I came away still feeling pretty much as I did the day I arrived: overwhelmed at the sheer range and variety of medieval scholarship, and despairing of ever really feeling on top of it.

This is our last night in the US. The cable satellite is down, so after a game of Scrabble we are all at our laptops. Plenty of time, tomorrow, to start packing up for our 7.00 pm flight and the horrors of the journey. When we get home, we’ll head up to Ceres to let the chickens out (one day I’ll blog about these chickens, I promise), and in the afternoon head out to visit Jean, who’ll have some more health tests next week. Alas, Paul will be on a plane again first thing Monday morning, on his way to Port Moresby.

This afternoon Joel and I made a last, tired trip to the Met. We’d spent a good few hours there a few weeks ago, but wanted to see the Temple of Dendur again. When he was a boy of about five, we had shared a deep fascination with all things Egyptian, and today we meandered around, feeling weirdly at home with the mummies, the drawings and the carvings, the faces of sarcophagi so serene.

On the way home, I found the three piano showrooms I’d walked past last week. We went into the least intimidating-looking one, and got into a bit of a discussion with the piano-maker there, that was way over my head in terms of the technicalities. Still, we are thinking it’s time to start saving to buy Joel a new piano, and you may as well start at the top. I realise I know almost nothing about how to do this.

After a while, Joel asked if he could play, and the two brothers agreed. Joel sat down quietly at a big Steinway, and felt his way into a G major chord (as he told me later: wish I had perfect pitch, but I don't). I wondered what he’d do, but he just started to play a few gentle arpeggios, and then started improvising around them. He was not intimidated by his surroundings at all; just played gently but freely, working up confidence gradually, but still barely testing what this beautiful instrument could do; and I could tell he was happy. They were closing up, but they've invited him back tomorrow morning, and I'm sure he'll go. After a month away, his fingers are itching to play.

The other night we went to Carnegie Hall to hear Daniel Barenboim lead a program of works by Elliott Carter, an American modernist composer. The highlight was a sonata for piano and cello: when the bow first moved across the strings, I could feel Joel's intake of breath. Piano is his first love, but a month away from both instruments is starting to show. At the end of the concert, Carter, who is now 101, was helped up onto the stage and took a few curtain calls and bows to rapturous applause. As we were leaving, an old man said to Joel, "Well that's history in the making. You won't forget that!"

We also made our pilgrimage to the Cloisters museum on Tuesday, and on Wednesday got down to the opposite end of Manhattan Island too late to get the ferry out to Ellis Island, and instead walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in the sunshine. So many wonderful things to do. So little time. But time now to head home and pick up the threads of our real lives, our own beds, our garden, and our little cat. This time tomorrow, we'll be in the air, flying home.

Best. Gelati. Ever.

Still so much in love with NYC there is hardly time to blog. Of course, I am doing some work as well: have just finalised a book proposal for the medievalism book; and have also been reading PhD drafts and writing references. But Paul is away in Canada for a few days, so I'm doing things with Joel in the afternoons too.

The night we got back from DC, we had dinner with a friend down in the NYU-owned apartments in Washington Square. We spent Monday at home exhausted from travelling, then spent Tuesday afternoon at the Museum of Natural History, including the fabulous Planetarium show — Cosmic Collisions. Again and again in this city, I just get overwhelmed by the scale and the depth of its collections. We toured three out of four floors, marvelling at brilliant dioramas and ethnographic/anthropological displays. Room after room of displays that were perfectly presented. Sometimes one drifts through museums, but these taxonomies of evolution made perfect sense. I really felt I was learning things. Each new branch of species development — the second cavity behind the brain, the cavity in the hip that made it possible for legs to move forwards not sideways like lizards —had its own wing or gallery, with introductory film narrated by Meryl Streep.

On Wednesday we saw Ionesco's Exit the King with Geoffrey Rush, Susan Sarandon, and Lauren Ambrose (Clare from Six Feet Under). Sarandon's part is difficult — the voice of reason is never particularly amusing or engaging — and I'd heard she'd had bad reviews, but I thought she was ok; and in any case, I could listen to that beautiful rich voice for ever. But Rush was just extraordinary: melodramatic, poignant, mournful, joyful, acrobatic and absurd. We booked the cheapest seats online at 60% prices, and were right up the back of the balcony. But the top half of the balcony was empty, so before the play started, we were allowed to move down to the front and sides of that tier, so in effect, we probably had $80 seats for $40. Still and all, I'm glad we saved and saved for this trip so we can do all these things, and not worry too much about the cost. The recession helps, too, without a doubt. Interest rates on our mortgage are down, and competition for our business in New York is high. The second half the play probably does drag on a little, as the King slowly dies, and after it was over, Rush seemed to relish prancing about the stage taking the most elaborate, ballerina-style floppy bow, and bringing all the rest of the cast with grand gestures, as if both demonstrating his own athleticism and flexibility; as well as his relief that he could reverse, or deny the long process of decrepitude.

Today, we wandered down below Canal St, meandering around China Town down as far as the river, in between Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge, then up around City Hall and back into Little Italy. Joel is developing a knack for finding good places to eat. He found the "Excellent Dumpling House" in Lafayette St, listed in Zagat, and offering incredibly cheap and fresh food. Then later, a gelateria and pasticceria that reminded me of a smaller, less chi-chi Brunetti's (in Carlton), where we had excellent coffee and shared a trio of key lime sorbet, raspberry and tira-mi-su ice-cream. We are no strangers to good Italian ice-cream in Melbourne, but the lime was tangy and sweet; the tira-mi-su included pieces of cake in perfect balance with the gelati; and the raspberry tasted like truly fresh raspberries. Maybe it was because we'd been walking for hours, but every mouthful was like a new act of an opera in the mouth. We then bought Joel purple hi-top Converses for half the price we paid in Melbourne, and congratulated ourselves on the ease with which we found our way home.

I then took myself off to St Thomas for evensong. This time, the boys were there as well singing, and the music was Gibbons, Byrd and Tallis. Jackpot!!

But one of the downsides to this excess of riches is the excess of packaging. Everything is triple packaged. We aren't being as careful as we would be at home, but if we buy a pack of prosciutto, it comes sliced with a piece of waxed paper between every slice, a plastic envelope, and a re-sealable plastic box. A cup of coffee and a muffin comes with a cup, a lid, a cup holder, paper around the muffin, a plastic fork and a handful of napkins in a paper bag. A loaf of bread comes in two plastic bags. We sat next to a woman at the theatre who lives in Denver, but moved there recently from California. She had not been able to throw away her polystyrene coffee cup: "we gave up using these in California 100 years ago", she told us.

P.S. I knew I'd forget something! The other night we walked up a little onto the Upper West Side, and came across a museum of folk art. Inside, an exhibition of wildly inventive quilts on the theme of jazz and blues music made by African-American women, and to celebrate the opening, a free concert from Julliard jazz music students. Wild rich sounds filling the gallery space. More beauty, everywhere you turn.

In Which We Join the Paparazzi for Beyonce

Sometimes when I'm too tired to get up off the couch, I do a little channel-surfing at home. It doesn't take very long, as we don't have cable, and have only six or so channels to nip around. Sometimes I run into the Letterman show. I don't really enjoy this rather smarmy host, or his over-rehearsed formula, or the self-promoting adulation of that guy on the keyboards, but the writers are funny enough; and his visitors often edgy and nervous enough to make a good spectacle.

Where we are staying now is just one block [update: I blogged a while back about an apartment on the Upper West Side, but the photos made it appear far too small for the three of us for a month, and instead, I found us a larger place on West 53rd, at Eighth Avenue] from where the show is shot. Around 5.30, just as the traffic really starts to heat up, the crowds start to gather to see the stars exit the stage door. Big black cars and vans with blackened windows line up, and the stage door opens and closes constantly as assistants and security men prepare the way. The serious paparazzi are there, and last week Paul switched between masquerading as one of them, and then taking photos of them:
He's probably just an ordinary person squinting into his camera to do his job, but that tall blonde one really does look predatory, doesn't he?

We wait for about thirty minutes. Joel and I find a little barricade to stand on, opposite the stage door on the other side of the narrow street, but a man comes and moves it away. Big lorries and vans drive slowly down the street in peak-hour (sorry: rush-hour) traffic, to the moans of the crowds on our side of the street whose view is blocked. And suddenly, there she is, a vision in white. We all cry out her name and cheer. She stops, poses, and smiles for the cameras.

After a while she is ushered into her car, and heads west. People with big glossy photographs held with elastic bands on stiff cardboard rush after her, and contrary to my expectations, when her car stops at the lights, the window is wound down and she signs a few.

I like Paul's photos very much, but we realised we were not true paparazzi when he said, as we walked back to the apartment, "I should have taken the telephoto lens." Oh well, another day, another star.

Smokey Rain

It rained, and was cold all day yesterday. I was glad of the big black alpaca coat I had bought in Boulder (on a huge sale, but still hugely expensive: still, my winter coat problem is solved for the next 20 years, I hope). We struggled with umbrellas and the worn out soles of Joel's shoes, in and out of libraries and the subway, all day, then in the evening, the rain really started pelting down. We nipped out to buy provisions at 6.30, and all you could see, at either end of 8th Avenue, was grey mist; and from our little balcony, the top of the Hearst Tower, the building we use as our landmark, a few blocks north of us, was shrouded in mist, looking like smokey rain is supposed to look. Here's the building in sunny architectural light. It was the first skyscraper to be started after 9/11; boasts some impressive green credentials; and has won at least one award.

Lying in bed last night, listening to the rain rushing through the pipes and splashing onto our little patio, I couldn't help but wonder (Oh, sorry for SATC syntax there) about what such a tremendous amount of rain could do for parched southern Victoria, and how at home, if we heard such rain, we'd rejoice at the way it would soak down a few inches and relieve the terrible dryness of the earth. But all I could see in my head, as I drifted off into sleep, was rain running off grey buildings, into the grey streets, and down into the East and the Hudson rivers. Manhattan was a long thin island floating on the water, rising in the flooding rains; and water running away off the land, and never finding a single tree.

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.

Perry's stopped at the red

So, we get off the subway and were walking back to our apartment this afternoon, and a block from our front door we walk past the stage door to the Letterman Show. We have seriously been thinking of going: they tape in the afternoon, then you watch yourself on TV that night, apparently.

Anyway, there were crowds of folk, and photographers, and big black cars. J and I are on one side of the street; P with his big camera lining up with all the others, looking very professional.

And who should come out, but Matthew Perry from Friends. AND ... I recognise him! He looks around briefly, and I observe a neat jacket and rather a lot of hair (I saw an ad the other day for some kind of hair-thickener that coats your hair with texture, a bit like fuzzy iron filings: all the stars use it, apparently!). There's a riotous click of cameras, and he's off, closely followed by a small blonde woman who we hear is on the new series of 24. The convoy of cars pulls away, and things start to quieten down, and then we see two big men with big sheets of paper (for autographs?) calling, "Quick! Perry's stopped at the red," and they race off. We say, but already I know we won't, that we'll walk past every day at 5.30 to see who's in town.

Still Waiting

Waiting for Godot was absolutely extraordinary. Funny, poignant, cruel, hopeful and despairing in all the right ways. Goodman was an amazing Pozzo, just carrying that body around the stage. The scenes where he cannot sit down, and cannot rise from the ground were just mesmerizing. This was the Goodman from Barton Fink, and the West Wing, not Roseanne. All five actors were remarkable. I knew Nathan Lane, but not really John Irwin, though P and J recognised his face on the playbill from other things. When they took their curtain calls, I was waiting for that break in concentration, the gracious and relieved smiles that signalled the release of tension. But there was none. The little boy kept his nervous empty smile, and the others all remained just about blank in expression. Goodman, particularly, remained inscrutable, distant. A remarkable refusal to concede the theatricality of the event, to mark the boundaries between their play and our lives.

And my second weather pixie is now set for Central Park, NYC: I wish the name of the city would appear on the widget, but can't see how to program this.

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.

Work and Play

A few busy days since I came back from New York and my talk at NYU. It was a very rushed but utterly delightful trip (train from Phillie; lunch with Chris; long walk; talk, with pointed, knowledgeable and generous questions; dinner with the nicest imaginable group; good night's sleep in this lovely hotel; train back in the morning).

I then started a couple of busy days with my writing collaborator. We gave a talk together on Friday at Penn; then spent a couple of happy days wandering the streets, checking out the new Galileo exhibition at the Franklin Institute, eating and drinking with his cousins, with our mutual friends, at Time, at Parc, and at the Sofitel. We made good progress, I think, and sketched out our talk for Kalamazoo sitting in the sunshine at Rittenhouse Square which is almost exactly at this degree of greening (though much more crowded on Sunday):

The next few days have been a bit slower (though I did write out the first draft of that talk on Monday night), but I have now put together my talk and most of the powerpoints for Boulder. I leave tomorrow afternoon. I also slipped out this afternoon and bought a pair of shoes and two —TWO — frocks. What was I thinking? Perhaps something about giving all these talks...

Yesterday, though, I went out at 4.00 and did a tour of the amazing masonic temple. It was begun in 1868, and thus pre-dates the city hall. It looks very much like a cathedral:

I really don't know that much about the masons, and our tour guide wasn't too forthcoming. He was a young mason, very keen to normalise the activity of the fraternity and to demystify freemasonry. The interiors of this building — the Egyptian Hall, the Corinthian Hall, the Renaissance Hall, the Gothic Hall, etc. — and the staircases, hallways and ceilings, are all pretty spectacular. Check out this site to do some on-line tours or look at photos.

Masonry here is on a much larger scale than the little lodges I'm familiar with: tiny buildings in little country Victorian towns. I guess most lodges in American country towns are tiny, too. But in this country it's sometimes hard to remember how BIG everything is. I picked up Time Out, too, in New York, to get a sense of what's on, and what we should book tickets for. Absolutely mind-boggling, to see what's going on there. A month suddenly looks like no time at all.

Imagining the Weather

I've just come back from my morning walk. I drove Joel to school with the cello, and paced around Princes Park at top speed for half an hour. There's light rain coming down, and I was wearing jeans, t-shirt and long sleeve fleecy. But today is a day of total fire ban, and for the first time last night, with millions of others, I received a text message from the Victorian Police warning of severe winds and fire danger. The radio is full of emergency warnings, but the burden of many of them is that we must stay alert, despite the rain. Forecast top for Melbourne is only 31, but the fire index — that measures temperature, humidity, wind, drought conditions, etc. — is rated over 200 in some parts of the state. The index is designed to range from 1 - 100; and it was well over 300 on February 7. The real danger is the cool change that's going to come through this afternoon, with the possibility of lightning strikes.

It's almost impossible to imagine today as a day of hot wind and fire. Let's hope I'm right.

Meanwhile, The Age website has an article about snowstorms in New England, Washington, New York and Philadelphia. I will have to think very seriously about the coat question before I leave for that last-named place on Sunday week. I do have a couple of coats, but they are all too short, too light, or not waterproof enough for snow. I bought a beautiful green tapestry-style coat in St Louis with fake-fur collar and padded lining, the November we were there, and the locals laughed pleasantly at my sense that I was set up for winter. And by mid-December, when we left, I could see what they meant. I guess I should wait till I'm there to buy something appropriate.

It's very difficult, despite the best evidence of a range of media, to imagine yourself experiencing alternative weathers. I went to New York in July a few years ago, leaving a cold Melbourne winter, and loaded up with coats and jackets I never took out of my suitcase once. Of course this would not be a problem in England: I had to buy a leather jacket there last July.

But what is it about the weather, that even with the help of the fanciest websites and predictions, you really only believe it when you see it with your own eyes, feel it on your own skin?

Update: Oh. I see. Here comes the wind.


Evening update: Winds are still high; and it's still warm. There's so much wind the firefighters in the four major fires still burning have had to be pulled out; and there are trees and powerlines down all over. Apparently there's rain in the south-east, but nothing here yet. We've just been sitting over a glass of wine and some home-made bakewell tart (thanks, Kt!), and I realised there's a thin film of dust or grit on the table. We went outside to say goodbye and the sky is that yellow grey that presages a storm, but the wind is still hot and northerly. I heard someone on the radio on the edge of an area that was burnt out a few weeks ago: she said all there was around the house was ash; and the wind was just lifting it up and blowing it everywhere, so she had lost count of the number of times she had wiped the kitchen bench; and could not get the taste of ash out of her mouth.