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.

Ribbons of nutritiousness

Caught the ABC's doco about parrots last night (trying to fill the void left by the end of Robin Hood). Loved its cinematography: clouds of birds wheeling and turning en masse, and brilliant landscapes, whether desert, rainforest or snow slopes. Truly, spectacular camera work. But the commentary was pretty dire: uninformative and excessively anthropomorphic. I can't see why we need to hear about birds having dinner dates, etc. Worst of all was the over-writing, viz. "Ribbons of nutritiousness snaking across the continent" or some such.

But then, this is a nation that has just given TV Logie awards to the horrendously misogynistic AFL Footy Show and the appalling Bindi Irwin, so I can't claim to be with the mainstream here.

Medievalist Commodities

At the State Library of Victoria, there is currently a wonderful exhibition of medieval manuscripts, mostly from Cambridge, but with a goodly selection of local treasures, from the State Library, the National Gallery and the Baillieu Library in Melbourne, from Ballarat and Canberra, and also from New Zealand. It's not brilliantly laid out, unfortunately: some of the cases cast a shadow on the information cards, and half the time you have to look from an angle so as not to cast your own shadow on the cases. It's tricky with illuminated mss., though, as you can't have much direct light on them.

It's lovely to see the Library's own ms. of Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine against Cambridge's Roman de la Rose, though, and the giant antiphonals with their heavily embossed and gold plated illuminations. Or clever comparisons of different pictures of elephants from bestiaries.

The Library's website has some great features: an online image collection, and a soundless video presentation about the re-binding of the Pèlerinage for the exhibition (there is an article about this process forthcoming in the Library's LaTrobe Journal, too), which chimes beautifully with Ampersand Duck's recent post about bookbinding.

The exhibition seems to be attracting substantial crowds, and has been heavily advertised: here's the promo that's been playing in some cinemas, for example.

It's on my tram ticket, too.





And in addition to the glossy catalogue, and other books on sale, I can buy some more affordable postcards and bookmarks, or a poster; and if I can't afford any books, I can at least pick up the brochure of the books on sale:





This is not just clever marketing and promotional work: I reckon it also taps into the heart of much medievalism and typifies it: the desire to possess the medieval in some way, to take home or domesticate a little of its beauty. Of course it's incredibly selective: the manuscripts that go on tour like this (and it's rare to see them making such a voyage) are not the medieval workaday books of devotion or history; but rather the top-end products for a wealthy readership. We can't read more than a page at a time when they are displayed like this, either, but thousands of Melbournians are peering into the glass cases and glimpsing those worlds. And by taking home a poster or a postcard or a bookmark, and indeed by hosting this free and public exhibition in the heart of the city we can purchase a great deal of very attractive symbolic capital at very little cost.

Truly, if you get a chance to visit, it's worth it.

And more is yet to come: this Sunday, April 20, there is a "medieval fayre" from 10.00 - 4.00. I'll be there, for research and teaching reasons, you understand...

Beautiful things in Brunswick St

Last weekend, Paul and I did a luxurious thing we sometimes do with Joel: Saturday lunch. This week, Joel was at a friend's house for the day, and so we caught a tram down Brunswick St. We went to Zetta Florence, first, to buy a present for a friend's 50th that night. Their website and catalogue are very technical, designed really for the professional archivist, perhaps, but in addition to white gloves and archive boxes and folders, their beautiful big store is full of delectable leather-bound folders and albums, gorgeous notebooks, cards, folders: a stationery lover's delight.

The style is French/Italian, and this is what my "household" folders now look like on my desk. I love the way the bills and tax receipts get to live in these beautiful folders, and their pale blues and greens that sit so lightly in my newly painted study.

We also called into a new shop that seemed to sell just Japanese papers and inks. I didn't note its name, and can't find a web image or site. It's much smaller than Zetta Florence, and in contrast to the perfect balance of beauty and utility there, this shop was concerned just with beauty. There were dozens of shallow drawers along each side of the shop, perhaps twelve or eighteen from floor to hip height, all finished in black matt veneer, each carefully pulled out a centimetre more than the one above, so that each bank of drawers displayed a narrow strip of the sheets of paper lying there, like the sides of so many ziggurats. The papers were beautiful. Tissue papers like raw silks, their threads and patterns inviting the hand to touch, and the eye to linger, and to range up and down across the spectrum of colours. Elegant prints and woodcuts in muted or luxurious colours, a stack of drawers for natural earth tones; another for kimono-style prints. Several drawers held papers that looked like what I imagine cloth of gold to look and feel like. We disputed whether they were prints for framing or papers for wrapping. I think the latter. But such luxury.

We then went to the Brunswick St bookstore, to hang out and see what was new. And I bought this beautiful object ...



... which you can also read about here.

And then we took ourselves off to Mario's for lunch. It was where we had had our first date together, and where we still like to go. The food is always excellent, "democratically priced" as one review has it, and I really like the challenge of the waiters....

I've just been looking for images of these shops, and have come across a wonderful website.

Make sure you can see the bar at the bottom of your screen, then scroll from left to right: you are travelling north along the west side of Brunswick St, starting (oh my goodness!) from the restaurant where we held our "wedding", along all the cafes and shops. You can see Zetta Florence, then keep going past Flowers Vasette and the big bees above the shop front on the corner of Greeves St, and note the room with the windows open above the Delicatessen (I lived there for a year), then two doors down from Johnston St, there are Mario's and the Bookstore next to each other. You can keep going for several more blocks, noting the red curtains of the Polly bar (great place for a late night cocktail on the one evening a year I might indulge in such a thing), and right down to Lucrezia and de Sade. So many memories and encounters all along and up and down this street. Wonderful pictures! Wonderful street! My city!

Anyhoo, as I was tucking into my eggs florentine and an aromatic mclaren vale sangiovese (my companion had the baked gnocchi with sage leaves deep fried in butter), I looked up at the sky, which was as blue and clear as it is in these photographs, and looked around in my head for the usual feelings of alarm and anxiety. Yes it was all very well to be going out for lunch, but what about all the other chores to be done, books to be written and read? What about the general terribleness of the world? Well, I looked for that feeling, and to my surprise, I couldn't find it. I checked, and looked again: it simply wasn't there.

Yes, there are still loads of things to do. I had to count up for someone today, and realised I have my finger in 5 (FIVE) book projects. Yes, once again we are re-organising our teaching curriculum. Yes, life is far from straightforward.

But I do believe that little by little I have been able to streamline, or simplify or straighten out my life somewhat, since being ill. I do believe I have learned to unravel some of the knots and tangles. And it feels good. And no, I haven't forgotten about Excruciatingly Personal Blog post No. 3; just pausing a moment to celebrate the world of textiles, images, sensations.