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.

From the streets of Philadelphia

From the windows of my tenth-floor apartment on 16th and Sansom, I look out across a series of even taller brick buildings: offices and apartments. Go to Google Maps here, or follow the link below and click on "street view" to see my corner and the Oakwood apartments. My windows are up on the far left of the tenth floor on the larger side of the building.


View Larger Map

I do not have a camera with me on this trip, so it's going to be up the words to describe the city. I am getting to know its patterns and its grid, laid out in the seventeenth century by the quaker William Penn. I am not far from the half way point between the Schuylkill and the Delaware rivers. It's about a 25 minute walk east to the Delaware, and the same distance west, across the Schuylkill, to the university. Every day I'm walking an hour or two, up and down (east and west, that is), getting a sense of the different areas, the shopping malls, the "historic" district and its rows of eighteenth-century houses. Lots of people around; and daylight saving started a while ago, so it's pleasantly busy in the early evening, and I feel quite safe. It's not as if I'm in a business district that's empty at night. Lots of people smoking in the street, though. I'm intrigued by the big City Hall in the middle of this grid, arching over Market St, so that it blocks the view, but allows you to walk under its carriage ways. I might even go and do a tour tomorrow.

On the other hand, I might just stay in my pyjamas and write — as I did today — for six hours. Unusually, I'm sleeping in late, but then just hitting the computer when I wake, and working well. I have a library card already, and will start to work in the library soon, but at the moment, it's been great to be away from all the books and files. Makes it easier, somehow, to see the shape of the chapter. And so the first chapter is just about locked up into a state where I might be able to give it to someone to read.

So far, this is turning out to be a good balance of hibernatory writing time, with the perfect amount of social contact. Having an apartment is so much nicer than being in a hotel; there is no doubt. There are lovely people here, too; I'm getting to see the graduate students in action; and there are lots of fabulous events and speakers. I've just missed Stephen Greenblatt, but Chris Cannon and Anthony Bale are coming through town in the next few weeks.