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.

Farewell to Phillie

My last night in Philadelphia. I'm just going to try and finish a report on an article tonight, then pack up in the morning, and get an early afternoon train to New York. The rest of the family are on their way, and they'll arrive there tomorrow evening.

When I think of Philadelphia, my image is that of Liberty Place. I'll paste it in again.


Of course at street level, or at the tenth floor level of my apartment, it looks nothing like this. I can't see the building from here; just some other apartment blocks and glimpses of 1930's office towers. Walking along the street you're just as likely to be huddling into your coat against the wind, or fighting with your umbrella to stop it from folding inside out. The shops are smart; the food is pretty good; the little neighbourhoods within the city are neat, too. But there are people living on the street, asking for money, or sleeping in doorways, or even just curled up on the street. People just step around them.

Last week I was in Boulder for a few days to give a talk. You fly into Denver and drive along some very very flat, low industrial terrain for about forty minutes, and then suddenly the mist clears and you can see the foothills, and then the Rockies behind them, still snow-capped, and stretching along, wider than you can take in. From everywhere you look, the mountains look quite different, and if you get to drive up into them even a little, they will take your breath away with their beauty. Cliffs, rocks and trees, with little by way of undergrowth — quite unlike the bush or the tropics. You are 5430 feet above sea level, so you feel a bit dehydrated and dizzy.

But it's a different world, in other ways, too. Boulder is a small, affluent and white city. It's sporty and outdoorsy, but also a bit of a haven for hippies, organic farmers, etc. A lovely farmer's market on Saturday morning. Extremely pleasant for people like me, though there is still poverty. We'd had a spectacular meal, indulging in the best of local produce and organic foods, and then spilled out into the streets. We saw a homeless man in a wheel chair, and I remain haunted by his face: brown skin drawn tight around staring, vacant eyes. Beth gave him some money, but I still hesitate to do so. There are good arguments for assisting organisations, rather than individuals, but I haven't done that either.

I stayed with two different friends in Boulder. One lives out in a new suburb. Eerily quiet; with very few people around, though the house was a beautiful warm and golden place inside, and surrounded by trees and trellises. But because it's only just very early spring, the trees are mostly still all white. We walked around the new estate, with houses ranging from large to enormous, and came to the rise of the hill where the old farmhouse still stood, and looked over at the mountains. It was mid-morning, and the air and the light and the mist were all a stormy blue grey; and the trees and mountains white and cloudy. Ethereal, silent and still.

My other friend's house is much closer to campus: an older, more cluttered house, and an older street, and I think a bit more neighbourly, so she has colleagues who live over the road, for example.

When I travel, I can't help but wonder what it would be like to live in the place. I could see myself in either Philadelphia or Boulder — and both universities, while quite different in style, are also very good ones. But while I sometimes hanker to be in a place where I might have more medieval colleagues, I'm very pleased to report that being here hasn't made me particularly dissatisfied with my lot. I'm also very pleased to say I've not felt too homesick, or beset by anxiety about my work.

And something of a revelation, too. Jeffrey gave me a copy of Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three, and I keep picking it up and turning up some new, or some familiar gem. Follow that link and check out the contents page if you want to see what "romantic and postromantic poetry" looks like these days.

Now, on with that report, then a little preliminary packing.

Bye, Philadelphia

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.

Philadelphian Vignette

A beautiful French patisserie, Miel, serving the best coffee I've had in this city so far, and a pristine display of beautiful art — I mean, cakes. I decide to have my coffee there, and the new owner gives me a lovely plate on which to eat my baguette, and takes pleasure in making my coffee "in the right cup." I sit at the bar facing the street, and am struck by a woman wearing a smart short red skirt, black boots and jacket, and a black fur hat — it's really a circlet — with a red flower in the side, over long, well-groomed blonde hair. She comes into the cafe, and asks for the smallest bottle of water they have and sits next to me, eating handfuls of cheerios, rattling round loose in a big opaque plastic bag. She strikes up a conversation with the man next to her, who's reading the New York Times, and asks if he's raising children into the world.

It's Always Like This

So, yesterday was a GREAT work day. I got to the library at 12.00 and didn't leave the building till 7.30 (there's a little cafe downstairs), when I sent off to my co-panellists my revised talk. That left today to sort out my talk for NYU on Thursday, and Wednesday morning to sort the powerpoints.

In this talk, I'm ambitiously trying to skip through the preface and the first two chapters of the Garter book, to produce what I hope will be a coherent thematic thread about the "mythic capital" that circulates around the Garter story. There is plenty to do. And so by contrast with yesterday, I dithered and dithered, and finally took myself out of the apartment at lunchtime and ended up doing a tour of the Philadelphia City Hall, which took an hour and a half.

I may have to buy a camera in the end (I found this photo on the web), but I remembered the little camera in the phone, though I still haven't worked out how to get a decent sized image. The sky was blue all around, so the view from the top, from the 360 degree gallery just under William Penn's feet, was pretty nice. This picture shows Penn's shadow on the roof of the amazing masonic temple, whose tower you can see to the left, above (that's next week's tour).
The City Hall is truly monumental: the tower is built on solid granite foundations. For many years, it was the tallest building in Philadelphia. Then they built this beautiful building — Liberty Place, which is just a block from my apartment:

And the legend has it that it was because it reached higher than Penn's statute, that was why no Philadelphia sporting team ever won a national contest. They then built the Comcast centre which is even taller, but apparently they put a little statue of Penn on its very top, and after that some team won something. Nice story, though.

OK, now back to this paper. After all these years, I kind of know not to worry too much if I seem to be delaying the completion of something like a paper: it's a sign that I really am in control of the material, and that maybe it's going to be better if I don't have a complete script for performance. We'll see...

Beethoven in the rain

This week I am working to three deadlines: a journal submission, and two different talks, to be delivered Thursday in New York, and then Friday here in Philadelphia with Tom, my collaborator.

So I am working like a demon in my little apartment, and haven't done the reading for David's graduate class today, and think I will probably call by his office later on and become an apology.

I'm writing up the paper I gave at ANZAMEMS last year to be one of three responses to Bruce Holsinger's The Pre-Modern Condition. Oh. Yes. I posted it on the blog. But I'm making it a bit longer, and have also realised I have left all my photocopies of Umberto Eco at home. There are various versions of the essays I want to cite, so I will have a messy day in the library trying to untangle them all for the footnotes.

Anyway, I worked at my desk all day yesterday, from 9.00 in the morning when mist hung low over the city, till about 6.00 when the sun was shining and it was about 18C. I went out for a walk and bought myself a little present (it was my birthday, though it was actually already over in the land of my birth; and I'm really saving up the celebrations for New York, when Paul and I can celebrate both our birthdays together): Lang Lang playing Beethoven's Piano Concerti #1 and #4. Absolutely wonderful, fluid rich sounds. I'm playing it through the ipod but can't wait to get it home and through the proper amp. and the big speakers.

I'd walked south along Broad St till there were not that many people walking around, stopping at a very imposing building that turned out to be yet another Philadelphia college of the performing arts — this is a very cultured city. I turned round, and almost at that point, the wind picked up, and the sky started to go that pale duck-egg green of a storm with fast-moving grey clouds against the westerly sun. I picked up my pace, and felt the pressure drop. Would I get home before the rain? No! Suddenly all hell broke loose in an immense hail storm. I took shelter in a car park: no one was leaving for fear of the stones beating up the cars, let alone people. I guess it lasted about ten minutes: even when it stopped hailing, the streets were white with the rain.

Then suddenly it was over, and I scurried home the last few blocks, water still pouring off awnings and car parks above street level. This morning? Blue skies again, and fluffy white clouds.

And congratulations to Meli at Northern Lights, who is handing in her PhD thesis today. Let's hope she's going to have the energy for some celebrations herself!

You Know You're in North America ...

• when you can buy organic blue corn chips, and scoff them down with divine spicy mango and lime salsa (yep; found a great deli on 13th street) from a jar, but tasting fresh and not over-pickled. I don't know how American folk survive in Australia when the only corn chips you can get are over-processed and taste like twisties. Love that dark blue crispy goodness. The packet says blue corn is a Hopi and Zuni tradition. I don't know where those tribes are from, or where they are now, but blue corn makes great chips.

• when the streets are named after numbers or trees. Philadelphia was laid out on a grid, like Manhattan (and Melbourne), so 1st street runs north-south along the eastern side of the city, and along the Delaware river, and then the cross streets, running east-west, have names like Vine, Spruce, Walnut, Chestnut, Pine, Locust, Cherry, Lombard and Filbert, though with the exception of the two widest streets that intersect neatly at City Hall, the even more generically named Market and Broad. It will be blindingly obvious to locals here, but I hope useful to prospective first-time visitors to the US to note that the numbers along the streets don't always run consecutively, but locate the address much more precisely in relation to the numbered streets. So, my address is 1601 Sansom, because it's on the corner of 16th street. The numbers go along a bit, then start again at 1701 on the corner of 17th st. Makes it very easy to know which block of the street is the address you want. (Took me several visits to work this out, I'm sorry to say.)
  
• (and at one of the great ivy league universities) when the library is still busy at 6.30 on a Friday night. I spent the day in the well-stocked library yesterday, and was impressed by how hard everyone was working. If there was a moment's talking, it was only a moment. And at 6.30, it was still busy. David's graduate class is full of voracious readers. He says you give them a chapter to read and they are just as likely to read the whole book. Currently, at least, on Penn's home page is a picture of the recently re-modelled stairwell in the English department. Pretty nice, huh? Wonder if they change that picture of Will around much.

• when, after a hard day's slog in the library (really, really working hard to see if the insights of medievalism can help us read medieval texts), you decide to treat yourself, and you can walk just five blocks from your apartment, waltz in to the Kimmel Centre, and pick up a ticket for that evening's performance of Gil Shaham playing Khatchaturian's Violin Concerto and the Philadelphia Philharmonic belting out Dvorak's 8th symphony. The Centre is amazing. It is several venues enclosed under a soaring glass arched roof; and the concert hall we were in is like being inside a multi-tiered cello: all curves like a cello's body (sometimes just one or two rows of seats along the side walls), and all — floor, walls, ceiling — made of lustrous dark red wood (Cherry, perhaps?). I was in the front of the top tier, but the sound was still pretty good. I don't go to that many classical concerts, but this was splendidly enjoyable, and I'm not sure why I don't go more often. I am also honouring the injunction of (a different) Paul who recommends "lots of treats" to counteract homesickness and the exhaustion of study. So, in the next few days, I have to send off the latest draft of the paper Tom and I are giving here on Friday, work on the revisions of my ANZAMEMS paper from Hobart for submission to a journal, and also put together a talk for NYU on Thursday. Chapter One is now locked into place, so I'll extract from that.
• when, generally, you feel the mixture of exhilaration of being in a different place and the luxury of hibernating away, writing and reading in a pristine apartment with few distractions, or a calm and productive library, but you are also looking forward to the rest of your family joining you in a couple of weeks for the pleasure of exploring another city. I'm almost at the end of the quietest writing time of my trip away, and will start travelling and socialising a bit more quite soon.
  

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.

From Melbourne to Philadelphia ...

... is a very long journey indeed. Yes, I know: relative to C19 or earlier travel it's a breeze, but even at jet speed it's still pretty punishing. And that's when you have tail winds all the way, and when connections are easy and timely.

I was sitting in the midst of a bunch of US and Canadian fire-fighters, all on their way home after a month helping out in Victoria. I've never seen such a massed force of quietly gentle and politely heroic masculinity. They were modest about what they had done; and reticent about what they had seen. The man next to me wanted to show me pictures on his camera of his grandchild, and raced through his pictures of the campsite (he was a logistics specialist), apologising for the photograph of the dead wombat ("well, I'd never seen one"). They were all being very well looked after by the crew.

It's now the end of my first full day in Philadelphia. I've gone for several walks, cooked a meal in my little apartment (actually, it's quite a decent size, and beautifully fitted out, with its own laundry facilities and proper kitchen, and quieter than a hotel). Maybe it's the cooking? I don't feel too much of the horror homesickness that dogged my stay in London hotels last July.

I also lasted about two hours of David's graduate class this afternoon before the jetlag hit, when I gave up trying to make intelligent interventions, and just sat back and marvelled at his students: so well-read, engaged, and articulate. They are, of course, graduate students, so they have more experience than my honours students, but what really impressed me was the efficiency of their discussion. They are so articulate they can raise a problem or a question in such a way as to focus discussion for a few minutes — discussion that always seemed to be moving forwards, never back or around in circles — before another topic arose. David has won heaps of teaching awards, and it was great to observe his style first-hand. Jetlagged himself, he still directed and guided, while trusting the student presenters to do their work well, as they did.

I have a few little chores to do for home, but tomorrow morning I'm just going to stay here in the apartment and start knocking Chapter One into shape. As I always say to my students, you'll probably write the introduction several times before you write it for the last time. But it's time for that last re-write, now.

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.