Barbara goes to Boston

on my way home..

2007-10-24T18:11:00.000-04:00

So in the end I learned there are indeed far too many human beings on the planet, but not including, dear reader, either you or me. In a little park I visited during a lunch-time walk in Seoul, there were many schools sharing corners of open space with one another, and the pigeons. The children amused themselves greatly by taking the normal level of pigeon-human harassment and reversing it, although one did avenge itself and its fellows by a nicely targeted top-of-the-head splat.

I learned that of the many forms of spoken English, mine is an obscure and often unintelligible one to our cousins across the Pacific. I also learned that the Australian use of irony increases misunderstanding times the percentage already created by our accent.

I learned that the stock has places for locking up legs, the pillory is for arms, and that wherever you are on the planet and whatever time of day or night it is, Dr Phil is there too, demonstrating the modern-day equivalent for his viewers, the unsleeping jetlagged among them. American television is astonishingly 'unprivate'.

I learned that when your hotel Internet access seems to have failed, think like a librarian, climb under the desk and plug the network cable into your laptop. I also learned that wherever you are, there might wifi be, except in those places which advertise providing it like VIA Rail Canada.

I learned that mastering bathroom engineering across the globe is as challenging to the modern-day traveller as getting hold of money in a foreign country used to be. The one below offers a steam sauna option. If only I could read the Korean instructions on the wall.

I learned that anyone offering any kind of service in an airport or train station has a metaphorical hand already outstretched for the tip. I also learned that this goes for EVERY service offered by a Hotel chain, and that the equal and opposite is true of Mum and Dad outfits. But isn't tipping just one of the last remnants of feudalism, with no place in a properly managed economy?

Most of all I learned, yet again, how much fun it is to head off into the world, pocket camera and bank notes at the ready.

GIBSON HOUSE - Toronto. This woman was dressed for the Rebels Dinner that night, and neglected to invite me! The house was a beautiful American-Georgian building, both fascinating and appalling. People slept propped up on their straw beds, presumably hoping to overcome nightly the asthmatic effort of breathing in straw dust. And the wife of the house shared it with the farm manager who had his own attic, carefully locked off from the woman folk at night.

GREENWICH VILLAGE - I was tempted to have my fortune told by 'Zena' until I caught a glimpse of her through her prominent shop front. Shortly thereafter a man I photographed in Washington Square filled me in quite succinctly in any case, with two words.

The very grand GRAND CENTRAL STATION - rescued from demolition by, inter alia, Hillary Clinton and perhaps reason enough to hope she becomes 44th Prez. Consider the fate of Penn Station, main entry and exit point to NY for those of us fond of train travel, a station once built on a scale to rival Grand Central, but its replacement version as nondescript as a public rest room. There's also the curious shambles involved in actually getting on the right train at Penn. Important travel information is suddenly unveiled by last-minute disclosure of the Track allocation. While waiting, along with the hundreds of other travellers in the same jostling predicament, there's nowhere to sit, and no indication of which track your train might be leaving from. Prue and I discussed mastering this process. Her assessment was that even in running shoes, and ready to spring down the stairs the minute the track numbers began to spin, one would always be shouldered aside by a stiletto-wearing woman in leopard print pants. So I had no chance.

And of course I re-learned how extremely nice it is to be heading back home again.

Stradbroke Island, last Christmas (thank you Elizabeth).

Stockyards in Purga, outside Ipswich.

Of that Ilk

2007-10-18T19:12:00.000-04:00

My knowledge of Toronto until Monday might have been summed up in two words : Glenn Gould. The great Bach keyboard exponent lived in Toronto for most of his life, from memory in one of the suburbs built along the shores of Lake Ontario. As my tram trundled towards the lake, I looked about for the perfect accommodation for such a man, surely an apartment block all chrome and glass, with an outlook to the horizon and some sea birds wheeling in the stratosphere. But I saw nothing that really matched.

In fact Toronto is so long and flat, and is such a beautiful old Victorian city, and has such a fabulous network of trams, and is built along such a huge expanse of water, that it seems a lot like Melbourne, but without the 'edgy' under-belly. Or so I thought until I came across the numerous homeless men strewn asleep on the footpaths, right in the heart of the financial district, and often right by the kerbside or wherever one of the grates above the subway warms the air.

Their visibility was confronting. And so was this sign in Trinity Square, on the side of the little church next to Eaton Square:

How do the homeless survive in such a climate? The answer clearly is, that like the woman who froze to death in one of Chekhov's stories, they often don't.

Eaton Square itself is a massive shopping 'mall', a convergence of shopping and tourism, and where our conference is being held, and almost presents a challenge to my pre-eminent love for department stores.

There are heaps of good places to eat in and around Eaton Square, but as my VISA card is currently in a state of disarray (memo to self : A$ do NOT = CA$) I'm currently confined to gazing from without, like the little match-girl. And my hotel is but a pretty pathway away.

At Niagara Falls (yes, of course I had to go there) after our baptism on the Maid of the Mist we were given a commemorative card. The opening words were rather striking in their complete separation from the truth : "Standing at the bow, you feel the mist lightly spray your face"

In fact, rather than feeling a light spray upon our persons, we were pounded by what felt like two turbine driven front loaders. Even in our fetching Da Vinci style blue plastic hoods and capes, it was basically a full body immersion. The water crept inside everything. It wasn't quite as exciting as being dumped at Main Beach after Christmas lunch, but I still loved it. I also loved the fact that the first recorded dare-devil to successfully go over the Falls in a barrel, was a 63 year old woman, in 1903. Time to get in training.

Bu why does every tourist 'strip' look like it's been designed by Homer Simpson? And with the cacophanous soundscape to match.

By contrast the little town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, scene of the 1813 British victory over the fledgling US army, and also of Ontario's earliest government, has retained its elegant 18th century architecture right down to the colours people are allowed to paint their buildings.

I did like the far from subtle Nelsonesque statute of General Brock, gazing across the river for eternity, like a gigantic middle-finger raised straight at the losers over the border.

Peace has now formally broken out in the form of a North American Free Trade Agreement, but for the first time travelling from the US to Canada requires a passport, something only 17% of American citizens have. So now they don't visit Canada for cheap pharmaceuticals, instead the Canadians go there to buy.. well, everything. The exchange rate having reversed the status quo, even going to the US supermarket for milk can save a bundle. Buying a car will knock CA$10,000 off the price. The whole area around Nigara is a micro-climate and vast fruit-bowl. It was warm and sunny for us for the day, cold and wet in Toronto.

And now to the pointy end of my journey, the conference launched last night, in the Ontario parliament. I asked directions of a couple of people, but no-one knew, although it's a little hard to miss.

I did find my way, by following a likely group, until I came to a gathering point of others, clearly of my own ilk.

Black robe

2007-10-14T19:30:00.001-04:00

Heading North across New Hampshire and Vermont in a Greyhound bus turned out to be one of those unstuck plans which prove to be exactly the right outcome. As we drove deeper into the New England forest and the rain picked up, I saw occasional deer standing in the distance, and until the Canadian border the perfect realization of Fall Colours.

And the truck-stops were almost as good. Pausing in a tiny Twin Peaks village, overhead traffic lights swinging in the wind and wooded hills looming all around I succumbed to the ersatz allure of vending machine Apple cake and 'vanilla' cappucino. Once I might have added an insouciant Peter Stuyvesant.

Solzhenitsyn spent his twenty year exile living in Vermont, no doubt fully prepared for the New England Winter by his apprenticeship in Siberia. I recall a picture of him wearing a hunting cap. The ear flaps lent a certain symmetry to his down-turned mouth. Apparently he showed up at the occasional Vermont town meeting, in practice for his return to Russia where he lambasted Gorbachev and perestroika. Wonder if he's still alive, and if yes, whether he has anything to say to Putin. Speaking of writers whose fire remains undiminished by age, how fabulous to see Doris Lessing as an 88 year old Bohemian perched on her front stoop and not looking quite like anyone's grandma.

Unlike the beautiful old port city of Quebec, Montreal is rather charmless. In fact to me it resembles some rundown Scottish city, with its grimy blockish architecture and badly laid out streets.

Weirdly the street names echo every corner of Paris. Such familiarity of cadence, but set in a colonial aesthetic, has been disconcerting. Montreal apparently prides itself on its souterrain, the vast network of underground shopping strips joylessly connected by empty, and therefore mildly sinister, corridors.

Above ground, the streetscape is ugly, dishevilled and rather dirty; below ground it's like an unending airport corridor, all artificial gloss and gleam. I looked around for a flock of hosties, trailing their wheelie bags behind a handsome pilot or two, but .. there was no-one. Upstairs, damp and cold; downstairs, cosy and warm. What would Dante have to say?

But I'm staying somewhere so charming that the awful streetscape hardly matters.

It's a house in which the owner continues to live on the ground floor (first floor in American parlance) while progressively restoring each of the rooms on the floors above for a B & B. My room has all the things I like. It's made of old fashioned building materials i.e. real stuff like timber, brick and stone. The window frames are pine and my room has a window seat, wifi, cable, and a huge plasma TV screen fixed to the wall. Geraldine Grainger looked the size of a small piano in her Vicar's robes (and there's a bit of a Pride and Prejudice plot coming up for Dibley's vicar, not that I want to give too much away).

On some good advice given in Brisbane I spent a day visiting Quebec City, built on the immense St Lawrence River, and still partly within the huge city wall which failed to repel the British during the so-called seven year's war (how useful Wiki can be).

Along the river's edge, and built beneath a long escarpment which borders the city, little harbour-side houses sat in flat rows.

The trip from Montreal to Quebec took 3 hours each way by bus, and was completely full both aller and retour. The journey was on the longest, straightest road I've ever travelled upon, rather like going from Oakey to Dalby but over and over again. Alongside ran a railway line and at one point we passed a container train miles long, on its way to the port with cargo bound for China or empty containers returning, it was hard to tell. On each side of the road vast fenceless grain fields flowed, and in the distance I could see a little French eglise here or there. Listening to and reading French everywhere seems to be a necessary ingredient of any vacance I decide upon; however this time I wasn't prepared by bringing with me my trusty miniature Harraps, so there were many words I grasped for without success.

It's been extremely cold. I loved Bruce Beresford's film Black Robe when I saw it, for a variety of reasons. Even in October it's been possible to get a sense of the ferocious winters that so defeated the early Quebecan missionaries portrayed in that film.

I couldn't find any real bears for you darl, but I did find some inside my giant TV - bears playing in the snow. If the bears can ski so can you. Actually they were rather good, but they do have four paws. Canada awaits you!

Miss Nichols will see you now

2007-10-11T09:40:00.001-04:00

It was fun staying at the Parker House, imagining Jacqui's whispered response to the call of history and an improved wardrobe ("Was that a yes Jacqui?") but not so much fun listening to every conversation of my neighbours through the paper-thin walls. I didn't find 'low-talking' to be a Boston characteristic, any more than I could claim it as a feature in my own arsenal of uncorrectable flaws. The online reviews of the Parker House seemed on the mark (tiny rooms, unreceptive receptionists, shabby furnishings, steep prices especially with all of the construction noise going on outside); but there was the history of the place, and that made up for a good deal. It was simply a matter of stepping across the street to reach Beacon Hill, the Massachusettes State House, the Samuel Adams Courthouse, the Nichols Museum, Louisburg Square, the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage Trail, the Granary Burying Ground, Boston Common, and so much more. So I tramped about in the sleet, crossed the river in a Duck and tried to make sense of a subway which in places doesn't make sense, all of the time surrounded by Europeans who, like me, are happily taking advantage of a very favourable exchange rate.

I did think of making a trip to Amherst on my last day, but when I rang Emily Dickinson's number she wasn't there. It's 3 hours each way, quite a long journey. You have to go by Peter Pan (bus). I've been a bit disorganised since I got here, dawdling about in what seemed like limitless time. I confess I've even spent some mornings in the beautiful Boston Public Library, reading Ian Hamilton's book about Robert Lowell, at times accompanied by a woman reading aloud through the knitted hat pulled down over her eyes. I couldn't think of a better companion for a morning spent with Lowell, one time patient of Carl Jung.

By good fortune I caught a discussion on court TV, on the workings of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which I think is an appellate court only. As well as sitting in on some of the real-live process in action, with all of the judges happily interrupting the lawyers and each other during the presentation of legal argument, the Chief Justice then spoke to camera about the way the judges distribute the writing of decisions among themselves. She made the observation that they almost always reached unanimity with one another over the legal points at issue, I presumed because of the highly interactive manner in which the appeal was heard. The US judicial process, like its legislative process, seems wonderfully open to the society it serves. But is the other side of that a kind of national solipsism?

Reading newspapers, listening to the radio, watching TV, it always seemed the same: parochialism on a truly grand scale. But I did see a tiny paragraph in one of the give-away rags you get on the subway. Queensland doctors had kept an Italian tourist alive by feeding vodka to him intravenously for 3 days. And I'll never complain again about the amount of sports coverage in The Courier Mail. The Red Sox won something important, and well, that obviously matters a great deal.

SPORTS FAN

Even more than Brisbane, Boston seems at the mercy of engineers, politicians and town planners. Besides the massive and ongoing Big Dig, an apparently never-ending process of tunneling, widening, ripping out and re-building, some subway stations seem in a permanent state of semi-repair. But at least they have a subway. Transport issues, car accidents, poor urban planning: watching the nightly news was déjà vu all over again for me. One thing that wasn't was the horrendous gun slaughter. Boston Police now have a device which pinpoints gunshot by a kind of GPS system; as soon as the warning system picks up a shot, cop-cars swarm to the scene. And can it really be true that a teacher is claiming her right to bear arms in the class-room? You can see the logic…

My favourite place in the end was the Nicols House Museum, the former home of Miss Rose Standish Nichols, Boston Brahmin, landscape gardener, carpenter, pacifist, suffragette, and all round amazing woman. She spoke a number of languages, had friends all over the world and helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. And she didn't believe in marrying. Unlike Miss Bouvier, Miss Nichols was an heiress.

Boston has been tremendously interesting, and very beautiful, except for the bits the urban planners have got at. Last night I ate snails, drank pinot noir, and enjoyed myself talking far too much to Clare's good friend Janet, from the Harvard Law Library, who as it turns out will be in Toronto next week at the conference I'm going to. I've begun to think of law librarians as a kind of international cabal; everywhere I go there are friends, or people off the INTLAW list, or others with useful connections into and out of our own not very self- contained little research realms. Meeting up has been part of the fun too.

HARVARD PIX -I liked the little gardener's truck most of all

Salem

2007-10-09T09:23:00.000-04:00

Salem is such a beautiful town. Its streets are lined with perfect clapboard houses.

The little burial grounds burst with deceased personages of sometime note.

Its cobbled streets, built from the ballast shipped into its 47 wharves, wend their way from the low-lying harbour where pirates from all over the world once waited along the coastline to plunder its returning riches.

The prosperity of Salem was such that other parts of the world considered it a Kingdom in itself. But of course the reason Salem teemed with tourists on the suitably bleak morning I visited, is not because of any these things. And sadly for them, the personages of note are now only footnotes to Salem's true moment in history, the so-called 'witch' trials. The unfortunate women (and some men) persecuted during this bout of mania are now far more notable than any of the worthy inhabitants of the graveyards (Ozymandias, anyone?). And the 'witches' were not even permitted graves, but rather lay in hollowed out places, barely covered.

Of course most of us now know so much about Salem and its infamous witch-trials because of Arthur Miller's wonderful play The Crucible. And I retain a further sense of connection with those events because of my sister's, also wonderful, performance as Elizabeth Proctor (correct me if I'm wrong J).

On Sunday, in a curiously well-placed reminder, I meandered past the amphitheatre near City Hall late in the afternoon, and stayed to listen at a rally against the current events of Darfur. There were six important guest speakers, each of whom told a story of survival. Each had been a child when caught up in the lunacy of a genocide. The speakers were a very old Armenian man, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi persecution, a man who had escaped death from the Khmer Rouge, a young woman whose family was slaughtered in Rwanda, a young man who had lost his father and brothers in Srebrenica, and a teenager who had escaped the ongoing violence in the Sudan. So Salem was yet another a sobering reminder, if anyone needed it, of just how crazy human beings get.

Of course the business end of Salem is now a little overwhelmed by melodramatic enactments of the trials and the events which lead to them, irrelevant 'dungeons' with spooky things in them, New Age shops selling crystals, places which can photograph your aura, mediums who will steer a séance for you, glass globes to trap a familiar should it enter your house, and all sorts of other money-making clap-trap. I particularly liked this theme on a garden gnome, and lamented my already bursting luggage. A cyber version will have to do:

I noticed a Goody or two disappearing down the rainy side streets like messengers into the past.

But a modern-day Goody went by without drawing much attention. She paused to adjust her cape and packages because of the rain.

The house of Sheriff Corwin, the Magistrate who helped send 19 people to the gallows, is still standing, the oldest house in Salem (and built in the post-Medieval style, for anyone interested).

One of the required tests, I was fascinated to learn, was that those accused of witchery, usually very young women, were made to remove their clothes so the Sheriff might examine them for signs. Mistress (or was that Goody?) Corwin bore her husband 11 or 12 children.

The House of the Seven Gables is still standing, right at the water's edge. I always imagined it set on a hill, I can't remember why.

One of the women I discussed Melville and Hawthorne with in New York did not care for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, she said, had been mean to the shy Melville, and made him feel that his great book Moby Dick wasn't much good. But which is now the better remembered?

After tramping up and down and round about I hopped onto a trolley-bus driven by a middle-aged history buff who knew everything anyone could want to know about Salem. We quizzed her so much that she announced she was bored with her normal route and took us on an extended tour right out to the edge of the sea, onto an island where people were executed until recent times, and where the ocean pounds right up to the base of the houses in winter, gales sometimes smashing in the windows. It was fabulously elemental, and easy to imagine because of the bleak wintry day. Yes, the New England winter has finally shown itself, just a little.

Rats' alley

2007-10-07T15:08:00.000-04:00

Valley girls are, you know, like, everywhere in Boston? In fact I found one crouched in the drapes outside my fairly grand hotel room at 3:40 am, cell phone grafted to one ear while her words struggled within a thicket of self-exploration. Is there a quota of 'you knows' and 'like's to complete within each 24 hours? And should I, like, have been more understanding of the 3:00 am wake-up call? Why is every Valley girl (and boy) utterance a, you know, question even when it isn't, like, a question? The effort of trying to express anything seems immense, but onwards the tide of words flows. Valley girls are, like, not quitters.

I'm staying at the Parker House Hotel, where JFK proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier in the hotel dining room, Malcolm X was once a busboy, and Ho Chi Minh a pastry chef. John Wilkes Booth was a resident only weeks before the Assassination, and practised for his spot in history by repairing to a shooting gallery (you know what kind I mean) just around the corner.

The Parker House is at the edge of Beacon Hill, right on the Freedom Trail and very close to Boston Common and the Massachusetts State House.

Not only is this district celebrated for its part in the founding myth of American independence, it is also celebrated for the role of its abolitionists in the Underground Railway. When I came across this slaves alley (below) my first thought sprang out of Eliot's words :

I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

I walked along the whole way (the alley seems to disappear, but in fact rounds a corner and emerges into another little street) thinking of bounty-hunters, slave-catchers, child-sex tourists, arms-traders, and all the other really unpleasant forms of humanity that have the survival skills of the cockroach. But the struggle for Independence seems minor compared with the ongoing difficulties faced by so many of America's black citizens. The only people who have begged money off me during my days in the U.S. have been black people, and it's not hard to see why. For many of them, ill-educated in rundown local schools, without health cover or adequate welfare, and confronted by unspoken racism, the struggle for them is a long way from over. On the flight from Seoul two of the four 'Classic' films available to watch were 'Gone with the wind' and 'Guess who's coming to dinner?' As every other available movie seemed to involved a bunch of violent men trying to blow each other apart, I watched both. The issues each film tried to deal with (in a whitey kind of way) have been resonating with me ever since I got here.

Like most of the rest of America I went to church this morning, into an undistinguished looking building nearby which resembles the exterior of St George's in Paris in its lack of front. Inside was a different story. Because of the music it was anything but undistinguished. The entire liturgy was sung to a jazz setting, with fabulous drumming, a pianist, a guitarist, a trumpeter, and several backing singers, and frankly the music was out of this world. At one point they picked up a 5/8 rhythm, at others the influence was plainly gospel, and at another the drumming was of the kind Gene Krupa could produce on a good day. Of course most music has come out of religious worship of different kinds; it was fascinating to see how well such a vibrant and modern sound could integrate into the still ancient words of the liturgy. I was really blown away.

Halloween soon!

Another naughty squirrel darl - this one shared my park bench with me.

Docking without incident

2007-10-05T17:42:00.000-04:00

It's been a hectic few days. First I had to rule the world...

Then I found a small window of time, just enough for me to reverse Australia's position on the Human Rights Committee's findings before we lunched in the Staff Dining Room.

After lunch I joined supporters of Sochi in their struggle against the Tsarist dictator Putin.

And checked out the pro-democracy rally for Burma this Saturday in Boston. All in all maintaining world peace has taken up more time than I allowed.

Visiting 9/11 was strange, still only a hole in the ground, but now with lines of tourist coaches queueing for a viewing. Across the way the tiny 19th century grave yard seems poignantly situated, with its little bell and the Church behind it like a shrine.

Strangely, the FBI, once with offices on the top floors of one of the two towers, is now rebuilding right next to the empty site. After I'd shopped for a few knock-offs at Century 21 over the road (it's been so hot, I needed lighter clothes) I set off for the Straten Island ferry, surging aboard with thousands of other people for what seemed like a ticket-less ride. Well it was for me. I went over and back without paying a dime. The day was sunny and clear. Little sailing boats whipped about in the wind and I photographed Liberty from all angles.

Then a fog settled across the water and soon it was impossible to see anything, but the burst of fearful cell-phone activity which followed was ever audible in the shrouding mists. The ferry docked without incident.

New York was a lot of fun. But being a tourist is always like that, one drifts from one serendipitous moment to the next, imagining that the next day, or the one after, there will definitely be a plan. However my attempts at making plans all came to nothing. Rowena and I having planned from Brisbane to meet yesterday failed in all our efforts to co-ordinate. My T-mobile pre-paid, having voice-mailed my calls rather than let them ring, refused me listening rights - not enough cash in the account. It was the middle of the night when I checked, I couldn't top up the phone account on thieved WiFi .... what can you do! So instead of that plan coming to fruition, a plan I had been looking forward to, a different and also rather pleasing day took place. I spent a lot of time at the UN Library with Rosemary who runs the legal department there. She also co-ordinates GLIN and showed me heaps of useful things we can do with it. We also had a long look at the UN website, not a set of databases I've ever liked using much. But now I feel bolder.

It was immensely interesting, not only roaming about the chambers of the General Assembly and the Security Council (see above) and peering out at the Chrysler Building and Empire State buildings in the night-scape, but just looking at the vast collections of the Library itself.

Of course being in any library is a home away from home for me. At one point I found myself re-plugging a non-functioning printer and checking the printer settings. Old habits die hard.

So it's goodbye to New York, for the moment at least, and hello to Boston.

No-one ever sleeps here any more

2007-10-03T03:21:00.000-04:00

It's hard to sleep in cities. As ever the general level of existential angst rises with the hours of the night. Now it's 3:30 am and apparently every significant other across the way is raising 'issues' and not for the first time. I detect the well-worn tram tracks of old disputes trundling to whatever clapped-out conclusions they generally arrive at. If only it could be done in silence like the butterfly in the forest. Ooops.. or was that a tree falling in the Amazon? After several days on helicopter overflight early morning wake-ups and sitting by the window at night to catch tales of the neighbourhood as well as a bit of free wifi on the breeze, I've slept less lately than an international traveller returning to Hobart.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT IS ALWAYS DIVERTING

But I did have an excellent day yesterday, full of bad timings and happy misadventures. By stepping onto the wrong bus I lucked into an accidental tour of 5th Avenue accompanied the entire journey by out loud suggestions of many old Jewish women. I eavesdropped (how was it possible not to) a continuous whine from the hugely overweight woman sitting behind me. Finally after 30 years she'd forced an elevator onto the subway stop at 96th. As the traffic log-jammed around its construction she gazed upon her work with satisfaction. Because of her knees she hadda keep catching the buses. But all these handicapped people took all day to get on the bus. Sometimes it was 50 minutes to go four blocks. The wheel-chair passengers slowed her day up even more. Now the subway is quick. Ten minutes at the most. But the stairs are too much for her. She can't get up and down those stairs. A voice suggests knee replacement surgery. Has she looked into that? No no no, she's not gonna get inta knee replacements. Once you haddem done you hadda keep doing em. She was taking better care of her health than to have that surgery. The elevator would solve her problems. Once the elevator was in, no more buses. Finally she got off and the decibel level reduced. I wondered had she thought things through. What if her destination was a subway stop without an elevator? How was she going to get up those stairs and then down again to return. There was much to mull over.

Finally we passed the Metropolitan Museum, distinguished by the swarm of people roosting on its steps (how strange that the pigeons should be so out-numbered). Then I made a happy discovery, the Age of Rembrandt exhibition was on, with a huge collection of Dutch painters: Vermeer and Jan Steen, Albert Cuyp and Breughel and of course the great Rembrandt himself.

The Rembrandts were all portraits, none of the later interesting paintings of his old age. I've always loved the Rembrandt and Hals portraits (who doesn't) and the Dutch landscape painters. I came across a painter I have to confess I've been ignorant of, Hobbema, whose beautiful landscapes converted me to instant Hobbema fandom. I sneaked a picture, which does the original no justice at all.

And I pinched this image off the Metropolitan's website. It's a painting called The dissolute household, and Jan Steen used his wife, his mother in law, and his children as its models!

Although I now have a pre-paid USA SIM (cost me $10.00!) when I made my arrangement for dinner last night I was using a public phone. It was a struggle to hear, and then to write down the details coherently. Not being able to write intelligibly is a disadvantage in so many ways. Others complain to me about it, but they don't know how I too suffer. As well as that, while jotting notes in the noisy non-booth and on the slippery non-platform for writing, the receiver fell from my ear several times. Crucial bits of information vanished unheard. So I managed to wind up at Times Square instead of the other end of 43rd.

Finally, after much use of my newly acquired 'cell' Rosemary and I actually met, at the mid-way point of the Algonquin Hotel and an hour later than we planned.

But we had an excellent evening, dining Cuban (it was that or Russian), drinking Sangria, and nattering away like a pair of well, middle-aged librarians. My previous last meal with her was in Moscow, where we ate an adventurous cuisine from one of the 'Stans' (Uzebeka, Kazakha.. I can't recall any longer except that one of the soups came served in the shell of a gourd, like a halloween pumpkin). After the delicious Cuban food and wait-staff with sliding Desi accents, Rosemary drove me home. I took the opportunity to get some questions resolved, questions which had kept me awake for years e.g. "Is the New Jersey turnpike really a turnpike?" and "What exactly is the beltway?" She had all the answers, as any good New Yorker would.

THIS PICTURE IS FOR YOU DARL, LOVER OF BEATRIX POTTER FROM INFANCY

Apart from the misadventures of the day I took a turn through Columbia University's beautiful grounds (I'm staying right next to it), roamed the edges of Central Park, ate a good lunch at Nussbaum's and generally enjoyed myself altogether.

When Superman came to Macy's

2007-10-01T20:32:00.001-04:00

Getting out at Penn Station to collect my, as it turned out, useless Amtrak Rail North East pass, proved serendipitous; the subway led straight up to 43^rd & 7^th, and to Macy's!

My love for department stores is one I know I share, at least with a nameless someone who boasts of spending an entire 9 hour day in David Jones in Sydney, a store which also lists among my favourites. When I lived in Knightsbridge with Harrods as my tube stop, my overdraft ballooned exponentially. In the end a move to Camden and its street markets was the only way to re-align my debt. Anyway, having expeditiously stumbled upon Macy's it seemed like a sign from above. So I headed straight inside. Sadly, although the goods and clothes were well worth a visit, there was something slightly scuffed and shabby about the ambiance. It lacked that high sheen one has learned, as an afficionado, to expect. When a scrawny Superman in ill-fitting costume yelled obscenities from Ladies Apparel, a costume which couldn't conceal his less than heroic proportions, I took stock. Macy's was verging on the tacky. Nevertheless I did buy a rather good tartan Jackie O number which I think will be valuable in the blizzard-like conditions of the Ref Desk. Department stores need to cater better to their devotees. They have home entertainment centres. There are rest-rooms, restaurants and bars. Why not sublet the bedding department for the overnight addict (what do you think Mary?).

I'm staying in an introvert's paradise, where talking is not allowed. In the lift there's a sign to gladden this librarian's heart. It says SILENCE PLEASE. Mobile phones are banned. I'm at St Hilda's House, a beautiful old building on West 113^th, run by a contemplative order of nuns, The community of the Holy Spirit.

The night I arrived, a Sunday, was one of the nights when the Sisters could speak. I joined them along with a number of other guests for supper, a delicious home-cooked sweet potato soup, with flat bread and a green salad, followed by butter-scotch pudding. Yum. We talked about books (Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Henry James) and we discussed Boston. This line of conversation may have had something to do with my, perhaps intrusive, presence at the table. In general however a glorious silence reigns over the whole building. There's no awful 'music' (I use the word loosely) thumping through the floor-boards. Meeting others on the stairs or in the lift requires no more than a monosyllable. The over-heard unwanted details of another's life are not a constant interruption. I've been considering a new role for the Sisters. They should franchise out, silence a few rail carriages and bus routes, transform the occasional air service with roneoed signs from the Lift, and buy up an apartment block for fully-qualified 'i' residents. Once they hire some extraverts to run the whole thing, the deed will be done. Of course I don't actually want to live in i-World, that could get boring. It would just be nice to know it existed when required. The observant will have noted a remarkable similarity to the name of my old school. Yes, they're both in honour of the very same St Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, and I did select my NY digs partly on that basis. But I also chose on the suggestion of my sister and it's been a really good one (thank you J).

I came across this poster late today. This was nothing to the sentiments expressed at Sunday night's refectory table. The commonly held view was that the U.S. administration now operated in an insane parallel universe. There was great lamentation over the destruction of long-held American values. Someone actually said "We are the terrorists now." I demanded the right of all Australians to vote in the next Presidential election, on the basis that we now agree with all proposals coming from the U.S. as if bound by law! Why not make it so.

It's night, and there's an excellent impromptu concert from the Court yard (the extraverts have arrived). A wonderful saxophonist and equally fantastic drummer are letting it rip. And here is the diner around my corner. It looks rather familiar. Brava New York!

Burma - on the offchance this might help

2007-10-01T06:15:00.000-04:00

There's a global campaign going on to help the Burmese people - http://www.avaaz.org/en/
You never know, signing it could make a difference. Doing nothing isn't going to.

Taking my soul to Seoul

2007-10-01T01:40:00.000-04:00

It was confounding to spend an afternoon in the beautiful grounds and palaces of Geongbokgung after a morning in the Dee Em Zee (Demilitarized Zone).

There were so many signs of hope in the DMZ, the curiously half functioning Dorusan Station, with its North Korean side fully equiped but closed while waiting on its first passengers to take the train right on through to the other side.

There was the convoy of orange construction trucks (number plates removed) heading back South and across the line on a Route already leading to China, Mongolia and beyond.

There was the boxy Red Cross van tootling through the many checkpoints, looking like something mislaid from and still in search of its MASH episode, apparently on a mission to rescue injured flood victims in the latest catastrophe of the unfortunate North. In the distance, from the Dora observatory, where we could stare through 500 Won a minute binoculars I saw 3 tiny figures.

It was hard not to gawp. I felt embarrassed at the ghoulish nature of our visit, like slowing down at a car crash. How Miss Horton (Empress of St Hildas during my incarceration there) would have dished out detention for this display of vulgarity, although the memory of that hard-won bit of etiquette didn't stop me from swinging my tourist binoculars from one land mine sign to another. Part of the morning was spent on an endurance exercise, tramping down a lengthy shaft to reach a watery infiltration tunnel 95 metres below ground, only to then scuttle bent over like a lamp stand along its bumpy route to the North Korean border. This was one of the many tunnels built as invasion options from North to South. From time to time a newly flushed out enemy emerges, to perish in the traffic like road kill on the Newell Highway. Looking across to North Korea from the Dora observatory the only movement I saw in the city visible to us was a few people walking. There weren't signs of cars. It all seemed horribly sad and pointless, and the footage filmed within my memory of family reunifications after 50 years of silence, was heart-wrenching to watch again.

In spite of my best efforts, dodging motor-bikes, step-through scooters and grandmothers hauling over-sized rickshaws of discarded stuff behind them, I was unable to find a single shop in Seoul which could sell me a USB key. But I did do quite a tour of the neighbourhood, trudging down ever more doglegged alleyways, up into tiny aortas of lanes which ended nowhere, often greeted as I went by the falsetto Allos of giggling bands of children.

Along the way I noticed miniaturised supermarkets everywhere, crammed to the rafters with jumbled mess while the owners sat outside in the full din of passing buses, watching television on the footpath. Everyone smokes. There also seems to be quite a trade in motorbike modifications in 'Downtown'. Instead of a pillioned baby boomer girlfriend, there's an iron frame bolted to the back. It's one of the curiosities of 'old'cities to me that they're so fully inhabited. You wouldn't drive through most of Brisbane on any old day and find much evidence of community living, people nattering along the laneways, or playing cards on a footpath table.

I'm really glad I spent even such a short time in Seoul. I liked the soughing (how DO you say that word?) pronunciation. I liked the ancient and mysterious palace walls lining so many of the long thoroughfares of speeding traffic.

I liked the mountains looming in around the city and the wonderful island drive across the sea from Incheon airport.

And I liked the way that taxis were so cheap and plentiful that I, and probably every other tourist as well, easily got about with only a bundle of 1000 Won notes and a cheap city map as my tools of navigation. I also ate all kinds of mystery dishes, being gently guided away from choices my Western palate might baulk at, although I have to say I'm already longing for my normal fruit bat quota of seeds, nuts, fruit peelings and apple cores. Eating what tasted like oat soup with vinegar cabbage was no substitute.

Lastly, one of the great pleasures of travel has returned to me, in the form of yet another screening of Legally blonde, on the movie Channel in my hotel at 6:00 am. I couldn't tear myself away until it finished. The work is a masterpiece of over-statement and kitsch goodwill. I love it.

The 'thoroughbred mental case'

2007-05-20T20:01:00.000-04:00

Robert Lowell : a man after my own heart, and with a most delicate ear for words. I could have loved mad Ezra more but for his fascist ways....

The scabrous old pianos at St Hilda's which inflicted their out-of-tune assaults on us morning and evening warmed me instantly to Great Aunt Sarah and her dummy piano:

My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow

Up in the air

by the lakeview window in the billiards-room,

lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour,

my Great Aunt Sarah

was learning Samson and Delilah.

She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano,

with gauze curtains like a boudoir table,

accordionlike yet soundless.

It had been bought to spare the nerves

of my Grandmother,

tone-deaf, quick as a cricket,

now needing a fourth for “Auction,”

and casting a thirsty eye

on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix

from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics.

But I always loved the figure of Lowell himself struggling manfully with his madness and his pedigree:

Waking in the blue

After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.

All sorts of heroes and heroines of mine lived in and around Boston - Literary Map of Massachusetts

I'm giving myself a week to get to Amherst, Salem, Lowell, heaven!