Who could ask for anything more

I had a somewhat different type of celebrity encounter tonight. Hélène Cixous was speaking at NYU. As befits her type of celebrity, the appreciation revolved rather more around enthusiastic applause than screaming, but as I landed up in the overflow venue, despite arriving well before the start, her significance is just as apparent. The event turned into a wonderful, enthralling and terrifying experience, as I appreciated her intensity, humour and insight without understanding much of what she said. If nothing else, the potential value of my French lessons (which I really am enjoying), comes home to me full-force when I consider the difficulty of reading her and her cohorts’ writing in translation alone.

It is so exciting to have the opportunity of hearing so many famous people, here in this city. In a fortnight, Judith Butler will be here. Could a grad student ask for anything more?

One of the benefits of living in New York

I had my first celebrity sighting today! It was a rather bizzarre experience. There were all these huge trailers/caravans parked in the street outside my department, and as I walked to class I found myself wondering whether there was some sort of convention happening. They were too big to be ordinary holiday campers, and many of them had darkened windows, which led me to suspect that they may be connected with some sort of police operation…. After my evening walk around the United Nations, I am more than open to such possibilities. There was a particularly big, imposing trailer parked right outside the door of my department’s building, and as I reached it, the door of the caravan opened, and a man stepped out. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. I have met so many people over the past month and a half, that I was just going to dismiss him as yet another of the faces I had encountered, when someone to my left began screeming and babbling as though she was in shock. The man from the trailer reached out to her and shook her hand, and for a moment I was convinced I was going to be dealing with an unconscious stranger on a New York street. She really looked like she might pass out. But she didn’t, and just as he moved away, I recognized the cause of her agitation as none other than Will Smith! Only in New York.

Shoe shopping, China town, and a full moon over Gotham City

Yesterday was a really fun day. A friend from my building and I caught a bus downtown, and went shopping at Century 21. It is right opposite Ground Zero, and so I saw the site briefly, but I decided not to spend much time visiting it then, as it really requires more focused attention than I could give it at that time. I’ll return there another day. Instead, I spent about an hour trying on one pair of shoes after another. Now quite unlike the stereotype, I do not find shoes particularly appealing. I like to own a pair of sandals, a pair of closed, smart shoes, and a pair of hiking boots. None of them are high-heeled, and all of them are comfortable enough for me to spend a full day in them without cursing them, or my judgement. In other words, I am a sensible shoe shopper. I have realized, however, that my hiking boots are the only shoes I own that will be suitable for the winter, and as they are hardly smart enough to wear with a skirt, or when I’m dressed for work, they alone will not do. So yesterday’s trip was for the express purpose of exploring my available options with regard to cold-weather shoes. While I didn’t buy anything this time, I did get a pretty good idea of what is available, at what cost, and I am fairly certain I know what I will be buying. There is a great pair of waterproof, fur-lined boots with my name on them….

While I may not have anything like the average woman’s passion for shoes, however, I do have a comparable fettish for hats. If they are colourful, quirky, unusual, or just plain fun, I like them. Scarves and gloves come a close second. And Century 21 has all three in abundance! I am not shy to admit that the main reason I didn’t buy the shoes I liked yesterday is because I wanted an excuse to go back to the shop on my own, for a longer time, to try on hats, too.

Anyway, from the shop, my friend and I walked up, past city hall (which is incredibly beautiful, and certainly deserves another visit, and, slowed somewhat by our mutual admiration of downtown architecture, made our way into Chinatown. The bid in Johannesburg to close down informal/street trading that has been going on for some time, is sadly misguided, if Chinatown is anything to go by. The colourful shop fronts, forming an attractive backdrop to the equally colourful street vendors, and the mass of pedestrian humanity that surges around them, make it a very exciting part of town. I have been looking for a decently priced fish shop since I arrived here, and as I haven’t yet managed to pull myself from bed at 4:00 am to make it out to the Fulton Street Fish Market during trading hours, I had encountered only the hideously expensive, rather sterile midtown fish mongers, and the fish counters in the various grocery stores I frequent. In China town, I have my pick. There were so many gorgeous fish shops, with such a massive array of produce, that I could try a different one every week, and eat all semester. And in amongst them you can buy everything from fresh produce to herbs, teapots and chinese fans, to home furnishings and some of the most beautiful clothing…. My companion even got his shoes reparied for $2 by a little man who spoke no English, and was sitting with the tools of his trade under a tarpaulin on the side of the road. We had luch at a quaint little restaurant with linoleum floors and vinyl tables, that served good green tea, cheap noodles, and soup that I’m convinced could cure anything. I had a wonderful mushroom lo mein, and learned, to my great delight, to eat it with chopsticks. My companion had lived for a few years in Japan, and so was more than competent with those unwieldy inplements that have given me grey hairs in the past. I was eating (albeit rather slowly) like the best of them by the end of it. Seems that learning the technique is practically a pre-requisite for anyone wanting to pass as a New Yorker.

We rounded lunch off with a sesame ball each at a bakery down the road from our restaurant. That too was a new experience for me. For the benefit of those who have never experienced them before, sesame balls are deep-fried balls of rice batter (kind of chewy, and very pleasant) filled with a sweet bean paste, and rolled in sesame seeds. It tasted nothing like what I had expected, and was really enjoyable.

I had a French class after lunch (I managed to hold a rather stilted conversation with one of my fellow students), and then dashed down-town for a departmental colloquium, which turned out to be an hour later than usual, and therefore gave me a bit of extra time to catch up on reading before it started. The colloquium was great, presented by a leading phenomonological musicologist who brought to mind a whole lot of half-dismissed ideas I have had at various times for more whimsical research papers linking music with everything from astronomy to cryptography. It really made me want to explore some other possibilities for future research, and got me excited all over again about potential future topics of study that I had put aside when I began to shape my career a few years ago. There really are an infinite number of possibilities ahead of me over the next few years, and that is really an exciting prospect.

There was a full moon making the dark clouds glow, as I headed home, and when it peaked out from behind some of the ornate neo-gothic high-rise buildings that characterise so much of this city, it brought to mind all those delightfully dark 1980s and earlier comic books set in cities modeled after this one. It is beginning to feel like autumn, now, and the whole character of the city is changing. I am really enjoying the contrasts as they reveal themselves.

vanishing posts and chocolate

What a terrible week for posting! Three times I have spent time typing up a post, only to have it disappear into blogger heaven (or hell). And it is really difficult to re-type a funny post from scratch. So I'll be typing my posts up on word from now on, and publishing them only once they are safely saved on my hard drive.
In the mean time, though, This week end is a bit of a mile stone. On Sunday I will have been in New York for exactly a month! Celebrate with me. I will be satisfying my unending chocolate cravings by baking my mother's wonderfully sticky chocolate pudding!

Intrepid

I spent the entire day today at the Intrepid museum. I didn't quite make the 10:00 opening, but I arrived quite soon afterwards, and stayed untill closing. And what a superb day it was. My feet are swolen from the 2 mile walk both directions, and the almost constant standing, but I feel quite satisfied with myself. I walked the entire aircraft carrier from end to end, one deck after another. I rode both of the flight simulators, wondered through the submarine (what a terrifying place to have to live in!) and pretended I was a passenger, and then the pilot of the concorde. I saw the statue of liberty off in the distance, down the hudson river, and New Jersey surprisingly close. I admired war planes, and paid my respects of Harmon Rabb and his Tom Cat. And on the way home I wondered how many of those starry-eyed young men and women who walked the same deck returned home to write about it.

Fire drill

I just got expelled onto the street outside my building, in my pajamas, with my dinner cooling on the table, for a fire drill. Mom, I am so grateful for your wonderful dressing gown!

Under cover in New York

When the thermometer tops 30 degrees Centigrade, the melting-pot of New York city turns into a simmering cauldron. It has been one of those days, with low cloud pushing the humidity up, and creating a muggy atmosphere that teased the already frayed nerves of the city's commuting public.
I began walking uptown, against the wave of pedestrian traffic, as the sun began sinking below the line of the tallest buildings. After a block or two, I became aware of an unusually high number of police officers around, directing the traffic, or watching the passing pedestrians from below the peaks of their severely tilted hats.
Further up the street, their ranks were swelled by legions of plain-clothes officers, identifiable by their dark business suits, and the tightly-coiled earphone wires running down the backs of their shirts. Their vehicles, all black, all larger than the average New York family car, stood in stark contrast to the paler, gaudily adorned vehicles of their uniformed counterparts.
I reached my destination, flashed my photo-identification card at the nearest police officer, who was patiently explaining to an agitated woman why she could not be admitted without proper identification, and headed down the street to a tall, mirror-covered building. I sat down in the paved courtyard beside the entrance to the building, and pulled out my pen and note pad. On the opposite side of the street, the United Nations elite and their wives paraded, waiting for tables to become available in the hotel restaurant. To my left, a man finished his cigarette, stubbing it out on the bricks before rising and pacing to the edge of the road. Looking impatiently at his watch, he sighed, and walked back to his former perch on the edge of an immaculate pot plant.
I waited about ten minutes before a short, business-suited Asian man exited the building, and walked uncertainly towards me.
"Nicol?" he asked, straightening his tie. I nodded and extended my hand. He grasped it briefly, before leading me into the building and down a set of stairs.
The interview lasted about a half an hour. Afterwards, I retraced my steps down-town, smiling to myself as I walked. The sun had nearly set, and the first tentative drops of rain began to fall, lowering the impossible temperature only slightly. I bought a doughnut two blocks from my apartment, and ate it under the shop awning on the sidewalk, spilling powdered sugar over my black purse as I did. It was a small celebration for a personal victory, but I felt it was worth it.

Sounding enough like a detective story yet? I couldn't resist trying my hand at the style, because the atmosphere on the upper west side yesterday really lent itself to it. In reality, all I was doing was attending an audition for a choir (I got in, by the way), but it was held in the basement of a United Nations building, and because of the opening of the general assembly, the streets were literally crawling with police officers and general security. And American security services really do look just as they are portrayed in the films. The dark suits, black SUVs and discrete ear-pieces are a reality!

Unfortunately, today my attendance at my first choir rehearsal was thwarted. I have fallen victim to the inevitable "new city tummy", though there is just a slight possibility that it may be an e coli infection. I am already feeling much better, though, and the doctor I saw this morning suggested just resting up and keeping hydrated, so I am certain I will be 100% tomorrow.