Merry Christmas to all my readers.  

The corporate canyon as I walk downtown. "See me walking down Fifth Avenue, walking cane here at my side..." 

Shank's Mare; or 東海道中膝栗毛ニュー・ヨーク編

So there's a strike on, but I still needed to do some Christmas shopping, since I will be jetlagged on the 23rd and really don't fancy braving the shops in London or Cambridge on Christmas Eve. Only one thing to do - walk. And walk I did, from 110th street all the way down to 34th street where Macy's is. Managed to do my shopping and even found a couple of unexpected bonuses on the way for my family, stuff I think they'll like. And of course there's nothing like walking through a city to get a feel for it, rather than spending all one's time navigating through the subway. That said, it was bloody tiring; 150 or so blocks, about five miles in total, and my feet hurt. Mission, however, accomplished. I'm off to JFK tomorrow morning and will spend most of the day there reading and trying to amuse myself; has to be done that way unfortunately as I can't take the risk of missing the plane. Time, I have plenty; money, not so much.

I also thought I'd reproduce the above view of the Columbia Xmas lights on College Walk. Photo "lovingly ripped off" ((C) Monty Python) from the CU website. Enjoy it, though, and merry Xmas to all my readers. Next time I post I will be in the Essex countryside putting my feet up.

Strike one...

So it's the end of term, and nothing seems to be quite working how it should. The printers in Starr aren't working properly, the heating in my apartment building is making some funny noises, and, oh yes, how could I forget the MTA strike? The subway and city buses are down until further notice, making it rather difficult to get around the city. Luckily there's a CU bus available to take me to JFK on Thursday when I go back to the UK; not so luckily, the only one available is at 10 a.m., so I am going to have to kill rather a lot of time in the airport. I guess I'll just bring some work with me...might as well use the time productively.

I wish there was something of interest to report, but there isn't really. I've been spending my entire time in the library (still) getting revision and term papers done. Classical Japanese final was this morning, that's now done and dusted, though I still have the Ogai paper to get finished. I'll manage somehow, I suppose. Damn tired, though, would have liked to have had all of the holiday back in Cambridge to relax and forget about NYC for ten days...not to be, apparently.

Going out to dinner with some of the J-lit people and Prof. Ono, a visiting professor from Gunma who's been here all year and who is leaving at the beginning of the next one. Curry on the menu, at one of the better places in Morningside Heights luckily enough. Pics will be posted here if I can be arsed to take any.

Tomorrow, I'm going to have to get my Xmas shopping done, so I'm going to have to walk about 70 blocks downtown to get to Macy's. If nothing else I suppose it'll be an experience...

Slush puppies

It dumped another load of snow on the streets of New York last night, about four inches or so - I woke up to see some big, fat, fluffy flakes falling outside my window, which had mysteriously stopped by the time I came back into my room from the shower. The clearing of the snow off the roads and pavement is efficient enough, they seem - unlike the UK - to have the knack of not letting snow paralyse the transport system. It's all very Christmassy, I suppose, although the pools of slush that accumulate very quickly on the kerb don't do much for the atmosphere. Alma Mater (the statue in front of the main Columbia campus building) has a rather fetching white cape and hat right now...

Not a lot's been going on here, apart from my getting on with my two term papers - the one a translation of Nativist scholar Motoori Norinaga's poetics, the other an analysis of Mori Ogai's Maihime. Which will mean squat to most of you, I realise, but that's about it.

I did, however, attend a couple of Christmas parties here - the one in the Law school, where I work, which was very lavish as one might expect - salmon, wild rice, clowns, ice cream, all sorts of stuff. Free alcohol, too, though I couldn't indulge because I was theoretically at work. And in the evening they had a do for 1st year international students. Which is apparently me, although most of the Americans here don't really think of me as "international" in that sense. More free booze, not so much of the food, although one thing was seriously cool - a chocolate fountain. It was a sort of combined fondue and decorative implement - it melted the chocolate at the bottom and then pumped the liquid stuff back up to the top. I am convinced it must have been invented by a woman.

The nights are drawing in...

...and it'll soon be Christmas. No sooner has Thanksgiving been packed away for another year than New York shifts up and gear and gets into Xmas mode. They're selling christmas trees on the pavement, the shops put up all their big displays and decorations, and - well - there's just something in the air. Columbia is getting in the spirit, as well, or so it would appear - they've wrapped the trees on College Walk with thousands of fairy lights, so they effect as you walk into and out of college at night is quite magical. I took a couple of photos tonight, but I don't think I had the shutter setting right because they came out all blurry, so I'll try again tomorrow evening. You'll have to make do with the shot below.

Still, it snowed last night, which rather added to the Xmas atmos. Not a huge lot - about two or three inches - but enough to blanket the place and hide most of the ugly stuff. The corollary to all this romanticism, however, is that it's bloody cold - New York's grid system is wonderful for navigation purposes, but it does act as a gigantic wind tunnel, and the gusts that whip down Broadway as I'm on my way to or from Columbia are distinctly uncomfortable.

Not that I am outside much at the moment, though - term paper demands mean I spent almost all of this weekend in one library or other, though I did go for a quick beer yesterday evening with some of the Japanese history guys. Nothing too exciting, though. Seems to be the story of my life right now...

CU campus in the snow. 

Stirring it up

As I walked home from class today, the NYPD were out in force outside Lerner Hall on Broadway. The reason? Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has been invited to speak by the Columbia Conservatives Association, and as I write this is probably making his speech right now. Needless to say, in a city as liberal as New York, and moreover at a university like Columbia, this has gone down like a lead balloon, and the otherwise desperately parochial college newspaper, the daily Columbia Spectator, has been covering it in some detail, obviously glad of something actually worthwhile to write about. No doubt the CCA have been patting themselves on the back over a job well done in a calculated attempt to create controversy. It'll be amusing, no doubt, to watch both sides whip themselves into a lather.

He's not the first bigshot; we've had Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan and the Iraqi Prime Minister here to speak at Low Memorial Library in recent months. Like I said, in NYC there's always something going on.

American blu-tak is f*cking useless.

I have a poster from the Met in my room of New York City as seen from Brooklyn. It's a very arty sort of 1930's black and white poster which I think is a rather attractive and evocative shot. My mum bought it for me when she was here visiting a month or so ago.

Now, here's the problem. I can't get it to stay on the wall. It's fallen off three times since I've had it. It's not THAT heavy. The other posters I have up of the Guggenheim and the MTA transport network are doing fine. So I have to conclude it must be the American blu-tak, which, I am reluctantly forced to say, is f*cking useless. It's got one job - to keep things on the wall - and it's not doing that. I wouldn't mind, but the poster is directly above my bed and keeps falling on me when I'm asleep, or trying to be. I'm going to bring some British blu-tak back when I go home at Christmas, it's the only solution.

Thank you for your attention. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Thanksgiving

And so on to Thanksgiving, that most American of holidays. Not one I can really claim to have a deep and meaningful understanding of, it has to be said, but still, gluttony is a cause I'm always prepared to throw my weight behind. I went for a couple of beers with my good friend Jonathan on Wednesday evening, and found the bars near Columbia almost completely empty - I guess New York, and particularly the Columbia area, really is a place where everyone is from somewhere else.

Jonathan's parents live in New Jersey, so it wasn't particularly difficult for him to get home for Thanksgiving. Rather harder for me, though, given that my parents are on the other side of the Atlantic and wouldn't be celebrating Thanksgiving even if I did turn up.

So it turned out that a group of seven of us celebrated Thanksgiving, after a fashion, at Reto's apartment over on Morningside Drive. Reto is a 3rd year Japanese History PhD with whom we play poker regularly, and he has a wonderful apartment overlooking Morningside Park. A fine venue for a celebration. It wasn't traditional Thanksgiving fare by any means - no turkey, yams, mashed potato or pumpkin pie to be seen. Instead we had seafood and couscous salad (prepared by yours truly), pork chops with pesto, and way too much icecream and fruit salad. Accompanied by six bottles of wine between the seven of us. Enough for a relaxed, happy and, dare I say it, festive occasion. It was great...chances to just kick back are few and far between at the moment.

It had started to snow shortly before I left, and I walked home as the flakes turned the sidewalk into powder ahead of me. A White Thanksgiving - a truly American moment.

Brookyln Dodger

So I went down to Brooklyn for the first proper time this evening. I had been there before, back in August to walk back to Manhattan across the Brooklyn bridge, but this was the first time that I'd actually been out in the urban areas and really looked around. It seems pleasant enough, it's certainly roomier than Manhattan and much less high-rise - you can actually see the sky, which a lot of the time the corporate canyon in Manhattan makes rather difficult. I'd like the chance to take a look around in daylight some time, though I don't know what reason I'd have to go there any time soon. We stopped for dinner at a Peruvian place near Pacific Avenue, where I had (for want of a better appellation) Peruvian fried chicken and a dish of fried plantains, not something I've ever had before. They were kind of like a cross between potatoes and bananas; or at least my friends' were. They ordered sweet plantains, I tried the salty ones - and found them stodgy and not particularly wonderful, though they certainly filled me up.

The occasion was our semi-regular game of poker, which has been in Brookyln the last few weeks owing to our Taiwanese friend, the lovely Pei-Ting, winning a few weeks ago and none of us being particularly willing to make the trek to Brooklyn. This time, however, we were able to make a party of eight people, and with our usual $15 buy-in that was a pot of $120.

Which I won.

Yeah, I'm still not sure how I did it - it wasn't the whole amount, we divide up by place so 2nd gets their money back and third only loses $5 - but even so, I walked away with $90. It worked out as a very quick game, really - I had wiped everyone else out by 10:30, and we started at 8:45. I guess the cards were just lucky for me, really...I finally won on the heads-up on a pair of 8s, which is a crappy hand normally but good enough if the guy opposite you only has King High. I guess the thing is that with eight people playing, you know that by the time it comes down to the final rounds the people who are still there are bound to have something good - and luck favoured me, I got 3's, straights and full houses on a regular basis. I won't pretend it was skill - just dumb luck. No less welcome all the same.

So all in all, with that, and with the most welcome news that I got my pension refund (all $4,000 of it) this week, plus payday from my job, I've suddenly gone from dire financial straits to being reasonably comfortable again. Funny how things change. I'm celebrating with a beer tonight.

Indian Summer

Well, it's been glorious weather in New York for the most part over the last week or so...it's almost been approaching what we laughingly call summer in England, at least today anyway. Unfortunately I'm too busy to really enjoy it, as I rarely seem to venture outside of the Starr East Asia Library at the moment. I'm trying to get my two term papers done as soon as possible, basically, as I have to use one of them as a writing sample for my PhD applications this autumn, and they will also be key in deciding whether or not I am able to stay at Columbia, so I want to make them as good as possible.

Still, needs must. In other news, I booked a flight home last week, so I will be popping off back to Blighty over Xmas to enjoy a few of the home comforts, and also the Ashes DVD as well no doubt. England seem to be carrying on where they left off in Pakistan, but I imagine that's all Greek to the majority of you, so I'll leave that one by the wayside.

We (a bunch of Japanese-oriented grad students) did go out for karaoke and izakaya on the East side on Friday night, though, come to think of it. It was a pretty good night all things considered, the izakaya fare was authentic enough and the prices surprisingly reasonable, though I still ended up spending a packet. Karaoke wasn't bad either, although the machine was a piece of shit and took forever to load. Still, you can't expect perfect J-karaoke every time I suppose.

Apart from that, I didn't emerge from the library until late Sunday night. My skin's turning pale - well, paler than it was before, anyway - you have to remember where I'm from. There are some parts of the UK that don't even know we have a sun, after all.

Autumn in New York

...is a terrible film. One of the worst I've ever seen, inflicted on me on a flight back from Japan a few years ago. If you haven't seen it, don't, and if you have seen it, you better have a good excuse.

Still, the reality - by which I mean an actual autumn in New York - is rather more palatable. We've had some glorious weather this week, a real Indian summer in complete contrast to the yukky rainy stuff we had when my Mum was here (as one would expect). Today was perfect, really, although probably a mite too hot for the runners of the New York Marathon.

Two very good friends of mine, Matt Davis (aka Pocket Rocket) and his fiancee, the beguiling Naomi, had decided to come over to NYC to see a friend of theirs who was running the marathon (in a rhino suit, natch) and to catch up with me. It was great to hang out with them - we go back a long way, to those heady days back as 1st years at Wadham all those millenia ago in 1997. We've all moved on a bit since then, I think it's fair to say.

It was a fine day out - the weather and the general atmosphere of the event were most congenial. I didn't know this, but it's apparently standard practice for the runners to put their names on their running suits so the crowd can yell out encouragement. It all leads to a very lively and convivial kind of event, which would probably be all the more so if you were allowed to drink in public here.

Anyway, we have tomorrow and Tuesday off, although I will likely be spending most of it in the library. Term papers and all sorts of nonsense beckon again. But today's photos are reproduced below for your delectation.

So I took a walk across Central Park this Sunday morning to meet Matt and Naomi to watch the marathon. The autumn foliage was out and it was a glorious day... 

First vantage point was on the Upper East side, around 81st street. We would later move over to Central Park.  

I was generally quite disappointed by the lack of fancy dress amongst the runners, a notably exception being the Blues Brothers right here. 

Matt's friend Phil, running in a rhino suit, naturally. Personally I think anyone that runs 26.2 miles voluntarily is mad anyway, but to do it in a rhino suit which must have been hot as hell and chafed like nothing on earth...I take my hat off to the guy. 

Phil and Tom, still in their rhino suits as they near the 25 mile mark. 

A wonderful shot in Central Park in the late afternoon as the runners near the finish. Shows the autumn colours off beautifully. 

The runners head on home, wrapped in their souvenir foil blankets. It had begun to get rather chilly by this point, so they no doubt needed them. 

Empire Statement

Anyway, today was Mum's last day in NYC so we thought a good way to round it off would be to go to the Empire State Building and go up to the top so we could see what the city looks like. I've never been up there myself (I went into the lobby in 2002, but not the tower) so was very glad of the opportunity. Went fairly early - we were there by 9 a.m., and that was definitely a good thing as the crowds were pretty impressive by the time we left.

The building itself is impressive enough, with its 1920s art deco throughout, but obviously that's not why anybody goes. With the fall of the World Trade Centre in 2001, it's now the highest building in NYC again (I think?) and the views are nothing short of breathtaking. Though rather cloudy, visibility was still not that bad (10-15 miles) and we could see the whole of Manhattan plus Jersey, Queens and Brooklyn. Amazing sight, well worth doing. Photos are, of course, reproduced below.

Saw Mum off to JFK this afternoon, took the subway out to Queens and then back again. I have a Hallowe'en party to go to tonight, and for once I'm not going as Agent Smith (thank you, Nes) - I'm going as the Scream slasher with the mask and everything. I'll let you know how I get on, assuming I don't get shot by the NYPD.

Yours truly, unshaven and a bit scruffy, but still me... 

Looking north. You can see Central Park (it's in the middle-left of the photo), but only just.  

Looking north-east, towards the Chrysler Building and various other landmarks. 

Looking south-west, towards Brooklyn and Queens. 

Looking south-east, towards Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. 

New York, baby! 

Burning the Midnight Oil

So my mum's here to visit at the moment - a big thing for her. She's never been to the US before, let alone New York, and while some aspects of the place do seem a little strange to her, she seems to be having a good time of it. I've been out for dinner with her every night since she's been here, sampling Korean, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Moroccan food, all of which are within 3 blocks of my room here. In typical mother style, she's also been buying me towels and pillows and generally sorting out my room...I don't think it really needs it, but it does look better for her intervention, I have to admit.

The downside of the equation is that it increases, de facto, an already pretty heavy workload, so I've had a couple of late nights this week (1:00 a.m. and later). Not that late by many standards, but I'm usually in bed by midnight, so it was something of a shock to the system. Been working on Edo plays (mostly dealing with love suicides...) and on Tayama Katai's Futon, a flawed and somewhat prurient if still interesting work.

I was asked by a friend down in Pennsylvania to take some shots of the CU campus for a project she was doing, so in the absence of anything more interesting I thought I'd share them with you. They're not really that interesting, but I thought they might give an idea of the campus surroundings. The story about Butler Library's lawn is interesting, though I don't know if it's apocryphal or not - apparently, it was used in the opening sequence of Ghostbusters, and in payment they asked for a tiny share of the profits of the movie, something like 0.0001 percent or similar, with the proviso that the money could only be used on the upkeep of the lawn outside the library. The film, as we all know, was wildly successful beyond anyone's imagining, and so Butler now has hundreds of thousands of dollars to be used on the lawn's upkeep...I guess that's why they allow sports teams to practice on it - you gotta give the staff something to do...

Lerner Hall, the student social centre. Almost Pompidou-esque in its structure, I suppose, only the pipes and so forth on the inside this time. 

The lawn outside Butler library. There's a story attached to this, which you'll have read about earlier. Note the sticker on the top left... 

Bronze of a lion on campus - CU's athletic teams are know universally as the Lions. Doesn't improve their performances at all, but still.  

St Paul's chapel, on campus... 

The overpass outside the law library. From here you can not only see downtown, but you can also... 

...see all the way uptown to Washington Heights and Harlem as well. 

The view downtown from the bridge over Amsterdam leading to the Law library. On a clear day you can see right the way down... 

The entrance to the Law School library, where I have my part time job. The statue is allegedly Bellerophon taming Pegasus (for those of you who have an interest in the Classics). 

The inside of Low Memorial Library, where the University administration have their offices.