New York State of Mind

After five weeks of bucolic relaxation, I'm headed back to the big bad city. It's been a tonic - the Essex countryside was just the ticket, exactly the right place to unwind and blow off the stress of the past year. Tomorrow of itself might be quite stressful - nobody seems quite sure what exactly I can take on board the flight, and I'm flying with BA, whose reputation for efficiency and high standards is not exactly flawless.

I was back in the Smoke this weekend, having dinner and drinks with Matt and Nina at a Sichuan place in London by the name of Bar Zhu. The food was, quite simply, phenomenal - the best Chinese I think I've had in this country, wonderfully piquant and (apparently) authentic Sichuan delicacies of all various flavours. Marvellous. Met Karen and my brother for lunch, once again in Chinatown, the next day, and hoisted a couple of pints. Mike was celebrating too - he just got a grant worth ￡26,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, quite against the odds, to do an MA in sculpture at the Slade (University College London's Art school). Beers on him then.

Sunday was my actual birthday, celebrated in a sort of aromatic haze of beer and Indian food. While the Indian on offer in New York - like, for example, Jacksonville Heights - is not bad, it's not British Indian food. I'm a creature of habit, a fact for which I make no apologies.

Will blog again when back in the wilds of NYC.

Smoke and Mirrors

By popular demand...

I've been told I need to update my blog more often. This is an unprecedented phenomenon; very few people indeed have ever told me that I should actually write more. Boringly enough, it's because there's not a whole lot to write about; I am at home most of the time, reading, watching DVDs (mostly The West Wing), and doing a bit of academic work from time to time. Even with the best will in the world, I doubt most of you really care about all the old books on my shelves I'm enjoying once again.

But at other times - namely weekends - I go down to London to meet friends. Saw Karen and Nat last weekend, took a walk by the river and remembered that London is just as amazing a city as New York is. I think perhaps one is apt to forget the qualities of one's own native land when one spends so much time overseas. As one of my professors remarked, London is like New York, only with history. And much, much more expensive - but that's a story for another time.

This past weekend, I reminded myself of an old and venerable English tradition, namely, the Session. Wherein a group of young men gather at a drinking place after work, and proceed to drink more than is really good for them in a turn-based system (known, I believe, as a round). Quaint and curious some may call it - others may prefer to think that it highlights the primitive nature of those who participate in it - but it's still damn good fun, especially when joined by old friends. It also proves that you can take the man out of college; but you can't take college out of the man. Of ten of us, I am the only one who isn't in a well-paid and prestigious job in London. Do we, then, enjoy fine wines and good dining? Do we hell. Eight pints of lager and a kebab on the way home. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

In other news, Al-Qaeda is once again trying to kill me. Or, if that fails, annoy the hell out of me. I'm not so worried about a fiery aerial death over the Atlantic - it'd have the virtue of being quick - as I am about being bored out of my mind in Heathrow, or not being able to have my laptop with me and thereby having it damaged by the heavy-browed baggage handlers at the world's busiest airport. It's 10 days until I fly out, so I have to hope that things settle down by then. Cos if my laptop were to get damaged - well, that'd put an end to the blog for, ooh, at least a week - and what would you do then, my loyal readers?

Notes from the Midlands

The occasion was the 21st birthday of my cousin, Sarah, at the family home in Bewdley, not far away from Kidderminster. In the final year of a teaching course at York University (while I, as she remarked, am in New York), she is a bright and very affable young girl, though no doubt teaching will change all that soon enough. One's 21st birthday is, of course, a moment for celebration and looking to the future; though left largely unspoken throughout proceedings, there was also a certain sense of poignancy, if not sadness, that my cousin - her sister - Claire could not be present. She had died while still a teenager in a minibus crash in the Midlands in the autumn of 1993. Had she lived, she would be about my age and have celebrated her own 21st five years earlier.

Still, it was a lively and boisterous occasion, the party being held in a marquee in her parents' capacious garden and supplied with copious quantities of food and drink. Most of the guests were Sarah's friends from York University and from her childhood in the Midlands, though there was still a sizeable representation of older friends and family. It didn't half make me feel old, though. Less than a month away from my 27th birthday, I was never entirely sure whether I should be chatting with the 2nd and 3rd year undergraduates that composed the majority of Sarah's guests, or making rather more adult conversation with the rest. I am ashamed to admit that I couldn't help silently drooling over one or two of the student body; one girl, in particular, was in possession of what I think were the two most perfect breasts I have seen in recent times and was not shy of displaying them. Proof, if it were required, that I am a drooling pervert. God knows what will happen when I have to start teaching (or rather, TA-ing) in a year's time. Put me and the English accent in a room with some nubile 18-year old American girls and it will probably be all I can do not to trip over my own tongue, let alone avoid getting kicked out of the University and summarily deported (needless to say, K is less than thrilled at this prospect, because, as she said, "we always fancied our TAs in college").

Still. It was all good fun in a teacher-at-a-school-disco kind of way, and I think most of them were suitably impressed at what I laughingly refer to as my 'jetset lifestyle'. I was rather happy that I didn't have to venture outside much, though - aside from the Worcester countryside, I find most aspects of the West Midlands - not least the accent - to be uniformly horrible. We went for a pub lunch on Sunday before I came back down to Cambridge at the pub at the end of the road. My family on my mum's side seem to have this bizarre obsession with pub lunches, even when they're manifestly horrible, and especially (as in this case) ridiculously overpriced. I got a leathery piece of beef and some overcooked vegetables for 8 quid or so, though everything else on the menu was at least ￡15. For the equivalent - $30 or so - I could get quite a feed in NYC. But then, as Mum reminded me - "this is the Midlands, dear, they're not very sophisticated round here".

Summer lightning

It's summer in England. You can tell by the rain.

Been back a week now, and though it seems to me pleasantly cool, those in the know and those on TV (usually not the same thing) are all on about the heatwave. It seems that summers in New York and Japan have given me a higher tolerance than most of my countrymen for hot weather; although whether this weather marks the beginning of a long-term trend, only time will tell. Certainly last year's summer was pretty cool overall, if I remember rightly - but right now the humidity has burst and there's a thunderstorm outside, which has been going on for a few hours now.

The flight back was passable - leaving at 4.00 a.m. was not fun, but the flight was 80% empty and I got a bulkhead seat, so I was able to stretch my legs out a bit. Normal modus operandi when coming back is to go to Stansted (it's only 20 mins drive from where I live in Cambridge), and so I did, but it was so packed with holidaymakers returning from the continent that I missed my Dad and had to get a taxi home. Was about 1 a.m. before I got to bed. But then, seasoned traveller that I am, I suppose I'm more or less used to that...

This last week has not, I regret to say, been very exciting. I've been reading some of my old books and magazines and enjoying my DVD collection again, partly through tiredness and the need to get over my jetlag and partly because I don't really have any money until I get paid tomorrow. This was always the point at which things might get a bit stretched financially, especially as I had to pay for a flight back to New York to resume my studies in mid-August, but I think I'll just about manage to squeak through. As from September 1st, Columbia will thankfully be giving me money instead of taking it away from me.

Off to Birmingham this weekend for a family function. May God have mercy on my soul...

Master of the Universe

So I got my MA thesis finished, finally. It's done, basically, though I will need to make one or two revisions to it before I submit it at the end of August. In the meantime, I have a translation to finish off, though that's not particularly urgent. In any case, it does feel good to have got the bulk of my work done; now I can relax for a bit back home.

It's hot in NYC right now; it hit 35℃ yesterday and will apparently be much the same way for most of the next few weeks. Thankfully I'm not going to be here, as I'm off back to the UK for a month or so. I managed to find someone to sublet my place, thankfully, so that's saved me a wodge of cash I would otherwise have had to pay on rent for the time I wasn't here.

The McCollums, friends from Japan, were visiting from California yesterday; we had lunch down in Bryant Park, then I showed them around Columbia and Riverside Park. Current and ex-JETs from Miyagi will no doubt remember both of them, especially their not insignificant contributions to Miyagi football. That's one of the great things about New York, people just are queueing up to come to visit.

In sort of related news, I'm also now the secretary for the New York JET AA association (which stands for Alumni Association; not, as one might think, Alcoholics Anonymous, although I think it's fair to say that there are more than a few JETs we know who would find the latter rather more useful). Not entirely sure how that happened, given as how I've only been to a couple of events, but I think it'll prove an interesting experience; I got an invite to a reception at the Japanese embassy at the end of the month because of it, but sadly I can't go as I won't be here.

One further invitation I sadly cannot respond to - my good friend Pocket's wedding in September. He and his bride-to-be have been great friends to me over the years, even coming out to visit in November of last year, and I'm genuinely distressed that I can't make their big day - but unfortunately I have to be here. I have no doubt it will be one to remember...but circumstances dictate otherwise for me.

Anyway...chances are the next time I blog I will be back in Blighty!

Red, white and blue

I celebrated the 4th of July down in Brooklyn, at a small gathering held by one of K's friends. We watched the fireworks from the south of the borough, from an area known as DUMBO - Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass - in the tradition of SoHo and TriBeCa. The fireworks were, as you'd expect, spectacular. Pics below for your viewing pleasure.

Sun, sea, sand and stupidity

Got out of the city on Sunday and went down to Sandy Hook in the neighbouring state of New Jersey. A long way south of New York, it's a peninsula on the east coast of the neighbouring state. It also represented the first time I had managed to get out of New York State, pathetically enough, so a jaunt out to the coast was really rather overdue. Went with Juliet, Jo, Tanya and Paul, friends and acquaintances of varying degrees of proximity mainly from the Business School - including me, two Brits, one Russian and one Frenchman, so a fairly cosmopolitan mix.

I can't imagine writing about lying on a beach would be very amusing for most of you, so I'll just post a couple of pics.















Jo, Juliet and Tania.














Self, Jules, Jo and Paul on the way back.

24 hours earlier, I was unfortunate enough to witness another England campaign fall short of expectations. In its manner of unfolding, it does rather bear out the adjective I used in my previous post, especially Rooney's stunningly brainless stamp on Carvalho with the ref less than two feet away. A further, more unpleasant aspect is that now the recriminations begin, and as they often do it's a case of let's-blame-Jonny-foreigner. Granted, Ronaldo's intervention was unnecessary and deplorably unsporting, but let's face it, Rooney has nobody but himself to blame for his actions. I hope that this event turns out to be an epiphany for him as a player, much as France 98 was for Beckham; I fear that too many excuses will be made for him and he will not have to accept the responsibility for his actions.

It's funny, really - there's always a scapegoat, someone or something to blame, never an acceptance that the players just weren't quite good enough. 98 was Beckham (or Simeone, for the connoisseur of xenophobia, or if you prefer, Alan Shearer), '00 was Phil Neville (or Keegan), '02 was Seaman, '04 was another cheating foreigner in the shape of the referee, Urs Meier. Always a sense that 'if only' that hadn't happened, then our boys would have gone all the way. English cricket didn't improve to win the Ashes by always looking for excuses; it recognised its shortcomings and took action to address them. I wonder how long it will be before English football decides to do the same thing.

In the meantime, though, it's all very depressing...

Fireflies

Most evenings, I'm at work til late in Butler Library, inching towards completion of my MA thesis. It's usually dark when I walk back along College Walk. Lined as it is with trees, I usually catch the blinking of one or two fireflies for just the briefest second before they disappear again.

They remind me of nothing so much as a discarded cigarette butt flying through the air.

And there was you thinking I was going to say something romantic and artsy.

On another, completely unrelated note...200 posts! My double-hundred up. Thank you, thank you, I couldn't have done it without you...

Sense and stupidity

I've got nothing much of interest to report over the last week or so, I'm afraid. It's all about the hard yards; I've just been working away in the library and on my thesis, K's gone to Florida for the week (lucky her), and I'm still here watching the World Cup.

Which reminds me, I've been meaning to have a little bit of a rant about the WC so far. It's been pretty good stuff, all things considered - except, of course, when England are playing. And what's concerned me more than anything, really, is that you can sum up virtually all of the last two months for English football with one word. Unfortunately, that word is stupid.

It works on a variety of levels, really. In the Ecuador game, it was a matter of practical stupidity - Paul Robinson's kicks, for example. I don't think I exaggerate when I say that every single one went straight to an Ecuadorian player - in many cases the opposing keeper. Fair enough, you might think, these things happen - but ten or fifteen times? Didn't he notice and think, hang on, better try and distribute a bit better? And in any case - with Rooney as the 1 in a 4-5-1 - who comes in at about 5'6" or thereabouts and was never going to win a decent percentage of knockdowns - it was such a daft idea as to leave me utterly dumbfounded as to why he kept on doing it. Unfortunately, as his outfield companions showed, the instinct for the long ball is just so deeply ingrained in many English footballers that they cannot help it, no matter how inappropriate the circumstances. A bit of thought, boys?

And the manager. What the hell was he doing only taking four forwards, two of whom were not fully fit? Why does he not know his best team or formation? I have until now generally held Eriksson in fairly high regard, but increasingly I'm coming to the conclusion that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, either.

And the FA who appointed him. We could have had a world-class manager who actually knows what he's doing replace Sven - namely, Luis Felipe Scolari - but the FA so utterly mishandled the affair that Big Phil got the hell out of dodge as soon as he realised what a bunch of clowns he was dealing with. Instead of a World Cup winner, we now have Steve McClaren, about whom the best thing that can be said is that he didn't get Middlesborough relegated.

And the English media. Before the tournament, we had our best side in 40 years, seven world class players, genuine chance this time. Oh yes. Four games in? Um...

But the stupidest thing of all is that there's a reasonable chance we could actually do the ridiculous and win the whole bloody thing. Portugal have to be weakened by injuries and suspensions - and once you get to the semis, well it's anyone's game...

Not that I'd put money on it, mind you, but mark my words. It's a funny old game.

From river to I-River

In a moment of unparalleled stupidity, I managed to put my MP3 player in the washing machine. And then put it in the drier for an hour as well.

Incredibly enough, it still works perfectly. I salute the makers of the i-River brand of digital music accessories. Well done, sirs.

Staying cool

K and I went down the to the Boat Basin Cafe on Friday night. It's right on the Hudson River, which forms the boundary between New York and New Jersey, and is a wonderful place for a long drink on a warm evening as the sun goes down on the other shore. It was, as it always is when I have been there, absolutely packed; it seems that all of New York had more or less the same idea that we did. Still, we got a table nonetheless...must be that inimitable British charm (cough).















We walked the mile or so back along the Hudson and Riverside Park. It was perfect early summer evening, balmy and fresh, and the park was full of people walking their dogs, barbequeing, playing football, and all sorts of things. Further up, back towards Morningside Heights, one could see the George Washington Bridge lit up along its span, which, along with the sunset and the leisurely walk, made for a quite perfect evening.















The following day, I went downtown to the Nippon Club for a little bit of nostalgia as I helped out with the orienation for new JETs departing from New York. It brought back no end of memories, and of course the peachy-keen bright-eyed young things all champing at the bit to get to Japan reminded many of the JET Alumni present of the shallow, bitter and cynical shells of human beings they have since become. I was responsible for orienting the new CIRs; in the event, there were only a couple of them, so I just sat down with them, had a bit of a chat, and let them ask questions.















I also got involved later on in the afternoon, with what was titled a "cross-cultural exercise", involving various role-play scenarios designed to get the new US JETs thinking about different cultural frameworks in Japan and situations they might encounter. In an inspired piece of casting, I was required to act the part of a scabby old school superintendent and sexually harass a young female ALT. As John F Kennedy might have said, ask not what JET can do for you...

This was followed by Happy Hour at a bar a few blocks away, where I and other JET alumni sank a few cold ones with some of the new recruits, showed off our knowledge about Japan, and generally tried to be as useful as possible. I think I may have been a bit less coherent after the fifth pint, but such is the way of things. I did advise them to encourage the stereotype that Americans always carry firearms, since it might prove useful in controlling the classroom.

And Sunday morning, I got up bright and early to attend the JETAANY brunch for the Japan-Croatia game. 9:00 is a little early in the morning even for me, but I did see this on my way through Greenwich Village. Those of my readers who work in consulting, perhaps the time has come for a career change...?

Ferries and football

Doubtless it will not have escaped my readers' attention that it's the World Cup. For a country that supposedly doesn't pay much attention to 'sawker', it's getting a lot of coverage; I was able to watch England's game on normal broadcast TV, to my delight, instead of getting lagered at 9 a.m. They were pretty bad, though they still managed to win. A good rule of thumb for the England team is that they're never as bad as they seem when they play badly, nor are they as good as they seem when they play well. It's kind of hard to get an objective opinion or a cool head anywhere; the British media were convinced England would win the whole thing, but one unimpressive game later and we're suddenly the worst team in the tournament. A little perspective and objectivity, chaps. Myself? I think many of the England players are vastly over-rated - but the team is definitely among the top four or five at the tournament. So who knows...?

Mike came back from Boston on Saturday, and we went to see the Da Vinci Code downtown for want of anything better to do. It was twaddle from start to finish - as I'd more or less expected it to be - but mildly entertaining twaddle nonetheless. I wholeheartedly agree with those who have said that the dialogue is as leaden as Victorian plumbing, though.


We took the ferry to Staten Island on Sunday, for a view of the island of Manhattan from the south. It's free, mainly by virtue of the fact that no-one in their right mind wants to go to Staten Island. We didn't linger - straight back on the next ferry to Manhattan, a course followed by about two-thirds of the passengers. That's Mike to the right - as you can see, he got all the looks in the family. Brief though my sojourn on Staten Island was, that does now complete my set of all the boroughs of New York City - Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Quite an impressive achievement. Well, not really, but I thought I'd mention it.

O brother, where art thou?

He's in Boston, actually, at least until Friday afternoon. He's gone up to visit our uncle in Cambridge, MA, and should be back in time for the England game on Saturday afternoon. It is, after all, the first game of the World Cup tomorrow, Germany vs. Costa Rica, and I shall be off to watch it in a nearby hostelry. I have a suspicion, given the neighbourhood, that there might be one or two Costa Ricans around to watch as well.

I've been slogging away in the Law library for the most part, doing my thing as usual. It's not a boring job; the time usually passes quite quickly, and there are many worse things I could be doing. And after all, I need the money; it was K's birthday on Tuesday (06/06/06, a number which, while of no real significance, caused a little bit of a stir here), and I took her out for a lavish dinner at a fancy French place. An excellent meal - you get what you pay for.

I was downtown on Sunday, doing some shopping, and saw an advert on the subway; a picture of a peanut butter sandwich with the legend "You don't need a therapist to get in touch with your inner child", and below it, "A friendly reminder from the peanut grower's association of America". Maybe I've been watching too much of the Sopranos recently, but the phrase "friendly reminder" did make me think that I might be losing one or more kneecaps if I didn't eat more peanuts.

In other news - and I know it's not really my business any more - but I had word of the whackjob from one of the girls I see occasionally in the Law library, who lives on what used to be my floor. Apparently, though his lease expired on the 31st May, he's still there - he never made any attempt to leave or gain an extension. He's been asked to leave, and if he doesn't they'll apparently call the police and have him evicted. I suppose that means he'll literally be out on the street. However much of a pain he may have been, nobody wants to see that happen - but if I were a betting man, I'd put money on that being the eventual outcome. I know, I don't live there any more and it's not my business...but I suppose it just shows what a complete mess Columbia made of the whole thing.

I saw Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind yesterday evening. Never seen it before, I'm ashamed to admit, but I have to say that I got the distinct impression that the cast, crew and most of the reviewers must have been on some pretty powerful mind-enhancing drugs for most of it.

Up steps the weekend

I can't say it's been an exciting last few days. I'm working extra hours at my job in the law library (legally, if anyone from the Department of Homeland Security is reading this. Lovely chaps, they do a great job), mainly with a view to buying a ticket back to the US after I go home for a month in July. I've more or less finished off my term papers, and now I've got to get my actual thesis complete. I've been saying that it's about 80% complete, which isn't strictly true...it still needs a fair bit more work, but I have about seven weeks left before I head back to Blighty.

It's hot, sultry and rainy here right now, reminding me of nothing so much as Japan in the rainy season. Summer storms are in vogue right now; barely a day goes by without a rumble of thunder somewhere along the line. There is, it's true, a certain majesty and even a sensual beauty about the storms; unfortunately, they don't make it any less humid like they tend to do back home once they've passed. And you should see the amount of grime that the rain brings down with it...we are, after all, right in the heart of the metropolis.

My brother is coming to town for ten days or so on Sunday. I haven't seen him since Christmas, and he will be the first of what will likely be many new guests in my new apartment. And to celebrate this momentous occasion - we'll be havin' ribs.

Central Park, today. Just a perfect day... 

New Digs

The apartment rocks. It's just orders of magnitude better than the shithole I was living in before. I'm sleeping better, partly because there aren't eight other people with their own schedule at all hours of the day and night, and partly because I don't have to worry about the whackjob any more. In fact, my flatmate's been out of town all week and I've had the place to myself. It's been very therapeutic to have some privacy once again.

I've been steadily furnishing the place - now is actually a good time to be moving, since everyone else is moving out and I can pick up their unwanted stuff cheap or for free. I've more or less got my room the way I want it, and tomorrow I'll be moving my couch (also acquired for free) up here from K's place, where I'm storing it. She's not so keen to part with it, understandably enough...

I've also been helping a professor at Columbia with his effects - he's moving to Kyoto fairly soon, and as one might expect he has a lot of stuff that needs processing. I and another grad student have gone out to his house in Scarsdale, which is in the suburbs and marks the first time in nearly nine months that I've actually been outside the city limits. Kind of lame, I know, but this place has a habit of being all-consuming. Picked up some free stuff from him - a couple of books, and the desk I'm writing this on right now.

And summer is here now. It's hot and humid - 27℃ out there today - and I'm off to spend a lazy afternoon in Central Park with K.

One year on

I realised today that it's been a year since I started blogging. I started this whole enterprise on the 13th May 2005, and in that time have managed 190 posts. Not bad, all things considered - that averages a post every other day, although it's actually not all that impressive since quite a lot of those are pictures. But still - it's been quite a journey. One year ago I was sitting at my desk in my place in Shiogama, wondering what life would be like in New York City and at Columbia. A lot has gone on in that year - the last rites in Japan, the terrorist attacks of that summer, the Ashes, moving to New York, Columbia, getting on the PhD track, meeting K (it's been six months now), the whackjob, and now, a new apartment as well. I've put some photos up below - it's not much to look at yet, but it's getting furnished steadily enough.

So it's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, really.

My room, looking inward. It's about 13' by 12', a reasonable size. 

My room, facing outward 

The kitchen and living room. Not a lot in here yet - so far I've concentrated on furnishing my room.  

Good Friday

So I've moved. I'm installed in my new apartment, and very nice it is too. There's one sort of downside, in that there was not a stick of furniture in my room when I moved in, so that's something I'm going to have to sort out. I do have a bed, an air mattress which will doubtless come in handy when people come to visit. The place needs a clean, overall, but I can get to work on that perhaps tomorrow. It doesn't have ethernet, unfortunately, but as luck would have it the building does have a few unsecured wireless networks which I can tap into since I bought myself a wireless card to go with all the other new stuff I've acquired. I'll have photos of the place up as soon as I find the cord that connects my camera to my PC; it's in one of my moving boxes somewhere.

The move itself was smooth enough, though it was preceded by a torrential thunderstorm and I did get a bit wet moving stuff. Sure enough, it cleared up and presented blue skies almost immediately we got my belongings into the service elevator.

I do have a flatmate, a bloke by the name of Matt who seems agreeable enough. He actually left this morning with his girlfriend for a week in Thailand, so I have the place to myself, more or less, and he will be going back to Chicago for most of the summer after that, so for this summer it's basically my exclusive pad. Awesome. But it's a good sign that he has a girlfriend...it means he's not only not a nutcase, but sufficiently socialised that at least one woman is prepared to sleep with him.

It's a huge relief to have managed to get out of Harmony Hall. The place was just a shithole; it wasn't very nice to begin with, but having to live next door to that fucking nutcase took the biscuit. Now, at least, I have a space I can call my own, a proper apartment as opposed to a dorm room, one with natural light, space, and best of all one not shared with eight other muppets.

I think my luck is changing, all things considered. Especially as at poker that night, I came up with a Royal Flush on one all-in hand. Perhaps a bit of background - the Royal Flush is the highest possible hand in poker, consisting of Ace, King, Queen, Jack and Ten, all of the same suit (in my case Spades). In Texas Hold'em, where you can only possibly have a maximum of seven cards to call your own, the odds of that happening are astronomical - apparently something in the order of 650,000 to 1.

It's not changing that fast, though. I still only finished 3rd. Baby steps, baby steps...

For a few blocks more

I know where I'm going. I'm moving a few blocks north of where I am now, to a two-bedroomed apartment on the third floor of a building just next to Morningside Park. It's slightly closer to campus, and from the floor plans it will even have some natural light, which is a wonder beyond wonders as far as I am concerned. I'll be moving in on Monday. I don't yet know who my roommate is or even if they're there yet, but I guess I'll find out in good time. Frankly, I don't care - I'm just relieved to get out of where I am now and move to a place with a semblance of privacy to it. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my mind.

I and K (and K's parents, actually) went to see the Yankees play again last night. Just as last time, they lost, to the Texas Rangers on this occasion. It was actually a good close game, well worth going to see and we got excellent seats, by which I mean ones that weren't open to the elements as there was a delay or two thanks to showers. I love the atmosphere of Yankee stadium; it's hilarious to listen to the vendors shouting to each other and throwing bags of peanuts at customers.

It's been raining on and off for most of the week, and it was enough, just about, to put a damper on the graduation ceremonies that seem to be going on here at the moment. I myself won't be taking my degree until the autumn, but there're still plenty of proud parents and their offspring clad in blue robes cluttering up the sidewalk. The speaker was John McCain, a somewhat controversial choice as he's a rather conservative Republican who just a few days ago was talking for your friend and mine Jerry Falwell's mob. Not a popular choice amongst the whole of the student community; there were more than a few people handing out, or wearing, badges that said "John McCain does not speak for me" or some such. Not that I paid them much attention; I was too busy with my papers. And fantasising about my new place, too.

Biding one's time

It really is a great feeling to be getting out of here, to be honest, and I'm looking forward to it immensely. Not least because Mr. Whackjob is still here. And I'll be gone before he will.

It seems to boil down to legal matters. His lease (and that of most other people) expires at the end of the month and he will then have to leave anyway. New York housing law does not allow for immediate eviction except in the case of criminal acts, and so were CU to decide to evict him, which they quite easily could, proceedings would take longer than the remaning duration of his stay here anyway. So they've offered other people in the building the opportunity to move to another suite elsewhere in the building if they want. There was some discussion of asking him to leave voluntarily, but they either didn't do that (it's a little iffy legally) or he refused to do so.

An uncharitable way of looking at the situation, of course, is that once again they're doing nothing. It is, as you say, Tori, a shit situation and one which has been, in my view, mishandled by the college administration. Not uncharacteristically - the admin side of things here (in sharp contrast to the academic) has left me deeply unimpressed whenever I've had to deal with them.

So there's unfortunately not a lot I can do now in instances where, for example, I was woken up by him sobbing in the communal kitchen (like at 7:30 this morning). Let's just hope nothing major happens between now and the end of next week.

I can not wait to get out of here.

In other news, I finished a paper and turned it in this morning. One down, one and a half to go. This summer will be a complete change in my living circumstances, and a major one for the better, no doubt.

Out of Harmony

I'm getting the hell out of here. My PhD student housing application was approved, I will be assigned a new, proper apartment on Monday, and I will be able to move into it at the end of next week. Finally. The process was in no small part expedited by the actions of the whackjob next door to me, I think - seeing as I was due to move anyway, I guess they thought that it'd be a good idea to hurry the process up. But it's most welcome nonetheless.

This comes as a huge relief, because the crappy nature of my current accommodation has been a real source of irritation this semester. And while I don't know for certain where I'm moving to yet, I do know that it really couldn't possibly be any worse. I've been a bit of a pack rat recently, picking up articles of furniture that those who are leaving are donating, including a couch, rice cooker and microwave, all of which will now have a new home. I'm rather optimistic that my new place will be several orders of magnitude more comfortable, spacious, tranquil and generally like a home. Not hard given the current competition. Guess it turned out that living in Harmony isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Clobberin' time!

Hulk SMASH!

Well, sort of. I certainly imparted a few home truths to the powers that be here. The lawsuit line certainly got their attention (as well it might, I suppose). I think I actually got them to do something this time...it's still pending and in theory confidential, so for the moment I probably shouldn't talk about it on the web as there are some Columbia people who read this (yes, I find it rather hard to believe as well, but apparently it's true). I'm still going to talk to the University Ombudsman tomorrow to register my dissatisfaction with the way the whole thing was handled.

A good vent can be therapeutic sometimes. Anyway - what the hell. I'll be moving out of this shithole shortly.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw a wonderful headline in the New York Daily News on my way past the newsstand today. In reference to Iranian President Ahmadi-Nijad's letter to Bush it said "Nuke Kook's I-rant". Wonderful. Not quite on a par with the Sun's response to Inverness Caledonian Thistle's 3-1 defeat of Celtic (Super Cally Go Balistic, Celtic Are Atrocious), but getting there, certainly.

Tipping Point

I live in New York. It's a strange and sometimes bewildering experience. One thing I still can't seem to work out it tipping. I and some friends went for lunch at a place across the way from Columbia the other day. We finished eating and left a tip that was double the tax, which is what I believe is generally acceptable. Not to the wait staff, apparently. They chased after us and said that they'd miscalculated the tax and wanted a bigger tip. Not something I think has ever happened to me before, but my more learned friends say that waiters basically don't get paid and have to get by on tips here. I would have thought that was illegal in several ways, but apparently not.

And tipping bar staff is something I feel to be rather nonsensical. After all, as I understand it a tip is for good service. A friendly and attentive waiter who brings you your food promptly and efficiently, well, fair enough - but there's really not all that much to go wrong with pouring a pint. And if, as it seems, it's obligatory if you don't want spit in your drink, it seems rather redundant. Might as well just add it on to the cost of the drink in the first place. Oh well. さすが異文化交流だね。

The whackjob next door is back in full swing again after an absence of a couple of months. CU public safety were called last night, for the third time. Talking to the officers who attended the call, I learn that he has had an episode like this in Butler Library (WTF??!!) in the last month, and moreover, and I quote, that "sometimes he forgets to take his medication".

Let me just pause for a moment or two to allow that statement to sink in.

I'm absolutely fucking furious about this. Housing and the University have done nothing about this guy despite repeated complaints. I am going over there to tear them a new arsehole, or possibly two, on Monday morning. I will point out that next time this happens, for my safety and that of others around me I will be calling not CU Public Safety but the nice gentlemen at the NYPD.

Something else which I find astonishing, as well. It may not have occurred to Columbia that, having been warned repeatedly about this guy by me and others and taken no action, if he does now hurt somebody, they will be liable for a massive lawsuit on the grounds of negligence. I don't know if it will come to that, but I doubt that the University wants to take that gamble.

It's even more ironic, I suppose, because on Wednesday I went to a "focus group" for the housing department and told them that the whole procedure for dealing with complaints of this nature was unclear and bureaucratic and that I thought the whole affair had been mishandled. Now I guess I have abundant proof of that.

I have rarely in all my adult life been this angry. Nobody should be expected to put up with this sort of shit, especially not at the end of term when I have final papers to write.

I'm here to kick ass and chew gum. And I'm all out of gum.

Rain stopped play

I was supposed to go down to Philadelphia this weekend. It would have represented the first time I've actually managed to get outside of New York City (apart from going home at Xmas) in the whole time I've been here. The occasion was an alumni game of the college which one of my friends here (Indian, for reasons that will become apparent) attended as an undergraduate. Not just any alumni game, though - a game of cricket. A rare opportunity to play on the American continent. The idea was to have been to head on down there and turn the arm over, maybe bat a bit.

Not to be, sadly. It rained all weekend. Ironic, I suppose, that this most English of games should meet an appropriately English fate - i.e., a watery grave. I would have liked to have seen a little of Philadelphia, actually - it's not a desperately attractive place by all accounts, but it has some history to it (the Liberty Bell and, uh...), and getting out of the Big Apple almost seems like an end in itself. Still, not to worry, there will be other opportunities - and considering I'd been drinking the night before, the call at 7 a.m. that confirmed cancellation was actually quite welcome.

Today, I purchased for the handsome sum of $10 a print remaindered from an exhibition held recently at Columbia of photographs themed around Hirohito. Not a great fan of the man (personally, if each had their own he should probably have been first against the wall after WWII), but there was a beautiful shot of the sunset on the last day of Showa, January 7th 1989 which particularly caught my eye. It's from the offices of the Mainichi Shinbun, and in the foreground was Edo Castle, the background a construction site. The play of light and shadow, old and new was particularly fascinating, as well as the poignancy of the setting sun considering the date. I will get a picture up as soon as I can figure out how to take a shot without reflecting the flash off the surface...

And now, the end is near

Yeah, the end of term is creeping up. It's about a week and a half to go until the official end, although I have papers and a thesis due after that, so unfortunately rather than slowing down things are going to have to speed up. Which means less time on the blog, sadly, though it's not as if I've been keeping it particularly busy of late.

It's a shame that I'm having to spend so much time in the library, because the weather right now is glorious. It hit 26℃ last week, and I can tell it's going to be a good summer. I might even get a tan, who knows.

Went down to Chelsea with K last Friday to see Thank You for Smoking. I'm not sure if this has been released in the UK yet, but it's a superbly understated black comedy about a tobacco lobbyist. All star cast, with Katie Holmes, Rob Lowe and various others even outside the main star (whose name I can't remember, funnily enough). Laughed my arse off. Had to raise an eyebrow at the ads before the show - one for a particularly loathsome "psychic" (aka scumbag who preys on grieving people) called John Edward, and the other for the US National Guard. A bizarre sense of priorities, I suppose. Still, according to this view, at least you can still talk to people after you've gone to Iraq and blown them up. Though they might not be able to tell you much more than what letter their first name began with.

K's got a new haircut, incidentally. It looks fantastic, and so does she.

Not enough hours in the day

And there really aren't. Being a graduate student, especially at an American university, is bloody hard work. Let me give you an example of my day yesterday.

7:15 a.m. The alarm goes off. I hit snooze. Four times. Am eventually awakened by the noise of the whackjob next door trying his best not to cry, since he's on his last warning about behaving himself. I get up, eat breakfast and decide whether or not to hit the gym (I'm packing a few too many pounds these days - it's all the great pizza around me...).

9:00 a.m. Decide not to. Spend the next three and half hours sitting in Starr library reading through Abe Kobo's Suna no Onna. Get about 90 pages done.

12:00 p.m. Have lunch with one of Hamilton Deli's excellent sandwiches. Eat lunch while reading the wonderfully parochial Columbia Spectator.

1:00 p.m. Go to work in the Law Library. Spend the next three hours cataloguing new books in the library, all of which are Japanese books on legal matters and most of which are dull as ditchwater. Although I did have to decide for one book whether it should go under Homosexuality - Law and Legislation - Japan or Sex Change - Law and Legislation - Japan. So it's not all dull.

4:00 p.m. I have to attend a talk being given by a prospective candidate for a 2-year teaching post at Columbia. I'm one of four graduate students who actually show up, the rest of the ten people there being faculty. It's reasonably interesting, but I'd rather be elsewhere.

6:00 p.m. Now there are certain perks sometimes. I and one of the other grad students are invited out to dinner with the prospective employee and half the faculty. Steak frites and crab cakes at the University's expense. Nice. The guy did his MA at Cornell, which one of our faculty remarks is the suicide hot spot in the Ivy League. I quip that I've felt like throwing myself off a bridge on the way to the library a few times too. Turns out one of the candidate's friends when he was a grad student killed himself there. Whoops. Nice one Tucky.

7:30 p.m. Back to the library and back to Suna no Onna.

9:30 p.m. Hit the gym and try to work out for an hour or so. It's very crowded, more so than I remember it ever being. Perhaps everyone's still trying to work off that Spring Break Excess.

10:30 p.m. Home. Knackered. Check e-mail and manage to get to bed by midnight.

Almost literarily...

The mercury's risen again, and this time it looks like it's there to stay. The trees on Broadway appear to agree with my assessment, and have burst into bloom in most agreeable fashion. Likewise, the pavement cafes are back in force, the girls are wearing a lot less in the way of clothing, and everything's right with the world, or so it feels.

It's been a good week. Term is creeping towards its conclusion in about three weeks' time, so I have a fair amount of work to get completed, but it's still possible to smell the roses. A bunch of us took one of next year's J-history PhD people out on the lash to persuade him to come to Columbia, fairly successfully, I think. I also got an e-mail from Prof. Shirane thanking me with my help in the recruiting process for the J-lit side - which is fair enough, as I think the role I played in persuading me to come to Columbia was instrumental. Although unfortunately I can't claim expenses for the dinner I treated myself to to sweeten the deal.

On Friday night, something a little different, a literary reading at a bar in the East Village by the name of KGB. I'm not really the sort to go to readings, but it was K's idea, and I thought I'd give it a try. The bar itself is decorated entirely in red, with old-school Soviet era propaganda on the walls, some of which K (who minored in Russian) was kind enough to translate for me. Before the event began, we grabbed some fish and chips at an English-run place called A Salt and Battery (ho ho. Yes, I am so classy, taking my girlfriend to a chippy on a date).

There were three readings, by amateur authors looking for a relatively non-hostile audience. And in all honesty, they weren't bad at all - basically some good stuff, though with the kind of flaws one would expect from the amateur - about one third too much description, at times somewhat forced humour, and so on. But definitely with some merit to them.

Except for the last guy. And boy, he was terrible. He read what he described as "some of my poems" in an absurdly affected pseudo sing-song voice, way too close to the mike and generally making a right prat of himself. The stuff was trash - clumsy, unnecessarily crude, one-dimensional, obvious and banal in the extreme. I wouldn't have minded, except he obviously thought he was hot shit, writing in the evening's guest book "remember the name!" and making a big thing about how he was submitting spec scripts to The Office and My Name is Earl. The only laughs he got were ones of embarrassment. Apparently he has a day job in the city's fish market - and I have a suspicion he'll be wiping herring guts off his apron for a long time to come.

The renowned Mr. Arudou

Well, I met Debito today. I got into the room late (they switched it at the last minute and didn't tell me) and stayed to listen to his presentation for a bit over an hour, then went to lunch with him and some of the law students who had attended the lecture. Knowing most of his work pretty well, the majority of stuff covered was quite familiar, but it was still interesting to hear him speak about it in person. Seemed like a nice guy - reasonably down to earth, genuine and very friendly, though obviously with a keen talent for self-promotion. I spoke to him for a while and took a photo - it's below, just for the grandchildren. Not that most of the rest of the world knows who he is, anyway.

Lunch afterwards was good - in Faculty House, which has a wonderful prospect view over most of Harlem. Got to talk in rather more relaxed surroundings and ask him a few questions. The guy's not exactly a hero of mine, but I have a lot of respect for him and it kinda made my day to meet him in person. I asked him if he didn't think that onsen and restaurants with discriminatory signs were small beer and that the real target should be discrimination in places where it can really ruin people's lives, like Japanese academia, and he answered that the stuff he did was much more clear-cut and easier to do, so that's what he worked with.

There was a Japanese law student there too, Toshi, who I think at times thought that he was kind of being attacked by proxy - and Debito did take exception to his talking about "we Japanese" when of course Debito himself is one of them. But I think he was able to smooth it over by stressing a couple of times that all nations, none more so than the US, have their own problems with discrimination.

Good times. Columbia provides one with a lot of opportunities.

Self and Debito! 

Credit or Debit(o)?

I learned today while at work that David Aldwinckle, also known as Debito Arudo, is coming to Columbia Law School on Monday to talk on his experiences in Japan. Most of you who are/were JETs will know who this guy is, but if you don't, he has a (admittedly badly organised, but still interesting) website. He's fairly famous/notorious amongst the JET and expat foreign community in Japan for his activism against racial discrimination in Japan, and, being bored at work fairly frequently in my CIR days, I've perused virtually all of his site and am very familiar with his stuff.

So I'll make sure to go along and see what he has to say. By all accounts he's a pretty good speaker, so this should be interesting.

I swear, I passed a beggar today on the street (or panhandler, to use the native terminology) who was wearing an iPod. Now if that isn't chutzpah, I don't know what is.

Embracing...?

I've been reading John Dower's Embracing Defeat - Japan in the Aftermath of World War II as required reading for my modern Japanese literature seminar. We're dealing with the literature that arose after the war as a response to Japan's surrender, occupation and the travails thus entailed. If you haven't read it, and you're interested, I would highly recommend it - it's an absolutely fascinating book, wonderfully well written, accessible and absorbing even to the non-Japan specialist, and belongs on the shelf of every would-be academic on Japan.

The relevance of which is probably debatable, but seeing as this is my blog I thought I would use if for a little bit of self-indulgent rambling. One of the most interesting parts of the book concerns sexual mores and their dynamics in the immediate aftermath of the war. No doubt influenced by the behaviour of their own troops abroad in WWII, the Japanese authorities set up what were in effect brothels to cater for the GI's needs (later shut down by SCAP), assuming that the incoming army would have a gargantuan sexual appetite. And one of the most noticeable figures in a Japan still plagued by shortages of even basic staples was the pan-pan, a prostitute who dressed in Western-style and often catered exclusively to GIs. The effect of this on the Japanese male psyche can well be imagined, especially former Japanese soldiers - hitherto "decent" women throwing themselves at the strapping, healthy, wealthy GIs initally out of need to sustain themselves, but increasingly in later years, as Dower notes, simply out of curiosity or wanting to make money.

My point in bringing all of this up is that it seems very much on reflection that the above history still exerts a considerable influence on gaijin-Japanese male-female relations even today. I can't claim to be an expert on this - I've never even so much as kissed a J-girl - but we can, I think, see echoes of it in Miyagi Prefectural Assemblyman Kanno's comments before the 2002 World Cup that measures would need to be taken to deal with unwanted pregnancies resulting from rapes committed by foreign "hooligans". Do remnants of the consciousness of the Occupation in some part account for the seeming popularity of Western men in Japan, or is it simply the grass being greener? Does it still hold true for general attitudes towards gaijin, especially white males? What do they represent to your average J-girl? Is this the root of the undercurrent of competitiveness that I tended to feel when socialising with younger J-guys?

Of course, it works both ways as well, and I think the image of the seductive, pliable Asian woman stems at least as much from the US's time in Japan as it does from Vietnam's experience (me love you long time, and all that). Still. All in all, there's no real point to this; I just wanted to put down some thoughts I'd been having this evening, since I know for some of you this is at least semi-relevant.

And in other news, I just realised that K and I have been dating for 4 months now. That's my second-longest relationship ever. Blimey.

Playing it down

It's been a curiously low key Spring break, really. If I were an American undergraduate, the chances are I would have spent most of it doing tequila shots off a half-naked college girl in Cancun or somewhere similar. So runs the tradition. So perhaps on reflection it's a good thing I'm not an American undergrad. Though I guess it depends on your attitude to doing shots off half-naked women (personally I have a lot of time for it). And also on how hot the half-naked woman is. And which half is naked. But I digress.

Maybe it's been because I've been working on my thesis all week - got a fair bit of productive research done - and so have most of the other people I hang around with. I went over to Arunabh's place on Tuesday to watch cricket, but apart from that I've been working, exercising and studying, with not much else to shout about. K's out of town - gone back to California - though she comes back tomorrow evening. I'll admit I missed her, sensitive new man that I am (though still rugged and chiselled as ever, be it noted. Especially since I took advantage of her absence to not shave). Be good to have her back.

Friday was, of course, St Paddy's day, one celebrated raucously throughout the city, no doubt, but not by me or any of my friends. It had been my plan to drink some green beer, affect my Irish accent and see if I could fool anybody into thinking I was actually Irish, as I have quite a convincing brogue when I put my mind to it. That didn't happen. Didn't even have a pint of the black stuff, although considering I think it tastes like pond water that's not something I was particularly cut up over.

Queens, Curry and Cafe Culture

It's warm outside, it's Spring Break and have no pressing work to do for a few days. Time to relax. Over poker on Friday night (I came 2nd this time), the plan was tabled to go for curry in Queens. Queens is the borough of New York which contains Little India, and so as a Brit it was hard to resist the opportunity. Self, K, my good friend Arunabh - we are mutual outlets for each other's obsession with cricket - Lizza, Reto and his Mrs. were all in attendance. Food was good, authentic enough and fairly varied, with even a goat curry on offer. Tasted a bit overcooked to me.

It was a lazy, hazy Saturday afternoon, and we stopped for coffee in midtown Manhattan before walking back up to the Columbia area through Central Park. In complete contrast to the previous couple of weeks, the world, his wife, her mum and his dog were there. The first really warm day for months, and everyone comes out of the woodwork.

Up in Morningside Heights, too, all the cafes have put their pavement chairs and tables back out again. What with it being spring break, the place is quiet, sunny and relaxed, just enough to feel like it was when I first arrived here. I'm going to have to do some work on my MA thesis this break, unfortunately - but you gotta grab the chance to relax when it presents itself, no?

Life is good

It's Spring Break. I'm not going anywhere for it - I don't have the money, and in any case I need to get to work on my Master's thesis - but it's good to have a little time off, even just ten days or so without classes. The weather's on the up, spring seems to have sprung and things with K and I are going great too. It also transpires I may be able to get $3,000 to help out with my expenses for this summer as I get my thesis done and maybe prepare another paper for publication.

So all in all, things are pretty sweet.

Village Idiots

Well, it wasn't quite as fun as I thought it might be. Down in the East Village once again, we had dinner at a Mexican place (Burritos the size of one's arm), and went to a local bar that K had heard good things about. Now, the East Village is NYU territory, and so the local bars are very strict on ID-ing people. I carry around my UK driving licence, so I got that out, and then K went to get her wallet out...

...only to find that it wasn't there. No ID, no drinking, and of course the absence of the wallet was an issue in itself. We went back to the burrito place, then all the way back up to Morningside Heights, thinking perhaps that the wallet had been stolen or dropped somewhere, but to no avail. Nowhere to be found. Luckily there wasn't anything irreplaceable in it - $28, a credit card and a driving licence. Still, it was a bit of a pain in the arse and put the kibosh on what would have otherwise been a pretty good night out.

I popped in to see K this morning just before going for breakfast with Juliet, my friend and her roommate, and apparently the card hasn't been used, so it seems more likely that she just dropped it or left it somewhere. Same end result, of course, but not quite as disturbing as if it had been pickpocketed. If it was, though, whoever stole it was a real latterday Artful Dodger - the subway wasn't at all crowded, nor was the place where we ate.

Village Idiot

In celebration mainly of Tim's birthday (all of 25) and Jonathan's engagement, and also partly of my acceptance to the PhD program, a whole bunch of us went down to the East Village, which contains most of the best Japanese-style restaurants in the city. There are sushi joints in pretty much every alley in New York (parenthetically, I suspect because the profit margins are pretty high on it compared to Chinese or Thai), but for your tsukune, your buta-kimchi, your tako-butsu and the like, in short your standard izakaya fare, you gotta hit the Village. We ate, drank and were merry. Photos below.

I'm going down there again tonight with K to check out some of the alleged dive bars in the area. Should be fun.

Chad and Reto chow down. It could almost be Japan. 

The newly affianced Mr. Twombly shows us he has a magnificent pair of jugs. 

Tim, looking suave as ever 

Self and the Yangster... 

Chad, a little crazed by the lack of beer. 

The North and Nostalgia; or, In Remembrance of Things Past

Nothing much has happened this week, but even so I thought I'd put down some thoughts. What? Bugger off, this is my blog, dammit.

We've been doing Basho's Oku no Hosomichi (奥 の細道, The Narrow Road to the North) in the Keene seminar for the last six weeks or so. Most of us who have spent any time in Tohoku will have come across one or two of the sites mentioned in it, even if we didn't actually know it at the time. So it brings about a little wave of nostalgia every so often to read of the places that Basho visited and which 300 years on, I would do too. I have many happy memories of Tohoku.

So it makes me smile when I read how the haiku poet Basho claims he got lost and wound up in Ishinomaki, because I've been drinking out there many times with many good friends (it's still just as much of a shit-hole as it was when he was there).

It makes me laugh when Basho says he saw Kinkazan from Ishinomaki - because it's about two hours away, and there's no way you could ever have seen it. He got it wrong. But I've been there (during the lifetime of this blog, in fact).

And when I read his haiku about the cool waters of the Mogamigawa in Yamagata, I recall the time I went there and stood on a bridge over the Mogamigawa with my friend Ando, talking about my plans for the future. It was the day after I'd taken the GRE, and I had a raging hangover. We'd gone there to make soba in a little mountain village, and it was a brilliantly sunny late autumn day. We stood there for a while looking at the mountains, talking about our lives and where we thought they'd lead us.

The Hojoki's opening line tells us that ゆく川の流れは絶えずして、しかももとの水にあらず - "The flow of the river is unceasing, and its waters are never the same." Eighteen months on, and the river has taken me to New York.

I didn't know at the time that that September afternoon would prove to be such a powerful memory. I guess you never do.

Yo-yos

It's viciously cold right now in NYC. Weather.com has it as being -9℃, -19 with the windchill, and I can believe it. It's like Dave Fusco said - "We have a program for dealing with the homeless in New York. We call it "winter"."

I'm probably going to hell for even repeating that comment. Still, I think that's the coldest temperature I've ever been out in, even in Hokkaido and the like.

Better late...

I'm aware that I said I'd update on Thursday, and that it's now Saturday morning, but life in NYC has a habit of overtaking one at times.

So the structuralism presentation on Wednesday I had to do for class went well enough - Derrida, signs, signifiers and signified and all that guff. I managed to work in the phrase "pretentious French nonsense", though, so it's all good. But funnily enough I really enjoyed it - I think I might be cut out for this teaching business.

Only problem was, Wednesday night we had another episode from the whackjob next door who just blew his top completely - pulling his new favourite trick of arguing loudly on the phone late at night. He wouldn't keep it down despite being repeatedly asked and eventually ran out of his room through the corridors of the floor and down the stairs then out into the street, ranting all the time. Security was called, again, and said that there was nothing they could do so long as UAH was aware of the situation.

Obviously, I went down to UAH on Thursday morning, unfortunately not for the first time. The guy I spoke to, Ross, is well aware of the situation but doesn't have the power to kick him out - it has to be referred to the GSAS, who have already spoken to him, and I can't get any guarantee that they'll take any effective action. I'm deeply unimpressed with this - the guy is mentally ill, and while I didn't think before he was dangerous, now I'm not so sure. I don't want to find out what he's going to do for an encore.

Anyway, irritation with my room and general surroundings has a cure. As of Thursday, I have been accepted into the PhD program at Columbia and will be stepping up from MA to PhD this autumn. Which means a better apartment, maybe even one to myself, as all PhD candidates are guaranteed housing. It also means I get fully funded, so money won't be quite so pressing as they were.

I've actually known that I was going to be accepted for quite some time, but for obvious reasons couldn't go and plaster it all over the net. It's a payoff for working my arse off last semester, I suppose, and it means that in a few years I'll be Dr. Robert Tuck, MA (Oxon), MA, PhD (Columbia). All those letters after my name - makes me quite giddy.

That night there was a reception in honour of Donald Keene, whose Anthology of Japanese Literature reached its 50th anniversary. It was held in the library, and with copious amounts of free champagne plus licence from Prof. Shirane to, and I quote, "get smashed", I got a little merry. The Don is still, despite being 83, at the top of his game...he upstaged everyone at the end with a deft and witty little speech about how he's still very much alive and kicking. An honour to study with him.

And yesterday I went with K to the International Photography Centre downtown after work. To my surprise, Viggo Mortensen (of Aragorn of LOTR fame) was signing books there, though I wasn't one of the hundred or so people outside queueing - we just went straight on in. It's not quite on the scale of the Met or the MOMA, but worth a visit anyway.

There's always something going on...

Thaw of the Roses

The downside, of course, to a record amount of snow falling in NYC is that it has to melt. And given that the drainage is not that hot in my part of Morningside Heights, this means that we tend to get large pools of slush at the corner of each block, some of which look solid, but aren't. Cold and wet feet, anyone? I've been lucky so far, but it can't last. Time to invest in some wellies, methinks.

I suppose the rant the other day, on reflection, was to some extent a result of culture shock. I'm not the only one to be fed up at the moment (though I'm doing OK right now, for reasons I'll touch on later) - my friend Juliet ain't happy either, and we had a good bitch about it in West End last night over a couple of beers. It's funny, really, because I should have recognised it from all the CLAIR stuff I've read as a JET - the cycle of everything being new and great when you arrive, then the grey of winter and the realisation that there's a long hard slog ahead of you sets in. I think this is what she and I are going through now - though of course there are always outside factors.

That said, I'm actually pretty happy right now all things considered, mainly because it's Valentine's Day and for the first time ever, I am actually going to be seeing my enamorata on the day itself. The only previous time was when I was going out with Sarah, and then I was in Japan and she in England. I was going to take K out for dinner, but apparently a bunch of her friends are going out and she feels she has to join them in the name of female solidarity and not being the crap one who does have a date. I'll be seeing her later on tonight, which is actually fine by me, because I have a lot of work to do and would rather meet up post 11 p.m. anyway.

Sorry, Tori, I won't be posting any photos of her just yet... but watch this space and you never know. And watch this space, cos I'll have some news on Thursday regarding the next four years...

The view from my window when I woke up this morning.  

White Out

It's snowing in New York again, and this time it means it. Apparently the snowstorm which began last night and is still more or less going is very nearly the heaviest ever to hit the city - close to three feet in under 24 hours. I realise that's fairly minor by Canadian or even (parts of) Tohoku standards, but hey, like I say, there's always something going on here.

I have to admit it's very pretty. I like snow, always have since my days growing up in Durham, and the CU campus looks great in it too. I passed people with sleds and even a couple on skis on the way over to the library this afternoon, and needless to say the students were making the most of it, sledging down the steps of Low Library and having snowball fights, playing snow football and indulging in a bit of snow wrestling. Photos below.

All of which, while a lot of fun for me personally, must have been a right pain for a lot of the attendees at the 15th Annual Graduate Conference on East Asia at Columbia, some of whom had come from as far away as Russia, the UK, Hawai'i and Germany. Not least because the snow shut down JFK for much of the morning.

The conference itself, however, went off smoothly enough; the sessions were interesting enough to be worth attending, and the paper I gave seemed to go down well - I didn't get shredded for it, anyway, and that's the most important thing. The evening saw festivities in Starr Library, culminating in dancing on the tables - and damaging a couple of the lights in the process. The place still smells of beer and Chinese food from last night, actually, and I have a feeling they'll need industrial quantities of Febreze there to get the smell out of the carpet...

And The Thinker, just outside Philosophy Hall. 

Alma Mater looking spiffy in her new coat. 

Rant

I'm having a bad day.

I'm fed up with the fucking headcase next door. He's got a new hobby - having vociferous arguments on the phone with random people, AT&T and UPS last I heard. And I can hear every bloody word.

I'm fed up with the fucking University for taking so long to deal with him and being so ineffective after numerous complaints, and not just from me.

I'm fed up with the fucking muppets who live on my floor, some of whom can't sit the right way on a toilet seat, and some of whom think it's acceptable to leave your leftovers lying around in the kitchen up to and beyond the point where they grow mould. Fucking disgusting.

I'm fed up with the fucking apartment block as a whole, it's dingy, full of roaches, too small and generally nasty. Whatever happens this summer, I'm getting a new pad. Fuck this.

I'm fed up with the fucking seminar that overran by 45 minutes this afternoon when I have so many other things to do.

I'm fed up with the fucking fact that I have no money and no life right now.

But then...

there's always K. Who's great. And when I got home today, there was a care package of two packets of sturdy British blu-tak in my mailbox. You have no idea how much that brightened up my day. Now my posters will stop falling on me in the middle of the night, and I can decorate my room properly.

Funny how little things can put a smile on your face. Didn't last long though - there's a grad conference this weekend, and I'm supposed to be giving a paper. My feelings towards that are about two-thirds of the way between exhilaration and terror.

All-American Guy

Well, sort of.

K and I went to watch a Columbia Lions basketball game on Friday night, vs. Harvard. It was, as you might expect, an interesting experience - I know next to nothing about basketball, but the game itself was reasonably interesting. Naturally, Columbia lost - they're fairly inept at most sports, I think - and the cheerleaders weren't even very pretty (though remarkably flexible, I'll give them that). Harvard are usually regarded as being one of the most hopeless teams amongst even the lowered standards of Ivy League sports, so I suppose that gives you some idea of how bad the CU team actually is. Still, entertaining enough...Harvard's point guard was particularly impressive, I thought, but I'll stop trying to sound like I actually know what I'm talking about. Forgot my camera again, though.

Sunday, I would have watched the Superbowl, that most American of sporting events, but unfortunately I couldn't find anyone to watch it with. K was out in Brooklyn and none of my comrades in the Battle of Starr Library could drag themselves away from their books. I don't have a TV, so I ended up missing it. Still, there's always next year, and I suppose I saved on beer and greasy food, though I ended up eating from the highly unimpressive Chinese takeaway from round the corner on 109th and Amsterdam. I don't recommend them.

And one of our aforementioned comrades, formerly known as the Lawyer Jonathan Twombly, is getting married. I'm sure all of us in EALAC join in wishing him all the best, and hope that this finally shuts him up from moaning about how he can never meet any nice girls in New York. Nice one Mr. Twombly.

Definitions

It looks like it's sort of official with K and me...though quite what official in this context means is anyone's guess. I'd stop short of calling her my girlfriend just yet...though I can't really go around introducing her as "hello, this is the-girl-I'm-dating". Seems a little gauche, I think.

The venue for Saturday night was a bar called Kanvas down in Chelsea, a rather trendy part of New York, or so I am led to believe. I have no real idea, unfortunately, as I rarely make it outside of Morningside Heights when I do go drinking. It was nice enough, though as one might expect on a Saturday evening very crowded. I met some of Juliet's friends, most of whom were over from England, including a guy who flew Lynx helicopters for the British Army. Being as how he's currently serving in Northern Ireland, he was not particularly impressed by the New Yorkers' predilection for the drink known sensitively enough as the Irish Carbomb.

It was an OK night, I suppose - I didn't really know that many people, and I've found recently that I have very little to talk about with Business School people, even fellow Brits. I wonder how much of that is just me and how much of that is the MBA crowd. Have I, I wonder, become desocialised, and only able to talk to people who have lived in Japan?

The weather here is completely schizophrenic right now; it was gorgeous at lunchtime, like 18 degrees, and now it's freezing again.

Theory and practice

So, had lunch at Cafe Swish with K on Thursday. It was very pleasant...a relaxed chat and a meal, a short walk in Riverside Park afterwards to aid digestion, and so forth. Short it was, because it's bloody cold right now; the wind from off the Hudson is not one you want to stand around in for very long. Party tomorrow night downtown, to which we're both going, as I think I've mentioned.

Been reading Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality (insert gag as appropriate) as part of the theory course and have been pleasantly surprised; it's almost approaching readable, and certainly provides some interesting and thought-provoking material.

One stray thought...there are a lot of people talking to themselves on the streets of New York. Nothing new there, perhaps, but what with the iPods and hands-free mobile sets, plus all the wannabe rappers busting out their lyrics as they walk or work their day job at the 7-11, it's not at all easy to work out who's up with the latest fashions and who's simply deranged.

Well Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, better known as the Met, rocks. Not only do I get in free, it's also a wonderfully interesting museum with a mind-boggling collection just about everything. Seriously, you could spend several days going around the Met and never see it all. The highlight for me was the Temple of Dundur, which, despite sounding like something from Lord of the Rings, is a completely authentic Egyptian temple (literally - they shipped it across stone by stone from the Aswan valley, and it still has the graffiti of Napoleon's soldiers on it), in a stunning setting inside the Met. I forgot to take my camera though, dimwit that I am.

So I went there with my date, who for the time being shall remain nameless. It was a beautiful day, feeling much more like spring than winter, so we walked across the park, spent the afternoon strolling around the Met and discussing the various merits of the stuff on display, went for a coffee afterwards, had a cheeky snog, and went our separate ways. I'm having lunch with her on Thurs and she and I are both attending a party thrown by a mutual friend on Saturday, so...yeah. Things are looking alright, right now.

On Sunday, I popped downtown to meet Laura Mann, who was in town visiting. Another member of the Shiogama clan, as was, who loved Japan so much she went back there even after JET. I'm not sure quite if I should call her an old friend - she'll probably object to the "old" part - but nonetheless it was great to see her and act as tour guide; we took a walk up Broadway to Central Park, before I left her and her friends to do their own thing, as I had to head back to the library unfortunately.

Classes are keeping me busy, but not quite as insanely so as last semester. A bit more reasonable, this time round, thank God.

Beyond parody?

While I think of it, I'd like to draw your attention to something that I find it useful to dip into now and again when confronted by particularly egregious lit theory gibberish. It's the story of Alan Sokal, who managed to get a completely fraudulent paper published in the journal Social Text. Sokal thought that he could get a piece of complete nonsense published if it sounded good and if it flattered the editor's ideological preconceptions. In the piece, he argued among other things that the uncertainty in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (a construct in quantum physics) is a result of the unease felt by former colonial powers after they lost their colonies, and that gravity is essentially a racist Western invention. None of this transparent nonsense stopped it from being published, much to everyone's amusement. As Sokal himself later remarked:

"In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' [note the scare quotes] ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.'' Not our theoriesof physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough: anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)"

Well, if you're interested (which most of you won't be) you can read more here.

Not so much fun

A quick post-library pint last night at West End, the bar across the street from Columbia, turned into a bit of an unintentional session. I didn't know that West End had a dance floor from 11 p.m. or so onwards, but naturally I went and shook my booty for a bit, which was quite fun. I left around 1 a.m., though I hear that various others were still going at 5 a.m., which takes some stamina. I had been intending to go to the gym this morning, but other matters demanded my attention.

We had another episode with the guy in the room next to me this morning at about 6:45 a.m., unfortunately, waking me and several other people on the floor. Not being able to get hold of the building superintendent, I went off to talk to the University Housing authority up on 119th. They seemed to be aware of the situation but not that there'd been another occurrence after the guy in question had been told to knock it off on Sunday. After a short talk, during which I pointed out that he was either unwilling, or more worryingly unable to control himself, they said they'd put the wheels in motion to get the guy kicked out.

I feel sorry for the man in question, I really do - as I mentioned, he's not a happy camper, but the situation can't be allowed to drift. He may be having a rough time of it, but that doesn't give him carte blanche to act like an asshole himself. After this morning, I have to question his stability, and while I personally just find the noise annoying and slightly unsettling, the girls on the floor are understandably really quite scared by him and almost afraid to leave their rooms. It's had the effect of creating an atmosphere of general unease and tension on the floor as a whole, which is hardly conducive to a relaxed living environment. Better for everyone that he leaves and gets some psychiatric help.

Didn't give me any pleasure, but needed to be done. Nobody else seemed willing to do it, so...

In other news, it's unseasonably warm in NYC right now, 16℃ today, which is definitely not the January weather I was told to expect. I hope it stays nice for my walk across Central Park to the Met tomorrow...I'll keep you posted.

May you live in interesting times...

...or so runs an alleged Chinese curse. If curse it is, then I am indeed maladicted. It has been an interesting week or so, in the various possibilities of the word...

Anyway, Friday night, went out for a few drinks at a rather unneccessarily expensive bar down on 78th, a lounge called Evelyn or something. Had a couple of G&T's and a shot of tequila, the latter of which, let the record show, I did note beforehand as a bad idea...not half as bad for me as for my compadre Tim Yang, who wound up having to be put to bed after little more of the same. A rare medical condition called tequilaphobia, they say.

Sunday...well, they - or rather, I - do say that there's always something going on in New York, and this time there was rather too much of something. The guy who lives next to me in my dorm had what seems to have been a mental health episode. He was gibbering and crying loudly in his room and slamming his door. Unfortunately it wasn't the first time this has happened, and not entirely sure what to do, I ended up calling campus security. We managed to get him to calm down, then sat him down for a while and impressed upon him that this sort of behaviour ain't acceptable. Poor fella - he's not a happy guy, and while it's not for me to talk about his personal problems in my blog, let's just say I and the building superintendent heard all about them in detail. Fingers crossed not just for him, but for the general peace of the block. I wasn't the only one weirded out, it was most of my floor. Seems to have been quiet since then.

So on a different note, term started today, and I had a seminar this afternoon with the semi-legendary Donald Keene, author of myriad books on all aspects of Japanese lit. This was more or less why I came to Columbia (aside from the fact it was the only place that'd have me), and it's a real honour to be able to study with him. He's in remarkably good shape for 83, still mentally very alert, with a fine sense of humour and obviously an in-depth command of his stuff - he was able to talk about Basho from memory with no notes for nearly 90 minutes. I look forward to this seminar, mainly because it doesn't have a term paper or exam attached...

Finishing off the last dregs of the reading list Prof. Suzuki gave me for the winter, I've been wading through Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. I find most lit. theory stuff to be very heavy going and sometimes incomprehensible. I'm not alone - there is a general tendency in British academia to be very suspicious of theory, perhaps not coincidentally because much of it is produced by the French. Still, I can't help but feel that there's an element of intellectual masturbation about stuff like the following:

"Is Nietzsche's desire (as Derrida sees it) to place the castrating idea within history akin to Freud's rewriting of the primal "scene" into the child's primal "fantasy"? Is the Nietzschean text, in suggesting that in order to have (possess) the truth (woman) the philosopher must be the truth (woman), undoing Freud's incipient phallocentrism, which provides quite a different alternative: if the son (man) disavows sexual difference, he seeks to be the phallus for the mother (woman) and becomes "the lost object"..."

I know it's decontextualised, but I defy you to tell me what the hell that's about.

Oh, and I have a date on Saturday...

Well, so...

..yeah. It's been a busy week or so since I got back, been dividing my time between studying and working in the library. For the first couple of days I wound up cleaning the shelves and making sure the books were lined up correctly...partly because of a Japanese tradition of New Year cleaning, and partly, I suspect, because Yukino the librarian doesn't know what to do with me now that I'm there on increased hours. And in case la inmigra is reading this, I'm still legal...just about.

The rest of the time I have devoted to getting that damn Ogai paper finished, and thankfully it seems to be near completion, which means that I might even have that rarest of things, a free weekend. Term starts on Tuesday, and I will be taking the usual round of classes - things totally useless in the real world, like Japanese poetry. The seminar is on Basho and is taught by Donald Keene, a hugely respected figure in the world of J-studies, so I suppose I'm very lucky to get to study with him.

I've been meeting a few people here and there as well; Rich Shelley, of Shiroishi fame, popped in on his way to a friend's wedding, and we met up for a beer (literally - it was late when he got in touch). Bizarrely enough I also ran into Steve O' Connor, a guy I knew at Wadham who has spent the last five years here at Columbia. We used to play on the same football team in college, and I never knew. He sort of remembered me, my surname at least.

So, here we go. Reasonably optimistic about the next six months. I'll have a Master's soon enough (a proper one, as opposed to the fake Oxford one), and by March will even know where I'm headed next. I'm going places.

Back in the U.S.S.A....

...I don't know how lucky I am. Back I am, after ten days or so in the UK. Much as I expected, it was damp and overcast most of the time, although not actually all that cold - it's about five degrees warmer than New York, although it's blue skies and dry right here now.

It was good to be home, although increasingly I find that short stays are enough to remind me of both the good things about Britain, and also why I left in the first place. I've spent about two and a half months out of the last three years there, so perhaps it's not surprising I'm a little out of touch. There's good stuff - the telly, Cambridge in the morning mists, London, all my friends - and bad stuff, like the fact that everything is absurdly overpriced, the trains don't work, and the weather is horrible. Much like any country, I suppose...one has to take the rough with the smooth.

I spent most of the time at home, having Christmas Eve at Mum's place, Christmas Day at my Dad's place and going up to Birmingham (or the general area - Kidderminster, actually, for those of you that know) on Boxing Day to see my aunt and uncle, as well as my grandma - thought I'd better pay my respects, since I didn't go to the funeral. Nothing particularly exciting over the duration - unlike the last couple of Christmases, I'm not on a salary to splurge, so I spent most of my time sitting at home and eating or watching TV. Precisely what was needed.

But I'm back now, and more of the same beckons - I have a Master's thesis to do this semester, as well as a whole lot of worrying to do about whether I'm going to be able to stay at Columbia. I'll be upping my hours at the Law Library before term starts to earn some extra cash, and trying to get a couple of annoying uncompleted assigments from last term finished before this one starts. Not taking quite as heavy a courseload as before, so if all goes well I won't be quite so occupied 24-7 with J-stuff. And the obligatory New Year's resolution? Along with (apparently), half of New York, it's to lose some weight...