Those loyal readers who have been with me from the beginning (all of five months ago today, can you believe it?) would know that I dubbed my 10-week playwrighting class “Playschool”. With the class well and truly behind me now, a few former classmates and I have formed “Playgroup”, which is a less frequent but regular meeting to share and discuss the material we’re working on. We had our first meeting late yesterday at Dean & Deluca, a sit-down outpost of the grocery-cum-coffee bar/institution in SoHo.

Having been rather preoccupied with finding shelter for myself, I had nothing to contribute other than a great idea for a play (based on an article I read recently about a man who lost all his savings on one of those internet get-rich-quick schemes). Not so my creative colleagues, who are each working busily on a play. We decided to meet monthly and, more importantly, to aim for a staged reading of our works-in-progress in a few months’ time at a small theatre in the Financial District (a location for a theatre as likely as a good Italian restaurant in Chinatown).

I’ve found that – in general - the Americans I’ve met like to keep their private lives very private; but if you’ve got something in common, they will be extremely generous and collaborative wtihin the parameters of that “something”.

Australians, I realised sharply this week, are accustomed to long, seemingly unending periods of warm or warmer weather, interspersed with a few weeks here and there of cool and sometimes downright chilly weather which correspond only roughly to the calendar. Over here, the seasons are delineated much more sharply.

This week I’ve experienced the beginning of autumn. Nobody is running around with a placard announcing it; I can just feel it – in the abrupt drop in humidity and corresponding fall in temperature of about five degrees, in the suddenly shortened evenings, and the reapparance of my trusty black cotton cardigan. I had to retrieve it from the bottom of one of the myriad plastic bags my possessions have been stashed in for the past six weeks.

My cardigan is mostly carried rather than worn, “at this time”; I was quite shocked to see a few women bringing out the knee-high black boots and shaggy sweaters at the hint of a cool change. Most of us are thrilled at the cooler weather, although disappointed that the summer, which arrived in a horrific heatwave, seems to have ended suddenly. This country certainly is a place of extremes – I’ll no doubt be whingeing about snow and sleet in a few months’ time.

Dear reader

Thank you for returning to see if I’ve written anything new. I am totally pooped – it’s after midnight here in NYC and I’m at the end of a very long few days in which I hastily found a place to live in Brooklyn, then had to madly scramble to gather the relevant paperwork to convince the real estate agent (a lovely man who wears a beret and has the melodious name of Bob Obembe) that I am worthy of his and the landlord’s financial trust.

I move in this weekend to my one-bedroom apartment, just a block away from Prospect Park (the Brooklyn big sister to Central Park), the Botanical Gardens and the Brooklyn Museum. Now that I’ve got a place to sleep, I just need something to sleep on …

My friend Jen took this photo of me in a Brooklyn cafe last weekend, days before I found out I didn’t have a place to live after the end of August. I’m still smiling, but I’m experiencing tedium of the most profound kind – having to prove my “value” to a complete stranger in the form of a real-estate agent.

Without a full-time job, a US tax return, savings in a bank account here, or any kind of credit history, I am considered something of a dubious bet as a prospective tenant. One is only what one can document.

Friends here have kindly agreed to be guarantors for me, as I apply for a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn not far from the place I thought was a sure thing. Cross those digits please.

At the moment I’m working three days a week which means on Mondays and Fridays I don’t have to commute like most people do. Today (Friday), however, I ventured on to the subway system to inspect a furnished apartment in midtown on the east side that I might have to rent for September. My “too good to be true” prospect in Brooklyn has suddenly become just that.

Coming back downtown to my SoHo temporary home took a long time. The east side transport is notoriously limited, which means every train is packed to the rafters with commuters, visitors with their luggage, and those entrepreneurial salesmen I’ve described elsewhere.

Emerging from the Spring St subway exit in SoHo, I was shocked by how familiar the gridlock of cars, trucks, tourists, taxis and tooting horns felt. It felt like white noise made visible – sounds and people filling every possible visible and aural space. It was exactly the same as Sydney on a Friday after work – everyone trying to get somewhere else in a hurry, and going nowhere fast.

Oh dear. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your apartment, for my “sure thing” in Brooklyn has vanished into thin air.

Having lost several weeks’ worth of searching due to the promise of a lovely furnished studio in Brooklyn which would have been perfect (see previous post), I am now scrambling to accommodate myself for September and beyond.

There is still a good chance the Brooklyn pad will work out, I am just not able to confirm a move-in date. (The current tenant – from whom I would sub-let the apartment – is hoping against hope she doesn’t have to relocate to the West Coast for health reasons, and is waiting for a final test result that will decide the matter.)

So do I take an expensive short-term lease for one month in the hope of moving into the Brooklyn place in October, or do I try to find a more permanent home in the space of a few days?

Being new to the country, working only part-time and having assets outside the US makes me a dodgy prospect for real estate agents when compared to someone sporting their most recent pay slips and tax returns. But I’m confident I’ll find somewhere suitable. I might just have to move twice rather than once, unfortunately.

One of the advantages of living in New York is that my Australian-made metaphorical glasses have fast lost their rose-coloured tint.

I am both encouraged and disappointed at discovering that the same frustrations and constraints occupy the minds and hearts of people within and without the New York publishing scene – well, those I’ve met so far anyway.

A case in point: a competition run by GalleyCat – a well-regarded industry blog – called “The Hotties of Publishing”. Being able to vote for male as well as female contenders for the title is supposed to signify its gender-neutral politics. What a joke.

Have a look at the competition as well as the outrage generated by another blogger, Claire Light, who rightly took issue with the issues behind the competition.

What’s next? A Books Illustrated swimsuit issue?

Better late than never, this is a photo of me with Valentina, a friend of my novelist friend Stefano, who was visiting New York from Italy in late April (I think). The fact I’m wearing my leather jacket is a give-away as it hasn’t left my cupboard since that night. 

While my jacket is from Firenze, Valentina is from Colle val d’Elsa, just outside Siena.

I was late to meet Valentina at a restaurant in the East 80s, and when I arrived the place was heaving with people. I had no clue what she looked like because I’d never met her before. I explained my situation to the maitre d’, who to my surprise described Valentina so precisely that I was able to recognise her – when I eventually found her outside the restaurant – immediately.

Who says a big city is impersonal?

Apple Girl was most surprised by an unusual spat this afternoon as she made her way down Prince Street after getting off the train.

Wandering along in my usual post-work daze, I was initially confused by the sight of a huge dog, similar in colouring to a labrador but much bigger and almost wolflike, running untethered along the street. I wondered if it was part of a commercial, as there are often ads and films being shot around the picturesque SoHo streets. A moment later I realised the dog’s owner was in hot (and sweaty) pursuit, shouting out in vain for his pet to stop, heel, anything but keep bounding away.

The dog paid no heed. He rounded the corner at the bodega (Spanish word, now part of the local idiom, for corner store), where he promptly began barking at a much smaller dog whose acquaintance he must have made a short while earlier. The little one gave as good as he got, but an even bigger noise erupted from the two owners, who started in on each other as if it were a verbal title fight. The sound and the fury literally stopped pedestrians in their tracks and slowed the traffic to a crawl. It was highly entertaining to watch.

I have been so lucky to have a temporary residence in a luxurious SoHo artists’ loft during August, thanks to my friends who own it. Jen felt very fortunate also, as she’d just flown in from London where she’d slept in a tiny flat on a couch with a cranky cat.

When Jen’s brother Paul came over, she snapped the two us pondering one of the many abstract paintings that adorn the massive walls of the loft. It’s a very creative and inspiring space. I have been getting lots of writing and web-related work done here.

A Broadway show is a quintessential New York experience. Often, however, the most memorable parts of such shows are the price of the ticket and the triumph of style over substance.

So it was with great anticipation that Jen and I headed to 42nd Street to catch Canadian comedian and performer Martin  Short in his new show, Fame Becomes Me. We bought our tickets on the day of the show using a promotional code that got us 50 per cent off the ticket price! Love a bargain.

We laughed ourselves silly for the next two hours. He sang, he danced, he mimicked, he joked, he held us all in the palm of his hand. Well, everyone except for the Asian woman beside me, who didn’t crack a smile all night. Through my peripheral vision I could feel her keep turning to watch me guffawing and wondering what on earth I found so funny.

The show takes the form of a mock-life story in which Martin Short, having confessed to having much too normal a life for a Broadway show (married for 25 years, three children), decides to reinvent himself as a drug-addled, self-absorbed nincompoop and pants-man. By doing so of course he highlighted the ridiculous extent of celebrity worship in our culture and mightily impressed two tough Australian critics.

When playing tourist, having a partner in crime is always preferable to roaming solo. So I’d waited for my friend Jen to join me in New York before visiting the Museum of Modern Art. I’d been there several times in its previous incarnation, but had not seen its brand-new look. The museum reopened last year in its midtown location after a few years of total renovation. I don’t know whether it’s testament to the comprehensiveness of its overhaul or to my aging memory, but the musem was so dazzling I could not remember what had gone before it.

And that’s before I even mention the contents of the place – room after room full of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Klee, Rothko, Rauschenberg, O’Keeffe, Dali … not to mention the design gallery displaying everything from a Marc Newson chair to the first iPod, a Smart Car, and even an Apple Mac SE II (for those of us who remember them well).

Here’s Jen in front of a few of those design icons.

Dear reader, thank you for turning up so regularly. I wanted to let you know I’ll be “offline” (as a former boss of mine likes to say) for the rest of the week, catching up with my friend Jen while she’s visiting.

There will be photographs, I promise.

It struck me today as I waited in the humid subway station for the next train, how multiple and varied are the forms of entrepreneurship one can find on the subway system.

While riding the trains, I’ve seen a man selling cold drinks, another peddling bootleg DVDs timed perfectly for the weary home-bound commuter, a gospel-singing family of five, and three young men break-dancing. They time their sales pitches and performances precisely to the distance between stations, so that they can pitch, play and collect money all within a brief timespan.

When I first started coming here in the early 1990s, all you would expect to encounter on the subway was a homeless person with a non-sentimental but long-winded story about how they became homeless. That doesn’t seem to cut the mustard anymore. No specialised “service”, no “sales”. New Yorkers are one tough crowd.

I don’t know if this article, “Maybe we should just make Mel happy”, is in the current issue of Time magazine on sale in Australia, but you can read it here. Regular contributor Joel Stein reviews 3,000 years of anti-Semitism and suggests on behalf of Jewish people some modifications they could make to appease the Mel Gibsons of the world. In the article Stein also offers a novel theory as to why the Jews “took over the media”.

I wasn’t aware until reading this that Mel told his Jewish police officer “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”. Try working out that logic. Especially on a Monday morning.

Australians all let us rejoice that this man was born in the USA and only immigrated when he was 12 years old.

One of the friends I’ve made in New York is Australian writer Kate Veitch, whose first novel, Listen, is published in a few weeks by Penguin. Kate spends half her time here, which is where her partner lives. I met them at a poetry reading hosted by Lily Brett and her husband.

I am thrilled to recommend this book. It’s a terrific read – I read it in two sittings within 24 hours – and I’m sure it will do brilliantly. The novel explores the lives of complex characters without one single cliche among them. And it does so in proudly, identifiably Australian English. The Women’s Weekly has picked it up for its September issue and the booksellers are all salivating over it. Not literally, I hope … but check your copy first.

I heard about this website on National Public Radio this morning and thought you would have a chuckle at it. It allows you to schedule calls to your mobile phone so that you can (a) impress someone or (b) get out of a situation you don’t want to be in. Brilliant.

When your phone rings, a pre-recorded message will play that contains prompts for you to respond, thus tricking your companion(s) into thinking you are conducting a real-life conversation.

It took me a while to find the website – I forgot that here there’s only one “l” in “dialer”!

I’m so excited that my dear friend Jen Fleming – co-author with Shannon Lush of Australia’s bestselling stain-removal guide Spotless – is visiting next week on the final leg of her round-the-world ticket. If she can get from Barcelona to London to catch her trans-Atlantic flight, that is.

British Airways turned her back from Barcelona Airport on Tuesday, the day that the “no liquids” policy entered the airline safety handbook. They told her to come back on Saturday. As I’ve not heard from her today I hope she’s been able to get to London at last.

Safety is paramount, of course, but catching up with one of my best friends? Priceless.

Australians tend to believe that Americans – very generally speaking – don’t have much in the way of an ironic, let alone laconic, sense of humor. So it is with great delight that I’m able to report on today’s exception to this rule.

Today I caught a cab for reasons too tedious to mention. Turning off Houston into Wooster Street, SoHo, we had to drive particularly slowly as part of the street was closed off. This block is a real patchwork quilt of original cobblestones and ugly smears of tar to fill in the gaps. After a few seconds of bumping all over the place like we were riding a wild bull, the driver looked at me in the rear-view mirror and said with a real drawl, “I think the last time they fixed up this street, the Dutch was here.”

Perhaps you had to be there. But we laughed the rest of the way down the street, and I asked his permission to reproduce his comment here. Thank you, Wayell (sp?).

A few quick snapshots of SoHo for those of you who only read my blog for the pictures. I’ve had camera trouble lately so it’s been out of action.

Above is (left to right): the closest cross-street to where I’m now camped, a terribly funky art gallery, and a typical street scene – minus the masses of people usually found in this swanky area (I took these about 7 am on Sunday). On the far right is an amusing promotional play on Lewis Hine’s famous series of photographs of the construction workers of the Empire State Building from the 1920s. These workers took their sandwiches with them all the way up the tower, and ate them, legs swinging over beams, totally unprotected by technology or legislation. These reproduction figures are fixed to a van that moves around the neighborhood attracting a lot of attention … and perhaps some new business.

I was looking at my website statistics the other night – an online version of navel-gazing – and was intrigued to read the search terms and phrases via which web-surfers had arrived at Apple Girl’s homepage.

“Richard Caliban wife or girlfriend” one said. I burst out laughing. Richard Caliban was my Playschool (playwrighting course) teacher, to whom I referred in a recent post. Someone’s obviously got a crush on him. Unfortunately the poor girl’s visit to my site would have left her none the wiser.

If you’re reading this, honey, he’s married.

When my friend Stefano Maccianti’s novel is published in Australia – the one set partly in Cowra, where his great-uncle was a prisoner of war at the detention camp there during WWII – he will already have a head-start with the media.

The Cowra Guardian has just reported on rather an amazing coincidence that took place following Stefano’s visit there in January of this year, with his convertible car-driving sidekick in tow. “Old news” must be defined differently in the country.

Read all about it.

I’m such a dag sometimes. Approaching Broadway along 86th Street from my part-time job, I spotted a tall thin man dressed in the traditional white robes I have seen some Muslim men wear. He was handing out pamphlets to commuters descending the stairs at the subway entrance on the corner.

A perfect opportunity to find out more about what he believes, I thought. With the current crisis in Lebanon and my lack of reading material for the journey downtown, his timing could not have been better.

Alas, I was mistaken. When I looked down at the pamphlet, it offered no insights into religion, but a 20 per cent discount off my first meal at the new Kebab & Curry house on Amsterdam Avenue.

Someone’s looking out for me. Definitely. I’ve just got off the phone with Margot, who has to sub-let her apartment for at least six months from the beginning of September. It’s a small studio, but it’s right next door to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Prospect Park. And all for the same price I’ve been paying on the Upper West Side.

Margot has been working for Lily Brett’s agent, Heather Schroder, but has to move for personal reasons. We clicked over the phone and due to Lily singing the praises of each one to the other, we’re as close as two complete strangers can be to a sub-let arrangement for an apartment I’ve never seen.

Don’t worry – I will inspect late next week. But look at my prospective new backyard! What a treat. And a herb garden and crape myrtles to remind me of Hay Street. Not that my herb garden is a patch on this, of course …

Not, it’s not a poetic reference to the heatwave we’ve been enduring. My Italian friend and novelist Stefano Maccianti has just told me about a wonderful literary celebration that’s taking place in Florence as I write this. Roberto Benigni is reading the first 11 chants of Dante’s Inferno in Florence, one every second night until the middle of August. The readings take place in Santa Croce square, in front of the church where Dante is buried.When Stefano was in Australia in January, we read a newspaper article about Italy that said the country, despite Berlusconi, is still a place where people dress up and go to readings of Dante’s poem. Noting that 5,000 people showed up for the first reading last week, Stefano wrote: “There are some aspects of Italy that I can say I’m proud of.” His favorite part of the Inferno is the fifth chant, which can be found in three translations here. Stefano thinks I will love it because “It’s tender and very intense.” Not me at all, is it?