Today the moving company men came to take away my books, my clothes, my bed, sofabed, desk, and the various accoutrements of my life over the past 18 months. I arrived in New York with three suitcases and two local friends. Since then my tangibles and intangibles have swelled considerably. Let’s hope I hang on both to my friends and my stuff.

The main thing I lost today was my internet connection, so it’s a temporary farewell to my beloved Skype and to obsessive email-checking (a terrible condition from which a large portion of the local population suffers). Off to London on Sunday for part-holiday, part-networking jaunt – wish me luck! Will post from Europe. If only it were all as glamorous as it sounds …

It pains me to tell you this, dear reader, but two nights ago someone was shot on my block. Still alive; just a scratch to the forearm, by the accounts I’ve heard. It’s the first incident of this kind I know about in the year I have lived in Prospect Heights, but my testimony would be unreliable: I was home during said incident, and failed to hear either the two gunshots, the wail of police sirens, or the roar of the helicopters over our neighbourhood subsequent to the shooting. Perhaps I have early-onset deafness, or maybe it was just that crazy syncopated music I was listening to was turned up too loud. Anyway, the drug/love/territorial dispute which prompted the shots has resulted in one hospitalization and one new presence on our block: a roster of New York’s finest, on foot and in their little three-wheeler NYPD vehicles.

I couldn’t help but marvel that this event occurred in the week that I am vacating my apartment. After finishing the book I suddenly became detached from my neighbourhood and started spending time again in the touristic surrounds of Central Park and Museum Mile. I am surrounded by boxes and piles of papers to be sorted by the end of the week, an inevitable drag. In the midst of my logistical tango I am also attempting to organise my European vacation (I fly to London on Sunday), meetings with agents and editors, and possibly even a local agent for The Young Widow’s Book itself. In other words, my usual frenzy.

Last week I met up with an old family friend. Well, the family friendship is old, but Chris is a mere pup at 24. It was sobering to remember over our sandwich lunch that I have known him most of his life. He’s halfway through the Australian middle-class rite of passage: the post-university northern-hemisphere tour – and landed recently in Connecticut, a mere hour’s train ride away from the bright lights and big smog of Manhattan.

We met on a rainy day in SoHo and swapped stories. He confessed to having recently forgotten to tip a hairdresser, and only realised later why she had been hovering at the till as he collected his change from the cashier, put it in his pocket and walked out the door with a cheerful wave goodbye. At a minimum wage of $5 or so in that particular industry, individual hairdressers rely on tips. Depending on who you talk to, it’s a longstanding convention, or a form of subsidised slavery.

Chris, if you read this please send me your email address, as my attempts to reach you keep bouncing back.

Hmm. The Jersey Shore – is that at the mouth of the River Styx? Having made it four hours south of Manhattan in a coach, having braved not only the zoo that is the Port Authority Bus Terminal but also Atlantic City, I can attest that Stone Island, whence I am writing, is far from hell as the New Testament would picture it. However, it is very much a white ghetto of huge houses maintained by Latino and black weekend workers, seven miles of grey-sand beach full of families having summer fun, trinket shops and “spaghetti with red gravy” menus. I’m here playing tennis and drinking wine with my friend Lara, who is herself a guest of family. So basically I’m freeloading and loving it. Last night she and I enjoyed quite a delicious meal of calimari and crab at a place called The Princeton (truly) in the town 20 minutes’ drive from Stone Harbour, where we’re staying. And at $7 per head for a game of tennis, it sure beats Manhattan.

Apologies for the lack of regular postings recently. After raising my head from more revisions on the book (my book!), I realised I had only several more sleeps before I go … first to London, then back to New York, then Sydney, then …

As a result I am frantically busy pulling the various strands of my professional life into some version of a coherent plan. Trying to, anyway. I will be available from mid-October if any Sydney readers are looking for someone to assist with a project of a communications or philanthropic nature. Project work will suit me best for this next phase, in which the book will be my primary focus. I find it quite surreal to be talking like this. But it’s a fact now and there you have it.

Yesterday I had lunch with a publishing colleague who is off to Ulaanbaatar for a visit (I Googled to check its accepted spelling; this version seems consistent although I had always thought it was two words). We had been discussing a few work projects and realised we needed to meet again before I head back to Sydney in October.

“I’ll email you when you get back to set up a time,” I offered.

“Oh no,” he said instantly. “I’ll be on email in Mongolia.” I burst out laughing. That’s not a sentence most of us will utter in our lifetimes. And not quite what I had in mind for a list of the most important things to do when in Ulaanbaatar.

Just after seven o’clock this morning, I met my friend and neighbour DvG (whose art was the subject of a recent post) for a photography tour of our immedicate vicinity. The purpose of this tour was to take some photographs of me in my Brooklyn ‘hood, in the hope that one or more of them might prove suitable for the Young Widow’s Book and accompanying website. The early hour was chosen in order to avoid the paparazzi and crowds.

First stop was the corner shop at the bottom of our common street. It is one of three within two short blocks, but distinguished by its distinctive odour of cat piss. The only things I have ever bought from there are liquids in a sealed container – milk, orange juice, diet tonic. Sometimes just tonic. Other photogenic scenes were found outside the subway station, in Prospect Park, at Cheryl’s cafe, and in the foyer of my apartment building. DvG had brought three cameras to do the job; hopefully there will be at least one decent photo out of all those happy snaps.

After a light lunch in Central Park with old friends yesterday I tripped a few blocks south to the Frick Collection, a jaw-dropping collection of art that had hung on the walls of the home of 19th-century coal and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick at the corner of 70th Street and 5th Avenue, until he eventually turned over the collection – and the house with it – to the public.

Stepping inside the Frick is like visiting a private home, although no one I know, or know of, lives quite like this. Despite the presence of multiple works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Goya, Gainsborough, Whistler, Velasquez et al, the museum exudes intimacy and the collector’s pure delight in the act of collecting. Works of decorative art – porcelain vases, Chinese urns and centuries-old clocks - sit comfortably with sculptures and paintings, just as us mere mortals might try arranging our more modest objets d’art on available surfaces. I’m also yet to meet anyone with their own internal courtyard garden, complete with atrium (added to the house during its conversion to a museum).

Recent reports of the hedge-fund squillionaires, today’s robber-barons, snapping up available masterpieces and sending prices soaring, are troubling. It’s not just because the public museums and other art institutions cannot compete on price and are getting squeezed out of the market. Rather, I wonder what will happen to these privately held works over time. Could it be that the democratization of enormous wealth might lead, perversely, to the gradual decline in publicly available art?

It’s almost 10pm on Tuesday night my time. I had believed I would get through the entire day without turning on my laptop computer, but it looks like I have formed a habit. Email seems to run like blood in the American cultural veins, and I believe it’s time for a transfusion.

In the past week my body clock seems to have gone haywire. I’m awake until three in the morning, then tossing and turning until I get up mid-morning. Going back to the manuscript – UQP wants a final draft by the end of the month and I need to tweak certain parts of it first – seems to have exhausted me. At the same time I’m trying to finalise other aspects of my professional activities here and do things like work out what I’m actually going to do back in Sydney.

But today I received two blasts from the past. One in the form of an invitation to my 20th high school reunion – surely there must be some mistake – and second, an al fresco lunch at the Central Park Boathouse Bar & Grill (above) with my old University of Sydney pal Derek, who’s in town with a friend to attend a wedding. Several photographs were taken, but not on my camera, as we chatted about the spectacular weather (the humidity has vanished in the last two days) and the respective virtues of the Metropolitan and Guggenheim Museums to the visitor with only one or two days to spare. A bottle of wine and two hours later, I waved Derek in the direction of the Met and proceeded to the Frick Collection at the corner of 5th Avenue and 70th Street, my favourite small museum in the city. That will have to be the subject of my next post. Night-night.

I am thrilled to announce officially that my memoir, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, will be published next year in Australia by UQP. As many of you know, I have been working on this book for most of the time I’ve been living in New York. Moving here was the necessary step in putting some physical and psychological distance between past and future, and for opening up time and space for me to write and organise my thoughts about loving and losing John, and the ways in which the renovation of our house in the first year after he died had both symbolic and literal aspects.

But finding a publisher so quickly has exceeded my hopes. I am honoured that I will be part of a list of authors that includes David Malouf, whose new volume of poems, Typewriter Music, was recently published to critical acclaim and the sort of sales of which most writers, let alone poets, only ever dream.

I hadn’t heard so many Australian and New Zealand accents since Christmas when I was visiting home. The accents belonged to fans of Crowded House, who had flocked to the venerable Beacon Theatre (74th and Broadway, in my old Upper West Side neighbourhood) to see the band on their first world tour since 1996.

The first time I saw Crowded House was in 1986 at the Tivoli on George Street with my friend Daniela. The venue closed shortly after but the band’s career took off. Then there was the farewell concert at the Opera House in 1996. My friend John Moore, who bought the tickets for last night’s show months ago, had watched the famous Opera House concert with me from a boat on Sydney Harbour. It was he who informed me that the band had a new album out. (I’m so out of the pop music loop I don’t even know if “album” is a word still used in this context …)

The sold-out show was two hours of enormous, uncomplicated, extraordinarily musical fun. I had goosebumps at how beautifully most of the material stands the test of time – testament to Neil Finn’s songwriting skills – and the band was full of energy and excitement to be playing live and in New York. If you have the chance, see them.

Two inches of rain overnight caused the entire New York City subway system to flood and shut down this morning. Not Spielberg-style, with tunnels of water carting subway cars into the Hudson or East Rivers, but rather via an excess of water that the system’s existing network of pumps could not accommodate. As a result, millions of commuters were stuck mid-transit or caught unaware when they arrived for their early-morning commute. Fortunately I was not one of them. 

Infrastructure failure is sadly evident across the city and last week’s Minneapolis bridge collapse hints at a more widespread neglect. On NPR (National Public Radio, a poor imitation of my beloved and much-missed ABC) I heard one expert admit he suspects the lack of care about infrastructure relates to the “wild west mentality” which is alive and well in the US. He suggested that fixing and maintaining older equipment was simply not part of a culture that is constantly searching for the next new invention, object or territory. It’s a bit scary to ponder what else is about to fall down or break.

Here is an interesting interview with a transportation expert on the infrastructure problem here.

A huge milestone: my piece “Sex and the Single Bed” has just been published in the Spring 2007 issue of Griffith Review and should be in most bookstores now.

Two odd coincidences worth noting: my client Simi Linton also appears in this issue (the theme is “Staying Alive” and both of our pieces are memoir), as does a former lecturer from my undergraduate Honours course in 17th Century literature at the University of Sydney.

Australian readers, count your blessings where you find them: you do not have to endure TV advertisements for prescription medications, or for individual law firms. Lately I’ve been struck by one particularly urgent commercial, featuring two alleged victims. Each victim describes their fall or other accident and then, looking directly into the camera, states:

“I suffered pain. I needed law.”

Have you suffered pain? A strident male asks again over the ensuing voiceover. If so, apparently I need law. More specifically, the ambulance-chasing law firm paying for this ad. It’s as simple as dialling 1-800-LAW or something like it. There’s no need for me to worry about the cost of it all, either, because they also clearly state they have “attractive payment plans” for me. I guess that means that when they bleed me dry I won’t feel a thing.

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my fondness for the NYC subway. I stand corrected: while commuting daily to midtown during the morning rush hour for my class at New York University throughout July, I was forced to admit my fondness for travelling around the city by train is limited to non-peak times during spring, autumn or winter. A few recent summertime experiences should paint the current picture for you:

Perspiration crawling down my front and back as I wait on the platform for the next train. Holding the oily pole that countless other strange hands have already held as a tightly packed group of strangers hurtles along the tracks. Spotting the acute psoriasis on the hand next to my own on the pole, wondering where the rest of the flakes of his skin are falling, flinching, and realising there was no other section of pole available to hold on to. Smelling the Orthodox commuter some distance away, who was kitted out in intense humidity in full three-piece black suit, top hat and ringlets.

On the other hand, I love looking at what people are reading. Some are nose deep in the New York Times or the Post, others are reading poetry or Kierkegaard. Quite a few women are reading bodice-ripper romances. They are fewer in number than those reading the Torah, the Bible, or even J. K. Rowling. One young woman sat studying her Bible the other day while an elderly Chinese woman stood right in front of her, gripping the safety rail and swinging like a fragile pendulum as the carriage lurched its way downtown. It took some effort for the young women to ignore her “neighbour”. Do unto others, my ass.

Dear friends, I’m thrilled to report that my client David Kowalski’s novel, The Company of the Dead, is now in stores around Australia. It’s the first book I have agented to appear on the shelves, so it’s a big moment not only for the author, but for agent as well. Even before David has met the media the book is already selling. This could be because David knows approximately ten thousand people. Or maybe it’s just because it’s a great read.