While spending hours at a library has always been a slightly romantic idea for this bookish girl, recent excursions to the Brooklyn Public Library have started to tarnish my rose-coloured notion. BPL is a true community that brings together so many different readers, from the little ones on the ground floor opening their first books, to the recently unemployed filling the Job Resource room, to more serious scholars of all ages expanding their horizons and finishing assignments. What the library also seems to attract, however, is a range of hackers, coughers, splutterers, snufflers, throat-clearers and conversationalists – including two high-volume policemen who for some reason were on duty on my floor last week. The other day I had to pack up all my stuff and move to another floor to get away from a young man who didn’t know there was anything other to do with all the phlegm he was creating but to channel it back through the nose and throat whence it came, turning the stomachs of all within hearing range. All except the young man, of course; he was oblivious due to the headphones he was wearing.

Yesterday we were treated to a different sort of throat-clearing over the PA system, an unintentional on-air warm-up by a clearly nervous announcer inviting us to join her at the BPL’s regular reading group, which would be starting in just ten minutes. In a deep voice with a heavy European accent she intoned slowly, “We will be discussing the book Three Cups of Tea.” At which point all the people on my floor looked up from our communal wooden desks and burst out laughing.

Today I stumbled upon this lovely essay in a great aggregator blog called 3QuarksDaily. In The Literature of the Piano, Bryant Urstadt details his current reading tour – what he terms ‘another time-wasting obsession’ – of literature about the piano, prompted by his daughter recently taking up piano lessons. He wanders through some of the piano memoirs that have appeared in recent years, wondering why it is this instrument of all musical instruments that inspires so many literary responses. After reading Perri Knize’s Grand Obsession, “essentially a book about going crazy”, Urstadt notes: “As an author, I am frankly curious to know how she managed to sell a proposal for a book about getting a piano properly tuned.”

My own work on women and piano music creeps forward slowly. I’m currently researching the first piano music concerts in Europe, featuring women and children, which were marketed as freak shows. 

Some days it takes forever to leave the house. I left it about as late as possible on Sunday to get to the last day of Pierre Bonard’s late paintings and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum. And for no good reason either. I felt guilty for racing around the enormous exhibition – representing years of devoted work in the life of an artist – because I had another appointment later in the afternoon. Although I moved through the works with more haste than I would have liked, the strange beauty of Bonnard’s domestic interiors was affecting; they appealed to me much more than his still lives of fruit. As I was leaving, I spotted playwright Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange squeezing into the crowd to catch the show before it closed.

Last week I saw Australian pianist/composer Barney McAll and his band – featuring the fabulous saxophonist Billy Harper – at the Jazz Standard in Gramercy, which is possibly my favourite jazz club in Manhattan. The space is respectful of the musicians, both from the perspective of acoustics and from its “quiet policy” throughout the performance. My review of the gig, which was a CD launch for McAll’s latest release, Flashbacks, appears on this Australian jazz website, home to the Sydney Improvised Music Association.

As of yesterday I am an official card-carrying member of the Brooklyn Public Library. Having lived in the vicinity of the library on and off for the past three years, all I can say is that it’s about time. The sweet woman who prepared my card – my identification was based on my greencard photo ID and the address panel of my latest subscriber’s copy of the New Yorker – told me she was retiring in September. I told her she seemed too youthful to be retiring. That’s when she dropped the news that she was a great-grandmother.

With the last book – the first book – my research requirements were minimal, as I wrote primarily from memory. Memoir is by definition intensely personal. This time, my project is still very personal, but has a broader scope and context, hence the natural and pressing need for research. Women musicians, the history of the piano, the philosophy of music, Jane Austen’s piano-playing heroines, music teachers and the history of the piano lesson. Among a myriad of related topics, these are some of the clusters forming on my sheet of butcher’s paper as I collate the fruit of previous research and focus on a few months of dedicated writing, thinking and reading time.

Last night I caught up with friends for a night out at the Public Theater on Lafayette Street to see Christopher Durang’s new play, Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. The Public contains more than one theater, so we giggled to hear a staff member directing confused audience members to their correct destination: “‘Torture’ this way,” he kept repeating. Between that and the play’s title, I felt I was backstage at a Stephen Colbert rehearsal.

The play is hilarious, although you would not suspect it from a brief plot summary: The central character wakes up to find that overnight she married a complete stranger whose name is Zamir and who is prone to outbursts of mysogynist rage. Then, within minutes of introducing her new husband to her father, the men are threatening to kill each other, while her mother exists in a dazed reverie of what might have been had she pursued a career in the theater. Ben Brantley’s New York Times review celebrates the accelerating absurdity of the humour in the play, which tackles head-on the paranoia and violence of our time. Durang skewers the fears and frustrations of contemporary Western life, while also providing a tribute to the theatre’s ability to represent and console us.

I have to confess I found the last quarter of the play a bit flat – the young Felicity tears down the play’s “fourth wall” and demands that all the characters return to an earlier moment in the play so that all the terrible events that unfold can be prevented. Perhaps this was the best way to dramatise our need to “make nice” all the ghastly events that US foreign policy since 9/11 unleashed; unfortunately it felt more like a cop-out to me.

It’s less than 48 hours since I’ve been back in Brooklyn, so my head is still waiting for my body to catch up. Wait, I think I mean my body is waiting for my head to catch up. My computer tells me it’s five-ish on Monday afternoon, but to me it’s actually tomorrow morning in Sydney. Tonight is my first fiction workshop class, and my main achievement will be to get there on time. Anything more than that I will have to regard as a bonus.

This afternoon I wandered around the homewares department of Target at the vast Atlantic Avenue mall, looking for a few specific items to make my cell – sorry, room – more livable. A desk, I thought, would be a good idea. And something to sit on. As my trolley began to pile up, it occurred to me that home delivery might be a good idea for these bulky items. Delivery would be free, and my only expense would be a tip for the unlucky guy whose job it would be to lug it all to my place. On inquiry, however, I learned that I could only have my goods delivered free – or delivered at all, in fact – if I had purchased them online. Old-fashioned shopping in the old-fashioned shop disqualified me for the service. And so it was that, during an intense mid-afternoon downpour, I found myself in hurried league with a taxi driver from Sierra Leone, who knew the trick of getting the Target trolley out of the store (mere mortals’ trollies get no further than the storefront’s sliding doors), and then my stuff into the enormous trunk of his car. I was so ecstatic about the achievement of securing a taxi in this weather that I didn’t understand what the driver was asking me as we set off in the car. After a few polite attempts I realised he hadn’t a clue where to take me and my stuff.