11 September '07

The one-month anniversary of my time here in New York coincides with the sixth anniversary of the World Trade Centre bombings. A coincidence? Probably. The two are on opposite poles of a spectrum of importance. The New York Times led today with a lest we forget-esque headline and evocative photos. I led with a bowl of 99c raisin bran. Flags were half-raised in remembrance. I rolled my jeans half-way up in a futile effort to save them from the monsoon rains. People all over the country presumably thought not about the victims or the 'terror' of it all, but of where they were on the day, how they felt about it, who they knew that was involved. And this is where the poles converge. This shoddy narrative is so introverted that it fits well with the self-interest inherent in our species. And such is the nature of this type of transmission.

I am tempted to - but will not - use clichés like the 'time has flown by'. And of course, as it must be, clichés alone are the most apt. In thinking about what this last month has consisted of all I can think of is the subway. This is, perhaps, fitting. That small window of time waiting for or riding the train is the only window a person has in this city to pause and reflect. Once the rider is above ground movement really begins and one cannot help but be caught up in it. One cannot help but be reduced to mere flotsam in a frothy, dirty, thick tidal wave. Even when you stand still in this city the force exuded by the movement of the 15-million people around you makes your blood turn in a vortex, your head spin, your mind wander. In a word you are never static. When you stand still you become the sun around which the planets orbit. When you move you must accelerate to the pace of the other planets lest you be nudged and bumped and flattened and reduced to fragments that are themselves nudged and bumped and flattened until all that remains is dust that hovers like a cloud - less of a person and more of a idea.

More concretely, the weeks since my last transmission have been occupied largely by school. Classes have started – all five of them – to various paces and levels of interest. I am taking Anti-Colonialism, Culture Politics and Ethics, Transnationalism and Principles of Anthropolgy. The last is supervised research. The first week of classes left me fairly nonplussed about the university (it is hard for the professors to match, I suppose, the grandeur and authority of the campus – the blocks that Columbia occupies are riddled with towering gothic churches, marble halls fronted by carved Greek-style columns, bronze sculptures and statues with Latin inscriptions, granite walls, elaborate facades, manicured lawns). I have the suspicion (which has been deflated, though not eradicated by this week's classes) that Columbia has been so gorged by its reputation that it has become indolent and fat. Like Greenpeace, the university was too successful, too well regarded. What formed that reputation then – revolutionary scholarship and academic prowess – is now less important that the preservation of the reputation itself. If I'm right, which I doubt, the university will feed off itself until there is nothing left to sustain it. Then it will crumble and implode and be little more than a memory preserved by alumni and op-shop sweat-shirts. More likely is that the first classes were introductory and the pace will increase and the content deepen and the classmates will quit acting like students in the first week of a first-year tutorial and will say something of note.

It is nice, however, to be back at school. The classes at least have the potentially to challenge and it is that I look forward to.

Other events of note, let's see. Last week I bought a Yankees cap and went to the game. Me and 50,000-odd other fans in caps at the Yankees Stadium watched them thrash, err, somebody else. The game was great. Some guy nicknamed 'A-Rod' scored two home runs in the same innings – a historic moment, so I was told. The beer I bought from the guy yelling out if I wanted to buy beer was served in a giant red plastic cup. The frankfurter for the hotdog I bought from the guy yelling out if I wanted to buy hotdogs came from a sack with other frankfurters suspended in a stainless-steel tub on the guy's head. On Saturday I tripped to Coney Island, an experience right out of an 8mm video. Coney Island is a strip of beach boarded by a retro theme-park-meets-circus replete with a wooden rollercoaster, freak-show, carnies, at least two ghost-train rides and myriad hot-dog stands. The whole experience was surreal, cast in Technicolor, a mix of lurid hues and burlesque costumes, hairy women and dwarfs and strongmen, tourists, natives, pick-pockets, bikinis, live screams from the rollercoaster and tinned screams from the ghost-ride - all this while sweating in 35-degree heat. What I'm beginning to realise is that countries like India, China, Mexico don't have a monopoly on madness. America is perhaps the maddest of them all. Made more so because it thinks it is normal and sane.

Other than that I have been spending time with friends, drinking, eating and navigating that most untranslatable of human phenomena – humour. I have found a new place to move into on the first of October. The room itself is much smaller and is only six blocks away but is significantly cheaper at $740 a month, an important variation as every step in this city requires the surrender of a couple of dollar-bills. My current landlord threatened to keep my deposit and kick me out until I brought his attention to the illegality of his actions and the number of my law-school friends at Columbia who are all aching to whet their teeth on a test-case.

There is more but that will do for now. It's 7:45 in the evening on Tuesday 11 September 2007 and all is well.