Autumn comes to the city. My Wednesday morning visit to Columbus Circle brings me up and out into a darkened morning, with Cristoforo Colon ominous on his pedestal. Ah Cristoforo, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, little did you know what you started.

Off to Jimmy’s, and noticed for the first time that the little piece of 103rd street that takes me from Broadway to West End Avenue (sometimes, recalling North-west London, I think mistakenly of it as West End Lane) is called after Humphrey Bogart – thanks, Jimmy tells me, to long and patient work by a local resident. The late Lauren Bacall came to baptize it. Soon I’ll get Jimmy out there in a Bogie-style hat and trench coat (he owns both) to bring the great man to life.

Back to BC and my Fascist Literature class – this volume is the ‘packet’ for the class, full of Fascist tidbits, speeches, definitions of Fascism etc – a class which is becoming more interesting by the week as the students become more vocal, more involved. I tried to get the department to let me teach this for years, and now that they finally relented I couldn’t quite figure out how to teach it and what my syllabus would be. But it’s coming together.

Back in Woodstock, another fine creation for Bread Alone by flower-arranger Nataka. And up on the hillsides, the ‘Leaf Peeper’-paradise is coming into color. We drove up perilous Platt Clove Road. Usually we do this on 2 wheels but I thought, Play it safe, don’t want anything to go wrong just as I’m about to sell the bike – and the Platt Cove climb is genuinely dangerous, very very steep and very badly paved. It was once ‘Legs’ Diamond’s whiskey-smuggling route from Canada, and over the side, beyond the guard-rail, you can see the rusted remains of a car from that era, perhaps – certainly from before there was ever a guard-rail.

My dear former student Andrew Blais, with wife Elana, came to see us and the leaves – Andrew looking just as he did, but (like me) silvering now, just turned 45, with a son soon-to-be if not already a grown-up – I remember Andrew and our work together so clearly from 20 years ago.

Our amazing Indian summer continues (surely the term may stand, since it can only mean good things about Indians) – indeed for many in our part of the world it’s been a memorably perfect summer. Not so for much of America, as Joe and I saw on our trip around the country in May, June and July, the trip chronicled earlier on this blog: plenty of bad weather, enough to go around. And to everyone’s frustration, the statistics show that this summer of 2014 was, overall… an average summer. (This fits no one’s view, which proves that it’s correct.) The weekend just past featured the annual Garlic Festival in Saugerties, a jamboree that was once charming ($1 admission) and is now, like everything else, more squalid, more expensive ($10 admission), more popular and with only uncertain memories of the reason for its existence (a small number of stalls actually offer garlic products, including garlic ice cream, but most of the Fastival’s disgruntled vendors, complaining about taxes and the cost of renting their pitch, simply offer standard Midway fare, trinkets, dull craft objects, the usual rubbish, at exorbitant prices). Listening to NPR this morning I found myself plunged into some grand ecumenical conference featuring Judaic and Islamic and other scholars – the Dalai Lama was present too – and the Pope! – and I came in on the end of an Islamic speaker’s oration about the decay of beauty as a sacred concept (or any kind of concept, perhaps), citing what has happened to great Islamic centers – Isfahan was one he mentioned – where urban sprawl has destroyed, he said, any sense of a city dedicated to the deity as Lord of the beautiful, indeed as the spirit and principle of beauty itself. For my part I realized this first in Tuscany, on returning to Siena, having visited it first as a penniless teenager, arriving at night, exhausted and content to sleep in the grass across from the railway station; in the morning I climbed up into the old city, not knowing its history, not knowing what the Campo would be, or the Signoria – oh joy to be that innocent traveler about to be overwhelmed! I climbed the stairs to the little parapet at the top of the Signoria’s tower and gazed down on that peerless assemblage of tiled roofs that formed, small house by small house, the ancient topography of Siena – then. When I next came to Siena, tense with anticipation, I found to my amazement that in the intervening years it had acquired a modern carapace, a vast encircling city of the usual charmless architecture, enfolding what I had thought of as Siena in a cement embrace and turning the old city into an outdoor museum at its center. Yes, the palio is still run; the contrade still sport their colors, worn by every Sienese; but it’s all DisneySiena now.

And Isfahan too? Well, perhaps I won’t visit it – it was one of the last places I hoped yet to see – I’ll just stick with a virtual tour (I’m sure there are plenty) of the Blue Mosque. There’s only so much disheartening a heart can stand.

Something about this sweet chill moment – still the warmth of summer but now an overlaid autumnal freshness like a sea breeze – crossing Columbus Circle, the trees picking up the wind, the leaves as dark as they will get this year, the pedestrians hurrying a little… and up we go… to where Linda and Princess happily await a capuccino and a Princess-cup of water.

In the subway, a most melodious percussionist. And on return to the country, a delightful interview on WAMC Albany with that master of the interview, The Roundtable’s Joe Donahue – who dwarfs me here as he dwarfs almost everyone, gentle giant that he is. Good news yesterday: Who Was That Lady? has infiltrated the Bookbub trend towards choosing mainstream-published books for their promotions, and suddenly now (perhaps because of our fine reader reviews on Amazon) they’ve chosen it – after John tried over and over, with all our books. Book One of the e-book version of Who Was That Lady? will be going out free from October 16 to 20 to Bookbub’s 750,000 literary fiction subscribers. Last year Justice caught Bookbub’s eye and we broke their record with 23,000 e-book downloads in 3 days, and reached no.1 on Amazon’s literary fiction downloads list. Will it launch the new novel onto the same level? We’ll see! There’s reason for hope.

The week’s climax came with Claire’s Afternoon Tea event at the Uptown Gallery, where her paintings are being exhibited – to notable acclaim. Several of her ‘victims’ – her sitters, or subjects – were present, and I seized the opportunity to capture them sitting or standing beside their immortality.

This is the weekend of the Adirondack Hot-Air Balloon Festival – one of the biggest in the world – and I know I won’t be able to go and see it (too far away, for our busy weekend ahead). Instead I picture it: a skyful of balloonists each one a cartoon thought-bubble set alight to bubble heavenwards, crowding the sky as if emanating from a child’s illustrated Earth, one that we own again just for a moment gazing upwards at an aether crammed with giant Easter eggs. Can this really be the same planet tearing itself apart with wars and weaponry? On my way to the Red Hook diner – a pleasantly converted converted pizzeria – to meet my pal Trey, I stepped out to take a photo of a lake in Zena that has a resident heron often on the watch for prey, and was surprised by the sound of winter – already? Geese overhead (you can just make out the V-formation in the photo), honking ominously.