Elinor Nauen

On the Road with William Carlos Williams

Leaving for Maine in the morning

I can't decide:

Pictures from Breughel or Paterson.

Oh me oh my

 
I almost always take Breughel.

I used to take Paterson.

 
Once a truck driver picked me up hitching.

It was too noisy for the usual where-ya-froms

& I pulled out Paterson

which he said he'd read in school.

 
He took me to a steel mill in Gary

Indiana in the dawn.

I never get far from WCW. I still take a book of his pretty much whenever I travel. And off I go to Baltimore, WCW in hand. 

I know what's going on in the world, all right? But I get to do what I DO, which is write poetry & share it with people, & maybe cheers us all up. I can't help it, I'm from the Midwest & people laugh at even my saddest poems. And there's still a week before we have a felon fascist in the White House, so I'm gathering my rosebuds while I may. 

Johnny has had increasingly bad ("profound," the audiologist said) deafness for quite some time now. Everyone who knows him has been hollering at him to do something. Finally, he did, & what a difference. To have a conversation where I don't have to repeat &/or scream everything I say is a relief to both of us. Even though it was entirely for the purpose of being heard, he took it that I was yelling at him & I felt he was ignoring me. In just half an hour we were happier than we have been in ages. I can't see them even though I know they're there, that's how discreet they are. The world opens up. 

He said, What's that noise? And it was the microwave, which shows how deaf he'd gotten.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

~ Samuel Johnson

These days we seem to need more of an excuse to get together for a party than when we were in our 20s & anyone might end up with anyone after drinking, smoking, dancing. And so it was a birthday, & we sang & ate Texas sheet cake, & caught up. More sedate but all the better for being such longtime friends & colleagues. And still with grudges! animus! gossip! 

We keep having the flood, though, too. 

The Pacific Palisades fire alone, one of several uncontaine fire in the LA area, is bigger than Manhattan. 

" Malibu beach lifeguard tower dissolves into ashes, no help in sight, 100 feet from the limitless blue waters of the Pacific." See "Apocalypse Los Angeles" in the Washington Post.

I opened a box on the back shelf that was labeled "Do Not Open Until 2025: This means you, Elinor." High hopes for excitement but it was a bunch of Johnny's old mss (which is exciting! but he gets to look at them first), some crap & this rotary phone. I think a phone came when you installed the phone line, although the long cord was something I bought so I could talk anywhere in my apartment. That phone was good as new for at least 25 years. What does a smartphone have on a solid machine like this? 

I remember a kid somewhere saying he had come up with a great idea: What if there was a way to attach your phone to a wall so you didn't lose it. 

Tiny Instructive Poem

 
Between the cat & the fat

the claws & the jaws

all my clothes

are full of holes

I was grubbing around for poems, which I only do when someone asks for poems for a magazine or I have a reading coming up, & found this. I very well could have put it here in my blog before. It kind of falls into Ron Padgett's category of "poems I guess I wrote" but have no recollection of. 

Unexpected & lovely, it stuck around long enough to make me happy. I'm such a PR machine ~ I push out the praise like the snow machines on ski slopes wallop out the snow. I think people realize that I won't lay off until they tell me they maybe like snow a little better now. 

And "something potentially significant" this weekend, according to WillisWeather, my bespoke forecaster. 

It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.

~ J. M. W. Turner

Or as the poet Murat Nemet-Nejat said, If no one's buying the bread you're baking, you can make it as salty as you want. 

Or the late Kris Kristoffersen: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. 

It's hard to know you're playing your cards close to your chest till you trip & drop everything & it all changes. 

A walk in the briskness of New York January... Tremblay Apiaries had the honey I like without me having remembered to order it in advance... I made plans for the future with visitors I really like but I can go home today as early as I want... I had a good hard class at the gym: stronger every day! ... Met the son of the terrific poet Mary Ferrari, still kicking at age 96, & am full of plans to throw light on her while she's here to enjoy it... Words are life, ord er liv....

Issue 5 is now out & they just keep getting better. A retro presentation of absolutely contemporary work. A community like I haven't felt in years. I'm thrilled & energized to be part of this project with my old friend Maureen Owen. 

A young man (I must have asked) told me firmly that I should stop doing my blog. It's 2025! he exclaimed, which I understood to mean I needed to get with the many newer ways to communicate. 

I hadn't thought of taking a pause but now I am. My original goal was to finish something every day, to know it was finished because I published it. I have come up with different strategies over the 12 years I've been doing this & while there are definitely stretches where I'm more interested or less, I still enjoy finding out what I'm thinking about by writing something here. 

No conclusions. Maybe he'll be back tonight with next steps. 

How I pay for internet: I take my neighbor across the hall out to lunch every month.

He would share it for free but why should he? We like to hang out & I would take him out to lunch. Everybody wins. 

Proving yet again that where I live is indeed a village. 

Also: HAPPY 2025! 

Two little-known facts about the 39th president & me: 

1) I moved into the apartment where I still live the same month he was inaugurated, January 1977. 

2) Maggie & I won the Village Voice Jimmy Carter joke contest in 1978 or 79. And we took that joke on the road. The prize, worn by Maggie, was a rubber head of Jimmy. I was Rosalynn in a prim pastel skirt. Maggie had stagefright in those days so instead of reciting her lines, you'd just see Jimmy's big head shaking. It was all way more punk than we thought, I suppose. 

We spent a lot of time writing the dialect. They almost rescinded our prize when we went to pick it up & casually mentioned we had repurposed an old pimp joke. 

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Never thought of Wittgenstein as whimsical but what do I know. 

An hour past sunset & it's 53° in the East Village. 

And I'm late for dinner. 

The snow is gone & so am I.

Peta was the oldest of my five first cousins. She died two days ago after several months of health problems. 

Pete was born & raised in England. We met for the first time, as far as I remember in 1964 or '65 (she could tell you the exact date), when she visited us in Sioux Falls. I brought her to my junior high, where she was lively, interested, glamorous & English. I felt like the coolest person in the state. She had a good time ~ nothing was ever beneath her. 

She ended up living in LA, & one time we drove around meeting her Mexican friends & eating tacos. Also impossibly glamorous. 

Peta loved her family, all of us but especially her two kids, Dave & Julia. That they are so devoted to each other is a tribute to her. 

She was brilliant, with a vast memory for dates (oh no, our family encyclopedia is no more!), kooky, utterly fair & tolerant by nature. 

A quarter of a million people unsubscribed from the Bezos-owned WaPo when the newspaper rescinded a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. I get it ~ their chickenshit pandering to tRump was disgusting. But there are many good journalists there & I support them, & believed that unsubscribing would hurt journalists & journalism more than Bezos. 

I unsubscribed today over something that seems more trivial. I'd been reading less of the Post since the election, although I've been tiptoeing back towards news. But the advice columns were my rock, my escape, my community.

What the Post did a week ago was change the comments section, which had a simple "like" button, to giving these four choices of response:

__Clarifying  ___New to me ___Provocative  ___Thoughtful 

along with the requirement that anything you write contain at least 25 characters. 

First off, why these 4 adjectives? Not even an ___Other or a simple ___Like? 

They also provide an Artificial Stupidity (AS)-generated summary of comments. 

I've seen various theories: they want to replace readers with subscriber bots, for example. And that our comments are training the AS model. 

I feel sick to my stomach when I see it. I wrote several letters, with no response, so I unsubscribed. Which got me an offer to pay half of what I'm paying now if I come back. 

No thanks. 

I'm in the vast majority, btw. A typical response: I have no idea why you took the only worthwhile reason to keep a subscription and turned it into something not worth staying over. You took away functionality and ease and replaced it with complication and inane. Who thought this was a good idea? You should have used the money for this downgrade and used it to pay writers and copy editors.

Instead of exchanging gifts, my friend & his partner give each other wrapped boxes with pictures of what they're not giving each other. Lou didn't give Adam an expensive bottle of vitamin C oil, a sports coat, & I've forgotten what else. Then he extravagantly didn't give me a car & I didn't ask him what this meant for our friendship. It is highly satisfying & made me feel generous & loving. 

I now know the Norwegian word for sheaves, or more specifically, Christmas sheaves: julenek. Sheaves is not a word I've ever heard anyone say in English. Somehow this makes me love both English & Norwegian all the more. 

God jul! Happy Christmas! Off I go to Washington Square to sing carols. 

It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.

~ John Burroughs

It snowed! On the first day of winter! 

And 33 years of my happy marriage hits today. 

Oh man, a long walk in a snowy Central Park was the greatest thing. Fat geese (yum), kids in bright yellow snowsuits, dogs in fur coats over their fur coats, someone playing carols on a one-string bowed instrument, snow & brightness. 

WillisWeather, my bespoke forecaster (snow only), held out a tiny bit of hope for me. Maybe today, maybe this weekend.

I'm still so full from my week in the Far North that I'm OK (so far) with however much or little we get this year.

Since 19140, 69% of New Year's Eves in my hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, have had snow coming down. 

Update: Not 5 minutes after writing this, someone told me it's snowing in Westchester & I had a deep stab of jealousy. So maybe I won't be OK with whatever comes...

When I was observing shiva, the seven days of mourning, after my sister died, a non-Jewish friend stopped over.

I happened to mention that no one had brought rugelach, & how unusual that was. What was a shiva without rugelach?

He didn't say anything, but the next day he showed up with an expression of "I'll never understand the Jews"—and handed me a giant bag of arugula.

A young man walking past: 

Like, my dad doesn't use any secondary messaging apps

Another young man whose belt was halfway down his thighs.

Intentional? He was one of those kids so skinny you can't imagine how all their organs even fit inside, so maybe it was gravity not fashion? 

If you'd be surprised to see that leaf drifting along with the rainwater

was living its daily life and thinking about its fate

I'm surprised to be that leaf

I ate an impossible burger, did some $ work, got the leaky faucet fixed

the same me listens to Ray Charles, sees the hope, drifts

with the Northern Lights

moonlight in the pines

Nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist than the Arctic night. It is dreamland. painted in the imagination's most delicate tints; it is color etherealized. One shade melts into the other, so that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms - it is all faint, dreamy color music, a far-away, long-drawn-out melody on muted strings. Is not all life's beauty high, and delicate, and pure like this night? Give it brighter colors, and it is no longer so beautiful.
~ Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North

Keeping the magic of that incredible week going....

I've written about my love for Biala before but a new exhibit at Tibor de Nagy is my opportunity to do so again. I was first interested in her because she was Ford Madox Ford's last companion but I fell in love with her art. The current show is later work, set in Paris, where she lived the last 50 years of her life. It includes two small lovely flower paintings that we own, and another half dozen much larger interiors, courtyards, and cityscapes. Take a little vacation to the City of Lights by stopping by Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 11 Rivington St (just off Bowery & 2 blocks below Houston). 

I was at the light, 1st Ave & 4th St. I guy with a dolly pulled into the street as the light changed, then managed to spill all his parcels. The car that now had the light waited, didn't honk. A young woman & I waited. Just as he got himself together, she looked at me & said, I didn't know if I was supposed to help him. I know! It was like watching someone slip on a banana peel ~ it's not funny but it IS funny & you kind of get stuck inbetween. Yes! she said & wished me a nice day & was halfway down the block in no time.