Elinor Nauen

I’m not a film expert by any means, but it bothers me how many people haven’t seen or even say they “don’t like” old movies. Here’s a lightly annotated list, in chronological order, of a few I can’t imagine not enjoying. They’re movies I love and have seen several times (or more). All are a great pleasure to watch, and if they have redeeming social value, well, that’s extra.

* Sullivan’s Travels (1941). Joel McCrea plays a Hollywood director who’s successful with comedies but is dying to make a serious movie called O Brother Where Art Thou. As with all Sturges movies, there are switchbacks and guffaws galore.  Read More 

In the last 4 weeks I've broken or lost 5 pairs of sunglasses. The latest was a pair I bought on Thursday that fell off on Sunday. They were $7 on St Marks so not tragic, but I also lost my all-time favorite white-framed 60s Elizabeth Taylor ones.

I also lost a photo from maybe the 1980s where I was wearing 3 pairs of sunglasses, up & down my face.

Decluttering whether I want to or not.  Read More 

I think this was Key West.
I think it was 1982.
I think I was on my way to go snorkeling.
It was a trip with Janet.
I got so sunburned I threw up that night.
My hair didn't stand up like that on its own.
My dad was still alive.

We found so many things while clearing out Johnny's storage space.

We threw out a lot too.

Not this!

It's full-length, down to the ballet slippers he is wearing, & signed: Ted Berrigan, 1981

I hope you appreciate how much blood & sweat not to mention magical eliadic mind-power over matter bulk it took to compress 425 lbs of beautifully-aged crispy-sweet jelly-pork major-poet self-taught American mortal-coil flesh (meat!) into this dingbat-suit Oscar De La Renta whipped up personally for me to wish you HAPPY BIRTHDAY in, Stanton!
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I know my dad's family was Reform, & I know they were moderately well-to-do, so I think it's a pretty good guess that this was his synagogue.

I wonder why his family left Breslau? Was it like leaving Boston for New York? It's about the same distance & with much more opportunity in the bigger city. His parents had little Hans & Charlotte (I can't remember if she was older or younger). Was it in-law trouble? Or maybe the relatives were in Berlin & Breslau was just a waystop?

My father's been gone almost 30 years, my oldest sister more than 10—who would know the answers to any of this? Frustrating but thrilling to have new questions. And why didn't I ever wonder about this before?

Update: My mother says Dad's father had gone to Breslau to work in a department store; they weren't from there. Also, his sister was older.  Read More 

I'm reading a noir mystery called Death in Breslau, by a Polish novelist named Marek Krajewski, which I bought because it's where my father was born.

The 1900 census listed 5,363 people (just over 1% of the population) as Polish speakers, and another 3,103 (0.7% of the population) as speaking both German and Polish. The population was 58% Protestant, 37% Catholic (including at least 2% Polish) and 5% Jewish (totaling 20,536 in the 1905 census). The Jewish community of Breslau was among the most important in Germany, producing several distinguished artists and scientists.

My father was born in 1906, halfway between the founding of the German Empire in 1871 and the early Weimar Republic. In those days, I've read, relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were more open than they became after WWI. Jews were a part of a broad urban community where they were largely equal but also able to remain Jewish.

His family moved to Berlin, 200 miles to the west, when he was 3, & as far as I know, he never went back before being forced to leave the country in 1939.

Breslau, renamed Wroclaw, has been part of Poland since WW II.

On this date, 43 years ago, my life changed. I hitchhiked to D.C. with my friend Beth to go to a large demonstration (500,000 of us!) against the Vietnam War. We slept overnight on the Mall & she woke up next to a guy who became her boyfriend for the next 3 years. I was stuck with his friends for the day, but they soon became of lifelong importance. We all lived in a hovel in Maryland known as The House. I learned to have fun & deep conversations, I discovered I had allies in this long strange trip, I still love Steve, Forrister, Phil, Teresa, Sam, Max, Paul E, Frenchy, Billy, Bill, George, the Man of Good Humor, Mike, Jason, Elmo, JD, Wayne, even Duane.

Breathing is also hard to put into words.

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If I had been around when old blues guys like Henry Thomas were in their heyday, I suppose I wouldn’t have gone to hear them play. Surely that world would have been—was—closed to a not-wealthy white lady such as myself. And I most likely wouldn’t have made the effort. I don’t go, never did, to a lot of live music. Never seen Chuck Berry or Little Richard or B. B. King, who soon will be gone, and that opportunity lost.

Henry Thomas (1874-1930) was born in Texas into a family of freed slaves and recorded (some say originated) “Texas blues guitar” in the 1920s, playing reels, gospel, ragtime, and blues. He was a hobo who earned a living singing to railway employees and in towns he passed through. His two dozen songs were recorded in the 1920s.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that attracts me so much about him when a lot of similar singers don’t. His songs have catchy melodies and brilliant lyrics that often rework common motifs: “She bring me coffee, she bring me tea, she bring me everything but the jailhouse key,” a line that turns up in two nearly identical songs of his. I like the contrast between his rough voice and the sweet pipes he plays, which I have learned are called quills and made from cane reeds, similar to the zampona or panpipes of Peru and Bolivia. The quills, it seems, are an old African instrument, pretty much unknown today.

Several of his songs have been recorded by others: “Fishing Blues” by Taj Mahal and the Loving Spoonful; “Honey Won’t You Allow Me One More Chance” by Bob Dylan (as “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance”); and “Bull-Doze Blues” by Canned Heat as their Woodstock hit “Going Up the Country” with different lyrics but the same music, down to the sound of the quills (but played on a flute).

I read a lot of mysteries, & I suppose like everyone who does, I am happy when I find a series I can live with for a nice long run. I like books set in places I've spent time, nothing too dark (no Mafia, please, except in Donna Leon), & good writing. And then there's something  Read More 

So beautiful & so vicious.

Achoo.

Achoo.

ACHOO.

Gradually being won over to the charms of photography. So quick & descriptive. Do I want to write a poem about this woman & her window boxes, and how long she was in taking them in & bringing them back, and wondering who that bust represents, & how much rent does she pay, & assuming she's in an unrenovated apartment where she raised at least a couple of kids, & how tight-quartered it was then & how roomy it is now, & she even has a cellphone & facebook account, & sometimes it seems so much easier & sometimes it was so much better then, & how soon I'll be her except with a cat not plants.  Read More 

The three of them were walking in front of me on 6th Street this morning, and I couldn't help but notice they had the exact same bodies. That's how I was sure it was a mother and daughters, not a nanny and charges. I was trying to take this photo surreptitiously as well as in the bright sun and with them walking away, so maybe it's not as striking here as it was to me.

Also, same coats. Read More 

to the love of my life (Johnny, although I'm pretty fond of the cat)

I had forgotten that I could go outside & sit on a bench—ah, Spring!

This is in Madison Square Park, & I could hear people delivering lectures but I didn't feel like finding out the point of these low-lying water towers. I guess I don't want to learn that yet another piece of New York has become history.

Happy Passover! (Back on Thursday.)  Read More 

Not Graig, who I once described as seeing "more horizontal than vertical," in reference to his terrific ability at 3rd base, but which garnered some eyebrow action.

No, I've been drinking nettle tea all afternoon & feel miraculously much better. Allergies be gone!

Is it spring making me so sleepy? Or was it editing, working out, shopping, writing a condolence card, looking up the fares to Spartanburg, talking to the accountant? I bought my Passover plate (2), bowl & spoon at Crate & Barrell, & lots of food at Holyland, where I got the first chag sameach of the season. Now I'm going to go talk art with my friend & neighbor.  Read More 

I heard about the terrible computer virus Heartbleed & changed my passwords at work, including for email, credit card, Facebook. Then I emailed the new passwords to myself.

* A saying of my grandfather, Charles John Phillips, who died when my mother was a girl. Even though he was known as Jack, the descendants who are named for him are all Charlies: Uncle Charlie, my brother Charlie, cousin Charlie ("Cha"). We do have a Jack & a Jackson a couple of generations later.  Read More 

Pleasant on a spring day to take the bus & not the subway to my meeting in midtown. I'm dressed nicely & feeling professional, going in to talk about a project I already have agreed to do—don't have to sell myself, I've worked with these people before. When I wrote the poem below, it was long before you could take a photo with your phone. The poem was the photo. Better? Worse? Easier? Lamer?

On the Bus

As much sky tonight in NYC as buildings
along First Ave
on the bus
I’m overcome

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I wait & wait for a new one, & then it's gone in a day. By Its Cover is one of her best, with its look into the world of book thieves & book lovers, set in Venice.

In 1971 I was living in Severn, Maryland, with a bunch of Air Force friends who worked at NSA. We were only about 20 miles from Annapolis & used to visit a lot. One day I went in a frame shop & saw this print. I fell in love with it, and visited it regularly until I moved away in the fall. A few years later, I was passing through Annapolis & found the same store. The guy said hmmmm, went in the back, & pulled out the picture I had loved. I bought it—the first artwork I ever bought.

Finally, all these years later, I've replaced its cracked plexiglass & cheap poster frame with a good frame, falling in love with it all over again.

When I first saw "The Neighbours # 142" I had never been in a city. Once I moved to New York, I saw how this picture predicted my life. I also never thought to look up the artist, but now that I have—well, I haven't found him yet.  Read More 

Even though there seemed to be more people taking photographs than fighting this morning, I've yet to see one of me. However, even without documentary evidence, I can say that I completed my month(s)-long promotion to nidan (second-degree black belt) this morning. Tired, wired, amazed, grateful, humbled. So much love, so much fun.

I have been wondering for years where this picture got to. I moved a small pile this morning & it fell out. That's the writer Ray Robinson on the left. We were at the Montclair Book Fest in about 1994 or '95.

Sitting next to Berra was like leaning into a cliff. I told him I had a dream about coming to clean his house, & he mumbled that his wife wouldn't like that. Did girls have crushes on him in his heyday?  Read More 

An absorbing day of editing, creating, walking around the block, not making a doctor's appointment, buying toilet paper, reading Jude the Obscure, listening to the Staple Singers, talking on the phone for 20 minutes to a friendly woman from the insurance company who told me about her garden, sweeping & mopping my office floor, banging the dust out of the rugs, reminding people that Bonny Finberg & Murat Nemet-Nejat are reading tonight in Prose Pros, gossiping about  Read More 

Vee likes containers. She has a nice tasteful 60s house for her collections. It's funny to have known someone when they were too little to have tastes.

What I remember: Being little, 4 or 5, standing on the front porch of our stucco & brick house at 1503 S. Summit Ave in Sioux Falls, & watching a parade go by, featuring Casey Tibbs, my mother in her early 30s sighing in such a way that I understood she had a crush on him.

The truth: probably none of this, except that he was handsome. Why would there have been a parade on our street? And Tibbs was from South Dakota, so he likely passed through town regularly. Maybe we saw him once at the airport?

Here's more: He was born in 1929, 50 miles northwest of Fort Pierre, South Dakota, in a log cabin on the family homestead on the Cheyenne River. He won six world saddle bronco riding championships in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, a record. He won the association's all-around cowboy title twice and also won one bareback bronco riding championship. For many years, Tibbs wrote a syndicated newspaper column, "Let'er Buck," for Rodeo Sports News. He also did stunt work in television and the movies.

From his website: "Casey has been described as being to rodeo what Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were to baseball, what Jack Dempsey and Muhammad Ali were to boxing and what Red Grange was to football." More soberly, the NYT obituary wrote: "Because of his flamboyant personal style, which included purple Cadillacs and a flashy wardrobe, Mr. Tibbs was often credited with bringing professional rodeo to national attention."

He died in 1990 and is buried in Fort Pierre, home of the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center.

P.s.: My mother says in fact she didn't like him because she once saw his (very beautiful) wife crying at the airport & her mother saying, Don't worry, he won't do it in public. But maybe he did something at Augustana & we did see him on Summit, she added, although a parade was more likely on Phillips.