A ballet was obligatory in Act II of operas produced at the Paris Opera House in the 19th century, so that wealthy members of the Jockey Club could eat a leisurely dinner then arrive in time to see their mistresses dance. Wagner's Tännhauser was a flop in because he didn't write in a dance.
I'm shyly taking promotion this weekend to 4th degree black belt. Shy because it's a big step & I don't entirely believe that I'm qualified. All I do is practice practice practice. I'll be glad when this is finished & glad to have really learned & polished my material but it's consumed my time & attention for the last many weeks. I'm amazed I've done anything else. Maybe I haven't.
This was in Jeff Wright's Cover magazine in November of 1987. I sort of remember it but I would have probably guessed that the lines I recall were all in different poems. Is it my style? Was that my style in the '80s? Ice palace, huh ~ that's not a later obsession, apparently. Was there something secret about Johnny in that poem? Your guess is as good as mine.
More on the theme of haircuts. Basically, our moms cut our bangs at the very top of our foreheads, let them grow & whacked them again. My mom had better things to do & only cut mine when they covered my eyes. The good fortune in that is that I look good in this photo. No one who knows me takes more than 30 seconds to find me in this photo so I won't point me out.
I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
~ Basketball great Michael Jordan on putting in the work
It's funny when a photo you don't remember evokes what you believe about your past. That I was always a reader. That I really did grow up in Leave It to Beaversville. That I have always owned a similar shirt ~ that my tastes were fixed early on.
I believe the other girl is named K/Cathy Koons (sp) & lived next door to us. Despite my pretty sensational haircut, at one point around this time, I took it into my head (haha) to cut my own hair. My mother was so furious that I immediately & cravenly blamed C/Kathy. I don't remember if there were Consequences. Many years later ~ I mean, maybe 5 years ago ~ I finally told my mother the truth. The little girl she had blamed & badmouthed for decades was in fact not the culprit. She rejected it utterly. K/Cathy had ruined my 6-year-old looks & would forever be the villain of my childhood. C/Kathy, wherever you are, I'm sorry!
OK I'm not really hopeful. Instead, I'm reading a book called Northeaster about a blizzard that took place in Maine (on the day I was born! That was coincidental but adds to my pleasure). I know streets & lakes & roads that are mentioned. It made me intensely homesick for a minute, although not so much for Maine as for being 20 & footloose, with everything still to come. I'm happy to have met my friends & lived my life, happy to be me now, but there's some sorrow in having so much of it behind me.
An hour after I wrote this, I ran across this quote from Dag Hammarskjold: Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either...Your duty, your reward—your destiny—are here and now.
Some things that weigh 10,000 pounds:
* A southern elephant seal, the world's largest carnivore.
* The African elephant.
* Many types of RV, trailers, and mobile homes.
* Certain construction vehicles such as bulldozers.
It's officially spring, in fact it has been for a couple of days. I guess I can't remain in denial about that. However, it has snowed in NYC in April quite a few times, although the latest date, April 25, which saw 3", was in 1875.
For some reason it makes me think of in the '60s when my mom (& many others) had a garden. All the moms grew potatoes & sometimes carrots. That's it. Potatoes & carrots. One, potatoes were the cheapest thing you could buy. Two, they always got pulled up way too early because no one knew how to anticipate a harvest.
Soon after I moved to NYC I saw a huge bug in my apartment. It freaked me out so much I called a neighbor, (half-)hysterical ("half" for dignity's sake), who was disgusted that I got so exercised over a waterbug, something I'd never seen before. Not long after that, I had a mouse & found myself, without expecting it, standing on a chair like a lady in a cartoon. Since then I've gotten inured & when I had rats recently, all I did was yell at them. Only when they didn't cower & bolt did I call the exterminator. OK, they definitely made me jumpy but I was willing to live & let live, except they came out all day long. I guess I'm a New Yorker now.
World Within World is Stephen Spender's autobiography, republished after David Leavitt plagiarized from it in a 1994 novel, When England Slept. He wrote it at age 40 & looked back to his youth as though it had been a half century earlier. People got older faster then! He says he was too shy to take advantage of offered friendship from the likes of T.S. Eliot & Virginia Woolf, but he seems to have run in those crowds early on, perhaps as Auden's mentee from their college days. His explanations about poetry & schools are incisive & convincing.
I wanted to read this book because of his poem about the Spanish Civil War, "Port Bou," a rare war poem that admits to fear:
I tell myself the shooting is only for practice,
And my body seems a cloth which the machine-gun stitches
Like a sewing machine, neatly, with cotton from a reel,
And the solitary, irregular, thin 'paffs' from the carbines
Draw on long needles white threads through my navel.
There's a part II to this silly note where I discover she's borrowed "baby sizzers from empty mayonnaise jar disguised as desk accessory" and signed
"I am so abused! I am so oppressed" I remain,
Upstairs."
We amused ourselves endlessly & still do. It's good to have a good friend
Upstairs
I love her work. Far beyond loving her because she was my favorite novelist's last wife. I may have become a Biala collector. The one on the right we bought yesterday.
Why does this image exist? I knew a guy who always called me The Inor. And a Chicago friend who pretends that the El is named after me. My name has so many variants. I've been called El, Ellie, Nor, Nora, Noriega, NorNau, ElinWhore, Igor, Ike. People continue to come up with variants. I guess in books Elinor (Eleanor) is the fussy maiden aunt. As opposed to sparkling Auntie Mame or Aunt Wanda. I spent my childhood idly wishing I was Debbie or Sue or Becky, like most of the girls I grew up, but now I like my name & its elegant Welsh spelling.
I always forget how blue & bright the early morning air is, even in New York City. I guess I should know that perfectly well from Edward Hopper but it's a surprise every time. I don't often get out at 7 & if I do, until this week 7 was well past dawn. It's not exactly the post-blizzard morning I've been longing for but at least it means I can do outdoor karate today.
A little white rain for a moment & it's back to sad waiting.
Well, happy Pi(e) day.
Stephen Crane: A critical biography by John Berryman was first published in 1950. It's much briefer than Paul Auster's bio of Crane that I read last year, and was written when some of the principals were still alive or recently dead. There's a strange & Freudian final section, "The Color of This Soul," that was hard to get through but otherwise Berryman is suggestive & illuminating on the work, giving lots of room to the poetry.
Today I saw this possibly flowering cherry but flowering SOMETHING in Tompkins Square Park & I saw forsythia almost out on the way home. The day my dad died, I kept thinking an exception would be made, it was so unlikely & wrong. I feel similarly about our snow-less winter.
I've taken an interest in this wonderful collaboration between Joe Brainard & Frank O'Hara. Isn't it terrific? Lately these poets & others long dead have been filling up my life, due to renewed interest, new books & interviews, & the like. This is one of my favorite Brainards. Not much more to say except: Enjoy.
I live in a classic tenement apartment, meaning the tub's in the kitchen & the toilet was once in the hall. When I moved in, in 1977, I was shown several empty apartments, one where the toilet was still in the hall. Even though I'd moved to New York only two months before from a cabin in Maine with an outhouse & without running water, I couldn't see dressing every time I needed to pee.
I also often explain that I live in a two-room studio. I've been reading John Berryman's biography of Stephen Crane, & he describes in some detail various buildings of artists where Crane lived or crashed. It got me interested in studios.
According to Charlotte Beach in Hunker, "studios were originally occupied by rich artists from wealthy families in the late 1800s. They were dubbed 'studios' because their creative inhabitants not only lived in them, but they also made their art on site, much like in an art studio." The Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, built in 1857, is accepted as the first-ever studio apartment building.
However, Beach adds, "The studio apartment's fall from grace came through a sneaky tactic from the real estate field," when it began to use the term for one-room apartments (like mine) that were nothing like the original light-filled, high-ceilinged studios. Before that, it would have been called (if not a tenement, an "efficiency" & I probably wouldn't be nearly so chipper about it. An efficiency sounds like it's for career girls before they get married. A studio is for ARTISTS.
Now "studio" is the accepted designation for any small apartment & those olden-days studios pretty much don't exist. The Tenth Street Studio Building was torn down in 1955, & the last residents of the 170 studios above Carnegie Hall left (were forced out) by 2010.
Buster was the most accommodating soul I've ever known. He never complained, no matter what charming indignities we came up with. I still love & miss him every days. Yesterday's post & photo left a slightly unpleasant taste in my mouth & so today I'm showing the purest being I've ever known.
This caught my eye & I stopped to take a photo. It seemed deliberately provocative & there was a little too much of the border graffiti. So who is Rick Owens? A fashion designer & that's all I need to know. I hate that kind of fake-authentic advertising.
Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me is sensationally good. I'm impressed by her honesty and depth in talking about her father (poet & New Yorker art critic, the late Peter Schjeldahl), poetry, growing up in New York City. That she works hard to be fair & figure things out. The book is about writing this book and also about not writing the book she set out to. I admire that her scaffolding is showing; like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, all the pipes are visible. For example, she tells us exactly how much she paid to quote half a dozen lines of a poem of Auden's. And it works. It all works.
Weirdly, I don't remember taking this picture or even where it is exactly. Manhattan, because there's the Chrysler building. How many moments in one's life become opaque & mysterious as soon as they happen? How many times to I go in the other room for ... something. Paying attention or not, we lose so much. Not everything, but plenty.
Double Trundle
Hear that lonesome whistle blow
And the cowboy who loved you so true
That's a devil not a man
That's the difference between god & me
I'm crazy for crying & crazy for trying & crazy for lying & crazy for spying & crazy
Hmmm. Found this in a batch of old poems. I do kinda sorta remember it but pretty sure I never published it. Because I lost it or because it's not any good? Both? Let us ponder. I'm too scatterbrained at this exact moment to know.
This is on the southeast corner of 3rd Ave & 13th Street, on the Kiehl's building. It reminds me again of that very good book I read last summer, The Island at the Center of the World, about Dutch Manhattan (New Amsterdam) and how we live on top of and next to so much history.
Close to Whitman when I walk down to the East River, sky & bridges that he knew, or at least the Brooklyn; the Williamsburg Bridge (on the left here, looking east) wasn't built till a few years after he died. Still, it's the same sky, water, & longings.