Elinor Nauen

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 They almost rescinded our prize when we went to pick it up & casually mentioned we had repurposed an old pimp joke.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A quarter of a million people unsubscribed from the Bezos-owned WaPo when the newspaper rescinded a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.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. 

Whaddaya know, it wasn't jetlag but a cold. SO dry on the plane, I'm not surprised. But I am suffering. Hello & goodbye.

Yesterday was smooth sailing but today it's hitting me hard. Good thing I haven't had to do anything that require me to be more than present. As you can guess, I'm back in NYC after the most wonderful trip of my life, to Finland & Swedish Lapland. 

Wednesday, November 8th, 1893

Here I sit in the still winter night on the drifting ice-floe, and see only stars above me. Far off I see the threads of life twisting themselves into the intricate web which stretches unbroken from life's sweet morning dawn to the eternal death-stillness of ice. Thought follows thought—you pick the whole to pieces, and it seems so small—but high above all towers one form … Why did you take this voyage? … Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill? My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of wind. Build up the most ingenious theories and you may be sure of one thing—that fact will defy them all. Was I so very sure? Yes, at times; but that was self-deception, intoxication. A secret doubt lurked behind all the reasoning. It seemed as though the longer I defended my theory, the nearer I came to doubting it. But no, there is not getting over the evidence of that Siberian drift-wood. But if, after all, we are on the wrong track, what then? Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity?
~ Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930)

Farthest North: The Incredible Three-Year Voyage to the Frozen Latitudes of the North

Nansen was a Norwegian scientist, diplomat, Arctic explorer, & humanitarian, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of refugees and people displaced by World War I. His "Nansen passport" for stateless persons was recognized by more than 50 countries.

I'm just back from the snowy stretches of Swedish Lapland and am choosing a Nansen quote today in order to keep feeling that lovely cold & seeing the miles of snowy firs & birches. 

Dog sled (didn't fall off) 
Ice buggy (egged on the staff kid, who tipped over; helped push it back up)

Snowmobile (tipped over when a different staff kid was driving; helped push it back up) 

I love it here way above the Arctic Circle. I loved driving an ice buggy, though it wasn't exacty a nature experience. I floored it & hit the piled up snow & ice along the sides a bunch but it's kind of like bumper cars - I immediately got pushed back onto the track. I like the others on this trip a lot. This is shorthand again because it's late. Somehow the day flies by. 

Now that I'm up north in Lapland I can say: Of all the wonderful experiences I have had, this is high on the list of one I would have regretted not doing. 

First & foremost, plenty of snow. Then the thrilling sweep of the aurora borealis. Driving a dog sled (which is a lot of work - you're standing on the brake a LOT), Snowshoeing. The very nice folks in our group, including Esther from Holland who had trained as a seafarer, which was so charming that I had no intention of telling her the word was sailor. 

More to say but it's time for the lecture in the Brown Bear Lounge. 

To have another language is to possess a second soul. 

~ Charlemagne

That second language is not going to be Finnish. Hello from Helsinki, where I can get by in Swedish as far as reading menus, as Swedish is a second tongue here, but Finnish has so far not a single word that relates to any that I know. I knew that about Finnish, that it's related only to Hungarian, but now that I'm listening to people speaking, it is more strange than I expected. It does have a Scandinavian lilt. I've learned a couple words so I can be polite, but jet lag has eaten them up, I suspect.

Greetings from Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, where we have a layover before our flight to Helsinki. I must have slept on the plane because I feel pretty normal right now. Can't wait to see the snow. And a whole new city & country.