Elinor Nauen

How did I used to work dozens of hours a week AND do a million other things? Now, if I have two hours of editing work, I'm done in for the day & surrounding day. I feel like I do a lot: classes at the gym, readings, long phone visits, writing, reading but not compared to when I was 30. Somehow time has fewer hours now that most of the hours are my own. 

One of my favorite poets turns 100 today. The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate and the New School are celebrating his life and work on Monday, March 17, 7-9, at the New School Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street. 

Koch, who taught at The New School from 1958 to 1966, was a poet, teacher, playwright, fiction writer, collaborator with artists, and a major poet of New York. Participants include Jim Jarmusch, Lucy Sante, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, Ron Padgett, Charles North, Tony Towle, and more. 

A great night! Put it on your calendar! 

If I summarized the last 10 years of Johnny's health, you would gasp & ask how he could possibly be still alive. If I summarized the last 3-4 years of events in my emotional life, you would wonder how it is I'm not on heavy psych drugs. It's not worse for me than lots of others, of course, & there's been lots of fantastic stuff, etc etc, but even though I can't help running a list of my troubles, I suddenly feel fine. I don't know how it works that sooner or later I can shake off my sorrows & feel like my real (optimistic) self but it happened this week. Am I like those weighted dolls that you can bat around but ends upright? It's said that no matter what happens we end up in our normal state. The hopers gonna hope, the curmudgeons gonna curmudge. I'm happy that my natural state is happy. 

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
~ Adlai Stevenson

And where you don't have to try to figure out how & when to be brave. 

My wonderful gym has classes aimed at older people. I usually take several a week. I thought I would try "Life Barre Fusion," my first Sunday class. It was hard! Turns out I hadn't noticed it wasn't an Arora (old folks) class. I did notice a lot of young people in the class, but assumed they were allowed to take our classes. I looked at my watch & we were only 20 minutes in: could I survive another 25 minutes? But I'd forgotten what time the class started & we were actually almost to the end. I'm glad I went, although I would never have gone knowingly, & if I can walk tomorrow, I'll consider taking it again. 

I'm full of useful info this week. The Resistance Reader is a great source of practical, strategic articles on many topics. It addresses my question of how to proceed, bravely. 

I've done the training & will soon start volunteering in a program that helps new immigrants improve their English language skills by means of conversation. I think it will be fun & right now feels like something useful without being fraught. "English in Action" is part of the English-Speaking Union, a huhdred-year-old organization that also sponsors speakers and a Shakespeare contest, among other activities. 

4 good readings last night at the Bowery. Very bold to have 4 men poets on the bill: Joel Lewis, Mitch Highfill, Mike DeCapite, Edmund Berrigan read, in that order. Each different & well-prepared. Joel read about his upbringing as a jazz fan, Mitch riffed on Emily Dickinson, Mike read a moving story ~ how he loves New York City! & June!, and Eddie's works were compact, witty, & wise. The series, in its second year, continues to attract & create a community. 

In many ways, a perfect day, because what I like to do on my birthday is have a long soak, in part while yakking on the phone ("Are you in the BATH?!") then enjoy all the messages from every corner of my life, starting with a friend from kindergarten. Lunch at Mogador with my beloved & tonight, poetry at the Bowery. This is as good as the parties I used to throw. 

Our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice.

~ Upton Sinclair

It's easy to see the cowardice of Republican senators like Collins & Murkowski but less easy to see exactly what any of us not in a position of power can & should do. Rush the barricades & be taken out in the first wave? (I hope I'm speaking symbolically.) How many opportunities for bravery are any of us going to have? I'm not even sure what the right questions are. 

In 1971, we had a 1970 dayglo calendar of a carrot on the wall of The House in Maryland where most of us were in the Air Force (or the Air Farce as we called it) or part of a larger group that had managed to find each other & share values, goals, ideals, and LSD. Those of us who were really there are always there. We wrote phone numbers & sayings & reminders on the carrot calendar. An artefact of the time: "Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope" was one of the witticisms. I ended up with the carrot & eventually sent it to Teresa, who has it framed in her house in Cuenca, Ecuador, where she has lived for the last dozen or so years. (She gave me Sam's AF shirt, still after all those years only a little ragged around the cuffs.) Every Thursday Steve in SC makes a flower arrangement & tags whoever is having a birthday that week. For the last many years he has included a carrot in my birthday arrangement. People always love it, speculate on the meaning, "unique" is a common descriptor, a sign of spring. We know it as a symbol of our lifelong love & friendship & fellowship of The House. 

Ah all that flying caught me in the lungs. No sleep: instead I KOFF. 

I plan to be coherent tomorrow. 

Or soon.

For a long time I knew all the neighbors in my 16-apartment building: their names, occupations, hometowns. Then apartments began to turn over faster, and less-friendly young people moved in, generally to renovated spaces where they were paying 3 or 4 times the rent of the long-timers. I suppose they didn't have time to socialize when they had to work 2 jobs to pay for a place with a real bathroom, rather than a tub in the kitchen like I have.

Yesterday, my neighbor told me she had let the police in to do a wellness check on a nanny, except the guy in that place isn't, & is fine, & I realized which apartment they must have meant (if they had the right building at all). And I realized that I once again know most of my neighbors, at least by sight & to nod to. I believe the next few years have to be about community, standing up for & protecting each other. Knowing who's in the Ezra Pound: it's a start. 

Promise the weak strength and have the strength of a thousand weak at your bidding.

~ William Carlos Williams, from "Red Eric," In the American Grain

I'm more interested in moving forward than parsing how we got here but because it's my main man, WCW, saying it, & a hundred years ago at that (In the American Grain was published in 1925), I'll lay it here. He certainly didn't mean to be congratulating anyone for being strong, but analyzing "weaklings holding together to appear strong" and how hard it is to be alone. 

That beautiful South Dakota sky and a historic church in a place where my friend Nils had generations of relatives. I'm grateful I could be there for his funeral, despite how sad & wrenching it was and is. Most of all grateful to be there with old friends, all of whom go back to 7th grade and one who was in my second-grade class. We all marvel & rejoice that we've stayed connected all this time. It was worth traveling 20 our of 40 hours to be there & be home the next night. 

I was giving my health history & she asked if I drank coffee. Yes! When did I start? I knew the answer: as a hitchhiker, people often offered to buy you a cup of coffee & it would have been rude not to accept. I guess it made the transactional ride become more like a favor. I didn't drink coffee until the, but that was when I began to. Occasionally, a driver would buy me a sandwich or, memorably, a fantastic Italian lunch in Worcester, Massachusetts, but usually it was coffee.

That memory is locked in! she said. 

This morning I have an appointment on the Upper West Side. Tomorrow I'm flying to Sioux Falls. Going uptown feels more adventurous. I don't think I ever go up there without looking at a map. Where is Amsterdam Ave in relation to Broadway or Columbus (is that even the name of the street)? What a hick I am! Whereas, LaGuardia Airport is a familiar destination & then I don't have to look at any map at all. I will deplane in my hometown & someone I have known most of my life will pick me up. I didn't always like the coziness of being from somewhere, a small hometown at that, but I do now, from so far away & long ago. 

Update: I got off the train at 72 St, what turned out to be 2 short blocks away from where I was going, and spent 20 minutes circling around trying to find the address. 

Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic is a wonderful account of the author's relationship with his father and with the classics. It made me long for the pleasures and difficulties of ancient Greek, and also has taught me a lot about Homer and his work. 

Even an indifferent OK bad cook ought to be able to make a decent plate of pasta. You would think. Even Johnny, the most unfussy eater, picks at what I make. It was full of vegetables! it had sauce! And "that stuff" (Parmesan)! Well, at least I won't be cooking again until March. 

Shouldn't you know this? 

~ Miss Ellen Skaff (1912-97), Latin teacher at Washington High School, Sioux Falls. South Dakota

in honor of her & her devoted student & my friend since junior high, Nils Grossman (1951-2025)

She also frequently told us that we have an advantage because of studying Latin, which turned out to be totally true. 

What a star! Check out Lucy Sante's shout-out in the NYT Book Review on January 30 (if the link doesn't work). BrokeDown Palace is a great book, Maggie's account of being a paramedic in Times Square in the '80s & much more: a mystery in which she tracks down remnants of the dismantled hospital, a biography of Mother Alice, the nun who set up the first AIDS ward in New York, and in general life in this city when it was at its craziest.