Elinor Nauen

A pleasure to start my day somewhere other than the 3 blocks between house & office. My sister & her 12-year-old are in town, she for work, he on spring break to go to an architecture camp. They are staying nearby & we walked to LaGuardia & 3rd to where the American Institute of Architects has a gallery and work rooms, & where Henry is going to learn architecture-by-computer (I can't do better than that).

We went by the Chaim Gross Foundation, also on LaGuardia Place, & I remembered waiting for an elevator somewhere in Soho a few years ago & falling into conversation with this wonderful kooky woman who turned out to be his daughter & Red Grooms' ex-wife, Mimi Gross, & have been intending for ages to go see his art there.

Last night two guys at the next table at Mogador were speaking a Germanic-Scandinavian language that we correctly guessed was Danish, even though I've never heard Danish spoken (as far as I know); the AIA has an exhibit of Danish green building techniques & my sister speculated that the two guys were here for that; she might be right as the opening was just a couple of days ago.

I walked back to the East Village along 4th St & remembered my very first stop in New York, Café Dante, & my first apartment, on Thompson St (for 6 weeks). You never think anything is for the last time. I didn't ever think: this is the last time I'll ever hitchhike or see this friend, & after a while, you read those affectionate letters & can't recall who that person is. Maybe I'll go west again.

At synagogue yesterday, I sat in the balcony. Two boys were playing cards & I said, Do you want to learn a game?

One said no, the other beamed Yes!

I taught him the GGoBB® (aka the Great Game of Bingelbumpf™). He loved it, and even contributed an appropriately elaborate new rule, to which  Read More 

My sister Varda had the artist Sally Mara Sturman make this bowl for my birthday last year. You can't see that around the inside it says "The Great Game of Bingelbumpf," which is a card game Vee & I invented 15 or 20 years ago. There are endless rules (which are printed on the outside of the bowl). These madden most people. The only four people to ever play Bingelbumpf willingly even eagerly are me, Vee, our sister Lindsay, & our brother Charlie. Others (et tu, Lara?) bizarrely claim that we make things up as we go along, which only seems to be the case because we can't remember all the rules from game to game. What the hell was Fujitsu Fujitsu Fujitsu? Tim Wiles remembers it as the central rule, but we have lost it altogether.

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A fun thing in Sioux Falls was to go to the airport, Joe Foss Field (named after the WWII flying ace, American Football League commissioner, former governor, and possibly South Dakota’s most famous native son), and watch the plane take off or land. I’d say planes, but it wasn’t exactly a  Read More