Elinor Nauen

Snow predicted today for southern Alabama & South Carolina, rain for New York City. What's wrong with this picture? And as someone pointed out, there's something amiss when 36° registers as a heat wave.

Weather, weather. Maybe it's not the all-consuming interest for me that it is for a couple of my friends. I can't remember from day to day what yesterday was like, & I'm not much interested past advice on sweaters & scarves. Or maybe weather's a great hobby, since, like cloud-watching, it involves little more than paying attention whenever you think of it.

Just blew a fuse so now the heater's off in here. That's weather for ya. Read More 

Maybe the great separation is not the living & the dead, but the minding & the not minding.

For years I've said hello & nothing more to one of the elderly janitors at YAI, where I help teach karate once a week to developmentally delayed adults. I actually wasn't sure if he was YAI or not, due to his heavy accent. Last night when I was leaving, I waved & idly asked if he was enjoying the cold weather. Oh boy!  Read More 

A friend from back home ee'ed me to ask: "I know you like snow, but when is ENOUGH?!"

We only had 11" & they didn't cancel school. How could that be ENOUGH?

Now it's Day 3, & it's bugging me not to ride my bike. Maggie says the trains are horrible—infrequent, therefore crowded—so I'm mostly walking but it's harshing my mellow. Also, it's cold without much prettiness left. I like the cold when I'm outdoors, but in my office, not so much.

Friday update: My friend says the East River is frozen over off Greenpoint. "It looks like a bunch of icebergs." Read More 

This is the silver loving cup my mother won (along with 10 guineas*) for being the "bonniest baby" of 1924. She always says it meant she was the fattest baby.

The engraved text reads:

Presented by
The Rector of Walton
- to -
Alice Joyce Phillips
Bonniest Baby
July 7, 1924

That church, in Liverpool, England, was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.

* A guinea was a shilling more than a pound; in today's money her 10 guineas might be worth about $25. The silver cup is priceless.  Read More 

A birthday is just an excuse for a party in my fun-lovin' family. We are all FCs (Favorite Cousins) to each other & we know each other to a crazy extent: At the Joyce 90 celebration were a couple of 4th cousins.

AND I'm home in time for the biggest snowfall of the season. Yippie!

My mother turned 90 yesterday & a huge chunk of the U.S. side of the clan is gathering this weekend in Arizona to celebrate. Her cousin Hazel (also turning 90, in May) just flew in from Liverpool, where they both grew up. Lots of California cousins. A good time will be had by all. And no blog till Tuesday.  Read More 

I'm trying to remember why I wrote that line on my list of goals for 2014, which is in front of me on the bulletin board. Am I admitting that it's sometimes better (not to mention easier) not to be stubborn? That paying attention to how things are working out, then correcting course, isn't a bad idea? It's a good motto, if only I knew what I meant by it.  Read More 

Got up, ate a disgusting half-sandwich that was 2 days old, had a flat tire on the way to karate so I locked my bike in front of the not-yet-open bike store & ran the rest of the way & kept my perfect on-time record. You're supposed to do 10 pushups for every minute you're late to class,  Read More 

Hanging out in my studio, Becca on the phone in the other room, Eileen stopping by to grab her mail that I'd picked up while she was away, on the phone with Martha hearing about her & Baz's long (& long-ago) friendship with Baraka, deciding to pick up coffee & the cat's pills tomorrow, making a date to work on material with Sensei Michael, checking a dozen things off my to-do list, enjoying the spring-like weather especially as I'll be hopping on my bike in half an hour, looking at "January" on Willis's calendar of photos from his garden.  Read More 

January has so many of my favorite events, like the Poetry Project Marathon & this morning's official New Year's at my dojo. Everyone who can comes for an early morning workout (following all-day cleanup yesterday) & a lecture by our grandmaster, Kaicho, who announces a theme for the year. It almost always comes down to being humble & trying to improve our characters, which—as he points out frequently—is more important than kicking & punching. "Technique rather than Strength; Spirit rather than Technique."  Read More 

Kind of cool to go to the Municipal Archives, down on Chambers Street, across from the Municipal Building & City Hall. I was looking for an old photo & the whole place was nicely low-tech. You signed in, you leafed through bound volumes of hand-written records, you dug into a file cabinet of microfilm, you loaded (or in my case failed to load) it into a giant machine, someone wandered over to help you, & when you were done you put everything back & they didn't even charge for printing the photo that came out too dark to be usable. Everyone seemed vague & Barbara Pym-ish. I would like a job working there one day a week.  Read More 

Great scandal! Not icky-sexy, no complicated financial or legal shenanigans in places I've never heard of. Straight-up old-fashioned bare-knuckle politics. I don't have a horse in this race, so why take glee in Christie's misfortunes? Because he's a Republican & a bully & a crook. Because there's a smoking gun: "time for traffic problems in Fort Lee." Because thank heavens this came out before he made a serious run for President. Imagine him with even more power to retaliate: scary.

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What a good poet Linda Kittell is. I included her "What Baseball Teaches Us About Love" in my anthology of women's writings about baseball 20-odd years ago; to this day, I can't read or hear that poem without crying. We became friends through that book & have been ever since. I've visited her in Idaho, & we read together at a Baseball Hall of Fame event. At last she has a collection out, Love Reports to Spring Training, about a left-handed pitcher named Love. If she lived anywhere but rural Idaho, she'd be well-known, I have no doubt. She deserves to be.

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In the midwest they're having something called a polar vortex, which none of us (except Willis, of course) ever heard of but it's not new. It's not toasty here but there's a 30-degree difference with what we're having & what's hammering Minnesota & South Dakota.

I'm still in my jeans jacket & sneakers, as I am all winter, with earmuffs & gloves. I guess if 7°—about as cold as it ever gets in New York City—doesn't drive me to wear that fur coat, nothing will. Probably not a good idea to give it to the coat drive, right?

Update: I just found out it was actually 4° with a windchill of -16°. OK, that's cold.

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One of the best journalists around is Dave Zirin, who writes a blog called Edge of Sports. He's The Nation’s sports correspondent, which probably tells you all you need to know about what he does: which is talk about politics by talking about sports. A straight shooter & smart analyst of what's really going on. Check out www.edgeofsports.com. Read More 

Even on a cold day, it's possible to have a warm conversation with someone you didn't expect to see. One of my favorite things about New York is the networks, who knows who, and also, how interesting people are. A surprise lurks behind everyone. If this weren't a walker's city, a lot of this wouldn't work.  Read More 

Got up early, watched 2 episodes of season 3 of Treme, took a nap.

Sorry not to see the snow coming down all night (6 or 8"!) but walked in Tompkins Square Park. If you didn't look toward the 16-story Christadora & if you let your eyes glaze, it could be a hundred years ago: kids & dogs & brownstones.

The vet  Read More 

We're supposed to get quite a bit tonight, maybe 6" & blizzard conditions. Trying not to get too excited. I relish having to walk backwards when the wind is so harsh you can't breathe into it. Bison can, cows can't, which is why the former survive storms that the latter don't.

It's irresistible to want to turn over the new leaf that January 1 signifies. My best friend & I spend every New Year's Eve analyzing the year we're leaving behind & planning for the coming one. We enjoyed last night's talk so much that we decided  Read More 

I was thinking that what cocaine & money have in common is greed: The more you have, the more you want, even if you have no liking/use for them.

Another one bites the dust.

And we're still here.

Here's to art, joy, adventure, the highwire, croissants, love, & lots more.

Bad bad Buster Nauen
Fattest cat in the whole downtown

They say that being a black belt means you enough to start training. I really felt that today in Nidaime's class. His pointers were illuminating & I finally knew what to do with them. Whether or not I can demonstrate them accurately and elegantly is another story, but I no longer (after 2 years as a black belt, almost 7 years of training) feel like I'm in a foreign country. A few subjects—poetry, Judaism—have stayed interesting but karate is the first with a physical component that has continued to absorb me.

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What a pleasure to see Barbara Stanwyck & Fred MacMurray in a 1940 film called Remember the Night (but why that title?), with a screenplay by Preston Sturges. Stanwyck plays her usual smart, sexy, knowing dame, & FMacM is attractive except I guess you're cultured if you can manage not to be reminded of him as the hapless dad in My Three Sons. Fun to be at Film Forum on a sleepy Christmas. And the reason non-celebrators eat Chinese food is because nothing else is open, that's all.

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If you can't be homesick on Christmas, when can you? Like many (most? all?) Jews, I love the holiday lights, the music (although I didn't go caroling this year), eggnog, parties, the smell of fir .... uncomplicated by family melodrama. Christmas: our most perfect holiday.

Had breakfast at Donostia, a brand-new Basque restaurant on Ave B between 9th & 10th, right across from the park, where a pet food store used to be with an ugly green awning. Dunno why they are open for breakfast but we were happy (funny how many breakfast-type diners are not open in the morning). I had a tortilla, which is sort of a potato omelet, filled with leeks. We learned a lot about the area his family is from: the isolation; the language that's not like any others, which leads experts to think it might be Europe's oldest: "It has no structural relationship with the Romance languages nor with the Germanic ones"; the many hidden Jews, forced to convert 500 years ago. He only didn't know about Basque poetry.

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& counting

Johnny left at 5:30 to be at work at 6. At 7, his job called—where was he?

WHERE IS HE?

I called half an hour later: have you heard from him?

Oh, he's right here.

Put him on!
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51° isn't really putting me in the white mood.

But random facts do, like knowing that Saturn's rings are up to 99% ice. And thinking about cold things like polar bears, penguins, & ice ribbons.