Elinor Nauen

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.

Precipitate is a 1528 word that means hurl headlong, probably related to precipice via Latin. Precipitation is 50 years older—the act of casting down. It took till the mid 1600s for precipitous to make its appearance.

We fling ourselves recklessly into the joy of snow.

I remember something I don't like about snow, and that is when businesses don't bother to clear it away; eventually—predictably!—the snow turns to slush turns to bumpy, slippy, dangerous ice. The worst offender near me is the Rite-Aid on my corner. They usually manage to clear in front of their store on First Avenue but neglect the long 5th Street sidewalk.

I've been trying to get them to be responsible about it for years. Sometimes they lie: It's not our responsibility (wrong); no one told us (no one told you you're not two-dimensional? no one told you if you're on a corner you have two sidewalks?)  Read More 

It's kind of hard to think abstractly when it's actually falling. So often in the city we don't get snow till January, so I'm optimistic that I'm going to be happy this whole season. It wasn't a lot today, & it's stopped for the time being, but who knows? I might be happy again this very afternoon. It doesn't take much.

I mean, I could move to Churchill, Manitoba, or to Buffalo or back to Sioux Falls. New York's got more than snow so I guess it's not the only thing I care about.

That picture's a little underwhelming, isn't it? How come it can snow all day & that's all there is?

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Seeing that Joan Fontaine died (at 96) made me think of the lifetime estrangement between her & her sister Olivia de Havilland (who is still alive, at age 97). Are famous sisters more likely to be estranged than famous brothers or siblings of different sexes? Dear Abby & Ann Landers. A.S. Byatt & Margaret Drabble. Is it because these three pairs were all in the same profession?

Eric & Julia Roberts come up as a brother-sister pair, and Ray & Dave Davies.

Sibling rivalry is as old as the hills: Cain & Abel, the world's first siblings! Shakespeare, of course, nailed it: King Lear's daughters, Taming of the Shrew, all those kings in all those plays.

But there doesn't have to be an empire (or an Oscar) at stake: any woman who's not an only child can probably tell you that the sister bond is maybe the strongest & at times most maddening relationship you can have.