Elinor Nauen

I'm alive! It was touch & go for the last few days, with a head that weighed 200 pounds making it hard to do much. I don't know how people with chronic ill health manage to do anything. I know I KNOW I wasn't even really sick, allergies is all, but despite being utterly bored with myself, I couldn't think about anything else. Ugh & ugh. In a few minutes, I go to celebrate Johnny's 4 score (tomorrow) with his 3 kids & most of the grandkids. He was born as much after the Civil War as it's been since the end of WWII. His birth, that is, is equidistant between now & the Civil War. I am unable to grasp the nature of Time. 

Passover is over, the Great Matzo Shortage of 2023 resolved as the holiday ended & I was given a box of the now-superfluous stuff. My near-fatal allergies are letting up. No, not melodramatic at all, why do you ask? The weather has gone from a quixotic hope for April snow to 87° & I only hope to survive a summer where July starts in April. However, it's not too humid so maybe I'll live. i've paid my taxes, taken another load to the Little Free Library, caught up on this & that. Back on Monday in full vigor! 

My post disappeared, sigh, it was barely worth writing once let alone recreating but I said that the Times had a piece today on how to tell whether it's allergies or a cold, just when I was wondering exactly that. Pretty sure it's allergies, not that I'm suffering less for knowing it. 

I took a nap & feel a smidgin more resolute. 

That's all. 

I was "political" not just because I was involved, but in feeling I must choose to defend a good cause against a bad one. Auden remarked to me at the end of the war that he was political in the 1930s just because he thought something could and should be done. On the other hand, I never felt that the writers who did not feel this obligation were wrong. They might be concerned with values beyond action which, after all. alone justify action and therefore must not be allowed to lapse. Or they might be witnesses of a fatalism and despair which were equally important truths for the human soul as the "il faut agir" [we must act] of André Malraux. Politics of a rather direct kind had become my experience, but I defended those who had other attitudes. 

~ Spender, World within World

I envied the painter's life ~ the way in which he is surrounded by the material of his art. A writer does not have a visible palette of words laid out before him into which he dips his pen, mixes them and lays them on the page. The painter can immerses himself in his work more than a writer, because painting is largely a craft, a sensuous activity with tangible material, whereas writing is largely cerebral.  

~ Ibid. 

Interesting that Spender's autobiography is not in the NYPL, but books about him are, including one by his son on growing up Spender. He's insightful on poetry & goes on rather too much psychoanalyzing himself, which is dated. I wanted to read it because of his connection to the Spanish Civil War & his poem "Port Bou." 

I forgot to say in advance that I'd be off for Pesach... which kind of snuck up on me... as all the holidays generally do... ones in the home are harder for me & this year there seems to be a matzo shortage in Manhattan. I went to at least 6 stores & no one had any. Except egg matzo, which is abominable. I'm still catching up in general from the last couple months of really bearing down. I'll be more interesting soon, I think. 

In his autobiography World within World, Stephen Spender says that the art in which you hope to excel is the one for which you are willing to take immense pains over detail. I've had that same thought ~ when I'm working on a poem, every comma is a matter of consequence, every line break worth infinite thinking & rethinking. For most that I do "good enough" is good enough but in poetry, I not only take time, I love to keep turning the poem around & around. When I was writing So Late into the Night, I kept thinking up new challenges, so that I could keep rewriting it with additional strictures in the form. 

Spring is inevitable & I'm relaxing & enjoying it. Yes, I have given up my hope (though not my longing) for snow. I sat outside in the sun this afternoon, watching people go by in t-shirts, brightening like the forsythia to the sweet sounds of helicopters welcoming a future felon to his indictment on 34 felony counts. A lovely day! 

Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.

~ Audre Lorde (my birthday twin)

Transitioning back from karate all day every day to where I live, the architecture of my life.

A ballet was obligatory in Act II of operas produced at the Paris Opera House in the 19th century, so that wealthy members of the Jockey Club could eat a leisurely dinner then arrive in time to see their mistresses dance. Wagner's Tännhauser was a flop in because he didn't write in a dance. 

I'm shyly taking promotion this weekend to 4th degree black belt. Shy because it's a big step & I don't entirely believe that I'm qualified. All I do is practice practice practice. I'll be glad when this is finished & glad to have really learned & polished my material but it's consumed my time & attention for the last many weeks. I'm amazed I've done anything else. Maybe I haven't.

This was in Jeff Wright's Cover magazine in November of 1987. I sort of remember it but I would have probably guessed that the lines I recall were all in different poems. Is it my style? Was that my style in the '80s? Ice palace, huh ~ that's not a later obsession, apparently. Was there something secret about Johnny in that poem? Your guess is as good as mine.

More on the theme of haircuts. Basically, our moms cut our bangs at the very top of our foreheads, let them grow & whacked them again. My mom had better things to do & only cut mine when they covered my eyes. The good fortune in that is that I look good in this photo. No one who knows me takes more than 30 seconds to find me in this photo so I won't point me out. 

I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. 

~ Basketball great Michael Jordan on putting in the work

It's funny when a photo you don't remember evokes what you believe about your past. That I was always a reader. That I really did grow up in Leave It to Beaversville. That I have always owned a similar shirt ~ that my tastes were fixed early on. 

I believe the other girl is named K/Cathy Koons (sp) & lived next door to us. Despite my pretty sensational haircut, at one point around this time, I took it into my head (haha) to cut my own hair. My mother was so furious that I immediately & cravenly blamed C/Kathy. I don't remember if there were Consequences. Many years later ~ I mean, maybe 5 years ago ~ I finally told my mother the truth. The little girl she had blamed & badmouthed for decades was in fact not the culprit. She rejected it utterly. K/Cathy had ruined my 6-year-old looks & would forever be the villain of my childhood. C/Kathy, wherever you are, I'm sorry! 

OK I'm not really hopeful. Instead, I'm reading a book called Northeaster about a blizzard that took place in Maine (on the day I was born! That was coincidental but adds to my pleasure). I know streets & lakes & roads that are mentioned. It made me intensely homesick for a minute, although not so much for Maine as for being 20 & footloose, with everything still to come. I'm happy to have met my friends & lived my life, happy to be me now, but there's some sorrow in having so much of it behind me. 

An hour after I wrote this, I ran across this quote from Dag Hammarskjold: Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either...Your duty, your reward—your destiny—are here and now.

Some things that weigh 10,000 pounds: 

* A southern elephant seal, the world's largest carnivore.

* The African elephant.

* Many types of RV, trailers, and mobile homes.

* Certain construction vehicles such as bulldozers.

It's officially spring, in fact it has been for a couple of days. I guess I can't remain in denial about that. However, it has snowed in NYC in April quite a few times, although the latest date, April 25, which saw 3", was in 1875. 

For some reason it makes me think of in the '60s when my mom (& many others) had a garden. All the moms grew potatoes & sometimes carrots. That's it. Potatoes & carrots. One, potatoes were the cheapest thing you could buy. Two, they always got pulled up way too early because no one knew how to anticipate a harvest.

Soon after I moved to NYC I saw a huge bug in my apartment. It freaked me out so much I called a neighbor, (half-)hysterical ("half" for dignity's sake), who was disgusted that I got so exercised over a waterbug, something I'd never seen before. Not long after that, I had a mouse & found myself, without expecting it, standing on a chair like a lady in a cartoon. Since then I've gotten inured & when I had rats recently, all I did was yell at them. Only when they didn't cower & bolt did I call the exterminator. OK, they definitely made me jumpy but I was willing to live & let live, except they came out all day long. I guess I'm a New Yorker now. 

World Within World is Stephen Spender's autobiography, republished after David Leavitt plagiarized from it in a 1994 novel, When England Slept. He wrote it at age 40 & looked back to his youth as though it had been a half century earlier. People got older faster then! He says he was too shy to take advantage of offered friendship from the likes of T.S. Eliot & Virginia Woolf, but he seems to have run in those crowds early on, perhaps as Auden's mentee from their college days. His explanations about poetry & schools are incisive & convincing. 

I wanted to read this book because of his poem about the Spanish Civil War, "Port Bou," a rare war poem that admits to fear:

I tell myself the shooting is only for practice,
And my body seems a cloth which the machine-gun stitches
Like a sewing machine, neatly, with cotton from a reel,
And the solitary, irregular, thin 'paffs' from the carbines
Draw on long needles white threads through my navel.

There's a part II to this silly note where I discover she's borrowed "baby sizzers from empty mayonnaise jar disguised as desk accessory" and signed

"I am so abused! I am so oppressed" I remain,

Upstairs."

We amused ourselves endlessly & still do. It's good to have a good friend

Upstairs

I love her work. Far beyond loving her because she was my favorite novelist's last wife. I may have become a Biala collector. The one on the right we bought yesterday. 

Why does this image exist? I knew a guy who always called me The Inor. And a Chicago friend who pretends that the El is named after me. My name has so many variants. I've been called El, Ellie, Nor, Nora, Noriega, NorNau, ElinWhore, Igor, Ike. People continue to come up with variants. I guess in books Elinor (Eleanor) is the fussy maiden aunt. As opposed to sparkling Auntie Mame or Aunt Wanda. I spent my childhood idly wishing I was Debbie or Sue or Becky, like most of the girls I grew up, but now I like my name & its elegant Welsh spelling. 

I always forget how blue & bright the early morning air is, even in New York City. I guess I should know that perfectly well from Edward Hopper but it's a surprise every time. I don't often get out at 7 & if I do, until this week 7 was well past dawn. It's not exactly the post-blizzard morning I've been longing for but at least it means I can do outdoor karate today. 

A little white rain for a moment & it's back to sad waiting. 

Well, happy Pi(e) day. 

Stephen Crane: A critical biography by John Berryman was first published in 1950. It's much briefer than Paul Auster's bio of Crane that I read last year, and was written when some of the principals were still alive or recently dead. There's a strange & Freudian final section, "The Color of This Soul," that was hard to get through but otherwise Berryman is suggestive & illuminating on the work, giving lots of room to the poetry. 

Today I saw this possibly flowering cherry but flowering SOMETHING in Tompkins Square Park & I saw forsythia almost out on the way home. The day my dad died, I kept thinking an exception would be made, it was so unlikely & wrong. I feel similarly about our snow-less winter. 

I've taken an interest in this wonderful collaboration between Joe Brainard & Frank O'Hara. Isn't it terrific? Lately these poets & others long dead have been filling up my life, due to renewed interest, new books & interviews, & the like. This is one of my favorite Brainards. Not much more to say except: Enjoy.

I live in a classic tenement apartment, meaning the tub's in the kitchen & the toilet was once in the hall. When I moved in, in 1977, I was shown several empty apartments, one where the toilet was still in the hall. Even though I'd moved to New York only two months before from a cabin in Maine with an outhouse & without running water, I couldn't see dressing every time I needed to pee. 

I also often explain that I live in a two-room studio. I've been reading John Berryman's biography of Stephen Crane, & he describes in some detail various buildings of artists where Crane lived or crashed. It got me interested in studios. 

According to Charlotte Beach in Hunker, "studios were originally occupied by rich artists from wealthy families in the late 1800s. They were dubbed 'studios' because their creative inhabitants not only lived in them, but they also made their art on site, much like in an art studio." The Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, built in 1857, is accepted as the first-ever studio apartment building. 

However, Beach adds, "The studio apartment's fall from grace came through a sneaky tactic from the real estate field," when it began to use the term for one-room apartments (like mine) that were nothing like the original light-filled, high-ceilinged studios. Before that, it would have been called (if not a tenement, an "efficiency" & I probably wouldn't be nearly so chipper about it. An efficiency sounds like it's for career girls before they get married. A studio is for ARTISTS. 

Now "studio" is the accepted designation for any small apartment & those olden-days studios pretty much don't exist. The Tenth Street Studio Building was torn down in 1955, & the last residents of the 170 studios above Carnegie Hall left (were forced out) by 2010. 

Buster was the most accommodating soul I've ever known. He never complained, no matter what charming indignities we came up with. I still love & miss him every days. Yesterday's post & photo left a slightly unpleasant taste in my mouth & so today I'm showing the purest being I've ever known. 

This caught my eye & I stopped to take a photo. It seemed deliberately provocative & there was a little too much of the border graffiti. So who is Rick Owens? A fashion designer & that's all I need to know. I hate that kind of fake-authentic advertising.