Elinor Nauen

I've never had insomnia before & I have no idea why this unlovely gift has arrived, unordered & unwanted. Help! I thought once the midterms were over, I'd sleep like a baby but nope. I can't be lucid about it because my head's in a whirl. 

I love the Authors Guild & how easy they make it to have a website, but they have this crazy new system that makes using photographs unwieldy & time-consuming, which is why I haven't been including so many images of late. Many "improvements" are far from that. Planned obsolescence was a term from way back when but it applies now to technology as much as appliances. I admit I sometimes do grow to prefer what I resisted ~ for example, I was the last in my gang to get an answering machine but then it was wondrous not to have to sit at home waiting for a phone call. I hope to embrace this AG update, & others, but a big part of me wants everything to stop. 

"We Are Going to Pick Potatoes: Norway and the Holocaust, the Untold Story, by Irene Levin Berman, reminds us that there are Jews everywhere & that Hitler wanted to kill them all. There were around 2,000 Jews in Norway when WWII (Den andre verdenskrig) began, of whom around 700 died in Dachau. The author, a toddler at the time, escaped with her family to neutral Sweden. I'm glad she has told this story but it's devastating to read. 

Back in the 70s, KOFF, which I co-edited, included centerfolds of naked male poets in part because poetry magazines were boring, we proclaimed, & a naked man might enliven ours. Not much has changed except no naked poets. I've read all too many dull reviews & pointless, self-serving anecdotes, presented with line breaks. Occasionally there'll be a last line with a timid kick as if to prove that what they wrote is indeed a poem. Why? Their opinions are banal &/or inoffensive, their language has no life or magic, they seem not to have learned a single technique beyond enjambment.

 

It will cease to exist without me, so I need not exercise myself over it, except to worry that this drivel will prove what non-poets already believe, that there's nothing in it. 

 

Ah, this is such an old rant. 

 

Off to read this week's offering in Terence Winch's well-chosen Best American Poetry blog. And then a little Hesiod & a reading later this afternoon. Ever hopeful am I. 

As part of my Norwegian class, I watched Max Manus: Man of War this week. It's about a hero of the Norwegian resistance, & there's a lot of killing, but also love & friendship. On yet another Veterans Day, it's hard to think about & hard not to think about war, violence, armed struggle, unnecessary deaths of young people, Ukraine & other current conflicts. My two grandfathers fought on opposite sides in WWI & my favorite book (Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End) is about that war, with a memorable scene of the chaotic Armistice. No one is untouched by war.

Great night at the Poetry Project in celebration of Get the Money!, a just-published collection of Ted Berrigan's prose. Happy to hear the dozen or so readers with excerpts & stories, happy to hug so many people Ted mattered to. I loved Anselm saying that many of his dad's friends are now his friends, & to relish this contentious, loving community of 40, 50, 60 years. Happy that Johnny read, who of everyone there had known Ted the longest, since he was (in a poem of Ted's) "19-year-old knife fighter Johnny Stanton." Get the book!

Coulda been worse.... not a Red Wave.... The antisemite lost in PA.... Reproductive rights preserved in several states, including Kentucky. All over the country, lots of diversity: first black/out lesbian/trans/Gen Z elected etc.... That's encouraging but also surprising that there are still so many firsts of that sort. 

 

Quite a few races still undecided & Georgia's senate race goes to a runoff. 

 

Couldn't sleep & did everything I could to avoid looking at the returns till I felt ready. 

 

Could've been worse. 

Wearing my lucky (I hope) shirt. Vote early, vote often! Too nervewracking. I'd like to sleep till tomorrow but instead I signed up for a class after YAI. Hope to come home tired & calm. That's the best I can do today... 

 

Update: One person at the polls said, "I like your shirt." Disappointing. Johnny wore it later, when he went to vote, and he said when he walked in people started clapping. So! 

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

~ Samuel Johnson

 

That's as good a pre-Election Day quote as any, yeah?

Lefty's routine is to wake me up nice'n'early & make me let him out by plaintive & loud explanation of how much he NEEEEEEEEEDs to see Jojo & Harry, his friends across the hall. But since it's usually before 6 a.m., Wanda isn't up. He barrels out, cries outside her door & then drags himself home. He often waits on his scratchpad till he hears her open her door. Off like a shot with cries of gladness. 

Totally fun to go to Midtown this afternoon. First Maggie & I had lunch at a gluten-free vegan BBQ joint on Lex & 24th called Pure Grit. It was good! Ever so slightly reminiscent of my beloved meat & 3s of the South.

 

Then I walked up to the Stavros Niarchos (nee Mid-Manhattan) library for some Norwegian-language DVDs & on to a meeting with a lawyer about getting our wills prepared. (He's great, hit me up if you need a NY recommendation.)

 

Then a block to Grand Central through this casual display of public art. I guess lots of people must still be working from home, because Grand Central, at 4 on a Friday afternoon, wasn't crowded, nor were the trains. Lovely warm day, everyone chill, I'd almost forgotten the pleasures of other parts of town.

Trojan

 

And then that summer my boyfriend gave me a car.

This was amazing as I was not that kind of girl

boys made grand gestures toward, my boyfriends

were the kind of morons who liked

smart girls.

 

Dave hung his arm over my shoulder—

his stiff Swedish version of a hug—& laid me up

against the last elm on the block that hadn't succumbed to disease.

"My Mustang," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"I'm getting a Firebird," he said.

My other boyfriend Ken had a black Firebird.

We cruised up Main & down Dakota

for rubbery burgers at Teddy the Greek's drive-in

or to sneak in to the Dew Drop Inn.

 

"You can have the Mustang," Dave said.

"OK, cool," I said.

My parents would kill me so I figured he didn't mean it.

 

I called my friend Debbie whose dad let me park it 

in their field where nothing but horseradish grew

 

till I thought to tell my folks

Dave was letting me drive it

that one last summer before we blasted off to college

or the army or the moronic jobs

my boyfriends would have for the rest of their lives.

Gas was 20¢ a gallon

a dollar's worth could gallop us halfway across the prairie,

a nighttime ride to wherever we weren't supposed to go.

 

Alas the hidden treacheries—the shocks, the sparks,

the struts & timing I was heir to, what Dave wanted.

 

 

 

I'd forgotten all about this poem until I looked again at Ladies, Start Your Engines because we were watching a car race movie & I was filled with car lust. It's the kind of poem I used to write, I guess. 

Do you know the song "I've got sixpence"? I don't remember learning it but I'm pretty sure the last time I thought of it was when I lived in Maine, almost 50 years ago. I'm quite sure that it was because I was living in Maine that I always sang "I'm happy as a clam" rather than a lark. And "no pretty little girls" became "no sassy little boys." And when the song continues "rolling home..." we always responded "squares don't roll!" I just listened to Bing Crosby singing it & there's a line I don't remember ever hearing: "happy as the day when we line up for our pay" ~ I've always sung "happy as a clam believe me," which is really a line from elsewhere in the song. So there you have two things ~ the folk editing of a song that happens when a line is forgotten or misremembered & can easily become the or a standard version. More interesting to me is that it burst upon me all these decades later, without any trigger that I know of, complete in melody & words. I found myself singing it out of the blue. Where has it been all this time? I need more songs to bellow as I ride around town on my bike so I hope there are a few more lurking in whatever corner of my memory "I've got sixpence" was sleeping.

 

Come to thing of it, I probably learned it from my mom, since I see now it was a hit from 1941, when she knew all the popular songs. 

 

Here's the words:

I've got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence, I've got sixpence to last me all my life. Oh, I've got tuppence to spend, & tuppence to lend, & tuppence to send home to my wife (poor wife). / No cares have I to grieve me, no sassy little boys to deceive me, I'm happy as a clam believe me, as we go rolling rolling home. / Rolling home (squares don't roll), rolling home (squares don't roll!), by the light of the silvery moo-oo-oon. I'm happy as a clam believe me, as we go rolling rolling home. 

Next verse is fourpence & there's nothing for the wife. Then tuppence & nothing to lend or for the wife. 

 

How great is this? My Norwegian class homework is to watch a car race movie called Børning. Car race/chase films are the only kind I really like & I've already spent hours watching, backing up & trying to make out what they're saying under the vroom, looking up the songs, rewatching some of the exciting bits. I thoroughly enjoy it. I suspend my critical faculties when I see cars moving fast, even though this one's a little hard to get behind, given that no one really seems to be in a hurry. I mean, is it a race or not? But seeing fast cars is totally satisfying. I hope to have more to say (på norsk) by class tomorrow. 

Nobody will give you freedom. You have to take it.

~ Meret Oppenheim

 

She of the fur-covered cup, saucer, & spoon has a big new exhibition at MoMA, which I have yet to see.

 

Some people know almost by instinct that nothing is given. Some figure it out in time. Some never do. All I ever wanted was not to have a boss. I was like my cat fighting with every muscle against us trying to cut his pawnails. It didn't matter what I was being held down for, I couldn't stand it. I messed up plenty but have always taken responsibility for my life. No blame, ever. It's on me. 

Someone sent me these, from the early Abstract Expressionist sculptor. While they are clearly aimed at young people & some specifically at visual artists (I omitted a couple of those), a few are worthwhile challenges to anyone—artist, poet, citizen. 

 

David Smith's questions for students of art

 

1. Do you make art your life, that which always comes first and occupies every moment, the last problem before sleep and the first awaking vision?

2. Do all the things you like or do amplify and enjoin the progress of art vision and art making?

3. Are you a balanced person with many interests and diversions?

4. Do you seek the culture of many aspects, with the middle-class aspiration of being well-rounded and informed?

5. How do you spend your time? More talking about art than making it? How do you spend your money? On art materials first—or do you start to pinch here?

6. How much of the work day or the work week do you devote to your profession—that which will be your identity for life?

7. Will you be an amateur—a professional—or is it the total life?

8. Do you think the artist has an obligation to anyone but himself?

9. Do you think his contemporary position is unique or traditional?

10. Do you think art can be something it was before? Can you challenge the ancients?

11. Have you examined the echoes of childhood and first learning, which may have once given you the solutions? Are any of these expectancies still operating on your choices?

12. Do you hold with these, or have you recognized them? Have you contradicted them or have you made metaphoric transposition?

13. Do you examine and weigh the art statements of fellow artists, teachers, authorities before they become involved in your own working tenets?

14. Or do the useful ideas place themselves in a working niche of your consciousness and the others go off unheard?

15. Do you think you owe your teachers anything, or Picasso or Matisse or Brancusi or Mondrian or Kandinsky?

16. Do you think you work should be aggressive? Do you think this an attribute? Can it be developed?

17. Do you think your work should hold within tradition?

18. Do you think that your own time and now is the greatest in the history of art, or do you excuse your own lack of full devotion with the half belief that some other time would have been better for you to make art?

19. Do you recognize any points of attainment? Do they change? Is there a final goal?

20. In the secret dreams of attainment have you faced each dream for its value on your own basis, or do you harbor inherited inspirations of the bourgeoisie or those of false history or those of critics?

21. Why do you hesitate–why can you not draw objects as freely as you can write their names and speak words about them?

22. What has caused this mental block? If you can name, dream, recall vision and auras why can't you draw them? In the conscious set of drawing, who is acting in our unconscious as censor?

23. In the conceptual direction, are you aiming for the successful work? (To define success I mean the culminating point of many efforts.)

24. Do you aim for a style with a recognizable visual vocabulary?

25. Do you polish up the work beyond its bare aesthetic elements?

26. Do you add ingratiating elements beyond the raw aesthetic basis?

27. If you add ingratiating elements, where is the line which keeps the work from being your own?

28. Are you afraid of rawness, for rawness and harshness are basic forms of U.S. nature, and origins are both raw and vulgar at their time of creation?

29. Will you understand and accept yourself as the subject for creative work, or will your effort go toward adapting your expression to verbal philosophies by non-artists?

30. If you could, would you throw over the present values of harmony and tradition?

31. Do you trust your first response, or do you go back and equivocate consciously? Do you believe that the freshness of first response can be developed and sustained as a working habit?

32. Are you saddled with nature propaganda?

33. Are you afraid to exercise vision, seek surprise?

34. When you accept the identification of artist do you acknowledge that you are issuing a world challenge in your own time?

35. Are you afraid to work from your own experience without leaning on the crutches of subject and the rational?

36. Or do you think that you are unworthy or that your life has not been dramatic enough or your understanding not classic enough, or do you think that art comes from Mount Parnassus or France or from an elite level beyond you?

37. Do you assert yourself and work in sizes comparable to your physical size or your aesthetic challenge or imagination?

38. Is that size easel-size or table-size or room-size or a challenge to nature?

39. Do you think museums are your friend and do you think they will be interested in your work?

40. Do you think you will ever make a living from museums?

41. Do you think commercial art, architectural art, religious art offer any solution in the maturing of your concepts?

42. How long will you work before you work with the confidence which says, "What I do is art"?

43. Do you ever feel that you don't know where to go in your work, that the challenge is beyond immediate solution?

44. Do you think acclaim can help you? Can you trust it, for you know in your secret self how far short of attainment you always are? Can you trust any acclaim any farther than adverse criticism? Should either have any effect upon you as an artist?

Joe Brainard: A Box of Hearts and other works is the latest show of his work at Tibor de Nagy. It runs from October 22 to December 3 & shows more than 50 works that are various enough to be by half a dozen different artists: paintings, collages, watercolors, cutouts. Fabulous as he always is. 

I'm practically a resident. Twice in two days to 3 different parts of the borough (Williamsburg, the Botanical Gardens, East Flatbush). But dang, I didn't document it with a photo. D'yall believe me? Here's the words version: Had a delicious lunch at the Yellow Magnolia Café with the great poet Maureen Owen, who I haven't seen since before the pandemic. Seeing her was terrific (as was the daikon salad) & we made A Plan, which shall be revealed in due time. Then off on the same train (not that I could find it again) to see my friend Debra, who took me to a friend's opening at Brooklyn College, of remarkable small (& 4 large) b&w paintings from a series called "ref-u-gee," a solo exhibition of works on the theme of forced migration by Audrey Frank Anastasi. If you find yourself deep in Brooklyn, very worth your while to check out the show. 

Not only did I go to Brooklyn (Williamsburgh) this afternoon on a secret mission, I'm going tomorrow to two separate locations: the Botanical Gardens & to Brooklyn College for an art opening. I feel more international & adventurous going to this borough than to Europe. Then I got kosherie (an Egyptian dish of noodles, lentils, rice, fried onions & hot sauce: YUM) on the way back & my international day has almost ended, except for Norwegian class in a little while. 

I dreamed last night about my '73 LTD, Ford Madox Ford. I loved that car. I'd painted it with matte house paint, white & light green, & written lines from poems of mine along the body:

Dreams aimless as destinations

&

It will be easy to drive away from this

 

I got stopped by the cops all the time when I drove that car anywhere outside of New York City. They usually said: Just wanted to see who would be driving a car like this. 

 

In my dream I gave the car to a couple from New Jersey who were having a baby. It's too hard to park, I said. And with regret: I've had that car for 20 years.

 

In reality, I haven't had that car for 20 years, more like 25. I sold it for $1 to Eileen Myles, her first car. 

 

I woke up satisfied. Restored.

 

I'm only me as a driver.

The Island at the Center of the World suddenly seemed like what I should read & I put my hand right on it (a sign), & not only that, it's a nice clean paperback, perfect for travel. It's about New Netherland, the Dutch colony that predated and established Manhattan as we know it, freewheeling, open-minded, commercial. All the reasons people still come to New York were there from the beginning. If you want to understand New York City, this is the book to read. 

I love sleeping in a hotel bed. Niceties (though they forgot to stock our room). Taking taxis heedlessly (more this weekend in Pittsburgh than in 2 years). Seeing new places or the same places anew. Listening to accents & thinking about cultural differences.

 

I also love coming home, being met by my purring rubbing-up cat. Sitting in my own chair. Having food in the fridge instead of trying to figure out what & where & when to eat.

It really is fun to pick a place & see what's there. Could be any place ~ I could throw a dart at a map & find something amazing & wonderful if I went wherever it hit. Today we saw contemporary & classic art at the Carnegie, rooms sponsored by many nations at the Cathedral of Learning, absolutely the coolest classroom building of all time. We drove through the rich neighborhoods of Shadyside & Squirrel Hill, & I went for a walk & found my way back to the hotel. The information guy at the Cathedral of Learning said that in Pittsburgh, neighborhoods tend to stay intact, so the Polish or Italian areas, for example, are still Polish or Italian. This city is, he said, as diverse as New York. 

 

Another day, another taxi driver. Do you have a drunk in that bar fight? I asked referring to the Fetterman-Oz senatorial race. He laughed & said they're all drunks & he didn't care. Hmmm. What the heck? 

 

Tomorrow the Incline up Mount Washington, the Andy Warhol Museum & home early Sunday. 

A woman at the airport said, admiringly, you're adventurous, coming here without knowing anyone, just because you've never been. It's only an hour or so away on the plane & it feels, if not adventurous, fun to be in someplace completely new. Very pretty, with changing leaves, & big views & the rivers. 

 

The cab driver seemed great & told us that the Monongohela is one of the few rivers in North America that flows north. Great until he let slip his racist politics. As soon as I said mildly, "but don't you think that [ethnic group he looked down on] came here for jobs just like anyone else," he totally changed his tune. My fault, I asked what he thought of the senatorial race here. 

 

I wrote a post yesterday that somehow didn't get saved & now I don't even remember what it was about. I think it was to say we were PA-bound. Someday (maybe tonight?!) I will sleep & then I expect to remember things. It's so strange to be somewhere other than the East Village with Mr. No-Travels Johnny! 

My friend Dotathy (aka Melissa) had a show at her studio in Gowanus. I left the East Village, yes I did, & went to Brooklyn. Intrepid me! Especially, as my friend Maggie once said, It just seems like it's farther for us to go there than for them to come here. Dot embroiders on photos, & they are textured, beautiful, way more than the sum of their parts. Then I went to hang out with another friend in a different part of Brooklyn, my Norwegian teacher Marie-Therese in fact, but it was too late in a long day for me to manage to say anything much på norsk. I may go to Brooklyn again someday.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt is strange & wonderful. The plot makes the book seem either silly or heroic. "The world would be quite a pretty place if the only people tormented by atrocities were those who'd committed them." It's a serious book but also one where the author clearly put in everything she felt like & by wanting it made a place for it.

Yay for a new-to-me stop on the F train: Smith-9th street, with two very long escalators plus stairs. And also this fine view. Then the G train across Brooklyn, & eventually the L train home.

 

Pro tip: the G is not the J. Turns out the G doesn't go into Manhattan at all, & it's the J that you can catch at Delancey St. Who knew? I'm certainly not one of the dead who know Brooklyn. 

The open door policy between apartments 9 & 12 usually involves Lefty swaggering over to Wanda's place & terrorizing Jojo & Harry. But Jojo has slowly tiptoed into our apartment & here he is in bed with sleeping Johnny. Usually, as soon as Lefty realizes Jojo is visiting us, he gallops over & chases him away. Our little Napoleon, king of all he surveys. Especially me. 

This semester's Norwegian class is built around watching a Norwegian movie every week & discussing it. I seem to have been one of the few people who enjoyed last night's Fjols til fjells (Fools in the Mountains), a slapstick farce from 1957 set in a ski resort. It was dumb, sure, with a plot about identical guests mistaken for each other over & over, but Leif Juster was terrific & it even (maybe) had its subversive moments, such as a girl everyone took for a boy in her bellboy (piccolo) outfit who whistled at & propositioned attractive women. Lots of great Norwegian words & expressions & I could understand most of what everyone in class was saying, even when they were rattling along pretty fast. 

Thank goodness for having a name I don't share with a thousand Andersons. It meant that an email got to me from a woman in Sioux Falls who had found a copy of CHIPS (from the Tree of Knowledge), our high school literary magazine, in a storage box. Did I want it?

 

Oh my goodness yes, although I'm embarrassed in advance/in retrospect about my sophomoric (literally!) drivel. 

 

How above & beyond to reach out with something she could so easily have tossed. (Thank you, Teresa!)