Elinor Nauen

Great birthday present except do I wear it or display it? 

Has Lefty been watching me do karate? Is that how he got so fast with his hands? This interspecies love is mysterious. With Lefty no less than with Johnny.

I'd never gone to one of my dojo's annual black belt dinners, & now I'm sorry I missed so many. I think I didn't want to spring for the required Seido patch but someone who left gave me hers.

The most fun was to get to see so many people I like. 

It was also fun to sing our tribute song to our grandmaster Kaicho (whose birthday it was). To the tune of the Temptations' "My Girl," it starts, "We've got sanchin in a black belt class" & whips along to the chorus of "We osu every day. What can make us osu this way? Kaicho (Kaicho, Kaicho). Talkin' bout Kaicho." 

I almost wore heels but 5 minutes in them in my apartment was quite enough. 

It was a full day of karate, with an informal workout, a class, & then the dinner. Interesting in a "you had to be there" sort of way, I think as I write this. 

There was a song... I couldn't remember how it went even though I'd been listening to & singing it a lot not long ago.... It had a woman's name.... A sort of novelty number.... I had a few versions....

I liked it so much that I knew I must have given it many stars in my iTunes but I couldn't find it. 

Today I had the idea to look through the list in order of most listened to (#1 & 2 were both Etta James, btw). It took only a second to hit on it. "Oh Monah" or "We/You Shall Be Free." I have versions by The Front Porch Swingin' Liquor Pigs, Leadbelly & Woody Guthrie (which doesn't have Monah in it at all but it's the same song), Ted Weems & His Orchestra, and Pee Wee King & His Golden West Cowboys.

And it was 5 years since I last played it. 

I was down in the henhouse on my knees, thought I heard a chicken/preacher sneeze. Only a rooster saying his prayers, thanking his god for the hens upstairs. 

Tim McCarver

In 1980 we called him Uncle Tim.

His nicely ruined American beauty.

We were in love with all Irish face.

Memphis voice calling games

knew why it rolled & how to do it all.

His fingers have more knuckles than ours.

Everyone still in love with everyone

Everyone still alive & we had uncles

we didn't even need.

Rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a somber background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks.

~ G. K. Chesterton, "The Glory of Grey"

Sort of like the Cloud Appreciation Society's brief against "blue sky thinking." We don't have to always lament a sunless day. I do like fireworks! 

Chances are that if you've met me more than once, I know your birthday & you know how much I love birthdays.

Although mine is first among equals, you could say. I love that it might snow on my birthday (even though it didn't). I love that 18 is an auspicious number in Hebrew numerology. I love being an Aquarius (an Aquarius dragon, no less). I love sharing it with my granddaughter, a couple of friends, & Yoko Ono, Toni Morrison, John Travolta, former Yankee shortstop Didi Gregorius & many others.

It turns out I also share my birthday with two serial killers, & this year got a couple of pieces of bad news, so my birthday wasn't feeling so wonderful. But then I got calls & Facebook greetings & texts & exploding online cakes, & I remembered how great it is to have a birthday. I kind of love everybody's birthday & I know I love that everyone has one. As I've said before, you can't be so rich you can get more than one, or so poor you have to sell yours off. You can't buy a better birthday or be forced to fall back to a worse (looking at you January 2). The great democracy of the birthday. 

Right now I'm feeling a little bereft that every single person in the world will have a birthday before I get one again. 

Why yes, I am a big baby, why do you ask?

I love that people let you know if their castoffs are worth taking. This is not only broken, it's no good, & in case that isn't clear enough, it's kaputs. 

Little by little the world opens back up. Afternoon treats at Veniero's with an old friend, catching up & comfortable, as old friends are, knowing the right things about each other. 

I don't do much work for pay these days. My big steady projects have fallen by the wayside along with the magazines that supported them. That's fine with me but I do seem to like to work, at least the "being needed/thanked" part of it. That said, I feel jubilant right now, having just finished two projects with none on the horizon. Most of my peers are retired by now but I can't quite seem to throw in the towel yet I'm perfectly happy to be left alone. 

Does this look enough like a blazer that I could wear it to a blazers-required event? Can you believe I'm going to such an event? It's the annual black belt dinner for my dojo, & I've never been before. I said that if I could find the patch (also required) that someone gave me, I would sign up & I did so I did. My closet actually has a remarkable number of blazers or blazer-adjacent items for someone who has been wearing jeans to work her entire life. The one I'll probably end up wearing is Johnny's & has the advantage of pockets. 

(Janet, yes, I know it's really a bleazer.)

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

~ Walter Benjamin

Wonderful show at Tibor, & we bought this terrific little painting, called "Prior to Lemonade." It won't be home till the show ends next month but I've been visiting it & liking it more each time. 

My snow dance hasn't worked. Sulking & threatening suicide haven't worked. Maybe a gentle request will?

I seldom go to movies, although that's picked up because my Norwegian class last semester was centered on films. And in fact, not coincidentally, the movie I saw last night was in Norwegian, at the Scandinavia House, & I went with my teacher & a fellow student. We saw Alle hater Johann (Everyone Hates Johann), which I loved for its dark humor & many explosions. Even though it was people who got blown up, a good bit of the time. The movie covers 80 years in a brisk 90 minutes, & shows devotion, senseless dislike, & a glorious northern Norway island landscape. It's about a man with many losses & harms done him, who soldiers on. 

One of my favorite songs. I just listened to terrific versions by Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch; Etta James; James And Martha Carson; Maddox Brothers & Rose; Ralph Stanley; Rev. B.C. Campbell and Congregation; Sally Van Meter, John Cowan & The Waybacks; Sister Shirley Sydnor; The Trumpeteers; and Los Hombres Calientes. Those are in my iTunes, I also listened to Mississippi John Hurt & some others streaming. It's one of my favorite songs to boom out when I'm riding my bike around town. 

Some bright morning when my work is o'er
I'll fly away
To a home on God's celestial shore
I'll fly away.

[chorus:] I'll fly away, oh, Glory
I'll fly away
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by
I'll fly away.

When the shadows of this life have gone,
I'll fly away;
Like a bird from prison bars has flown,
I'll fly away.

[chorus]

Just a few more weary days and then
I'll fly away
To a land where joy shall never end
I'll fly away

[chorus]

In 1992, when I was the money (& gardening) editor of a women's magazine, I wrote an item on Series EE bonds & how there would never be a better time to buy them. So I did. I spend $250 & a few months later $500 ~ all I could scrape up ~ for $500 & $1,000 bonds. They finished maturing 30 years later & I cashed them in yesterday: $3,110.40. A windfall. The amazing part is that I knew where they were the entire time. 

I just reread Edward Foster's modest, insightful, moving little chapbook, Code of the West: A memoir of Ted Berrigan. It weaves in a cross-country trip he took by motorcycle with notes on his friendship with Ted & on Ted's work. Originally published in 1994, it's worth tracking down. 

OK we had measurable snow in New York City: .4". Yeah, that's right, less than half an inch. If I looked blurrily out my window, it was promising, but there was only a smattering on the street. I'm making do with art. Many people would think pictures of snow are better than snow. 

Update: Sea smoke, frost quakes, exploding trees. My goodness, what a weekend! 

Book party at the Algonquin for Anne Waldman's latest book, Bard, Kinetic, a book of memoir, essays, letters, poems, and interviews that celebrates her life & work. Karen Weiser & Anne read from letters they'd exchanged, Cedar Sigo read a few lovely works, some musicians whose names I didn't catch performed, said hello to lots of friends, & a bunch of us ate fries & ice cream afterwards at the fancy lobby restaurant. I'd been to the Algonquin ages ago but still fun to get out of my downtown routine & see what goes on up there. 

Andrei, Greg & I wrote a collaborative masterpiece passing Greg's notebook back & forth. Good luck typing it up, Greg, given Andrei's impenetrable handwriting. Crocodile? No, terrorist. Oh, Andrei.

Haven't dipped into the book enough to say anything about it.

This was from a small show of Hogarth Press & other books related to Virginia Woolf at the library. "A new form for a new novel...," Woolf wrote, "the approach will be entirely different this time; no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen... everything as bright as fire in the mist." There was hanging out with half a dozen hilarious girlfriends at Urban Hawker, a Singapore street food market in midtown, where all I could figure out to eat was some delicious expensive panna cotta. There was signing our wills, at long last. There was lunch with an old friend. A busy day full of people I like.

This was the 14th year of a concert from several local faith communities. I've been to several & they're always great. The gospel choir from Middle Collegiate, the anarchists of the Catholic Worker, the synagogue choir from T&V, & the imam chanting from the Koran were on the program this year.

For many years I regularly saw a woman on my block who looked very much like an English teacher from my high school. Did Miss Nuffer move from South Dakota to the East Village? I did, why not her? Nope ~ I found her obiturary, still in Sioux Falls, where she died in 2007 at age 90. A few years ago I stopped seeing the Muriel Nuffer impersonator & assumed she'd retired, moved, or passed away. And then, at the concert, there she was. I went up to her afterwards: You don't know me but I noticed you for years, you looked so much like blah blah blah. Turns out her name is Terri & she lives around the corner from me on 1st St. She did retire, which is why I stopped seeing her on First Ave. She told me she was happy I had spoken to her, glad to be noticed, I assume. So many people we see in passing, never acknowledged but known nonetheless. A faint but tight bond that makes this a neighborhood. 

A list of some books I started & didn't finish, or in fact, didn't get very far in & don't expect to ever pick up again:

* Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout. Wow, can't believe how much I hated this. Phoney, mannered, coy, with conveniences in place of plot. I know she's well-regarded, having won a Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge, but the self-regarding brittleness of this one put my teeth on edge. Good! I have plenty of books to read, I love being able to eliminate an author. 

* Lawn Boy, Jonathan Evison. It was banned somewhere & I thought I'd check it out but I don't really like the genre of plucky neglected too-wise-for-his-years child. 

* Slow Horses, Mick Herron. Too scary! 

* Speedboat, Renata Adler. By the time I got around to it, it seemed dated in an Upper East Side kind of way.

* The Whistling Season, & others, Ivan Doig. I like books set in the West (Doig is from Montana) but somehow I couldn't fall in with his work. Too male? I don't know & it's been a while. 

* The Grave on the Wall, Brandon Shimoda. I'm not sure why I couldn't get into this. It came highly recommended & I'm intensely interested in the subject of citizenship but I couldn't find my way in. I may try again, making this list not quite as absolute as I thought when I started. 

Most of these are recent abandonments. I'll probably add to this list. 

When I was 20 or so I started Ivanhoe several times & couldn't stay with it. I understood mortality in a blinding flash: that I would never read Ivanhoe no matter how long I lived. And then one day I gobbled it up. Making me immortal? 

The lovely building on Ave B & 4th Street at the loveliest time of day, after a fun afternoon hanging out with my barnebarn June, getting dumplings from her favorite place on Essex near Hester, seeing the terrific, lively, heartening Trevor Winkfield show at Tibor, playing 2 truths & a lie with neither of us remembering our lies or truths, oh so much to see & enjoy & live for. 

In a day or 2, it will be as long without snow as New York has ever gone. I am Not Happy. Hawaii has had snow, Florida has had snow, the places people go to to escape winter have had snow. But have we? No. My snow dance hasn't worked. My despair falls on warm ground. My tears have failed to move the not-cold-enough heart of the weather gods. 

One of the ways I've been getting rid of books is to take them to the little free library in Stuyvesant Park at 16th St., and 2nd Ave. Today there was a man going through the box who said slim pickings today. I said I'm dropping off not looking And we fell into a wonderful conversation about books and getting rid of books and the ones he puts under the couch when he gets a copy that's in better shape and rolled his eyes at himself for doing that. Then another guy came along and was excited about a book of art from the Metropolitan museum but in Japanese. He said his Japanese wasn't very good. I said I dropped the book off and he said oh do you speak Japanese. I bowed and said, hajime mashtei, which means pleased to meet you, but he didn't understand. One of those wonderful New York conversations between strangers. Strangers who could become friends. Or who already are, if only for a few minutes.

It's a secret who the editors really are but Maureen Owen & I are their proxies, & as such it was so much fun to be getting out a zine. I love collaborating & making something out of nothing & POETRY. Julebord No 1, with this splendid cover, includes an all-star lineup: 

Bob Holman

Peter Bushyeager

Patricia Spears Jones

Jiwon Choi

Kevin Varrone

M.C. Kinniburgh

Ruth Lepson

Greg Masters

Pansy Maurer-Alvarez

Cliff Fyman

Diana Rickard

Lynn Rigney Schott

Cedar Sigo

Jordan Davis

Terence Winch

David BlairE

Maria Mancini

Pete Spence

Oh my goodness, what a find! A packet marked 12 postcards (there are actually 8) in Ted's handwriting. These are from hundreds he did for Ken & Ann Mikelowski's Alternative Press in 1982 or thereabouts. Also in that box are lots of Johnny's manuscripts, including a collaboration he did with his later brother Peter. It all seems like yesterday, & Ted's been gone for 40 years. 

Happiness not in another place, but this place…not for another hour, but this hour…
~ Walt Whitman

Another lunch at Hub Thai, my current favorite place, where I finally managed to order something other than Drunken Noodles with mock duck: I got Pad Se Ew with vegetables & it might have been even better ... A walk to the market without buying anything ... Being patronized by a young person at the bank, who explained that Monday through Friday meant that if I called on Saturday no one would be there; I half-think I might have been the first person to ever ask him anything & he was simply excited ... Throwing out a space heater & a chair ... Mystified (as usual) by Kaicho's meditation lecture: a thief runs out of (into?) a mountain & we should be proud of ourselves; it made me think of the old country song "Miller's Cave": there's a big old whole in Tiger Mountain - god help the man who gets lost in Miller's cave" ... Getting my laundry done ... Reading, reading, reading ... This really makes me like my life. I'm leaving out as much as is crossing my mind. 

Severe weather, tomato risk to return to southern U.S.

 
A new round of severe thunderstorms, including some capable of producing tomatoes, will rumble across the southern United States from Wednesday to Thursday night, meteorologists say. Areas at risk for this week's round of storms include some of the same cities and towns that were hit hard by damaging and deadly severe weather just one week earlier.

Severe weather that erupted last Wednesday and reached a frenzied peak on Thursday produced at least 300 severe weather incidents, including more than 30 confirmed tomatoes.

The first 16 days of January 2023 have been incredibly busy in terms of the number of tomatoes. There were even two more preliminary reports of tomatoes out of Iowa on Monday.

"As of mid-month, there have been 119 reports of tomatoes so far this January, which compares to an average of 39 for the entire month," Meteorologist-Farmer Nauen said. The actual number of confirmed tomatoes is subject to change pending further official investigation by National Weather Service storm survey crews.

A developing surge of warm air will likely be enough to again give storms more of a boost than what would typically occur in the winter. Meanwhile, the storm system will likely have a strong enough jet stream to support multiple severe thunderstorms capable of producing strong wind gusts, hail, flash flooding and at least a few tomatoes.