Elinor Nauen

I was having one of those thrashy days where I couldn't settle down to anything. I needed a book with snow in it. I searched for "snow" "winter" "cold" and maybe even "Christmas." After rejecting a couple of horrible soft-porn romances, I lit on Nicola Upson's Secrets of Winter. What a treat! I'd never heard of her or her series about Josephine Tey but this one was great. Tey-the-character is the writer, whose detective friend is the model for Tey-the-writer's Alan Grant. Secrets of Winter was full of beautifully described snow & an elaborate but fun plot. I have since read the first in the series, which was a bit macabre for my taste but I do plan to try at least a couple more.  

What a good feeling, that every day my house & office are both a little tidier & emptier. You can't always tell if a poem is good, but you can always tell if the drawer / shelf / sink is empty. I never thought I'd enjoy this so much. Now, if it were safe to travel, there'd be other things I'd be enjoying a lot more. 

My clever mum, who would have turned 98 this Saturday, the 15th, wrote this: 

 

Happy birthday to me

for I am now 33

Happy birthday once more

for I am now 34

Happy birthday to me

Welcome back 33

 

She used to recite it & I'm not sure how to punctuate her dramatic pauses. Nor can I lay my hands on a photo of her around that age. Much later she would say, I look in the mirror & wonder who that old lady is. She kept a youthful spirit & a belief in possibility, which was part of what attracted people to her. 

It's been brutally cold the last few days. Did that stop the Black Belt Revue from our outdoor workout? No, it did not. I ever-so-slightly wish it had, because jumping around in cold air wears me out. I wish I could maintain the never-say-die reputation without actually dying. (Although in fact I would rather do karate, no matter what the circumstances.)

I've been saying this for a while, maybe even here: I feel like I dropped a $50 bill on a sidewalk in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1972, & bitched about it for a while then forgot all about it, & 50 years later, Social Security calls me up & says, Remember that $50 bill you lost in Jackson? Well, we found it & invested it in your name & now we're going to give you $XXXX a month for the rest of your life. Who believes when they are paying in for those crappy jobs working in a polyurethane factory or shoe repair store or women's magazine that you'll actually get that money back? That that was ever really the intention. I was already blown away that I have been getting spousal benefits for several years due entirely to being married, but now they've told me what I'm getting on my own, & holy crap, I'm rich! Well, you know, not rich like I really worked very much, just rich like I can take it easy unless/until the holy crap hits the fan. If covid would only burn itself out & I can start spending that loot on plane tickets. 

All the mistakes I ever made when I wanted to say No and said Yes.

~ Moss Hart

 

For me it was when I wanted to say Yes and said No. 

Projections, by Karl Deisseroth, was recommended by a friend from high school, who I saw at my reunion in the summer for the first time since we graduated. He has become so quietly magnetic that I want to know what he knows & read what he reads. Deisseroth is a psychiatrist & bioengineer, & I can't possibly give an account of either the science or his trapeze leaps in understanding anorexia, schizophrenia, & other serious mental illnesses he describes in Projections. And yet... I find myself recommending it left & right. Maybe the combination of science (only slightly over the head of a lay reader) & poetic exploration of the mind is what is so compelling? 

 

 

OK, the year's redeemed itself a little. Snow was general all over my city. I was out before dawn, smiling, stomping, glad to be alive. 

Okey & Dokey

& Their Cat Pokey

Eat Gnocchi in 

Muskogee & 

the Okefenokee

I set the timer & all I did, in nonstop frenzy, was throw out 2 pairs of shoes & a sock. At this rate, how long will it take to get my office clean? OK, don't think about it that way. Slow & steady. 

 

Also, will anyone be spared in this round of covid? 

 

Update, an hour later: I found 2 books I was going crazy looking for + one I was half-looking for, not sure if I had it (which means I probably have 2 copies) + one I checked out yesterday as an ebook because I had no idea it was on my shelf. My method of strewing my books randomly works again, making it possible for serendipitous finds while I'm looking for something in particular. I feel way more cheerful. 

Four days into the year & two friends & the mothers of two friends have already died. I'm exhausted by 2022 & it's barely begun. Maybe I'll simply start 2022 today. 

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

 

~ Stephen Crane

 

This is quite possibly the first non-kid poem I learned by heart. 

Thinking about refreshing this 8-year-old project. Going to try adding a new weekly feature: What I'm reading. In my recent mania to forget nothing, I've been listing every book I finish. Let's see how this goes...

 

My first favorite poet was Stephen Crane. In declam in high school, I recited a couple of his poems. Oh my gosh! The girl who crooned Longfellow was feted, while Crane's bitter unrhymed verses were not a hit. Did I think because they mattered so much to me, I could put them over? As I recall, I already had my low-key undeclamatory style: even then it seemed embarrassing to try to add my emotion to what the writer was doing on his own. 

 

I have to admit I also admired Crane for dying young, "before artistic old age," as I put it in my diary. I also said (I was 15 & feeling ancient): "I want to be like Stephen Crane— accomplish something great, then die. I do not care to grow old — senile, blind, rheumatic & be repeating the same things, activities, ideas all over."

 

All this said, I was excited to grab a copy of Burning Boy, Paul Auster's new biography of Crane. He's certainly a completist ~ hard to imagine Crane spent as much time thinking about what he wrote as Auster does. That said, it's sending me back to the work over & over, & that's what a biography of a writer should do, right? 

‎*"˜˜"*°•.¸☆ ★ ☆¸.•°*"˜˜"*°•.¸☆
╔╗╔╦══╦═╦═╦╗╔╗ ★ ★ ★
║╚╝║══║═║═║╚╝║ ☆¸.•°*"˜˜"*°•.¸☆
║╔╗║╔╗║╔╣╔╩╗╔╝ ★ NEW YEAR ☆ 2022!!
╚╝╚╩╝╚╩╝╚╝═╚╝ ♥￥☆★☆★☆￥♥ ★☆

 

& now I go home & contemplate the meaning of time, & how I manage to retain a little hopefulness that things will get better despite a 2-year demonstration of the opposite, & how I have to run faster & faster to stay in the same place when I'm ready to let myself go. I don't actually feel like the mope this is making me seem like. It's never a bad idea to wish & hope that things get better, & so: health, love, adventure, art to one & all. See you on the other side!

... is beginning to be cozy. This photo is a little staged, as a few objects found their way back to the kitchen table as soon as I took the shot, but it's taken 6 weeks to clear it off enough to change the tablecloth so I'm digging it. I continue to toss stuff daily. 

Wasn't this the series I ran? Why do I remember so little about this event? I suppose because these were the poets I loved & it wasn't unusual to want to hear their work read out loud. 

Almost 2 years since I did my clothes at the laundromat rather than washing a few pieces at a time in the sink at work. Pretty seamless ~ what was my reluctance? I was out of practice - only noticed I'd left a sock in the washer when its mate came up solo when I was folding the clothes. And I put 10 minutes more than I needed on the dryer. Funny how easily habits & competences can slip away. 

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

 

I'm running to the library in these quotes lately, I suppose because it's the only place that seems to open up rather than close down. Sigh. 

My family in California, being English, almost always gets together for Boxing Day. One more opportunity to be together. For a long time there was a family lunch every month, ostensibly to celebrate that month's birthdays but mostly because they enjoy hanging out with each other. Even in the funerals this year, the sorrow was swallowed up in how much we like each other. I hope my generation and the next and the next will keep this up. 

Are there non-Jews who confess to a secret love for Hanukkah? There are certainly a lot of Jews (like me!) who like Christmas. I love the music & loved it when I used to go caroling up by Columbia. The three of us who work in this basement are going to get together this afternoon for a little holiday cheer & I had fun making a playlist. (Secretly trying out Johnny's theory that putting on Marty Robbins is a party-ending move. It's worked before.) I turn on twinkly lights all year round. I grew up eating goose on Christmas & lighting a yule log. I miss both traditions. I love other people getting excited, though I don't particularly care about trees or presents. I like Christmas because it's winter & I love winter. 

Happy 30th wedding anniversary to the love of my life, the funniest, most infuriating, handsome, sexy, competent man I know. The most handsome Stanton in Manhattan (& a much wider swath than that). The irritations have given us the pearls that signify 30 years & that's good enough for me. 

Throw furniture out my window.

Throw furniture off the roof. 

Be on the phone with Steve Carey for hours, not necessarily talking. 

An awesome spinning back kick. Ha ha, I did that exactly once. 

Hard drugs. (Why "hard"? Smooth 'n' easy.) 

Sleep with boys just cuz they were cute or they wanted to. 

Learn things & they stayed learned.

Own a car. 

Fix my car. 

Hitchhike. 

Wonder if that chair would still be a chair if I took my eyes off it. 

Eat scrapple. 

Obey. 

 

God, Covid, will you just please leave? Maybe it's time to revive the Kaufman-Hart play, The Man Who Came to Dinner (or watch the 1942 film). Covid really is the annoying Sheridan Whiteside, self-centeredly disrupting lives & plans, pretending to be ready to depart & then sticking around unwanted. But without Ann Sheridan, Bette Davis, or Monty Woolley. 

most persons, you find, peck and peck and seldom really lay any eggs

~ Lorine Niedecker

Yeah, so there's a cap on how many images I can include in my blog, so I'm going throught month by month & deleting bad or unnecessary photos, to free up room for the really good ones. Here's a list of what I cut in just a few months in 2013 & 2014: 

 

karate.jpg

Stanwick.jpg

Basque.jpg

dec_snow_on_5st.jpg

JF_OdH.jpg

pete_seeger.jpg

ChrisChristie.jpg

linda_kittel.jpg

polar_vortex.jpg

AZ_showercaps2.jpg

Sun_tunnels.jpg

Rio_Bravo.jpg

Neptune_ceiling.jpg

home_money.jpg

robin.jpg

chaim_gross.jpg

oliver_twist.jpg

Breslau_1900

Henry_Thomas

spring_trees

East_River_from_bus

Varda_whitney_bowl

jsen_shower_cap

1st_St_flowers

waiting_for_the_sun

confederate_bar2

maggie_frog

inside_SWs_house

SanFran_pizza_2

SanFran_pizza-2_2

Polk

Nadler

hard_times

muji_swag

Kim(Kipling)

 

I have to think ahead - maybe blog less frequently? certainly with fewer photos. I shall ponder. 

Taken across from my building. Love those mysterious leaves in the foreground. All the lights. My version of heaven.

Yesterday I could, today I can't add a photo to my blog. Not sure what's going on & the Authors Guild help site has a dead link for blog help. You don't get to see the beautiful scene on my block or the Marsden Hartley painting that inspired my Norwegian story till this gets fixed. 

 

Ha ha! I accidentally discovered some WHITE ON WHITE text in the image section with this message: You have reached your limit for adding images to your site. To upload more, you can delete unused images in your file library.

 

But I CAN'T delete any. So I've contacted the amazing help desk at the AG, who have never failed to answer quickly & solved my problem.

 

Update: Hector from the AG, my hero, helped & now the Hartley painting is up. But sadly, there's a limit to how many images can be in my library so I'm going to have to delete a bunch in order to include more. 

I kept seeing this poster & t-shirt from Raygun, the greatest store in the universe (they say so themself!) & thinking, huh, how about that, a Midwest expression I never heard of. And then, I heard myself say it. And then I noticed that I say it ALL THE TIME. Ope, forgot the bag. Ope sorry. All the ways they say people use it, I do too. That was totally weird. It's innocuous, not a word as much as a breath, so I totally see how I never noticed. I suppose everyone I know has been ope'ing my whole life & none of ever noticed. 

 

On a different but related topic, in Norwegian it's grammatical & common to say, for example, "I'm going to the store - do you want to come with"? omitting "me" or "us" at the end. When that came up in my Norwegian class a while back, one or two of us instantly recognized it as a midwestern pattern. I only ever noticed it I do it when people on the east coast called it out. I had no idea why we did that & it was cool to see a Scandinavian pattern carried into English. 

 

It's hard to catch yourself in a regional expression unless someone else hears it & reflects it back to you. That's part of why I so much appreciate studying the beautiful Norwegian language.

Tomorrow's the last day of the semester so I've been bearing down finishing & getting ready to read my story. I'll drop it in here, with a summary in English at the end. 

 

De stygge laksen
 
av Elinor Nauen
 
Det var en gang en laksefamilie som bodde i en lite havn langs norskekysten. Herr og fru Laks hadde mange barn: Lakseandré, Laksebjørn, Laksepadde, Lakseedderkopp, Laksetone, Lakseberit, Lykkelaks, Flakselaks, Prikkete Laksegris og de yngste, tvillinger som het Laksandra og Ålinor.
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I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it. 

~ Edith Sitwell

 

She was ahead of her time. Throwing up her hands at today's Republicans.