Elinor Nauen

There was a julekonsert at the Seaman's Church & an open studio in Bushwick. But no photos ~ you'll have to trust me that I'm actually doing stuff. When Johnny & I got off the train in Brooklyn, we both knew where we were & set off towards my friend's place. In fact, it was the exact wrong direction but somehow eerily familiar. I get lost all the time & this is one of the few times I was absolutely certain. It didn't cross my mind that I wasn't. It should have! 

I don't remember ever having seen this photo till Rick sent it to me this week. Where we were or the occasion for the picture: no idea. I don't recognize the house or what I'm wearing. But there I am. [Insert statement of wonder at the passage of time & the passing of memory.] Rick & Sherri's daughters are now twice as old as we were here. 

I found this the other day, coincidentally not long after the founder's death. I must have been sent there by AARP when I was the automotive columnist for their baby boomer maganize, My Generation, most likely to do a story on how older drivers can ensure safer driving.* I remember starting my piece with a sentence about taking out half the state of Arizona when I rear-ended a truck carrying something nuclear. I remember learning "you go where you look," which is why people on the side of the road get hit by passing cars at a pretty good clip. I learned to trust that the car would go where I sent it. 

I thought I might still have that piece but I took a lot of stuff off my computer over the years. I kept a list** so I could find them again but of course I don't have those backup disks anymore, or if I do, no way to access them. Yay for technology. 

* found it! I think this is the final but here it is (where's the headline?):

 Read More 

Jim was Beau, I was El-beau, Baby Jeff's dog was also Beau. Not sure how it started but those were our nicknames & he got me pencils & stationery. Jimmy died in 1999 & Jeff a year or 2 ago. When Jimmy knew he was dying, we planned to rent a Dodge Viper. It sort of came with a speeding ticket, but what did he care? We left it till too late. I still miss both of them but I don't need this pencil. 

I'm a little amazed at how much stuff we are getting rid of, & pretty painlessly. I've taken out a large bag almost every day since this got underway, not quite a month ago. And still so much to look at. It gets easier. "If I don't need that, I certainly don't need this" is my motto. The only issue is that parts of the house build back up again ~ mail arrives & voila, the kitchen table is a mess again. But it's not worse than 3 steps forward, 1/2 step back. 

Tomorrow: a discarded treasure. 

Your library is your paradise.

~ Desiderius Erasmus

Did you sigh when you saw this picture or looked at the quote? 

That's why I can get rid of pretty much everything in my house but not my books. 

Getting my covid booster shot in a couple of hours. Will there be many more? Will we be getting annual flu & covid shots? Why am I nervous? Everything is wracking my nerves a bit at the moment. Is there any good news in the public sphere? Wish there was a shot that would give us all a lift.

Whew. Our semesterprojekt in my norsk "language & culture" class is to write a fairytale. I have tried to think about it for several weeks & pretty much got nowhere but dead ends. Then suddenly, it all poured out. I wrote the whole thing in 2 days. Now I'm delirious & exhausted & marveling once again at how much creative work gets done behind our backs, as it were. All the problems were solved in a flash, even problems I didn't see coming. Too bad it's in Norwegian & only a handful of people will ever appreciate it. Actually, I don't know yet if it's any good, & I don't care. Writing it was so much fun, the soaring as my characters said & did things I wasn't expecting. I let 'em loose & they ran with it. Doesn't happen that often but it sure is thrilling when it does.

My friend's building on East 10th Street, with marble stairs & old linoleum. His apartment still has the tin roof that I suppose has gone in & out of favor. When I think I want to move to a brand-new building, I remember how happy I am about and in the funky old ones. Mine being even more old school, with the tub in the kitchen. 

This was an early KOFF girls prank, or project, when we liberated a subway ad placard & changed "constipated" to "consumptive" then silk-screened the image onto t-shirts. When I say we, I mean Maggie. It was actually the Consumptive Poets League that did it; the magazine, KOFF (get it?), grew out of the League, but Maggie, Rachel & I were called the KOFF girls ever after. 

We went on to bigger & better, which you can read about here. 

We saw one snowflake & this maple, 20th Street east of 9th Ave. 

I think you have to teach kids to work, and you can only teach them to work if you work... I can't delegate jobs if I'm not doing it.

~ Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). She had six kids, by the way.

I got interested in her because she'd been at Black Mountain. Best known for her coiled wire sculptures, I fell in love with this painting at a show of her work I went to a day or two ago at the David Zwirner gallery on West 20th Street. You have to look closely to see the little scribbles in the back of the chair. Somehow that's what makes this great. 

My friend KG is moving away so I felt lucky that he had a couple of spare hours to hang out on Friday. We went to the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. This is one of the cool things we saw. 

Is Chisholm having a revival? Or what? After all, she died in 2005 & that was quite a while after she ran for president, the first Black woman to do so. I believe she was the first Black woman in Congress as well. Anyway, here is this poster on a mailbox up the block. 

As usual, my traditional Thanksgiving poem. I no longer have anything to do with the guy whose email I "found" it from 20 years ago, who became a Holocaust denier, with all the paranoia, conspiracy, & ugliness that goes with that. I still like this little work, however. 

Thanksgiving Almost Found Poem

Many years we go to my grandmother's in Virginia. 
My mother, father, aunts and at least two of my brothers are there. 
My son has a football game that morning. 
My daughter is home, but needs to get back to school this weekend. 
My wife doesn't want to ride for nine hours and turn right back. 
Sometimes I have gone alone, but not often. 
A couple of neighbors were vying for our company.
One of those my daughter's boyfriend's family, 
Which we did last year and had fun.
But this year it will be another family,
One we have visited on two or three other Thanksgivings. 
I have a turkey freezing in the garage.

Nothing to do with it.

This is so depressing.

According to the Global State of Democracy 2021 report from the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, "The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale." 
 
More than a quarter of the people in the world live in democratically backsliding countries, that is, nations seeing a gradual decline in the quality of their democracy, thanks to restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law.

Who do they blame? Take a guess. (The pandemic hasn't helped either, globally.)
 
The report does say democracy is resilient, with protest and civic action fighting repression around the world. 

The depressing part is how many people are OK with it, as long as no one makes them wear a mask to tamp down a pandemic. 

I'm thinking I wrote this for Ed & Lori's wedding in 1990. Found it going through papers & drawers & bags & boxes & piles as we clean our place out in preparation for fixing it up. 

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. 

~ Aldous Huxley, who also died November 22, 1963

Totally great to meet my friend Tracie at 8 a.m. at her place in Brooklyn. We were 7:30 karate students so getting together early was old times for us. The picture shows the city as it once was; the air was bright and olden days too. It was 15 minutes, if that, on the L train to a neighborhood (Bushwick, I think) new to me. We caught up & I got to see her wonderful drawings & new apartment. 

Is this by Edmund? 

I'm liking finding things in the process of getting rid of things. 

If the connection is poor, most people tell you it's your phone, you should move, you should hang up & try again. Hey, maybe it's you! Or more likely, it's probably no one's doing & the gods of phone calls are making mischief. What's the point of aiming a pointless accusation at the other caller?

This beautiful painting, by Lois Tønnessen Andersen, is part of an exhibit of her work at Sjømannskirken (the Norwegian Seamen's Church) up on 52nd Street. I was there the other day to help bake pepperkaker (Norwegian gingerbread) for their annual julemarked (Christmas fair). It was fun & homey & I got to practice my halting norsk with Anbjørg & Hilde (wives of the priests). Hilde very kindly said don't worry about the prepositions, we understand even if they're not quite right. At least I am pretty sure that's what she said. 

It's either clean or move & apartments are too bloody expensive to move. We are each spending 10 minutes a day evaluating & throwing out as much as possible - clothes, papers, books, puzzling items that kept getting put aside till we could figure out what they are for. Out they go. 

I figure this process could take a few months although, a week in, I am starting to notice little bare patches. 

The heart stops briefly when someone dies,

a quick pain as you hear the news, & someone passes

from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts

to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely.

~ from "Things to do in Providence"

Ted Berrigan (November 15, 1934 - July 4, 1983) 

This happened many years ago but I was reminded of it by last week's Health II story of Johnny punching out a kid who tried to mug him. I bet (& hope) the kid will never try that again. I was riding the #7 out to Queens, writing in a little notebook. I was aware of a man standing near me but not that the train was emptying out. I hunched over my notebook, quite sure he was trying to snoop on what I was writing & steal it for his own. I paid no outward attention but I was getting pissed off. When my stop came, I waited till the last second & stood up as the doors opened. Which was when I realized he wasn't reading over my shoulder but patiently waiting for me to see that his stupid dick was hanging out. I roared with laughter at my misapprehension (NO ONE IS INTERESTED IN STEALING YOUR POEMS, EL!) & jumped off. I didn't look back but I can only imagine that that was not the reaction he had been anticipating for the last 20 minutes. I also bet (& hope) he never did that again & spent the rest of his life doubting himself in the manhood department. 

I ran into phrenology recently in Walt Whitman: The making of the poet, by Paul Zweig. More quack science? Phrenology is the study of the skull to understand mental faculties and character traits. It was very credible to such 19th century thinkers as Hegel, Horace Greeley, Horace Mann, & many others. Whitman saw a connection between his "chart of bumps" & his poetical character and used phrenological concepts in his work; Fowler & Wells, leading phrenologists, sold the first edition of Leaves of Grass in their store & published the second. 

I can't help but wonder if a century from now people will look at psychology as we do at phrenology, a big advance in many ways but largely worthless. 

Here's a terrific article on a modern study of phrenology. While it couldn't find any correspondence between the skull & what's inside, it did find "a very strong positive association between the trait "amativeness" (the arousal of feelings of sexual desire) and "words." Which is to say, the more sexual partners a person has had, the higher their verbal fluency in a word naming task. 

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This is part 5 (the final one) of a themed week on the blog. I was feeling like I've been spinning my wheels here & am eager to try something new. Love to hear feedback or ideas. 

There's a family story about my parents going to the Twin Cities for a weekend, where they took in a play. Just as the would-be murderer was creeping up on his victim, my dad let out one of his enormous sneezes. I believe the villain dropped his knife. The next week, a client said, "Hans, I have to tell you what happened last weekend up in Minnesota...." My dad didn't say a word. 

One thing I've inherited from my dad is an astonishingly loud sneeze. Just the other day, someone started & turned from half a block away. 

What accounts for the volume? The sound of a sneeze comes from the air escaping from your mouth or nose. The average sneeze is about as loud as a lawnmower. According to Richard Harvey of St Vincent's and Macquarie University Hospitals in Sydney, the loudness depends on a person's lung capacity, size and how long they hold their breath. "The longer you hold your breath, the more dramatic you make it."

Advice for turning down the volume includes sneezing into a thick handkerchief, holding your breath right before you sneeze, coughing while you sneeze, & clenching your teeth and jaw (messy!). 

Here's the best part. According to the UK's Daily Mail, a loud sneezer "is often marking his position as an alpha male, while an elbow sneezer likes to follow the rules and may not be an individual thinker."

I love those "what your X says about you" quizzes. When I worked at women's magazines, we were always trying to come up with personality quizzes like this: what the way you wear down your lipstick, the way you park, the way you answer the phone says about you. 

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This is part 4 of a themed week on the blog. I was feeling like I've been spinning my wheels here & am eager to try something new. Love to hear feedback or ideas.

I'm a modern gal so it's a little shocking that people are going back & finding value in old ways like leeches & cupping. Cupping is a simple technique that involves pressing a suction cup into the skin. A recent experiment found that rats injected with SARS-CoV-2 DNA, which on its own quickly degrades in the body, followed by moderate suction had an immune response 100 times stronger than injection alone. This matters because vaccines that don't require refrigeration are easier to distriute in poorer countries, & if they can be more effective with a simple technique like cupping, all the better for everyone. 

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This is part 3 of a themed week on the blog. I was feeling like I've been spinning my wheels here & am eager to try something new. Love to hear feedback or ideas.

Johnny was walking home on 2nd Street east of B when a teenager demanded his money. Without pausing, Johnny hauled off & hit the kid. Half a block later he looked behind him & the kid was only then getting up. Don't mess with an Irish boxer, even if he's 78 years old & walks with a cane!

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This is part 2 of a themed week on the blog. I was feeling like I've been spinning my wheels here & am eager to try something new. Love to hear feedback or ideas.

Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.

~ Edward Smith-Stanley

Hmm, there are quite a few gentlemen of this name in 19th-century England, all with colorful histories, divorces, and accomplishments (many bird-linked). The one who said this could be one of the Earls of Derby or a clergyman. 

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This is part 1 of a themed week on the blog. I was feeling like I've been spinning my wheels here & am eager to try something new. Love to hear feedback or ideas.