Elinor Nauen

I got this email from Al Franken, whose birthday is today:

I know what you're thinking. "Al, you were born in 1951?" A great time to grow up! Post WWII America was very anti-Nazi. If you were a Nazi in 1951, you just kept that to yourself.

       "What are you doing to celebrate, Al? I do hope you're having a fundraiser for Midwest Values PAC!"

         Sure! Anything to keep funding the kind of work MVP did to win back the White House and the Senate!

       Now, here's the big surprise! Especially if you love the Grateful Dead like I do! No? Well, that might be because you never really listened to the Dead. And my special guest will be Bob Weir, the iconic singer/songwriter/guitarist for the Grateful Dead since 1965! Yikes!

       Bobby's going to play a couple tunes – and all donations will go to MVP to help Democrats win all across the nation.

       Please join me, the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir and lots of friends on Sunday, May 23rd at 6pm ET [5pm CT, 3pm PT] donate HERE to register for the event.

       I hope you can make it! And if you think I'm going to close this email with Keep On Truckin', you're wrong!

Al

P.S. Keep On Truckin'!

P.S. from me: Watch a very short video of Franken drawing the map of the states.

Norwegians love butter ~ this has come up before in my Norwegian class. Before I knew it, I was telling the story (in Norwegian) of my friend Augusto, who spent many winters in Antarctica as part of an Italian mission. Was he a researcher or a scientist? someone asked, in order to clarify which word I should use. I didn't know. One year, the French & Italian missions had decided to join forces in order to take less support staff. This fell apart ~ & almost came to war ~ when the Italians' choice of cook planned to use olive oil & the French cook naturally would only use butter. Augusto was scathing: butter! he sneered with all the contempt of a gourmet. 

When I say "I was telling the story," I mean that in the most general sense, of plunging in & giving it a shot. I only knew a few of the words I needed, starting with "gå," which means "go" but only as in "walk." So when I said he went to Antarctica, I was asked, Oh, did he walk there? Yes, of course, I said, & then fixed it to "dra." Nonetheless, I persisted, badly, awkwardly but triumphantly. Dammit, I will speak norsk before I'm done! 

My Norwegian conversation class starts tonight ~ I thought it was next week & am a little thrown off. I'm determined to listen & talk better so I shall plunge in. I wish I hadn't been at work since 8 this morning, pretty nonstop. I'm beat & it's only 5. Jeg elsker norsk! 

Got the first shingles vaccine & have been walloped. I barely made it home yesterday & I slept for a hundred hours or so. Still feel beat. They say the second is the tough one. Yay. 

The word for shingles in Norwegian is helvetesild, or hellfire. 

Happy Syttende Mai, Norwegian Independence Day (yesterday but I couldn't....)

One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it. 

~ Katherine Anne Porter

Unfortunately, all too many people have the courage of a gift they don't have. And many people don't have the courage that should accompany talent. Somehow, though I diagree, i like to think that this is true.... that if I can summon the courage, it'll prove I should be doing [this]. Exceptions in every direction aside, she is probably right. 

We toddled to 14th & 2nd to see this small but surprising show of art in odd places. Our friend Lynne strewed signs & puffy pillows of lichens, with a brief explanation near each (per the photo). Somehow we missed seeing her & Lucretia but it was terrific to connect even a bit. New York's back! 

Laughing on Ice

Come with me & let the moonlight

turn to ice in our hands

Find stars in our pockets

spend them on diamonds

Come with me & let ice turn to moonlight

& fall from our fingers

Perfect day. Movie-worthy clouds in clear blue, Johnny & I reading our poem-of-the-summer (Stephen Mitchell's trans of the Iliad) on the benches, nobody wanting any work from me, lying about reading, pictures in the mail of my friend's baby, an invite, Pete Spence's magazine fresh from Australia, The Last Kings of Thule on life in the Arctic, some old loved songs springing up in my feed ("Galveston," George Jones "Still Doing Time," Garnet Mimms, "The Last Roundup," "Truckin'"), plenty sleep, a sturdy kitchen chair found on the corner. You couldn't actually sit on the chair that was there - the back was broken off, there were spikes & nails sticking out, & one leg was giving way. We only kept it to scratch & stab our legs in the night. 

Today's Times carried the obituary of Pat Bond, "a sexual-subculture pioneer," founder in the early '70s of the Eulenspiegel Society, "an organization for adherents of bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism." When I first moved to NY, I found an ad for the Society in the Voice. I knew, through my German dad, about Till Eulenspiegel, a mischievous character in German folklore, & thought— well, I'm not sure what I thought. That my dad would like it that I was taking an interest in his culture? that I would find others who liked the stories about his "merry pranks"? I went to a meeting. I don't remember much, just feeling quite uncomfortable without having any idea whatsoever what was going. It certainly didn't have anything to do with Till & I'm sure the people there, who I remember as all being old & dull, could see that. 

I think I remember that the meeting was held on the 2nd floor of a theater building on 4th St. Is it possible it was the same theater that produced nothing but Strindberg? The lady selling tickets morphed into the star (& director & for all I know, the translator). Early on in knowing Johnny, who was a real theater buff, I told him how much I liked Strindberg & how funny he was. He's not funny, Johnny said. So I dragged him to this theater, where a really ancient lady played Miss Julie, & the most uncharismatic actor of all time played the love interest. She took every opportunity to strip & let her boobs fall out of her negligee. Johnny thought I was exaggerating but admitted if anything I had underpromised. 

These days I don't go to anything I'm not prepared for. What strange worlds I fell into when I just went. 

Many years ago I took a short adult ed class on Spanish. It was very introductory, not much in the way of actual speaking or learning, as I recall. I do remember that the teacher spent one whole session on diseases. He said, People named Dolores (troubles, pains) are called Lola! And he laughed uncontrollably. We sat & stared & didn't get the joke. 

This Dolar Shop is neither a 99¢ store nor a house of troubles but a hotpot restaurant.  

No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire. 

~ L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) 

I don't think everyone knows that the Wizard of Oz books, though set in Kansas, stemmed from Baum's years as a journalist in South Dakota.

My father (whose 115th birthday was yesterday) often said something similar, that the Nazis took away his family, his country, his language, but the one thing they couldn't take was his education. So, he would conclude, always get a good education! 

Been a while since I've done a roundup of books I'm reading or have recently finished: 

* Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell, author of the superb memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. Hamnet was good, not great ~ took too long to get to the part I as there for, the effect of life on art. 

* Donna Leon's latest Brunetti mystery, Transient Desires, was almost the opposite, in that it was really good & the last page ruined the whole book. I actually thought they had neglected to print the last chapter. It was the briefest wrapup, with nothing actually explained or clear. So disappointing that I retroactively noticed there was very little of food, family life, or the book (Tacitus) Brunetti was reading. 

* Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. After I had read 50 or 75 pages, I began to feel that at a thousand pages, the book was too short.

There's more but I want to get outside while it's nice, & read KL. 

This shows my best-ever non-bingo, QUININ. The triple word score is under the X & the Q fell on a double-letter tile. For a total score of 118 points. Things more often don't work ~ either you have a great word & nowhere to put it, or you're missing a letter 9or 20 to make a great word. So this was satisfying & most likely unrepeatable.

Why can't people talk about things anymore? It's all "around" a topic. A headline in today's New York Times (! you should know better) mentioned Facebook's "decision around" an indefinite ban of the former president. I can't find that headline now, so a wiser head must have fixed it. i see things like "projects around the border" when they mean "at." I don't have good examples at hand because they bug me so much I thrust them out of my head as quickly as possible.

Similarly, why is everything "within" and never "in"? Does everything have to come in "a set of" or "series of"? Do we never hold conferences or build tech tools but always a set of them? 

He must have been 5 when he made this. 

Now he owns an apartment in Brooklyn & manages things & knows things. 

What was I up to at age 5? Nothing that's framed on any wall, I'm sure. 

Adults weren't friends with kids when I was little. 

I remember Eddie's dad telling me that "Edmund thinks of you as a peer." And, just in case it wasn't clear: "That's a compliment." 

Oh yes indeed. 

Sadly, I have run out of room or I would have brought this home. Imagine getting tired of something as lovely as this. Maybe they went white modern? Was it your childhood chest? 

The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.

~ Thurgood Marshall

Is America great? There have been astonishing kindnesses over the past year & equally astonishing & public selfishness. I suppose every society has some of each.

This reminds me to recommend an excellent book called Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King, winner of a 2013 Pulitzer. Subtitle totally earned. 

Yesterday it was a Seido party on the west side, at Chelsea Piers. Most of us were vaxxed & it was off with the masks. Man, how great to see faces! It's really you! Today it was a couple of guys we know & we hung out on the street in the summer weather. So good to escape the zoombox strait jacket.

A Sign

I made up the word 

   PAYMONT

      in a dream

What does that mean—

    in a dream?

Only 

   the word—

      reverberating, intoned. 

Of all the things on my to-do list I only did the one that took 5 minutes. And pretty soon I'm going home to read Kristin Lavransdatter. I'm 75 pages into a thousand-page book & already I know it's too short. After working furiously to get my story ready for my last Norwegian class of the semester, I'm ready for an easy day. But just one—I already know I have a busy schedule tomorrow. This might be the least interesting post I ever write. 

Update: Changed a lightbulb.

Read an encouraging short article in The Economist on how several musical genres were invented by accident. Extreme metal came about because the band Venom was using bad musicians in a second-rate studio. Louis Armstrong invented scat singing by improvising lah-lah-lah syllables when he dropped his sheet music during a recording session. And so on. Nothing like a lucky accident to change everything. Oh that an apple would drop on my head! 
 

Years ago, Johnny & I went over to the KMart near us to buy a coffeemaker. Maybe it was when we turned off the gas so our little espresso pot no longer was of any use. All the electric coffeemakers cost maybe $25. But one came with a free package of 100 paper filters. THAT was the one we had to have. We didn't consider anything else, not price, reputation, warranty... we wanted those free filters. A hundred pots later, we discovered that filters cost a dollar. 

Not sure why that anecdote came to me this morning but it makes me realize that probably all of us have strange lacunae of ignorance. Why would we all know how everything works? I understand banks, having had an accountant for a father but it doesn't surprise me that people get scammed into opening accounts. For example. When I once had to go to some welfare-type city department, I discovered — because I did it wrong first — that I knew less than everyone else there on how to behave in order to get what I wanted.

Still not sure where I'm going with this, except to say I like when I rub up against my own obliviousness. (Except when a young person patronizes me. For that matter, why does everyone, young or not, like to tell everyone else how to unmute on zoom?)

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. 

~ Anais Nin

So if our life shrinks through no fault of our own, do we lose our courage? That's what it feels like, more than a year into this pandemic. All the things we took for granted seem impossible to do again. Get on a plane? No, I don't think so. Eat in a restaurant? Are you mad?! What good is the courage to carry on? We can't go on we must go on. The courage of the caregiver, the courage of the parent. Not admired bravery but sometimes that's all you get.

Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist who denied Pound had ever been insane, blamed the psychiatrists at Pound's sanity hearing for not distinguishing between delusion and political conviction, with the ultimate delusion a national one: "We have let ourselves be deluded—into a belief that responsibility is not responsibility, guilt not guilt, and incitement to hate not incitement to violence." This is from John Tytell's excellent 1987 biography, Ezra Pound: The solitary volcano. Tytell also quotes critic Irving Howe, who called the "abstract quality" of Pound's views what makes them so terrifying, the expression of a "theological hatred that never sought a particular victim or even envisaged the consequences of its rhetoric" but resulted nevertheless in a "blind complicity in the twentieth century's victimization of the innocents."

From this remove it's shocking how casual & widespread vile language like Pound's was at the time. How he learned nothing from what happened right under his nose. Stuck to his horrendous, ignorant, half-uneducated beliefs. 

And yet, I still read his work. 

I don't remember ever seeing hail in New York City but we got some on Wednesday. It suddenly got so loud that I thought the window was broken ~ & then I knew what it was. It felt so midwestern that I could almost smell the green prairie. 

Turns out that it hails here a handful of times a year, from none to 5. After Texas, South Dakota leads the nation with 377 major hail events in 2020 alone ("major" meaning hailstones 1" in diameter or larger), according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Storm Prediction Center, National Weather Service. Hey, wow, yet another reason to be proud of my home state.

Around the falling waters the Furies hurl!

Violence gathers, spins in their heads summoning them.

This beautiful remnant of the Industrial Age is near the Park & probably why I was discouraged from visiting Paterson, back when I was working in NJ & had a car. I always am drawn to shabby & like to see the trees through the open window frames. Gorgeous as the park is, if you wander randomly down paths you come to an animal shelter. Given that there's no parking & no visitors, one can only imagine that the pets aren't there to be adopted. 

If you peer over the fence & look down through the tangles, there indeed is the Passaic River. Why this sign? ("Passaic River," with a down arrow.) Do people wonder what river they are seeing? Or where the tremendous amount of water goes? Or are we being alerted to the presence of a river, which happens to be the Passaic? For a national park, there wasn't a lot of signage (this & a recent plaque on the history of the area were it, & almost no guidance to get to the spot. Oh, but that's New Jersey, I just recalled—I never knew what town I was in when I was driving around out there: Jersey for Jerseyites! must be their motto) or any park rangers that I could see, & a LOT of trash, because, as Dawn pointed out, the national park budget was severely cut in the previous administration. We were seeing a real-world outcome of a D.C. decision. 

Tomorrow: the abattoir.

I met them (1) in person for the first time on Sunday to (2) leave New York & go out to the Great Falls + to a Swedish bakery where ate an amazing cardamom loaf. Earlier that morning I had to try to remember what it's like to go on a social outing. It seemed both familiar & like something I had never done before so I was trying to remember what kinds of things people say to each other. Luckily non-Zoom conversation came back to me pretty quickly. 3D is a million times better than 2D in case you are uncertain like I was. 

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls

its spent waters forming the ouline of his back.

Say it, no idea but in things

a man like a city and a woman like a flower

—who are in love. Two women. Three women.

Innumerable women, each like a flower.

     But

only one man—like a city.

~ William Carlos Williams, from Paterson

I took this photo yesterday at the Great Falls National Park. How is it that I worked nearby for years & never moseyed over here. I was so moved to see the same sight as the cover of Paterson, a book I've been reading constantly for decades. 

This post begins a week of Williams or until I run out of pictures that I took yesterday. 

The wonderful, brilliant, insightful, discerning Terence Winch has chosen a poem of mine for his Best American Poetry blog. I am flattered. Although it's an ancient work, I still like it. And of course please that he does. That brightened a day that started with me mournfully singing "I ain't got a home in this world anymore" & feeling blue. Not no more!