Elinor Nauen

When I was 18 or 19 I went out with a guy named Jim Rigby. Over the years I've thought of him often, mostly in the context of the name I could have had if we had gotten married. Turns out I play the same role in his life - the girl who could have become Elinor Rigby. I happened to look him up on Facebook the other day, & he had just posted about dating two (!) Elinors his junior year of college. So now we're Facebook friends & catching up & he looks the same & holy crap it's been 50 years. I know it's all for the best that I ended up with Johnny & he with Marilyn but we both have that shining moment of could-have-been that is sweet to hold on to. 

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

~ Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Welsh Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of the UK

I've often thought that my generation, Baby Boomers, benefited by growing up in a booming economy. Our ability to live how we chose, if we chose to, came from the cushion that the economy afforded us. Our labor wasn't needed & we made or took advantage of the Generation Gap to create our ow lives. Wouldn't have been possible if we had had debt or want. 

Talking about the Dixon Brothers the other day made me think about other musicians I've been listening to & how much I like Irma Thomas, "Soul Queen of New Orleans," not least because we share a birthday (& in fact today is our half-birthday. Someone asked me recently if I really celebrate my half-birthday. Someone who doesn't know me very well, obviously. As a kid we always had a half-cake from Dixie Bake Shop on Minnesota Avenue, the only place I know of that sold half-cakes). Irma Thomas is a contemporary of Aretha Franklin and Etta James, although not as well known, obviously. What I just learned is she had her first child at age 14, and was a mother of 4 and twice divorced by the time she was 19. Like all great singers, she sounds like it's all aimed at you. 

Update: Here she is singing "Time Is on My Side." Thanks, DB!

Issue 4 is out, featuring a stellar cast of poets & artists. One day, Maureen Owen was in town. We had a long lunch at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden & talked about the fun old days of mimeo magazines. Let's put on a show! We came up with the name Julebord, literally "Christmas table" in Norwegian, but colloquially the anything-goes holiday party. We're having fun & sharing some good work. Every issue has an all-new cast, with an exception or 2 (us & our "house artist," Basil King). 

... take off my hat & hit me with a bat, if they put the sales taxes on the women. 

A Depression-era song by the great Dixon Brothers, who also sang "Intoxicated Rat" & other close or "blood" harmony songs like "After the Ball" and "Wreck on the Highway." I like their nasal South Carolina twang. 

I went out an hour ago & came back $450 poorer. At least it wasn't a sales tax on the women. 

Part of what is so upsetting about Dale Hart's death is that he's the last of my 5 formative teachers from Sioux Falls. It's so long since I've lived there that still being a part of that world is unlikely, yet there I am & it hit me hard. Mr. Fialkowski (orchestra), Miss Kleinsasser (English), Miss Norman (journalism), & Miss Skaff (Latin). They believed in me, pushed me, were proud of me, trusted me. Taught me. 

Hard too because there are fewer & fewer people left from the generation one up from me - my parents & their peers, my teachers, my friends' parents. 

Another stab of mortality. 

He was my English teacher in junior high, who taught English and theater in the public schools of Sioux Falls for 49 years, and much later, long after I'd graduated from high school, a friend. We communicated frequently for many years, and he always sent an apropos quote or poem, and was full of gentleness and intelligent responses. I'm sure I"m not the only former student who believe themself to be a special favorite!

At least I can go back to calling him Mr. Hart, no more of this phony baloney "Dale." Dale to his face, Mr. Hart behind his back. 

He was the first adult I remember speaking to me as though I were a peer. I was 15, it was after schoo, and he asked me about a current event. He asked with a genuine respect for and interest in my opinion. I still remember the thrill of being taken seriously by a grownup. 

The tributes I've seen so far call him: respectful, smart, thoughtful, an outstanding teacher., a just plain good human, a teacher that shaped your life and is remembered after 53 years was definitely someone with a gift, his character was so influential, and when he coached and encouraged me, he helped me to gain the confidence I would need for the rest of my life, truly a great builder of young adults, inspired me to become a teacher, his sincere interest in his students, a once in a lifetime teacher, validated our contributions and drew every student into participation, related to us effectively and respectfully, my favorite teacher in high school, a man of integrity, high standards, with expectations of excellence from his students, gave everything he had to those of us who loved him.

I am a better person because of Mr. Hart.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most. 

~ John Ruskin

That's the epigram for The Secret Lives of Color, by Kassia St. Clair, a book of short essays on the history and meaning of 75 hues, but also about war, art, politics, and civilization. I'm rationing myself to one shade a day & am already sad that the book will one day be over. 

When he was a Yankees announcer, Phil Rizzuto used to criticizing players for nonchalanting a throw or play. He would have been sorely disappointed in me today. I just can't get moving. I feel like I should have gotten compensation for my trip to Denver getting canceled but I pretty much slept since my little jaunt to the airport & back. Weird how you can get jetlag when you're only away from home for 3 hours & didn't get near a plane. Maybe I'll go buy a pair of cute socks....

Why do poets love/use lists?

* It's an easy way to organize material. I've written a lot of abecedaries, most notably My Marriage A to Z. I couldn't manage to write a coherent essay from many bits of information and theory, so the alphabet format was ideal. 

* Lists go back to the earliest poetry, when bards used lists as aides-memoire to reciting a long epic. 

* A name, a place, a date can signify so much more, the way we know what Woodstock and Pearl Harbor and January 6 mean without going into long explanation. You can tell a story incredibly efficiently. 

* Abundance can be beautiful. One tulip is lovely, but tulips, roses, azaleas, dogwood, rhododendron, dandelion, stonecrop, rain lily, and pasque add up to a tremendous jumble of size and color. Spare can be great, but sometimes you want a fully stocked yard. 

* We can learn a lot about a character by learning what they own or value or even know about. Is it carpet or is it a Turkish carpet? Are those books on the shelves or leather-bound first editions of late 20th-century science fiction writers? 

* I definitely got in the habit of list-making during my days as a health journalist. I broke up complicated sentence full of semicolons into readable bullet points. 

Oh! Look at this essay I just found: Why Literature Loves Lists, From Rabelais to Didion, an Incomplete List of Listmakers in LitHub. Let Brian Dillon do the thinking! 

Left for LaGuardia at 5, with Delta telling me it was an on-time 7 a.m. departure. Got the most upbeat & kind cab driver ever, Idris, who's been driving for 27 years. He told me he would charge half price because I was his last, and friendliest apparently, fare. (I said absolutely not.) I was at my gate around half an hour before boarding would start, which was fine. Got an alert: departure delayed till 8. I dozed & what woke me up was that sort of murmur that you can tell something's wrong. I looked at the board (& this time there was no alert at all). My flight was canceled. What?! Naturally, every other Delta flight today, tomorrow, & Friday was sold out. There was one $2,250 first class seat with a layover in Minneapolist - nope, gone. When I got stuck in Scotland at the start of the pandemic, my flight got canceled & at least Delta said they would try to rebook me. This time they let me know I was on my own. 

I went home & slept for the rest of the day. 

Totally forgot this existed. Ann Rupel pulled it out of a hat, I guess. 

Titled & Untitled

On my birthday (www.Elinorsbirthday.com)
in 1962 (www.bigsnowstorm.com)
2 days (www.date&time.com)
before John Glenn (www.ohiosenator.com)
went into space (www.wow.com)
for a little tumble (www.contortionism.org)
South Dakota (www.landofinfinitevariety.gov)
my home state (op.cit., Elinorsbirthday)
had the hugest snow (www.stormofthecentury.edu)
since the blizzard of '88 (ibid.)
& I didn't get a present (www.nobaseballglove!.com)
till days (op.cit., date&time) later
but got yelled at (www.childabuse.com)
because I bounced a ball (www.rubber.com)
against my parents' bedroom wall (www.howwasIsupposedtoknow.com)
while they were (I figured out years later) having sex (www.xxx.com)

No such thing as spare time. No such thing as free time. No such thing as downtime. All you have is a lifetime. Go.

~ Henry Rollins

It's one of my favorite dojo events. A hundred or more people arrive at Rockaway Beach well before dawn, then meditate together till the sun rises, after which there's a workout & watermelon. August is a month when people in Japan think about their ancestors, so that's the focus of the meditation. For the past few years I've been lucky enough to get a ride from a color belt who lives across the street from me. This year his plane got diverted to Boston & he isn't going to make it back for another day, most likely. I woke up at 3 to find we were staying right here in Manhattan. Feels like Maureen Owen's No-Travels Journals for the 21st century. 

I did a quote & a poem & some really minor blather. I am yawning just thinking about my life. Except for poetry, & I don't ever feel ready to pull out a poem & talk about it, which generally seems pretentious or uninteresting, or maybe wildly off the mark. Someone just sent me a video of a synagogue in Curaçao with sand on the floor. Everyone is somewhere else. Well, I'm going to Denver in a couple of days to crank out Julebord 4 with Maureen. Meanwhile, I'll go sit under the trees & relax before I get back to thinking about poetry (& not my life!).

Another heat wave! We barely had a week off since the last one so this isn't even a new thing to complain about. I have no new takes on misery. It's boring to suffer once you have already suffered. 

A Wineglass Full of Rain

 
love interrupted

a backyard evening

reminded us to go outside &

then come inside

we talked & talked

& talked ourselves into caring

or was it the

lovelight

under a big fat moon oh yeah

that moon

then the mosquitoes

& the kisses

People complain a lot about bikes riding on the sidewalks & the wrong way up streets. I agree (& am an exceptionally law-abiding bicyclist, even stopping for lights). My chances of keeping that up would be better if so many moving vans & delivery trucks (& passenger vehicles!) didn't look at bike lanes as free spots to hang out. Yesterday on 12th St, there was a USPS van settled down in 3 straight blocks. In one, the guy was eating his lunch, meaning he could just as well have stopped a lot of other places, without trying so hard to kill me by forcing me into traffic. There are too many vehicles & people for the streets of New York, no doubt, but it works better if everyone tries to make themselves small.

If you want to survive in New York, you better only read the box scores.

~ Billy Martin

Having a great weekend walking around the neighborhood with the wonderful Baltimore poet David Beaudouin, who seems to know more about what's around than I do. I had never seen the plaque for Frank O'Hara where he lived at 441 East 9th Street, for example, but it was something David wanted to see. I'd walked by the tiny hands of this effigy a few times but David's interest & excitement made me stop, not just for this but for the neighborhood as a whole. How fortunate I am to live here & know poets. 

I thought bravery was part of my character. I've taken a breath & leaped every chance I got. Reckless, maybe, but also brave, I think. These days, the weather keeps me indoors, Johnny's health gives me pause about going away, my knees make me reluctant to throw myself to the ground in karate ... & so on. I can still take courage in art, however, & I will continue to try. I just never expected to be someone who thinks twice. I guess it's exciting or at least interesting to see myself change, even as I get older, even they aren't changes that seem like me. But they are me & I am them & I'm grateful to be taking the whole trip. 

My neighbor in #8 when I first moved in was Mary Deane, a young mother who was very protective of me, which I was amused by given that I had hitchhiked all over the country by myself & felt extremely capable. She was right, though, that I had no clue about the Lower East Side (which was what we called the East Village back then). She had a beautiful sister named Gloria & lots of other relatives in the area. I once or twice went to the beach with a bunch of them & they really did the cliché Puerto Rican thing of setting up their blankets & grills on the median near the parking lot not the sand. When Mary moved out, she was afraid I'd be helpless so she gave me a metal bar with a metal chunk on the end to protect myself. My apartment got broken into while I was away, & my neighbors thought it was some kind of maniac because they found my weapon lying on the bed. They were so relieved to find out it was mine. Years later I ran into Mary & asked what Gloria was doing. "Twenty to life," she said, I think for drugs.

According to my sister, New York actually has 12 seasons (including The Pollening, between Third Winter and Spring) & we are currently in Hell's Front Porch. It's hard not to feel like we're being abused or gaslit by the weather: The temperature is way down (yay!) but the humidity is way way way up so it's just as unlovable & unliveable as it has been for the last 2 weeks. Can I call the Weather Violence hotline for an intervention?

What a pleasure to buy a brand-new 2025 (!) road atlas. All the places I've been & might go in this wonderful country are there for my random page-turning. Mobile, where have you been all my life? New Orleans, are you still as fun as when I was 20? What's going on in Merry Hill, NC, these days? What kind of Pierre pressure is my home state experiencing? Roaming the map has charms as good as jumping in a car. The only thing that's changed is I sent away for the Rand-McNally ~ they used to be for sale on tables set up in midtown or by Cooper Union. I used to have a dozen, because every time I saw one for sale I needed it. 

When he reached 95 years of age, Pablo Casals, the great Spanish cellist, was asked by a young reporter: "Mr. Casals, you are 95 and the greatest cellist who ever lived. Why do you still practice six hours a day?"

Casals answered, "Because I think I'm making progress."

Yay for lifelong learning. Yay for not giving up. 

Thrilled that Johnny has a new(-old) book out: Slip of the Tongue & other stories from Tough Poets Press, who republished Mangled Hands a year or 2 ago. A couple of the stories were supposed to be in a collection that never came out & we think were never published anywhere. A bunch are from before I knew him and were in The World, Siamese Banana Press, and elsewhere. Hoping there's more where that came from. 

This is just to say that 10 or 15 degrees makes the hugest difference between slow demise & staying alive (ah ah ah ah stayin' alive). 

I am a simple human creature, affected by the world around me. 

Bless me, for I can see. 

When the second of us gets in bed, Lefty is always a quick 3rd. He also likes to be alone with one of us. Alone & touching. It's kind of how Johnny & I keep in contact, although neither of us has a tail. After 4 years, he's become a loving little critter. 

We had a bad dinner, a good breakfast & time for a quick stop at the Mad magazine show at the Norman Rockwell Museum, thanks to a tip from my friend Diana Rickard, whose father, Jack Rickard, was a Mad artist. Rockwell was really good at what he did but it has its limitations. Not so much the corniness, because real people are never corny. but because what you see is what you get. K asked a good question: is ambiguity, layers of meanings, something that was valued by artists in other times? Probably not. But Rockwell is a bit like reading mysteries - you quickly get everything that's in them & move on. 

My friend K & I set off in her British racing green Mini convertible for North Adams, Massachusetts. Destination: MASS MoCA. By way of: whatever we see. Our first quick pause was at an honor system roadside stand where we bought a pint of blueberries and not peaches or sweet corn. We are longtime car guys & compatible friends. 

MASS MoCA is huge, in an old factory. We mostly saw works of James Turrell, including three events we signed up for in advance. He takes you places you don't expect & you don't resist. I lay on the floor of a dome & watched the sky at dusk to color projections. Sounds simple & it is, but it's also contemplative & lovely.