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NauenThen

Around the corner

August 27, 2017
Reason #42,216 to love my block. There's a shed (or trailer) around the corner on 1st St that gets repainted frequently, maybe weekly. I have never seen anyone going in or out of the shed, & only once seen people doing the artwork. I have no idea what it's all about. The most recent iteration has 2 elements I like.  Read More 
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Agony's liquor

August 25, 2017
Spring Street, New York City.
Great old—old without being dated—sign, palimpsest of Italian Soho. Before it was Soho.

* Anthony = Agony courtesy of Robyn Ryan, who knows some heavy drinkers!
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"Warning"

August 24, 2017
So mysterious. What is a "possible electrical condition"? What is an electrical condition? Is it a little bit sexy?

This was in front of my building when I left this morning. I went in the store to ask my landlord.

It's nothing, he said, it's resolved. Something that was supposed to be less than a 1 was a 1.

This is typical of Mike. He doesn't want to share information & he will never admit he doesn't know something or that anything is wrong. You wanting to know pretty much guarantees he won't tell you.  Read More 
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Tomatoes on a plate

August 23, 2017
Tomatoes are the best thing about summer. Juicy, sweet, on toasted bread with mayonnaise & sometimes a little cheese. I could live on them the whole season.
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Foliage on 4th St

August 22, 2017
It makes me happy when something escapes a well-tended block & gets wild. It makes me happy that no one from the bank felt an obligation to trim this. Maybe banks like wild growth.
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The New Museum

August 21, 2017
Tags: The New Museum
Fern and Lenard Tessler Stairs.
The Elinor Nauen Handrail?
The Elinor Nauen Elevator Button?
The Elinor Nauen Toilet Paper Dispenser?  Read More 
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Baby bird

August 20, 2017
This little guy was right outside my office steps a couple of days ago, making a noise that was louder than he was. I tried dropping crumbs into his mouth but that didn't work. Whenever he ducked his head you could see that he was bald under his feathers. Really a new bird. There was a lot of bounce-back chirping from all around, & a little while later he wasn't there at all, which I hope is connected.  Read More 
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Typewriters

August 18, 2017
The Royal on the left is a real beauty. The others are the K cars of their day.
None of them really work but I love having four manual typewriters. One still has a bunch of glittery car stickers on it (not shown here) that immediately hurtled me back to all the work I turned out on that Smith-Corona. My first typewriter was a portable Olivetti my brother gave me. I was so sad when my apartment was robbed (back when the East Village was way more dangerous & my only protection was a 2x4 wedged into the window) & it was stolen—I was sure my poems came from it not me & there would be no more.

Two of our granddaughters want typewriters so I hauled these out. Can I give them away? The older likes retro things—she also has a turntable, although it plays through an iPod. The younger  Read More 
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Charlottesville

August 17, 2017
"Every time Hitler crossed a new line, of rhetoric or violence or policy, those who had decided that he was what Germany needed found a new way to overlook his latest egregious step. His speeches and books, to say nothing of his policies, were dripping with Jew-hatred, but decent Germans, including many Jews, found reasons for looking the other way, all in the service of some other ostensible good which his election would serve. One does not need to read Ullrich’s book to know that matters did not work out terribly well for Germany – or for the Jews."

This is Rabbi Daniel Gordis talking about Volker Ullrich’s "stunning" recent biography of Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939, and why many Jews still support tRump.

The synagogue in Charlottesville hid their Torah scrolls & canceled events.

Sick. Read More 
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The president of the United States

August 16, 2017
The president of the United States can't bring himself to condemn Nazis & white supremacists.

What world is this? I thought the Atlantic Ocean had knocked me down last week but this is so much more terrifying & deadly.

And yet, and yet, he continues to have his defenders, who are sick of black people being "pandered" to &, I suppose, agree with his moral equivocating.

Sick.  Read More 
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Roof door

August 15, 2017
The view from the roof is great but the view of the roof not so much.

It's pretty funny that Mike thinks he is making the building better by painting the walls baby-poop-beige adding a terrible front door (see yesterday's post), & "renovating" with all sorts of "upgrades" that are invariably any or all of dumb, useless, unwanted, nonfunctional, ugly.  Read More 
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Across America by bicycle

August 14, 2017
My 15-year-old nephew finished a 56-day 3700-mile cross-country bike ride today. He started by dipping his wheels into the Pacific in Oregon & ended this afternoon at Coney Island. I've driven across the country many times & it's a long haul. To do every bit of it under your own steam is hard to imagine. He saw the uncountable stars in the West, climbed Rocky Mountains, followed the Columbia River Gorge, joined RAGBRAI for a stretch, was alone with himself for hours on end (the hardest part), ate incessantly, showered rarely, & had a life-changing time.

I love that kid. I can't wait to see what happens next for him.  Read More 
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"Be Careful"

August 13, 2017
The pale sign in the window's upper left reads: "Be Careful the door is shocking people"
My landlord's latest "improvement" is a door that is magnetized. It requires two hands to exit—you hold that red button on the right & turn the handle simultaneously. Not only is it inconvenient, & difficult-to-impossible if you are, oh, carrying something or have a bum shoulder or are short, it's probably illegal, according to a friend of mine who works for the Fire Department. It's mostly used for locked psych wards & is only legal if it's hooked to a particular kind of building-wide fire safety system, which he says we don't have. If the electricity goes out, which has happened many times & certainly could happen in a fire, we could be trapped  Read More 
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All that is solid melts

August 10, 2017
What lies beneath?
Climate change has led to many deeply buried mysteries being exposed. In the news recently was a story about finding the bodies of a Swiss couple who disappeared 75 years ago when a glacier receded. They had gone to milk their cows, leaving behind 7 children. An Iron Age horse was found in Norway & Incan child sacrifice victims in Argentina.

Think about these  Read More 
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Southern Cross

August 9, 2017
The one nice thing about having no internet at my office is sitting at Southern Cross, the coffee shop up the block. I had a decaf iced cappuccino & a too-peppery scone, & listened to the Doors & Beatles among much more contemporary music. They claim to have the best coffee in the city. It is pretty good but that seems an unprovable claim, doesn't it?

Unrelated fact: I own 4 manual typewriters.  Read More 
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Dirty scrabble

August 8, 2017
This is a game Ann & I just finished, where many more words than usual contributed to an unplanned, & rare, theme. (Although another game I'm playing with someone else right now includes bird, rat, sow, eel, bear, & local denizen.) This one includes:
Fellated
Spawned
Jaw
Horn
Wet
Vices
Coy
Lap
Off
Know
Hombre / Deft / Taxicab
Some of the words are suggestive mostly in a sort of snowballing way. Read More 
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Beach training!

August 7, 2017
Tags: karate
Yesterday was my dojo's beach training day. We black belts arrive at Far Rockaway around 4 a.m., meditate while the sun rises, then do exercises on the sand & in the water. It's really fun except when you're waking up in the middle of the night, oh, & when you are so blind-sleepy that you trip & spill a whole cup of tea & mash up your shoulder.

A day later, I'm still not totally awake, but it was fun to come home all sandy & take a nap.  Read More 
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On procrastination

August 4, 2017
I finally did a little task that I had had on my to-do list for probably two months, which was to get my passport picture. It took all of 1o minutes, so why did it take so long to get to it? I guess that's the nature of postponing, that tasks then take longer & loom larger than they need to. The accomplishment can't equal the investment.  Read More 
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Killers

August 3, 2017
Johnny and I watched The Killers on DVD. Angie Dickinson in the 1964 version, Ava Gardner in the ’46. He loves Angie but I love Ava. In real life, a 19-year-old woman in (I think) Maryland hired a hitman (really an undercover cop) to steal a lump of cocaine (really a block of queso blanco) and kill everyone (four men and “children if present”) in the house. Read More 
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From my roof

August 2, 2017
Could I drag an air mattress up here & sleep out? People slept on their fire escapes in the days before air conditioning. I can't imagine. I can't even imagine growing up in an apartment. When it was too hot in Sioux Falls, we kids would sleep on the floor in my parents' bedroom, which had a room a/c, the only one in the house. We didn't even have fans in our rooms, let alone a/c or central air. In fact, I've never had central air conditioning in my life, having gone on from South Dakota to even more primitive living conditions & ending up in a tenement for the last 40 years. Read More 
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Out of the rhythm

August 1, 2017
It's funny—as soon as I wrote the below, but before I could post it, I fell back into a blog groove. Internet is still out more often than not at my office, so that's not it. I would have guessed it's my aches & pains—karate being a young person's game—but they're worse  Read More 
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Sam Shepard (1943-2017)

July 31, 2017
Tags: San Shepard
Shocked & heartbroken to hear of the death of the great writer Sam Shepard. I've been a fan since the late 1970s, when I reviewed Buried Child for the City College newspaper. His genius was that his characters talk plain prose that’s also perfect poetry: how people should talk if they talked as they should.  Read More 
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Johnny in action, 1991

July 30, 2017
The back steps of St. Mark's Church in the Bowerie, home of the Poetry Project.
This was taken while he was being filmed for a (never finished) documentary about Jack Kerouac. I haven't seen the footage for a long time so I don't remember what he said, but he emphasized his points by bouncing down the steps. One of the few participants who was theatrical as well as smart.

I love this guy.

Update: This was the same project we filmed Sam Shepard for. Funny that I posted this picture the day he died, without knowing it.  Read More 
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Tesla

July 28, 2017
Tags: Nikola Tesla
Do you know about Nikola Tesla?
Tesla! I would just regurgitate the link, so go there—it's a comic—you will whiz through & be amazed!

Is it true that Edison mostly stole other people's patents? I used to spend time in northern Ohio, & I believe he's from Milan. Or am I somehow mixing him up with the Milan (pronounced MY-lin, by the way) Melon Festival? I must have read a kids' book about Edison—I remember he was deaf or near-deaf because someone boxed his ears on a train, & I spent a long time trying to understand how one's ears got boxed.

See, I'm doing the same thing  Read More 
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My window

July 27, 2017
I like that this photo makes it seem like my house is spare & serene, & practically in the woods. It is none of those things. We are borderline hoarders & have a giant cat who likes to leap out of nowhere & scare the bejesus out of us, & our courtyard is a dump. Also, the curtains & windows need to be washed, & we don't really get any sun.
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Oxford treasures

July 26, 2017
A faire felde ful of folke
"500 Years: Treasures from the Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford" was the show we went to this afternoon at the Center for Jewish History. Early books—some handwritten, some printed—in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, & Middle English, that have survived for hundreds of years. Works about the King James bible, biology, astronomy. I was moved by much of what we saw, maybe especially this page from Piers Plowman, because I know some of it & in fact borrowed a line for my "found" manuscript of medieval baseball:  Read More 
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Scientists embark on expedition to submerged continent Zealandia

July 25, 2017
Tags: Zealandia
Topographic Zealandia
It's like science fiction! Or the crazy UFO-history channels: Atlantis found! What makes our hearts beat harder than a "lost continent"?

Zealandia is half the size of Australia & surrounds New Zealand. It's an actual continent.

Read the article (link on photo caption)—it's interesting but I can't boil it down. I guess file this post under gee-whiz-science that I am interested in knowing exists but not so interested that I want to learn more.

October 3 Update The scientists are back & excited: https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=243192&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click  Read More 
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Sunrise

July 24, 2017
It's quiet & golden on the roof of a morning. It's like a midwestern dawn, with the air as sweet & fresh as silence.

I love the hectic city & I love the sleepy city.
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Into the Valley of the Dolls Rode the 600

July 23, 2017
How is it I never used this title for a poem?
How is it I never wrote a whole book with this title?
Another wasted opportunity.
It's so good I wonder if I stole it
except I found it in a file more than 10 years old
so the answer to provenance—
one way or the other—
is, I'm sure, permanently gone.
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Body by Mary Shelley

July 21, 2017
Johnny in a non-Armani t-shirt that he had made about 1990, lost recently, & just ordered again.
At the Armani store on Fifth Avenue, which we only went in because some guy at the bus stop said go, it’s amazing.

Johnny immediately said, let’s get out of here, I don’t like to be greeted so much.

I made him look at these wispy little shirts, quite ugly, with sequin butterflies on them, & others similarly kitschy. I can’t believe that wife beater is $345, I said.

It must be a trophy wife beater, he said.

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