Elinor Nauen

It's interesting how much buried trauma has boiled up in recent days.

It's hard to be passionate about tax codes and trade agreements, but everyone has a firm opinion about sexual assault & lockerroom talk.

Consciousness raising to the max!

(short on time, will amplify this when I get a moment. any thoughts?)

A wonderful afternoon of apple crisp, imaginative kids, a talky & thinky game called HuggerMugger, intense catching up with two of the people I love & admire most in this world, & a visit to the grave of Dante-Tito, my late & still beloved beyond breathing cat.

Instead of taking a picture of both of them, I woke up Johnny to show him that Buster & he were sleeping exactly the same way—curled on their sides, with one hand (paw) over their faces. My two well-loved menfolk.

This is one of the many short essays I've been writing.

Southern Paradox

“You are kept apart that you may separately be fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetrates a monetary system that beggars both.” This was  Read More 

My allergies are swarming & all I can see is the distant past.

Off to eat apples & honey, blow the shofar, & look deeply into the year I've just had & the year I would like to have. Peace to you in the coming year. See y'all on Wednesday.

I saw this movie weeks ago, and I've thought about it without really coming up with much to say about it. Natalie Portman wrote, directed & starred in it. I think I would choose the Amos Oz book it's based on, which from reading the first few chapters, clearly is more subtle & deep. Nonetheless, I liked the movie. I liked that she let everyone have their point of view even when it was clearly unrealistic, & you ended up being able to understand why they saw things that way. That's hard to do.  Read More 

Poem

I go to work
call my mother, my sister
a few others
watch Floyd fix the toilet
fret about my stuck hood
think about slapping a sign on the Pontiac: it’s yours
& never going near it again
I read a few pages of Shaw’s autobiography,
better yet Chesterton’s
& Quentin Crisp’s ditto
sigh & warble along with Patsy Cline
think about bills, snow, pills, Boston
the party this afternoon & Janet & Didier’s  Read More 

Three-quarters of the way through 2016 & I often feel like a person with one foot in the oven & the other in the freezer: on average I'm comfortable.

People I loved suffered, recovered, died. The loved ones of people I love suffered, died, recovered.

A short-fingered vulgarian is running for president. So is a woman I admire with all my might.

Two long-lost friends turned up, one from the House & the other, just today, my first and only college roommate, Pam.  Read More 

When it's late & Johnny's been sick all day & you want to rush home & make sure he's OK, & you're in the middle of two really good books & you're tired from class because your knee was bothering you, maybe all you can do is throw up a picture you took one day on the roof of  Read More 

= Leap, Terry Tempest Williams (still—just a page or 2 at a time)
= Outlander, recommended by a friend, not sure how far I'll get, it's pretty overwrought!
= Where'd You Go Bernadette, Maria Semple. The person who recommended it called it the funniest book ever. I thought it was sad—funny a lot, but sad.
= Welcome to the Goddamned Ice Cube,  Read More 

We saw the ocean, horse farms, masses of deeply orange flowers, churches, a really ugly stone house, thousands of other bikers, the blue cloudless Jersey sky—none of which I took photos of.

Do you think I post enough about my cat? He's the only cat I've ever known who is both dumber than me & doesn't think he is smarter. It's an excellent quality in a cat. Restful.

He sleeps like Ted Berrigan, with one (or 2, or 4) arms in the air.

For the first time, Sylvie, who will be 9 in 2 months, was allowed to walk alone to her piano lesson. Usually her mom watches from the stoop. The piano teacher is two buildings away, and there were texts to say she was on her way & that she'd arrived. I'm all for free-range parenting, & contemptuous of  Read More 

This poem is very familiar, but why the quote marks? when did I write it? I suppose it was meant to be an imitation of one of Michael's small heavy objects, but whenever I think I've written an homage, no one else does. I couldn't say within 10 years when I wrote it. I think I like it.


The Indian Maiden’s Head
for Michael Scholnick

“the middle class”
kicking around the reservoir
“is propitious”
 Read More 

It felt good to blow the shofar at minyan this morning. It certainly woke me up, which is why we blow in the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah. I have my intentions & worries, but when I blow, I'm not doing anything else.

I'm thinking about a 5-year-old in California who got arrested, hands and feet in zip ties, for "battery on a police officer"... & the fact that what we consider success in our peewee class of 4- and 5-year-olds is if they can stand in line without wiggling for 30 seconds. The "worst" kid I ever had in class, &  Read More 

I heard about the explosion last night in Chelsea (half a block from my dojo) thanks to a message from a high school friend, now living in Boston, who wanted to make sure I was OK. "Would never have imagined this would be something to worry about," she said. I suppose they still don't have homemade bombs in South Dakota. But they do have the kind of gun laws that make it just as scary.

Have we gone around the bend as a country? What can people possibly be thinking?

Even if the extreme right wing has managed to gerrymander themselves into control of 30 states & Congress, doesn't a single one of those legislators have a heart or a backbone?

The Times' editorial on Missouri's shockingly lax new gun laws begins, "In an alarming victory for the gun lobby, Missouri’s Republican-controlled Legislature voted Wednesday to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto and enact a wholesale retreat from gun safety in the state. The law will let citizens carry concealed weapons in public without a state gun permit, criminal background check or firearms training. It strips local law enforcement of its current authority to deny firearms to those guilty of domestic violence and to other high-risk individuals."

It just gets worse, doesn't it?

Two weeks ago, Johnny's urologist told him he had a 65% chance of having aggressive prostate cancer.

A week later he had a biopsy (glad I have lady parts).

Yesterday we got the results:  Read More 

The curse of the idiot savant is remembering birthdays of ex-boyfriends who I would rather not think about at all. And the birthdays of half of my second-grade class (I'm looking at you, Judi "October 12" Snook). And the birthdays of just about everybody who ever told me their birthday (unless they were born in July—those don't stick).  Read More 

It's a lot like my old one, but with a fender! I've hated the wet butt part of riding in the rain & I finally have eliminated it.

Here's the economics of owning a bike in NYC.  Read More 

What is it about schwa? Friends who are my age love the schwa, that upside-down “e” that represents the “uh” sound of an unstressed vowel. It was as much a part of a ‘50s childhood as the Mickey Mouse club. Seeing the word schwa the other day in an online scrabble game zoomed me right back to grade school.

Maybe it’s that it was my first clue  Read More 

Look down!
Look up!

Greasy samosas, with a big lump of cauliflower, say, or ground chicken. I used to eat here, delicious but too oily, & I stopped eating that sort of food. It's a spot where taxi drivers stop. Even in the most urban parts of the city, trees.

Whenever I think I would rather live in Iceland or the Faroe Islands or Sioux Falls or just about anywhere else, I try to remember to pause & see where I really do live. I always fall in love with New York again.

I can't remember ever being yelled at before. It's shocking. I had a moment of thinking I'd triggered it, but when he said I "provoked" him into screaming, I knew he was a lunatic.

A run-of-the-mill I'm-the-man lunatic.

We're weekly colleagues in a volunteer situation. I'd expressed my displeasure for the umpteenth time with our work conditions, & he told me to calm down, something that is routinely said by men to women to try to force them to  Read More 

All that work for one performance! A cast of dozens! Tap dancing! Dueling (with umbrellas)! Frances LeFevre as Orson Bean! Eileen Myles as the Mayor! A tableau vivant! Bands.

The Brave Little Poets Go Camping

Cast:
Elinor and Johnny
Peggy
Marion and her 10-year-old son, Joe
Alice and Doug
Alice’s 16-year-old son Eddie

Saturday, 9-22-90

I wake up early. It’s raining. I call Peggy to ask hopefully, Is anyone having second thoughts?  Read More 

We went to see 90-year-old Jerry Lewis in Max Rose. He looks amazing (could that really be his own hair?) & was sharp & subtle in the role of a man who had just lost his wife (Claire Bloom) of 65 years. He finds evidence that suggests she had had an affair 50-odd years earlier &  Read More 

Tim Milk did this wonderful window shade painting of Ted Berrigan. I don't remember who had it or where it ended up. I found this xerox the other day & it made me think of what a great poet & life force he was.

I often send these lines to people who are grieving:  Read More