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NauenThen

In the neighborhood

Crocuses in the Liz Christy garden. 

It's officially spring, in fact it has been for a couple of days. I guess I can't remain in denial about that. However, it has snowed in NYC in April quite a few times, although the latest date, April 25, which saw 3", was in 1875. 

 

For some reason it makes me think of in the '60s when my mom (& many others) had a garden. All the moms grew potatoes & sometimes carrots. That's it. Potatoes & carrots. One, potatoes were the cheapest thing you could buy. Two, they always got pulled up way too early because no one knew how to anticipate a harvest.

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A New York education

Soon after I moved to NYC I saw a huge bug in my apartment. It freaked me out so much I called a neighbor, (half-)hysterical ("half" for dignity's sake), who was disgusted that I got so exercised over a waterbug, something I'd never seen before. Not long after that, I had a mouse & found myself, without expecting it, standing on a chair like a lady in a cartoon. Since then I've gotten inured & when I had rats recently, all I did was yell at them. Only when they didn't cower & bolt did I call the exterminator. OK, they definitely made me jumpy but I was willing to live & let live, except they came out all day long. I guess I'm a New Yorker now. 

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What I'm reading

World Within World is Stephen Spender's autobiography, republished after David Leavitt plagiarized from it in a 1994 novel, When England Slept. He wrote it at age 40 & looked back to his youth as though it had been a half century earlier. People got older faster then! He says he was too shy to take advantage of offered friendship from the likes of T.S. Eliot & Virginia Woolf, but he seems to have run in those crowds early on, perhaps as Auden's mentee from their college days. His explanations about poetry & schools are incisive & convincing. 

 

I wanted to read this book because of his poem about the Spanish Civil War, "Port Bou," a rare war poem that admits to fear:

I tell myself the shooting is only for practice,
And my body seems a cloth which the machine-gun stitches
Like a sewing machine, neatly, with cotton from a reel,
And the solitary, irregular, thin 'paffs' from the carbines
Draw on long needles white threads through my navel.

 

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From the vault

There's a part II to this silly note where I discover she's borrowed "baby sizzers from empty mayonnaise jar disguised as desk accessory" and signed

"I am so abused! I am so oppressed" I remain,

Upstairs."

 

We amused ourselves endlessly & still do. It's good to have a good friend

Upstairs

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3 Bialas

I love her work. Far beyond loving her because she was my favorite novelist's last wife. I may have become a Biala collector. The one on the right we bought yesterday. 

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R-e-s-p-e-c-t

Why does this image exist? I knew a guy who always called me The Inor. And a Chicago friend who pretends that the El is named after me. My name has so many variants. I've been called El, Ellie, Nor, Nora, Noriega, NorNau, ElinWhore, Igor, Ike. People continue to come up with variants. I guess in books Elinor (Eleanor) is the fussy maiden aunt. As opposed to sparkling Auntie Mame or Aunt Wanda. I spent my childhood idly wishing I was Debbie or Sue or Becky, like most of the girls I grew up, but now I like my name & its elegant Welsh spelling. 

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In the neighborhood

I always forget how blue & bright the early morning air is, even in New York City. I guess I should know that perfectly well from Edward Hopper but it's a surprise every time. I don't often get out at 7 & if I do, until this week 7 was well past dawn. It's not exactly the post-blizzard morning I've been longing for but at least it means I can do outdoor karate today. 

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Snow

A little white rain for a moment & it's back to sad waiting. 

 

 

Well, happy Pi(e) day. 

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What I'm reading

Stephen Crane: A critical biography by John Berryman was first published in 1950. It's much briefer than Paul Auster's bio of Crane that I read last year, and was written when some of the principals were still alive or recently dead. There's a strange & Freudian final section, "The Color of This Soul," that was hard to get through but otherwise Berryman is suggestive & illuminating on the work, giving lots of room to the poetry. 

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Spring is hell

Today I saw this possibly flowering cherry but flowering SOMETHING in Tompkins Square Park & I saw forsythia almost out on the way home. The day my dad died, I kept thinking an exception would be made, it was so unlikely & wrong. I feel similarly about our snow-less winter. 

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Some Friday art

I've taken an interest in this wonderful collaboration between Joe Brainard & Frank O'Hara. Isn't it terrific? Lately these poets & others long dead have been filling up my life, due to renewed interest, new books & interviews, & the like. This is one of my favorite Brainards. Not much more to say except: Enjoy.

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In the Neighborhood: my studio apartment

I live in a classic tenement apartment, meaning the tub's in the kitchen & the toilet was once in the hall. When I moved in, in 1977, I was shown several empty apartments, one where the toilet was still in the hall. Even though I'd moved to New York only two months before from a cabin in Maine with an outhouse & without running water, I couldn't see dressing every time I needed to pee. 

 

I also often explain that I live in a two-room studio. I've been reading John Berryman's biography of Stephen Crane, & he describes in some detail various buildings of artists where Crane lived or crashed. It got me interested in studios. 

 

According to Charlotte Beach in Hunker, "studios were originally occupied by rich artists from wealthy families in the late 1800s. They were dubbed 'studios' because their creative inhabitants not only lived in them, but they also made their art on site, much like in an art studio." The Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, built in 1857, is accepted as the first-ever studio apartment building. 

 

However, Beach adds, "The studio apartment's fall from grace came through a sneaky tactic from the real estate field," when it began to use the term for one-room apartments (like mine) that were nothing like the original light-filled, high-ceilinged studios. Before that, it would have been called (if not a tenement, an "efficiency" & I probably wouldn't be nearly so chipper about it. An efficiency sounds like it's for career girls before they get married. A studio is for ARTISTS. 

 

Now "studio" is the accepted designation for any small apartment & those olden-days studios pretty much don't exist. The Tenth Street Studio Building was torn down in 1955, & the last residents of the 170 studios above Carnegie Hall left (were forced out) by 2010. 

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Buster

Buster as a lobster on Halloween, with his beloved Becca. 

Buster was the most accommodating soul I've ever known. He never complained, no matter what charming indignities we came up with. I still love & miss him every days. Yesterday's post & photo left a slightly unpleasant taste in my mouth & so today I'm showing the purest being I've ever known. 

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In the neighborhood: fake punk

Around the corner on 2nd Street.

This caught my eye & I stopped to take a photo. It seemed deliberately provocative & there was a little too much of the border graffiti. So who is Rick Owens? A fashion designer & that's all I need to know. I hate that kind of fake-authentic advertising.

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What I'm reading

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me is sensationally good. I'm impressed by her honesty and depth in talking about her father (poet & New Yorker art critic, the late Peter Schjeldahl), poetry, growing up in New York City. That she works hard to be fair & figure things out. The book is about writing this book and also about not writing the book she set out to. I admire that her scaffolding is showing; like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, all the pipes are visible. For example, she tells us exactly how much she paid to quote half a dozen lines of a poem of Auden's. And it works. It all works. 

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In the neighborhood

Weirdly, I don't remember taking this picture or even where it is exactly. Manhattan, because there's the Chrysler building. How many moments in one's life become opaque & mysterious as soon as they happen? How many times to I go in the other room for ... something. Paying attention or not, we lose so much. Not everything, but plenty. 

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Poem of the Week

Double Trundle

 

 

Hear that lonesome whistle blow

And the cowboy who loved you so true

That's a devil not a man

That's the difference between god & me

I'm crazy for crying & crazy for trying & crazy for lying & crazy for spying & crazy

 

 

 

Hmmm. Found this in a batch of old poems. I do kinda sorta remember it but pretty sure I never published it. Because I lost it or because it's not any good? Both? Let us ponder. I'm too scatterbrained at this exact moment to know.

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In the neighborhood

This is on the southeast corner of 3rd Ave & 13th Street, on the Kiehl's building. It reminds me again of that very good book I read last summer, The Island at the Center of the World, about Dutch Manhattan (New Amsterdam) and how we live on top of and next to so much history. 

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In the neighborhood: Manhattan's big sky

Close to Whitman when I walk down to the East River, sky & bridges that he knew, or at least the Brooklyn; the Williamsburg Bridge (on the left here, looking east) wasn't built till a few years after he died. Still, it's the same sky, water, & longings.

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Trifle

It's weird that there's a fancy food court a few blocks away, on Delancey Street, once home to jelly shoes & ultra-cheap jeans. It's a theme park of the old Lower East Side, superimposed on the still-extant LES, or so it seems to me. I don't often cross Houston, but I went down there with my best girls the other day. The 11-year-old wanted a Bing sandwich: a deep-fried scallion pancake wrapped around a filling such as tofu or tempura veggies. Then we had expensive pudding & I indignantly explained that lemon & strawberry pudding are in no way trifle.*

 

*The name is a joke ~ trifle is a time-consuming dessert, made & served in a cut-glass bowl, with layers of red wine-soaked ladyfingers, pudding, fruit, whipped cream, jello, & a few other elements. My back still hurts from carrying a trifle dish from Auntie May in Wales to my mother in Sioux Falls. 

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Monday Quote

Though still very far from being perfect girls, each was slowly learning, in her own way, one of the three lessons all are the better for knowing: that cheerfulness can change misfortune into love and friends; that in ordering one's self aright one helps others to do the same; and that the power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.

~ Louisa May Alcott

 

Why does this seem so corny when it's so true? Who doesn't appreciate cheerfulness over rancor, grumpiness, remonstration? I certainly have had the experience of making an effort towards kindness & being rewarded with kindness & friendship in return, usually way more than I put in. And the invisibility of keeping your life in order gets out of the way of others' tangles, which if it doesn't always help others, it sometimes does, for sure. And conscious gratefulness for small satisfactions & joys does make for a happy life. 

 

Saying this makes me thinking of being part of a group reading, years ago, called Blood & Guts in High School. Everyone but me talked about things like being the only heroin addict in their high school, while I read from my actual high school diary, all about boys & fashion & hippies (who I desperately desired to emulate, but unsurprisingly, there weren't any in Sioux Falls, SD, in 1970). Why is it more embarrassing to be a (relatively) happy, satisfied teenager than a malcontent? 

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Music!

First time I've been to City Winery since they moved up to Chelsea Piers (11th Ave & 15th St). Big but intimate (the photo emphasizes big but really, we were pretty close to the stage). We saw Nashville singers Drew & Ellie Holcomb, who have strong voices that blend well. She's mostly on the Christian music circuit: "This is the only song she's written about me," Drew said, adding matter-of-factly, "She mostly writes about Jesus." More mainstream than I generally dig in country music, but I liked their friendly energy. 

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Friday cat

Great birthday present except do I wear it or display it? 

 

Has Lefty been watching me do karate? Is that how he got so fast with his hands? This interspecies love is mysterious. With Lefty no less than with Johnny.

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Black Belt dinner

Some of the singing black belts. (Photo by Frank Ramos Sr.)

I'd never gone to one of my dojo's annual black belt dinners, & now I'm sorry I missed so many. I think I didn't want to spring for the required Seido patch but someone who left gave me hers.

 

The most fun was to get to see so many people I like. 

 

It was also fun to sing our tribute song to our grandmaster Kaicho (whose birthday it was). To the tune of the Temptations' "My Girl," it starts, "We've got sanchin in a black belt class" & whips along to the chorus of "We osu every day. What can make us osu this way? Kaicho (Kaicho, Kaicho). Talkin' bout Kaicho." 

 

I almost wore heels but 5 minutes in them in my apartment was quite enough. 

 

It was a full day of karate, with an informal workout, a class, & then the dinner. Interesting in a "you had to be there" sort of way, I think as I write this. 

 

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Oh Monah!

There was a song... I couldn't remember how it went even though I'd been listening to & singing it a lot not long ago.... It had a woman's name.... A sort of novelty number.... I had a few versions....

 

I liked it so much that I knew I must have given it many stars in my iTunes but I couldn't find it. 

 

Today I had the idea to look through the list in order of most listened to (#1 & 2 were both Etta James, btw). It took only a second to hit on it. "Oh Monah" or "We/You Shall Be Free." I have versions by The Front Porch Swingin' Liquor Pigs, Leadbelly & Woody Guthrie (which doesn't have Monah in it at all but it's the same song), Ted Weems & His Orchestra, and Pee Wee King & His Golden West Cowboys.

 

And it was 5 years since I last played it. 

 

I was down in the henhouse on my knees, thought I heard a chicken/preacher sneeze. Only a rooster saying his prayers, thanking his god for the hens upstairs. 

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Tim McCarver (1940-2023)

Tim McCarver

In 1980 we called him Uncle Tim.

His nicely ruined American beauty.

We were in love with all Irish face.

 

Memphis voice calling games

knew why it rolled & how to do it all.

His fingers have more knuckles than ours.

 

Everyone still in love with everyone

Everyone still alive & we had uncles

we didn't even need.

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Monday Quote

Rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a somber background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks.

~ G. K. Chesterton, "The Glory of Grey"

 

Sort of like the Cloud Appreciation Society's brief against "blue sky thinking." We don't have to always lament a sunless day. I do like fireworks! 

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Birthdays

Chances are that if you've met me more than once, I know your birthday & you know how much I love birthdays.

 

Although mine is first among equals, you could say. I love that it might snow on my birthday (even though it didn't). I love that 18 is an auspicious number in Hebrew numerology. I love being an Aquarius (an Aquarius dragon, no less). I love sharing it with my granddaughter, a couple of friends, & Yoko Ono, Toni Morrison, John Travolta, former Yankee shortstop Didi Gregorius & many others.

 

It turns out I also share my birthday with two serial killers, & this year got a couple of pieces of bad news, so my birthday wasn't feeling so wonderful. But then I got calls & Facebook greetings & texts & exploding online cakes, & I remembered how great it is to have a birthday. I kind of love everybody's birthday & I know I love that everyone has one. As I've said before, you can't be so rich you can get more than one, or so poor you have to sell yours off. You can't buy a better birthday or be forced to fall back to a worse (looking at you January 2). The great democracy of the birthday. 

 

Right now I'm feeling a little bereft that every single person in the world will have a birthday before I get one again. 

 

Why yes, I am a big baby, why do you ask?

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In the neighborhood: "Kaputs"

First Avenue at 3rd Street. 

I love that people let you know if their castoffs are worth taking. This is not only broken, it's no good, & in case that isn't clear enough, it's kaputs. 

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In the neighborhood

Little by little the world opens back up. Afternoon treats at Veniero's with an old friend, catching up & comfortable, as old friends are, knowing the right things about each other. 

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