Elinor Nauen

If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell!

~ Carl Sandburg

No comment needed. 

The young woman I work with to improve her English (which is excellent except for pronunciation) and I usually meet at the library but last week she invited me to her place for tea. She brewed roasted green tea & put out some snacks. Her apartment is spare & clean, & it was relaxing to chat without getting exercised about politics, or not too much. She played in a metal band in Japan & is full of many surprises. Another reason to love New York: the glimpses of many lives. I want to invite myself to everyone's house & poke around & see what goes on. In a curious not nosy way, to be sure! 

I'm relieved that the response to her flippin' testimony was pretty much the same as mine. It makes me feel less insane. Although in a way more insane. Stop!!

A package that was supposed to arrive last week is nowhere to be found. 

I can wait. 

It's everything else that is making me weep. 

I don't understand how Pam Bondi can smirk & lie & spit random insults & whine. To Congress. 

I saw a notice of someone's blog that posts 24 headlines daily. Each & every one of them should be shocking & the center of the news but the corruption & sewage is so extreme that I barely react before going on to the next. 

And people still support this administration? Nice people, people I know, people who would bring a hotdish in an emergency, who would cry for my troubles?

When I was 19, I believed I was smart & careful, even timid. Now I know I was stupid & foolhardy. Maybe all those people who are OK with what's going on will come to a similar realization. 

I don't usually (ever?) give birthday shout-outs on my blog but I do to Patricia, because she might be the only person who not only loves her birthday more than I love mine, but who still throws parties ~ & doesn't say "no presents" & is extravagantly happy for the presents she gets. She & I love being Aquarians, partly because, as I said to her recently, we never give someone the side-eye & say, What are you, 9? when we celebrate. Patricia is also a major poet & loyal friend. 

Her birthday follows by one day Diana Rickard, also a poet, friend, Aquarian, thrower of parties, & liker of presents. 

It used to be I would take the day off for a reading, lying in my tub all afternoon getting ready. 

I pretty much did that today, I think because I'm going to read tonight from my new book, which is really my first book (republished with 115 annotations & other material). It was nice to feel like I had all the time in the world for a day, & it was a good bath, & I edited the hell out of my new poems. I'm ready & looking forward to being onstage at the Bowery Poetry Club, hosted by old friends, with an audience full of old friends & hopefully a few new ones. 

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus.

Originally:

When an ox enters a palace, it doesn't become a king, but the palace becomes a barn (or stable).

It cheers me no end to be in the presence of many Aquarians, as at a party last night (sparkly!) & in various texts (quirky!) & conversations (smart!). 

Also, later this afternoon I'm going to the annual Spiritual Sounds concert, where various religious communities perform, from the Catholic Worker's sincere Dylan imitations to a recitation from the imam that I never understand a word of (but others do) to my synagogue's choir to the Middle Collegiate's gospel or jazz choir. They get everyone up & shouting! 

I gave the dvar (sermon) yesterday & got to say "cement shoes for youse guys" in my best tough-guy manner & was told I sounded like bad community theater and entirely midwestern. Cracks me up! 

Saw the terrific "experimental documentary," Fish Have No Psychiatrists: A Day With Andrei Codrescu, last night. Biographical but mostly him riffing in his usual offbeat & brilliant way on whatever he's asked by the director, Julian Semilian, another immigrant from Romania; they met as teenagers fresh from Eastern Europe. Andrei is also funny, game, generous, & a good friend of more than 40 years. I got a job as a visiting poet one time because the interviewer had heard Andrei mention me on his NPR segment that morning; I no longer remember why. 

It's streaming: see it if you can. 

Another reminder about this absolutely terrific series. Everyone brings their A game & it has been wonderful to hear a variety of excellence. It continues through the first Tuesday in March & they're all gonna be good. 

The people who work at Cooper Station on 4th Avenue & 11th street are, as always, rude, impatient, scolding, & ignorant (yes, there is a forever postcard stamp). I'm supposed to know what I want, but she was unable to tell me what denominations they have. I guess I feel sorry for someone that aggressively miserable but sheesh, keep it to yourself. 

Let justice be done though the heavens fall.

~ Lord Mansfield

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1705–1793), was a British judge, politician, & lawyer, best known for his reforms to English law.

It feels like a coded reference or threat to plop this in without comment, but I don't really have any idea what it means, or whether it's an entirely good thing, justice being but one of many essentials. 

A priest, a minister and a rabbit walk into a blood donation clinic.
The nurse asks the rabbit, "What blood type are you?"
The rabbit answers, "I'm probably a Type O."

RABBI(T)S

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one's heroes, no one's saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

~ Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic

And now Minneapolis has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The times they are a'changing. I hope

Reading my own book, trepidatious about typos. Didn't find any (yet) but I keep thinking of additional things I want to say. Maybe to have been more explicit in pointing out that it's about the memory of memory, & how different one's life seems than it did at the time. That the 1970s was a decade when women leaped into the fray & it turned out we were people, not just chicks. I would probably explore the source of my willingness to do what now seems brave but seemed simply my life & my desires at the time. I think CARS is more interesting to me now than it was when I wrote it, decades ago. The fascination of finding a glimpse of a me that is no longer quite me. 

Well, well! Here it is, just in time for the birthday of the automobile (tomorrow). The title poem of my first book, now with 115 annotations, bringing a 45-year-old book up to date. 

I just wrote a post wondering how people can defend the ICE terror & murders, & call people who don't "libtards" & so on. I went to school with at least 2 of them, who are very very sure they are right. I have always thought of them as decent folks but I'm not so sure. I know they get their news from sources that are pushing a different narrative. I hope I'm not merely doing the same thing from a different direction. Anyway, I went on in this vein, & the post didn't save, & I don't have the heart to ask those questions again.

America needs the flamboyant to save her soul.

~ Vachel Lindsay

Jes' sittin' around waiting for Sunday & the foot of snow my bespoke forecaster has promised. Ha ha - he never promises but he's pretty sure about this one. At least a foot!

In honor of Sam Cooke (& Byron)'s birthday, I'll talk about music a little. I don't listen a whole lot because it's a distraction to most of what I do but when I'm not listening to my faves, I put on Freegal, a free variation on Spotify, once or twice a week & see what comes up. Lately a swell Dwight Yoakam album called Brighter Days; a bunch of Buck Owens; some Van Morrison - whose real name, I discovered, is George Ivan Morrison - I've never been crazy about him & this'll be it for a long time; Rosie Flores; various joikers - indigenous Arctic singing; & the recently dead Joe Ely & Bob Weir/Grateful Dead. 

A month ago or a month from now it could be an entirely different list. Blind Willie McTell, Johnny Cash, Bruce are usually in heavy rotation. 

The wood decays, the wood decays & fails. Luckily for renters, a handyman comes around & replaces, reattaches, shores up as needs be. 

I once idly thought I would buy a cute little house in Flandreau or Dell Rapids, one of the little towns near Sioux Falls. I figured I would do no maintenance, that it would outlast me. Johnny pointed out that a squirrel could chew through the electrical wires, for example, & it is impossible not to have to fix things. 

Thus ended my momentary (shorter) dream of a house of my own. 

I realize that one of the reasons I'm so upset about what's going on in Minnesota (along with what horrifies most people & the fact that my family & some friends are there) is that seeing soldiers on the street reminds me of the days after September 11. It was terrifying to see men with big guns walking around my neighborhood, asking me for ID at checkpoints, looking like they owned the streets (my streets). I didn't for a second imagine that those weapons would be turned on me & it was still horrible & frightening. Today, our own government is treating its citizens with contempt, fear, hate, violence. That feels harder to bear than the invasive attack of 25 years ago. I know they're different - it's the basic fact of armed men that I'm comparing, & how scary it was.

Forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to his own life. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim.

~ Cynthia Ozick, in Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

In The Sunflower, Wiesenthal ("the Nazi hunter") recounts an anecdote from his time in a work camp durin the Holocaust; two thirds of the book is then taken up with various thinkers who attempt to answer his question: What would you have done? An important question for all of us, especially now, when the lines between cowardice and bravery, between complicity and resistance are clearer every day. 

Stumbled upon this 2021 review of my 1997 book Ladies, Start Your Engines. Enjoy! Thanks, Elizabeth Blackstock! 

Yesterday I didn't so much as open my computer or set foot out my door. I mostly slept. OK now, but boy do I resent being sick. I am an extremely pathetic & unsympathetic sick person, & I feel very sorry for myself. I had better not get sick again till I am 97, when, like all the women in my family, I will be sick for 24 hours & lie down & die. 

In case my headline suggests I'm going to say something topical, I can't. I don't know more or as much as the many other smart commentators. So I'll say that for a couple of years we had a refrigerator where the freezer didn't work. When we got a replacement, I marveled at having ice. I still do. This week our toilet was half-stopped up for a couple of days. I plunged & poured water & peed at my neighbor's. And then last night, when the water wasn't going down at all, even slowly, I used the plunger again, & suddenly whatever was stopping things up was gone. You don't know what you've got till it's gone. Grateful for a working toilet, grateful for cubes of ice (not the other kind). 

Sirens all night, my sister in Minneapolis says. Suing the DHS, my brother in St Paul tells me. A place I know, a city full of pretty lakes & Craftsman houses & great museums: invaded by our own government. Hard to wrap my mind around it. 

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

~ Adrienne Rich

Apropos of nothing in particular! No unspoken agenda!

We all still live near one another. We might not be in & out of each other's houses as much but they're familiar ~ the art on the wall, the same books on the same shelves. There's catching up but we all are pretty much caught up. It's to be together, to sit holding hands because we're old friends & love each other. We half-watched a series of Rudy Burckhardt films - look! there's Joan! Katie sure knows how to kiss! That's Alex! There were potato pancakes & cake & a young person to make us feel like we were still part of life. Getting older is OK by me! 

My landlord hasn't given us a new lease for probably 5 years. He doesn't much care, I guess, given how low my rent is. Now he is trying to get it together. Come down today! he said. I did, & he'd forgotten, week after week. He's going to start the new rent from September, mumbling something about that being the right time of year for a change. He probably doesn't realize I know that the new increase started in October & is slightly less than the one he's using - for us a difference of about $3 a month so I don't care, especially as he isn't asking us to pay back rent & the new amount won't even start til February. It's funny that he's doing this one little sly thing that doesn't matter to me in the least. 

Our unspoken agreement is that in return for the cheap rent, I ask for very little (our apartment hasn't been painted since 1985) & he doesn't do squat except keep the heat on in the winter. 

Update: I went in to pick up the new lease, & he based it on the wrong rent, putting it a few more dollars in his favor than it should be. Sigh. And my studio rent is going up too.