Elinor Nauen

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It's right around the corner from me & I was excited to check it out. Even before I'd gone in, I tried to answer my friend David's question: Why do today's bookstores look like hair salons?

This new one certainly does & has absolutely no surprises. Not one book of poetry that I have or want, all safe timid choices, like Louise Gluck. The history section was full of blandly ugly titles on what's wrong with white feminism (Faux Feminism) & what's wrong with Israel (too many titles to count).

The young woman who worked there didn't show a spark of interest at a customer coming in ~ it may as well have been a beauty salon & I an unlikely candidate for improvement.

I wonder whose idea this was & what they thought they could bring to the very sophisticated readers of lower Manhattan. 

According to Papa Google:

Vibe: Minimalist, curated, aims to keep the city curious and layered.
Founders: Lulu & Nika.

"The Definition of Female, Male, Sex, and Scrap Metal Dealer."

~ a 2025 North Dakota's bill

There is much that could be said... but I shan't say it....

My friend thought I'd be disappointed that we got 4" rather than 2 or 3 times that. Not at all. I like to see it coming down & piling up. The end result is irrelevant. I'd be happy for 4" every week or 2 but maybe with a foot every once in a while. Snow is snow is snow & I am grateful for every flake. 

I might be too excited by the snow that is coming our way in an hour or two to write anything interesting. 

Except to say that sitting at the Desk of Poetry is possibly even more exciting than snow. Right now I'm reading Olson, Zukofsky, & WCW, & really digging the conversation among them, even though they are all talking to themselves more than to each other. It's exhilarating. 

OK, time to go out again & see if anything has gotten started.

I'm torn: can I take a day off from contentiousness or do I bear down where I'm brimming over with shock & distress? Everyone keeps track of the big horrors. Today I'm thinking of a grade school principal in suburban Philadelphia, Philip Leddy, who accidentally recorded himself on a parent's voicemail saying horrible antisemitic things, with no shock or pushback from other employee(s) in the room. He was quickly fired but will there be deep education so that everyone at that school & in that town truly understands what the casual ugliness adds up to? I suppose the shock is that he's an educated professional man, a school principal, whose children go to school or camp with the children of the man he so casually demeaned. Will he become a martyr? Hard to say. Happy Christmas, everyone. 

I walk out for a 5-minute errand: get some cash. 

Hi! someone says when I've walked 20 steps. 

It's my Finnish friend Heli. We catch up. She says, let's take a picture for Tone, her friend & mine once she introduced us. I happen to be wearing the Norwegian knit hat Tone gave me when I was in Norway in September. 

Someone runs past, whirls back. It's June! I introduce them, Heli takes off & June gives up her run to walk with me to the bank. On 7th Street we run into Johnny, who growls because we block his roller before he realizes he knows us.

I'm ecstatic to spend time with June, & she is amused that I keep trying to buy her things & give her cash. She goes with me to the 99¢ store, where she finally lets me buy her something: 3 pairs of hello 2026 glasses that she will sneak to Mexico, where they're headed on Thursday. We talk about wills, including ethical wills, & also how strange & wonderful it is to all be here at the same time. 

My favorite thing: to run into people I love. To be with people I love. To love people in the here & now.

I was looking for a wedding photo to run for our 34th anniversary today but am settling on this one. Us as high school graduates (10 years apart) & 2 other pictures of us. I dunno, we seem to keep on keeping on. It's harder now that my old man is an old man, but I guess we can stick it out a little longer. It's interesting if nothing else. 

I don't actually mean to sound so lukewarm. I'm still crazy about Johnny, even now with all his infuriations. 

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care? 

~ William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All

This explains (at least at the moment!) why I love, revere, follow, & learn from WCW, & why he is always frresh. 

I'd planned to write about going to a Nutcracker burlesque show at Lincoln Center but it turns out that having a ticket didn't guarantee entry. Well, they were free, so I hung out at the Columbus Circle shopping mall & went home & basically slept for the next couple of days. Laryngitis is the worst! I had a hilarious one-sided conversation with my sister - she spoke on the the phone, while I texted my responses: 77 of them, to be precise. Here's a few. They are already beginning to be mysterious to me...

view of what?

Miller FH is like 3 blocks

they offered you a fork?

I feel like I'm keeping up pretty well

AAARGH

good!

where does eric live now

no wife

too bad!!

23!!

thimble

people used to sew more

he has a thimble?!?!

does he also have an apron?

& many washed ziplock bags

did henry make it?

why

oh the Man

oh damn, me too

I had to get out of the D Zone!

what place

ok me too

yikes

It's interesting (not my only word for it) to see how the antisemitism of the massacre in Australia has been stripped or minimized. Over & over I see people saying, earnestly, that we must fight ALL forms of bigotry, as if standing against antisemitism isn't enough. If islamophobia & homophobia had been dragged into the conversation about George Floyd the very day after he was murdered, people would have set up an unholy holler. Doing so in itself would have been seen as racism. (This was a friend's thought; she's right.)

But when it comes to killing Jews, the emphasis has been on the hero who subdued the shooters (of course he deserves praise!) and/or on how all forms of hate are unacceptable. 

I have yet to see anyone call out the misogyny that I am sure underlies the hate. Whoever people hate, they kind of throw in women & Jews for free. Whatever list the Blacks are on, women & Jews are on. Yet men rarely see that connection. Why do so many men hate women enough to kill them? I was on the phone earlier with a young man I've known all his life, recently out of prison. He said one man he knew there was "the nicest man you would ever meet." This was a man who had killed his wife. 

We've been studying Norwegian expressions. One I learned is "i bunn og grunn," which means fundamentally or basically. Why do they have an expression for that? Because it rhymes: bunn / grunn. We don't have to say, for example, "you're eating me out of house & home" but we do because of the alliteration. I imagine a lot of expressions or idioms in any language come about because they are pleasing to say, that is, they contain rhyme, alliteration, or some other poetic trick. 

Here's a couple of other expressions: 

* å hoppe etter Wirkola, literally, to jump after Wirkola, is to have to follow a master. (Bjørn Wirkola, born in 1943, was a great Norwegian skijumper. At some point, Wirkola will become virkola & people won't get the reference)

* hipp som happ means it makes no nevermind, six of one, half a dozen of the other

* A couple come from the seafaring or knight world, where we are so far away from knowing what the words literally mean that they are almost no longer figurative language, but the meaning persists. 

I love this stuff. 

Bonus treat: the word for ginger in the South Indian language of Tamil is ingi; in Norwegian it's ingefær. I love that ginger kept its name for a thousand years from Sanskrit through Latin & French, to the present day, in languages & places so far apart. Ginger = Ingi = Ingefær

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
~ Fred Hoyle

It's the Rolodex of the dead this year, isn't it. Mark was my teacher at City College, brash, kind, brilliant, quick, strategic, supportive. He once showed me around the part of Boston that his father helped save from destruction, with an architect & urban planner's knowledge of the area. That man knew everything & everyone. He founded Fiction magazine & brought people like Manual Puig to City College. He took me to a synagogue on the Lower East Side & called the balcony "the women's revenge" - they don't get to participate so they chat & ignore the men, he explained; that phrase has been in my head ever since. I remember things he said because they were crisp & vivid & sharp. A lovely man, whose enthusiasm for writing & writers never waned. 

Wait, all I had to do was a little mild reproach & the snow started pouring down? Fantastic! I should have been more specific, as it came last night while I was asleep & was gone when I woke up but I'm encouraged as all get out. WillisWeather® promises me more tomorrow night. Well, he never promises, as he once in high school told everyone school would be canceled the next day for some big weather that didn't happen, & he's way more cautious. But I take his every slightest hint as rock-ribbed truth. Plus I'm doing the snow dance. 

We've had a few really cold days this week, but the only time there's been precipitation is when the temperatures have gone way up. Meaning rain not snow. I know this isn't happening in order to thwart my desire for snow (right?) but it's hard to take, especially when everyone I talk to is "hang on, I hve to shovel out the walk" or "where's my boots." I won't really start getting antsy till January but you better believe I'm ready now. 

We found a small stack of clean, neartly folded, fine wool undershirts on 5th Ave just north of Washington Square Park. Patti's! we exclaimed & took the whole pile. Her album Easter had just come out & these were identical to what she wore on the cover. We were in our 20s & free stuff ~ Patti Smith's, no less! ~ was irresistible. I wore mine for a long time, years probably. I don't remember tossing it but the confidence that wearing her clothes gave lasted even longer. 

The third & last season of Ed Friedman & Bob Rosenthal's series at the Bowery Poetry Club is sure to be as brilliant & community-enclosing as the first two. Go! 

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

~ Margaret Thatcher

And now America is being destroyed by history or a-history. 

I realized recently I didn't know where the (main) Post Office is in Sioux Falls, my hometown ~ & that was, I finally figured out, because I always had what my dad called franking privileges. I left my outgoing mail (then, as now, largely postcards) by the front door & he took care of it. That was his dry sense of humor ~ he never pointed out that he was granting me governmental mailing, as though I were addressing my constituents. He just silently sent my correspondence & if anyone got his little joke, or not, it was all the same to him. For the record, I'm still not sure where the P.O. is, but it must have been near his office & my high school (which were a block apart) and most likely made of venerable Sioux quartzite. 

My branch now is famously bad & used to be where all the unemployable-but-unfireable ended up. They still are pretty horrible there & you have to approach on your knees if you want them to mail anything for you. Not long ago, one of the workers there yelled at me because I thought the postage was $2.06 when it was really $2.07. Yelled. 

Becky, I know you're going to let me know the facts of the case! 

One meaningless thing that I like (along with birthdays & fireworks, similarly meaningless) is that everyone seems to know someone who is related to or descended from a famous person. My accountant's late secretary, for example, was Art Buchwald's sister (& no one knows his name anymore, so there you have it). Every famous person has, at the very least, parents & usually siblings & cousins & a childhood coach or neighbor. My junior high school music teacher told us about the time that suddenly an ethereal descant floated through the room when she was teaching in Kansas & it was Randy Sparks (New Christy Minstrels) ~ she spent the rest of her career wistfully hoping for a reprise of a magical talent. Everyone knows someone who knows the guy who was the drummer in the Chamber Brothers or grew up next door to a second-string catcher for the Marlins or was married to the cousin of someone who won the lotter or blah blah blah. 

It's a little different from a celebrity sighting although equally random I guess. A dumb claim-to-fame coattail that almost everyone has.

Johnny & I play a little game: Dead or not dead? Well, I play & he gets annoyed at me for wondering.

To my surprise, these people are not dead:

Carol Burnett

Kim Novak

Tuesday Weld (& what is the difference between Kim Novak & Tuesday Weld?) 

Mel Brooks? Norman Lear? I think one of them may have died, or maybe both? 

This is about the usual lame way we play, come to think of it. Sometimes I look it up & sometimes I assume that I would have heard. And remembered. Like Dick Van Dyke: dead or not dead? It'll be big news when he goes, because he's lasted so long - his age has as much celebrity as he does by now. 

Petula Clark is older than Willie Nelson! OK, now I have no idea if I'm dead or not dead. 

I love Moby-Dick & have read it many times, including once as part of a nonstop 24-hour sign-up-for-a-chapter at Mystic Seaport, where we could have slept on a sailing boat but stayed in a hotel & came back the next day for the rest of the book. I'm reading it now, our loud, a chapter a day, & getting more pleasure than you can imagine. It's funny, deep, smart, American... everything you could want in a book. I had a conversation yesterday with my friend Louis, on why it's elitist to enjoy Moby-Dick. I mean, I don't think it is, it just happens to be the kind of book I enjoy. But the perception is it's show-offy.

And then today I came upon this article in the (elitist!) New Yorker: "The Curious Notoriety of 'Performative Reading"": Is the term a new way of calling people pretentious, or does it reflect a deprioritization of the written word? by Brady Brickner-Wood.

It begins: Here's a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." He could very well be reading "Moby-Dick" or "Gravity's Rainbow" or "Middlemarch," but, for the sake of this setup, let's say it's Wallace's 1996 novel, with its thousand-plus pages and hundreds of endnotes and the ghosts of a million bespectacled graduate students whispering, "You know it's got a nonlinear plot, right?" To the severely online, this guy is not simply enjoying a good book in the company of strangers but participating in the practice of "performative reading," a concept that's recently gained a curious notoriety. A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-"B" book.

(I also love Middlemarch & have not read the other two.)

The article is largely about authenticity, which is what Louis & I were getting at. People who are not putting on airs generally like a mix of highbrow, middlebrow, & lowbrow. You might have advanced appreciation in painting & prefer 19th-century architecture, for example. Any combination of tastes is possible, at least so long as you know what you really like & don't choose because it's what's being sold by the taste-makers of TikTok or wherever tastemakers come from these days. I once told Rudy Burckhardt that my favorite painting was Bastien-Lepage's Joan of Arc. He was a little surprised & maybe amused ~ apparently, it showed what an uneducated twit I was ~ I didn't know enough to choose a more sophisticated artwork. 

As one gets older, it comes full circle, you like what you like not because you don't know better but because you know better how to explain (or defend) what you like. 

Suddenly one stem of my glasses fell off. It wasn't the little screw, something had come apart. 

I did my usual handyman genius with tape & this morning went out to find new frames. The first place I tried, where I've bought my glasses for years, has only part-time optical service; the dour young man who works there has never once, in all the years he's been working there, been polite or friendly: why? The second place was closed. At the third place, the receptionist (waving my glasses by the taped stem!) explained superciliously that I needed the brand for them to find a fit & (twice) that the lenses had to fit exactly. I finally grabbed my glasses & skedaddled. On to Manhattan Eye Works, on 1st Ave & 10th St, the heroes of the story. She quickly found frames that fit, complimented the look, & within five minutes I was on my way. I don't quite understand why people in public-facing jobs so often are rude or dismissive.

If it were snowing, as promised, I would have written quite a different entry.

I muse upon my country's ills—

The tempest bursting from the waste of Time

On the world's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime.

~ Herman Melville, from "Misgivings" (1860)

In a poem from the year before he refers to "the meteor of war." Imagine knowing it's all coming. 

Melville & Whitman were both born in 1819 but there's no evidence they knew or knew of each other.