Elinor Nauen

Johnny once said that if you want people to leave a party, put Marty Robbins on the stereo.

I tried that once, & in 10 minutes the room had cleared out

And I like Marty Robbins.

My friend Heli & I were having breakfast at a nice neighborhood joint, the B Cup on Ave B & 13th St. A young man walked in, dropped two large suitcases on the table right next to ours, & turned to the counter to order.

Ugh! Heli politely told him it was dirty & disgusting to put bags off the floor on a table where people eat. Politely, really: I'm summarizing.

With a patronizing smile, he said, "Welcome to New York." She sputtered, I fumed. "Hope the rest of your day is better," he male-priviliged further at us. It will be, with you out of our lives, Pencil Dick.

"He shouldn't even be allowed in here," Heli said.

"Yeah. And I bet he didn't tip."

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I suppose writing about a book before I read more than a few pages of it is dumb, but in this case, writing this is part of the anticipation. The book is (my old friend) Louise Steinman's The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She says that 80% of American Jews are at least in part descended from Polish Jews. I'm not, so a lot of what she remembers or has found out didn't resonate personally—and yet, I share attitudes, such as thinking Poland was the worst, most antisemitic country. It wasn't. It seems a lot of our assumptions and beliefs are just wrong. For example, she says there are more Poles among the Righteous Gentiles honored at Yad Vashem.

From the short excerpt she read at her book party yesterday, I can tell you it's beautifully & thoughtfully written. "Do they miss us?" she asks, and we all caught our breath.

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Our milkman when I was very little was named Jim Lowell. He would give us rides in his truck, one of those old milk trucks with no doors and no front seats. He would creep along at 1 mph for about 10 feet. Nothing I relished more than standing up in a moving vehicle.

So it was not at all surprising to me that my elementary school, James Russell Lowell School, was named after a hero like him.

What was surprising was finding out that James Russell Lowell was someone else entirely. I don’t recall spending any time on the poet at Lowell School, except to memorize his most famous line: “And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days”—lines that I still repeat automatically on every lovely late spring day.  Read More 

My friends in Duluth sell LOcally LAid eggs (all their chickens are named Lola) and right now are one of the 4 small businesses in the running to win a SuperBowl ad.

Locally Laid is all about sustainable agriculture: They use solar power and non-GMO corn, they set up a carton return program, and they plant a tree with every delivery & t-shirt sale.

Duluth isn't exactly a suburb of New York City (or vice versa) but I sure do wish I could get Jason & Lucie's eggs here. I'll make do by voting for them.

Here's the lyrics to a terrific little song by Mississippi John Hurt  Read More 

Or maybe like I'm already dead

I'm so excited that Tony Towle and Ron Padgett are reading at the St Mark's Poetry Project tonight. Two of my all-time favorite poets, whose work I turn to again & again, for pleasure, for enlightenment, for a good laugh. Ron has an 800-page Collected just out (haven't seen it yet), which kind of makes me feel like I may never buy another book of his.  Read More 

Discovering that I can cook pasta in the microwave has changed my life. Well, everything changes one's life, right? It snowed in Brooklyn today. My friend Steve, who lives in Spartanburg, SC, loves snow as much as me. He lets me know what's coming. Snow & pasta. If I could only find the book I lost, life would be pretty darn perfect. Oh, and if I never had to get on a plane again.  Read More 

... because it's her birthday, & because she will wear it (unlike some or many of my less fun-loving friends), & because I'm the kind of person who likes other people's birthdays almost as much as my own, & because my favorite day is Monday, when Becca shares my office.

And now I want—what? a sandwich? a phone call? a vanilla bean?

I couldn't work out because I'm resting my ankle, so I'm a little antsy.

Happy birthday, Becca!  Read More 

Yeah, after you stumble, it's easy to see that the leaves were covering the lip between sidewalk and the square dug out for a sapling, and you wouldn't have tripped if you had, but it doesn't help when your ankle is throbbing and your heart is too over all the websites' dire warnings about ankle injuries. Twist, strain, sprain, break. I'm clapping (but not dancing) along with Hank Ballard & sure I'll be fine tomorrow. Round & around & around & around. Just like this. C'mon, baby.  Read More 

Hosting a monthly reading series requires some amount of coordination & energy; all the more do I admire folks who put together more frequent readings. Prose Pros, my series with Martha King, is in its 7th season and still as fun to us as it was at the start.

Some combos seem implausible but work great: Last night a dynamic young fiction writer, Bradley Spinelli, read from his novel Killing Williamsburg and from a new novel set in Thailand (finish it already!), followed by Ruth Danon, who's writing a thoughtful memoir about her family, which comprised refugees, revolutionaries, scientists, artists and feuders. The two writers' themes of dislocation and exile echoed & enhanced each other—something I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't heard them together.

We have a nice crowd every month, with a few people that come no matter who the reader is (looking at you, Mike!). A group that listens, laughs, asks, cheers.  Read More 

Instead of taking a karate class this morning, I retraced my bike route twice, hoping the keys that fell off my handlebar on the way to the dojo would still be lying wherever they fell.

But no, some concerned citizen thought they were doing me a solid by picking them up. Then what? If  Read More 

Now that I've finished Devil in the Grove, I have a little more to say.

I was talking about the book with a young black man at the gym. He asked if I'd ever witnessed a racist incident. I couldn't really think of any: because they didn't happen or because I don't  Read More 

But hey, this is my new polka dot nail polish.

Yes, different on each hand.

I've been reading the 2013 Pulitzer winner, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King. It centers on a 1949 case in Florida similar to the Scottsboro boys in Alabama, at a time when any white person's word was taken over any black's, and a white woman crying rape would almost inevitably lead to a lynching. The trouble also sprang from the economic conditions at the time: Citrus growers depended on peonage, with the KKK and violent lawmen like Lake County's sheriff, Willis McCall (who held that elected office until  Read More 

I don't have a great sense of direction. I still get lost in the neighborhood where I've lived for more than 3 decades, and don't have any instinct for which way is north or east. I think it came from growing up on the prairie, where there's no monument to orient yourself by. When I lived in Colorado for a year in my 20s, I thought that everyone from Denver must always know which way is which, since the mountains instill west as a matter of instinct, like getting perfect pitch by practicing as a baby.

I can read a map so I don't always get lost.  Read More 

Johnny woke up moaning. "Ugh, I was up half the night." He wondered if it might be due to the fish tacos he ate last night at a bar near us.

A really grim bar, I might add.

"Fish tacos? There? What did you expect?" I said sympathetically.

"But they were only a dollar."

Nice to be reminded that even in Manhattan there are lots of pretty growing things

What a treat to spend a little time this afternoon at the Loretta Howard Gallery, way west on 26th St, looking at some of the art (and bric-a-brac) John Ashbery has collected over the years. Unsurprisingly (for an art critic), he has good taste: there are several Joseph Cornells (not my faves, except for one that's a plain almost empty, weathered box called "The Storm that Never Came"), and works by Henry Dargar, Joe Brainard, Trevor Winkfield, de Kooning (both Willem & Elaine), Joan Mitchell (Johnny's favorite), and a beautiful Jane Freilicher "Peonies"—probably the single work I most would want.

Except wow things really cost a lot. "Inflation," Johnny snorted. Hey we have Brainards at our house. Johnny also had a little drawing Larry Rivers did as a cover sketch for Johnny's novel Mangled Hands, but he lost it.

Well-chosen excerpts from Ashbery's poems make it homey, as in You Are There in his pad. The show is there till November 2.  Read More 

Don't ever get in an accident, because not only does it hurt but you will have to talk to insurance companies for the rest of your life, and you might cry, and you might see steam coming out of your ears you will be so angry, and you might get so exhausted that you can't do any of the fun things that you are put here to do.  Read More 

One of the best books on Southern music I've read is Rythm Oil, by Stanley Booth.

Not just music but the 1950s onward, what it's like to hang with musicians like Furry Lewis and his wife Versie, ZZ Top, and Keith Richards, or go to the funeral of Mississippi John Hurt as a sort of insider (he was asked to speak).

Booth is a good reporter & researcher: for example, this quote from a Memphis pianist about Phineas Newborn Jr: "He had a boogie-woogie left hand, a bebop right hand, and this... third hand." A good writer too, describing Newborn's style as that of Secretariat or the young Muhammad Ali. "He could think of things to do that no one else had ever done, and then he would do them." Maybe my favorite moment is when he says to Fred Ford, "I can't believe I'm sittin' next to the man who barked like a dog at the end of Big Mama Thornton's 'Hound Dog.'" And Fred Ford says, "I was gonna meow like a cat, but it was too hip for 'em."

Elvis, B.B. King, Janis and so many more are respectfully and appreciatively described. He knows his stuff! The Trumpeteers, man!  Read More 

What a year for people dying. But Lou Reed! Seems unlikely, more than anything. I saw him perform in London in 1979 (I'm pretty sure that was the first time), & around town in subsequent years. He was our downtown Mick Jagger. As present & obvious as Katz's Deli. I bet half the people I know  Read More 

Just finished a memoir about hoarding, Coming Clean by Kimberly Rae Miller. Remarkable that she grew up in the chaos of her father's mental illness, in filth & fleas, yet still loved her parents staunchly, protectively, sweetly.

Could her dad help it? Alcoholics stop drinking, gamblers stop lighting their money on fire. An interesting take on this is  Read More 

Dropped by MoMA this afternoon to breeze through two shows & look even more briefly at a couple of others (Hopper, a chair made of white corrugated paper).

Luckily, Johnny's a member so the claustrophobia was a little lessened by getting waved through the long lines. I found it hard to be alone with the art when there was so little space to stare & absorb.

Predictably I liked Walker Evans's junkyards & old cars the best. As I've written before, I find shabby to be both soothing & inspiring.  Read More 

OK, I'm not going to make this blog a rolodex of the dead, but want to note that the poet Frank Lima died a day or two ago. "Raw, gritty, nervy and switchblade-quick," as Tom Clark called him, he was born in Spanish Harlem in 1939, and accidentally fell into poetry while in drug rehab. After that it fell out of him dangerous & gorgeous.  Read More 

It's 40 years—October 22, 1973—since one of my closest friends died. Lucy Kerschberger was 22, in London on a Marshall fellowship, and apparently had an aneurysm. She was a talented writer with a throaty chuckle that belied her fragile blond prettiness. I still feel such pangs of sorrow, but no longer know if it's for the  Read More 

Noting the death today of Lawrence Klein, 93. In 1980, the year he won the Nobel in Economics, I was working for someone who was working for Klein at the Wharton School in Philly. The Phillies were in a pennant race that year, and in a great examples of first things first, the headline in one of the Philadelphia papers ran: "Phillies Fan Wins Nobel Prize."  Read More 

I love my cousins, and I love the idea of cousins: people you're closely related to but with enough of a distance to ensure politeness. Cousins have the resemblances and antecedents of siblings, without the in-fighting.I have five first cousins, but innumerable more at one, two or more removes. We all call each other FC ("favorite cousin"). Another pleasure is the many cross-generational friendships among my cousins. I have quite a few courtesy cousins, too, people who are family enough to merit that designation.

Today is my sister Varda's birthday. She would be my main FC if she were my cousin. And that's as good as I can do.  Read More 

Slate has been debating: is it "victim blaming" to tell women to be careful, don't get drunk & all that? Shouldn't we, rather, address the rapists & a culture that tells (white) men they are more important than anyone else? (Does it have to be one or the other?)

If men rape because they feel entitled  Read More 

Johnny just brought over 3 boxes of materials that had been in storage for over 25 years where he used to work.

Mag City, Hard Press, Telephone, Big Sky: lots of small press mags. Some much older treasures too: early works by Michael Brownstein, Tom Clark, Ron Padgett. Many I've never seen before. All in good condition.

Now that they've been wrapped in tissue paper all this time, I feel reluctant to put my grimy paws on them.  Read More