Elinor Nauen

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. 

Today is the last day of the penultimate month of the last year of the first quarter of the 21st century. 

I talked on the phone to my godson, who was moving a huge Lego sculpture prepatory to going to Alaska to serve as a cook on a boat, & this afternoon am going to see an English production of Oedipus at Studio 54. I could have written some version of this a hundred years ago & I hope people will be doing similar things a hundred years from now. Or next year, for that matter.

Well, the food, of course. But the messages of appreciation & friendship mean so much more than the (best-ever!) mashed potatoes. And the promise (well, hope) of snow next week topped off a lovely quiet neighborly day. 

And today I went to an exercise class at my gym. So! 

And my traditional holiday poem:

Thanksgiving Almost Found Poem

Many years we go to my grandmother's in Virginia. 
My mother, father, aunts and at least two of my brothers are there. 
My son has a football game that morning. 
My daughter is home, but needs to get back to school this weekend. 
My wife doesn't want to ride for nine hours and turn right back. 
Sometimes I have gone alone, but not often. 
A couple of neighbors were vying for our company.
One of those my daughter's boyfriend's family, 
Which we did last year and had fun.
But this year it will be another family,
One we have visited on two or three other Thanksgivings. 
I have a turkey freezing in the garage.

Nothing to do with it.

Ya got yer Venmo & yer Zelle & there's PayPal, crypto, & payday loan sharks or whatever they call themselves. Will cash cease to exist? They've just decided to stop making pennies & we've long since gone off the gold standard. What's an accountant's daughter to think?

When the second of us gets into bed, Lefty quickly jumps in between us, purring & snuggling. It's so cozy, the 3 of us in a loving tumble. For the last month I've been reading Moby-Dick out loud, usually lying in bed, usually with Johnny awake. Today I got into bed, & Lefty leaped in. I started to read Chapter 25 ("Postscript") & without a word, Lefty got up & left. I laid into him: What a philistine, my little friend! This is one of the greatest books ever written. He didn't care, he's had enough of literature. 

I was hoping to find a sweater but they only had half a dozen & the only one I half-liked was a Ralph Lauren, which didn't seem authentically Scandinavian. I bought a marzipan pig, 2 Kvik Lunsj bars - sort of a Norwegian kitkat, & some ornaments as gifts. It was fun but too hot. I had to bolt. 

Here's my suggestion: don't miss the Christmas Market at the Norwegian Seaman's Church this weekend. Marzipan, ornaments, sweaters, gnomes, homemade cookies, & a chance to practice your Norwegian (or not). I'm headed up there in a few minutes. 

Loving & sad evening of tributes to Alice, with many laughs & stories & poems, both by her & about her. A large percentage met her in a workshop & it changed their relationship to poetry & to life. 

I wrote a little play, called "Alice and Johnny at Phebe's: A play based on mail & memory." Johnny read the title, Bob Holman was Johnny, I was Alice, Edmund was "The Tall One," Shelley Kraut, wearing a sequined lace apron was a cocktail waitress at Phebe's (an East Village bar for decades, where Alice, Johnny, & others would hang out after seeing plays on 4th Street), and O'Malley & his friend were random bar-goers. It was a real olden-days affair, with props & costumes & a "cast of thousands," all for a 5-minute presentation. A hallmark of that time was overdoing everything. 

Min katt Lefty

Den gale svarte katten min
vekker meg opp klokka ett
og to og tre og fire og fem

Den kjærlige katten min
kysser meg hver dag klokka ett
og to og tre og fire og fem

Den sultne sultende katten min
spiser og spiser klokka ett
og to og tre og fire og fem

Den kjempestore katten min
blir ikke større klokka ett -
han blir større og større hele tiden ...

Totally forgot about this little work, which I believe I read at the Poetry Project Marathon the year it was entirely online during the pandemic. 

Translation: 

My Cat Lefty

My crazy black cat wakes me up at one o'clock, two, three, four, & five. 

My darling cat kisses me every day at one & two, three, four, & five

My hungry cat eats and eats at one, two, three, four, & five

My huge cat doesn't get larger at one - he gets bigger and bigger all the time. 

It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.

~ G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

Reading because Auden (I think it was Auden, it's usually Auden) said it was one of the best books on the creative process. 

I'd had a different quote for today but I cut it from the file & then forgot to past it in. It was from an email or newsletter & is entirely gone. The gist was that you can replace a thing you lose but not time. Waste not a moment! 

My feed just gave me:

I Have A Friend Above All Others, Sam Cooke 

Cry To Me, Solomon Burke

I'm On The Firing Line, The Soul Stirrers

Jesus Gave Me Water, The Soul Stirrers

The Last Mile Of The Way, Soul Stirrers

Jock-o-Mo, Sugar Boy & His Cane Cutters

When New York Was Irish, Terence Winch (always makes me cry - it's Johnny's life & his New York, & it's all gone now)

Biloxi, Tom Rush Wrong

Texas Moon, Vincent Neil Emerson,

Carmelita, Warren Zevon

The Minstrel Boy, Wild Mountain Thyme

Pancho and Lefty, Willie & Waylon

Little Black Train, Woody Guthrie

What Did The Deep Sea Say? Woody Guthrie

Sugar Babe, The Youngbloods

Lonesome Valley, The Carter Family 

It's a nice afternoon for a sad/happy cry, I guess. 

I'm not sure how it came about ... I must have said I could sing... or that I had sung in a band... or that it might be fun... And voila, there I was at the Norwegian Church, singing alto (as it turns out) & learning songs for the holiday concert next month. Not something I ever expected to do! It was fun. I was OK, in fact fine given it was my first time in singing with a group. One of the songs is in Swedish.

I feel secretly smug being 70, like I know something the youngsters don't. I'm in the big kids club! I am older than Putin, Angela Merkel & I forget who else. Didn't I used to be the youngest just the other day? It's rather confusing & reading The Bow & the Lyre doesn't totally help, when Paz finishes several pages of argument with sentences like this:

Our condition consists in not being identified with anything in which it is incarnated, but also in not existing except by being incarnated in that which is not itself.

I don't think it would help to know what "it" is. Nonetheless, I'm loving his belief in poetry ~ I feel like I read this book when I was 14 & it determined the course of my life, which it did except I'm only reading it now.

Poem in the Classical Manner

I sing of legs & the man
Yes, & of what's in-between.

I found this in an email to Alice, where I said "Johnny & I wrote a poem!" So, apparently I have to give him credit.