Elinor Nauen

Yeah, so there's a cap on how many images I can include in my blog, so I'm going throught month by month & deleting bad or unnecessary photos, to free up room for the really good ones. Here's a list of what I cut in just a few months in 2013 & 2014: 

 

karate.jpg

Stanwick.jpg

Basque.jpg

dec_snow_on_5st.jpg

JF_OdH.jpg

pete_seeger.jpg

ChrisChristie.jpg

linda_kittel.jpg

polar_vortex.jpg

AZ_showercaps2.jpg

Sun_tunnels.jpg

Rio_Bravo.jpg

Neptune_ceiling.jpg

home_money.jpg

robin.jpg

chaim_gross.jpg

oliver_twist.jpg

Breslau_1900

Henry_Thomas

spring_trees

East_River_from_bus

Varda_whitney_bowl

jsen_shower_cap

1st_St_flowers

waiting_for_the_sun

confederate_bar2

maggie_frog

inside_SWs_house

SanFran_pizza_2

SanFran_pizza-2_2

Polk

Nadler

hard_times

muji_swag

Kim(Kipling)

 

I have to think ahead - maybe blog less frequently? certainly with fewer photos. I shall ponder. 

Taken across from my building. Love those mysterious leaves in the foreground. All the lights. My version of heaven.

Yesterday I could, today I can't add a photo to my blog. Not sure what's going on & the Authors Guild help site has a dead link for blog help. You don't get to see the beautiful scene on my block or the Marsden Hartley painting that inspired my Norwegian story till this gets fixed. 

 

Ha ha! I accidentally discovered some WHITE ON WHITE text in the image section with this message: You have reached your limit for adding images to your site. To upload more, you can delete unused images in your file library.

 

But I CAN'T delete any. So I've contacted the amazing help desk at the AG, who have never failed to answer quickly & solved my problem.

 

Update: Hector from the AG, my hero, helped & now the Hartley painting is up. But sadly, there's a limit to how many images can be in my library so I'm going to have to delete a bunch in order to include more. 

I kept seeing this poster & t-shirt from Raygun, the greatest store in the universe (they say so themself!) & thinking, huh, how about that, a Midwest expression I never heard of. And then, I heard myself say it. And then I noticed that I say it ALL THE TIME. Ope, forgot the bag. Ope sorry. All the ways they say people use it, I do too. That was totally weird. It's innocuous, not a word as much as a breath, so I totally see how I never noticed. I suppose everyone I know has been ope'ing my whole life & none of ever noticed. 

 

On a different but related topic, in Norwegian it's grammatical & common to say, for example, "I'm going to the store - do you want to come with"? omitting "me" or "us" at the end. When that came up in my Norwegian class a while back, one or two of us instantly recognized it as a midwestern pattern. I only ever noticed it I do it when people on the east coast called it out. I had no idea why we did that & it was cool to see a Scandinavian pattern carried into English. 

 

It's hard to catch yourself in a regional expression unless someone else hears it & reflects it back to you. That's part of why I so much appreciate studying the beautiful Norwegian language.

Tomorrow's the last day of the semester so I've been bearing down finishing & getting ready to read my story. I'll drop it in here, with a summary in English at the end. 

 

De stygge laksen
 
av Elinor Nauen
 
Det var en gang en laksefamilie som bodde i en lite havn langs norskekysten. Herr og fru Laks hadde mange barn: Lakseandré, Laksebjørn, Laksepadde, Lakseedderkopp, Laksetone, Lakseberit, Lykkelaks, Flakselaks, Prikkete Laksegris og de yngste, tvillinger som het Laksandra og Ålinor.
  Read More 

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it. 

~ Edith Sitwell

 

She was ahead of her time. Throwing up her hands at today's Republicans.

There was a julekonsert at the Seaman's Church & an open studio in Bushwick. But no photos ~ you'll have to trust me that I'm actually doing stuff. When Johnny & I got off the train in Brooklyn, we both knew where we were & set off towards my friend's place. In fact, it was the exact wrong direction but somehow eerily familiar. I get lost all the time & this is one of the few times I was absolutely certain. It didn't cross my mind that I wasn't. It should have! 

I don't remember ever having seen this photo till Rick sent it to me this week. Where we were or the occasion for the picture: no idea. I don't recognize the house or what I'm wearing. But there I am. [Insert statement of wonder at the passage of time & the passing of memory.] Rick & Sherri's daughters are now twice as old as we were here. 

I found this the other day, coincidentally not long after the founder's death. I must have been sent there by AARP when I was the automotive columnist for their baby boomer maganize, My Generation, most likely to do a story on how older drivers can ensure safer driving.* I remember starting my piece with a sentence about taking out half the state of Arizona when I rear-ended a truck carrying something nuclear. I remember learning "you go where you look," which is why people on the side of the road get hit by passing cars at a pretty good clip. I learned to trust that the car would go where I sent it. 

 

I thought I might still have that piece but I took a lot of stuff off my computer over the years. I kept a list** so I could find them again but of course I don't have those backup disks anymore, or if I do, no way to access them. Yay for technology. 

 

* found it! I think this is the final but here it is (where's the headline?):

 Read More 

Jim was Beau, I was El-beau, Baby Jeff's dog was also Beau. Not sure how it started but those were our nicknames & he got me pencils & stationery. Jimmy died in 1999 & Jeff a year or 2 ago. When Jimmy knew he was dying, we planned to rent a Dodge Viper. It sort of came with a speeding ticket, but what did he care? We left it till too late. I still miss both of them but I don't need this pencil. 

I'm a little amazed at how much stuff we are getting rid of, & pretty painlessly. I've taken out a large bag almost every day since this got underway, not quite a month ago. And still so much to look at. It gets easier. "If I don't need that, I certainly don't need this" is my motto. The only issue is that parts of the house build back up again ~ mail arrives & voila, the kitchen table is a mess again. But it's not worse than 3 steps forward, 1/2 step back. 

 

Tomorrow: a discarded treasure. 

Your library is your paradise.

~ Desiderius Erasmus

 

Did you sigh when you saw this picture or looked at the quote? 

 

That's why I can get rid of pretty much everything in my house but not my books. 

Getting my covid booster shot in a couple of hours. Will there be many more? Will we be getting annual flu & covid shots? Why am I nervous? Everything is wracking my nerves a bit at the moment. Is there any good news in the public sphere? Wish there was a shot that would give us all a lift.

Whew. Our semesterprojekt in my norsk "language & culture" class is to write a fairytale. I have tried to think about it for several weeks & pretty much got nowhere but dead ends. Then suddenly, it all poured out. I wrote the whole thing in 2 days. Now I'm delirious & exhausted & marveling once again at how much creative work gets done behind our backs, as it were. All the problems were solved in a flash, even problems I didn't see coming. Too bad it's in Norwegian & only a handful of people will ever appreciate it. Actually, I don't know yet if it's any good, & I don't care. Writing it was so much fun, the soaring as my characters said & did things I wasn't expecting. I let 'em loose & they ran with it. Doesn't happen that often but it sure is thrilling when it does.

My friend's building on East 10th Street, with marble stairs & old linoleum. His apartment still has the tin roof that I suppose has gone in & out of favor. When I think I want to move to a brand-new building, I remember how happy I am about and in the funky old ones. Mine being even more old school, with the tub in the kitchen. 

This was an early KOFF girls prank, or project, when we liberated a subway ad placard & changed "constipated" to "consumptive" then silk-screened the image onto t-shirts. When I say we, I mean Maggie. It was actually the Consumptive Poets League that did it; the magazine, KOFF (get it?), grew out of the League, but Maggie, Rachel & I were called the KOFF girls ever after. 

 

We went on to bigger & better, which you can read about here. 

We saw one snowflake & this maple, 20th Street east of 9th Ave. 

I think you have to teach kids to work, and you can only teach them to work if you work... I can't delegate jobs if I'm not doing it.

~ Ruth Asawa (1926-2013). She had six kids, by the way.

 

I got interested in her because she'd been at Black Mountain. Best known for her coiled wire sculptures, I fell in love with this painting at a show of her work I went to a day or two ago at the David Zwirner gallery on West 20th Street. You have to look closely to see the little scribbles in the back of the chair. Somehow that's what makes this great. 

My friend KG is moving away so I felt lucky that he had a couple of spare hours to hang out on Friday. We went to the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. This is one of the cool things we saw. 

Is Chisholm having a revival? Or what? After all, she died in 2005 & that was quite a while after she ran for president, the first Black woman to do so. I believe she was the first Black woman in Congress as well. Anyway, here is this poster on a mailbox up the block. 

As usual, my traditional Thanksgiving poem. I no longer have anything to do with the guy whose email I "found" it from 20 years ago, who became a Holocaust denier, with all the paranoia, conspiracy, & ugliness that goes with that. I still like this little work, however. 

 

 

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.

This is so depressing.

 

According to the Global State of Democracy 2021 report from the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, "The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale." 
 
More than a quarter of the people in the world live in democratically backsliding countries, that is, nations seeing a gradual decline in the quality of their democracy, thanks to restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law.

Who do they blame? Take a guess. (The pandemic hasn't helped either, globally.)
 
The report does say democracy is resilient, with protest and civic action fighting repression around the world. 

 

The depressing part is how many people are OK with it, as long as no one makes them wear a mask to tamp down a pandemic. 

I'm thinking I wrote this for Ed & Lori's wedding in 1990. Found it going through papers & drawers & bags & boxes & piles as we clean our place out in preparation for fixing it up. 

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. 

~ Aldous Huxley, who also died November 22, 1963

Totally great to meet my friend Tracie at 8 a.m. at her place in Brooklyn. We were 7:30 karate students so getting together early was old times for us. The picture shows the city as it once was; the air was bright and olden days too. It was 15 minutes, if that, on the L train to a neighborhood (Bushwick, I think) new to me. We caught up & I got to see her wonderful drawings & new apartment. 

Is this by Edmund? 

 

I'm liking finding things in the process of getting rid of things. 

If the connection is poor, most people tell you it's your phone, you should move, you should hang up & try again. Hey, maybe it's you! Or more likely, it's probably no one's doing & the gods of phone calls are making mischief. What's the point of aiming a pointless accusation at the other caller?

This beautiful painting, by Lois Tønnessen Andersen, is part of an exhibit of her work at Sjømannskirken (the Norwegian Seamen's Church) up on 52nd Street. I was there the other day to help bake pepperkaker (Norwegian gingerbread) for their annual julemarked (Christmas fair). It was fun & homey & I got to practice my halting norsk with Anbjørg & Hilde (wives of the priests). Hilde very kindly said don't worry about the prepositions, we understand even if they're not quite right. At least I am pretty sure that's what she said. 

It's either clean or move & apartments are too bloody expensive to move. We are each spending 10 minutes a day evaluating & throwing out as much as possible - clothes, papers, books, puzzling items that kept getting put aside till we could figure out what they are for. Out they go. 

 

I figure this process could take a few months although, a week in, I am starting to notice little bare patches. 

The heart stops briefly when someone dies,

a quick pain as you hear the news, & someone passes

from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts

to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely.

 

~ from "Things to do in Providence"

Ted Berrigan (November 15, 1934 - July 4, 1983)