Off Monday & Tuesday for the Jewish holidays. A sweet, healthy, adventurous, attentive 5776, everybody.
NauenThen
Pet peeve VII: My name is my name
September 13, 2015
I love Johnny Stanton & have for half my life, but my name is Elinor Nauen not Mrs. John Stanton. Likewise, my name is Elinor not Eleanor. People surprisingly (shockingly!) often respond to an email from me & misspell my name. "Elinor" is in my email address twice & 5 more times in the signature. It's one thing if I didn't spell it out for them but they have SEVEN chances to get it right. Read More
George Ortman
September 11, 2015
George Ortman is an artist who lives in the building where Johnny works. His work is remarkable, his constructions much more so than his drawings, in my opinion. In this show he had a large work with items like cigarettes in sand, an egg, and broken glass, about Beckett's "birth, death, and legacy," which caught the writer's mystery and pungent humor, and a piece about Detroit (where Ortman taught for 20+ years) that hit you with the life/decay/life of that city. The caption to the invitation links to a long interview in a publication called geoform, where you can see a wide sample of his art of six decades. "I have always been interested in what makes art. How is it that space, form and color painted on a flat surface can create a kind of magic?" Read More
3 books
September 10, 2015
I finished 3 good books in the last day or 2:
= Prudence and Jane, by Barbara Pym, the great observer of English life and human foibles. I haven't decided whether I have to ration her or not. It's possible I could reread any of her novels with as much pleasure as I got the first time through.
= On Elizabeth Bishop, by Colm Tóibín. Short & insightful. I haven't been reading much poetry other than hers this summer, & it was great to live her work with this smart Irish novelist.
= Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose. It's taken me months to finish because she sent me (back) to many of the writers she talks about: Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov, Joyce, & lots of others. She points out techniques that it would be easy to miss, and is undogmatic: Every time she finds herself formulating a rule, she almost immediately finds a brilliant, convincing exception. Read More
= Prudence and Jane, by Barbara Pym, the great observer of English life and human foibles. I haven't decided whether I have to ration her or not. It's possible I could reread any of her novels with as much pleasure as I got the first time through.
= On Elizabeth Bishop, by Colm Tóibín. Short & insightful. I haven't been reading much poetry other than hers this summer, & it was great to live her work with this smart Irish novelist.
= Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose. It's taken me months to finish because she sent me (back) to many of the writers she talks about: Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov, Joyce, & lots of others. She points out techniques that it would be easy to miss, and is undogmatic: Every time she finds herself formulating a rule, she almost immediately finds a brilliant, convincing exception. Read More
Stella D'oro
September 9, 2015
I didn't even know if they still existed. I remember having dinner long ago with some people who lived in the Bronx, across from the Stella D'oro bakery. So much better smelling than when I lived near the paper mill in Bucksport, Maine. I stayed with some folks in Homestead, Florida, near a fertilizer factory; Read More
2 Comments
Best sentence of the day
September 8, 2015
"See, if you were here you could have told me what you think of the yellow face poetry scandal while we did a morning walk before this insane heat set in."
And I suppose I'd better send you to the great Jim Behrle if you think you need to know more about the scandal: studio360.org/story/sideshow-best-american-poetry-annotated-jim-behrle/ Read More
And I suppose I'd better send you to the great Jim Behrle if you think you need to know more about the scandal: studio360.org/story/sideshow-best-american-poetry-annotated-jim-behrle/ Read More
Drive a car you can af-ford
September 7, 2015
I come from a Chevy family, probably because Jews notably didn't buy Fords, as ol' Henry was such an antisemite. That was the days when you stuck with a brand. I've owned a lot of Fords, since I bought whatever was cheap & ran OK: Dodges, Fords, Toyotas. "Ford" was said to stand for "fix or repair daily" but you could have said that about all my cars. Read More
Not exactly the Olympics
September 6, 2015
I agreed to learn—in three weeks—a three-column, 63-sentence Torah read (Deuteronomy 28:7–28:69). That's the longest single read in the entire Torah, and I feared I was building Rome in a day.
All I did until yesterday, when I chanted it, was work on it. I practiced when I got up throughout the day, on the train to the Adirondacks and Read More
All I did until yesterday, when I chanted it, was work on it. I practiced when I got up throughout the day, on the train to the Adirondacks and Read More
Kitty's alive
September 4, 2015
I first noticed Robyn when she told this story at a party: It seems that her mother was bothered by raccoons on their land. She would catch them in hav-a-heart traps then drive them down the road. But was it far enough that they wouldn't come back? She figured she'd find out, so she painted their toenails before she released them.
Robyn's telling of this story made me fall off a couch laughing.
Here's another bit of Ann-genuity in protecting a very old cat who likes to lounge in the road. Read More
Robyn's telling of this story made me fall off a couch laughing.
Here's another bit of Ann-genuity in protecting a very old cat who likes to lounge in the road. Read More
Postmen of the Wilderness
September 3, 2015
For most of his life, Arthur Heming (1871–1940) painted using just black, white, and yellow, apparently because he was color blind. (However, at the age of 60, he suddenly grabbed all the colors on the palette.) He traveled the Arctic for the Hudson Bay Company. "His best work is transcendent, calling to mind the rich velvety grayscale of Gerhard Richter’s realistic paintings, while his weakest work is the sort of mystic wolf lore that later became the vernacular of furry bedspreads and black crewneck sweatshirts," writes Abigail Walthausen in The Public Domain Review. I'm reminded of the straightforwardness (without the cobalt blue) of Maxfield Parrish. More illustrator than artist, perhaps, but still, with enough heart to make one linger over his work. Read More
September? How is that possible?
September 2, 2015
First it's Memorial Day, the next weekend is the 4th of July, & the weekend after that Labor Day, and the summer's over. Pretty much how it happened this year as always, even though Memorial Day was early and Labor Day will be later, so summer had two more weeks than it often does. Still, Read More
Westport report
September 1, 2015
I had a great time up in the Adirondacks, lounging at Robyn's family's camp on Lake Champlain, occasionally bestirring myself to eat a piece of the pie that her mother baked every day or paddling a kayak down to the island. One exciting day included a trip to the transfer station (i.e., the dump) and a studio visit to a local artist named Ellen Few Anderson, who lives in a (fantastic!) house Robyn had often ridden past on her bike but never seen up close. I raked seaweed, too, watched hummingbirds at their spaceship feeder, and— no, that was pretty much it.
The Adirondacks!
August 28, 2015
Through the magic of technology, I'm writing this in my office on 5th Street on Thursday afternoon, but will be on a train headed north when it's published. If I can, I'll post from Westport, NY, 6 hours away, but since the only wifi is a few miles from my friend's house at the library, which is probably only open a couple hours a week, I'm not planning on it.
Back Tuesday! Read More
Back Tuesday! Read More
A fun night
August 27, 2015
OK, I didn't take a photo. But the band last night was lined up just like this. They were less white & less snappily dressed too.
Five of us friends from the dojo had Ethiopian food on MacDougal Street (yum, but that spongy injera bread kept expanding in my stomach) then went to hear jazz at the Zinc Bar around the corner on 3rd St. Our dojo friend Mark plays trumpet in the band, which, we learned, doesn't rehearse. At the break I even heard two of the musicians introducing themselves. The bandleader holds up big letters so they know what section to play, either rhythm or solo, and they just do it. Pretty amazing & I think all of them surprised themselves at points. Or maybe not. Maybe they expected it to work this well. I see why pot & jazz go together—you sort of want time to stretch so you can hear everything that's going on. Read More
Braindead
August 26, 2015
C'mon, it's the end of August. How could I possibly have any thoughts in my head.
Jeg trenker på brannmenn hele dag.
I think about fireman the whole day.
That's what's in my head.
Jeg trenker på brannmenn hele dag.
I think about fireman the whole day.
That's what's in my head.
Half a thought
August 25, 2015
For all the people who find out that they're (part) Jewish—Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, lots of not-famous folks—there must be some who find out they aren't Jewish, yes? All Nauens but us are not Jewish, & my dad knew very little about his family. How strange & unnerving Read More
So they say
August 24, 2015
William Jenkins, a North Carolina Civil War soldier, with his flintlock.
I was talking with a couple of guys about idioms & words that hold an invisible meaning, such as one of my favorite words, companion, com = with, pan = bread, so your companion is the person you break bread with.
We got going on expressions that no longer refer to anything that we know about, such as "dead as a doornail," credited to William ("Piers Plowman") Langland, 1350. Doornails were long used to strengthen doors, being hammered all the way through the board then pounded flat, bent so it would be more secure, a process called “clenching.” This rendered the nail unusable for any other purpose. Thus, the bent nail was commonly called “dead."
Here's a whole bunch more, some of which Read More
We got going on expressions that no longer refer to anything that we know about, such as "dead as a doornail," credited to William ("Piers Plowman") Langland, 1350. Doornails were long used to strengthen doors, being hammered all the way through the board then pounded flat, bent so it would be more secure, a process called “clenching.” This rendered the nail unusable for any other purpose. Thus, the bent nail was commonly called “dead."
Here's a whole bunch more, some of which Read More
A gift for burning
August 23, 2015
It's a strange feeling when Johnny is working and Maggie is away. It's the same feeling when I used to drive cross-country long ago. In those days before computers & cellphones, when I would stop when I got tired or to spend the night in a town I took a shine to, I loved the lonesome feeling that no one knew where I was. I would repeat my favorite Adrienne Rich poem, "Song," from Diving into the Wreck, (which is too good to pull apart to quote from so please look it up). The joy is that I won't always be lonely. Read More
Jeg snakker norsk!
August 21, 2015
Stave church in Norway, which I learned about from my language course.
Well, it's not so much that I speak Norwegian as that I am learning Norwegian. It was a random thing, as my sister turned me on to the terrific language app DuoLingo, and I lit on Norwegian. I can almost read a thriller in Norwegian so it's working. And thrilling.
You can really see the Anglo-Saxon roots of (connection to?) English in it, with many similar words, like hus/house.
I did study some Old English not long ago. Read More
You can really see the Anglo-Saxon roots of (connection to?) English in it, with many similar words, like hus/house.
I did study some Old English not long ago. Read More
Yankees O Yankees
August 20, 2015
It's like finding your favorite shirt in a drawer, the one you used to wear every couple of days & loved how it felt on & how you looked in it, that you somehow inexplicably forgot all about. I've been—inexplicably (not just because Jeter retired—on baseball hiatus & it took the beautiful game Tuesday to remind me of how much I've Read More
Julian Bond (1940–2015)
August 19, 2015
I've been looking at the bound volume of my high-school newspaper, the Orange & Black, given to me by my journalism teacher, Miss Norman, because I was the editor my senior year. My then-boyfriend Ken, who was the Features Editor, & I drove down to Yankton, about an hour away from Sioux Falls, to hear Julian Bond speak.
I ran a full page Read More
I ran a full page Read More
Quick Tuesday note
August 18, 2015
It's my half birthday! I'm going to the ballgame! The Twins are in town! I saw Fred! I ran into Leo! I survived pilates-after-vertigo!
Spain Poem (part V)
August 17, 2015
V. Woman on a Train
Alone with trees
thoughts
Anthony Powell
What should my life be?
I ask that more now
than I did at 20
Is it too late to run away?
At 20 I knew:
live in country
be hippie
unconsume
I am no longer sure of anything at all
I’m on a train in Spain Read More
Alone with trees
thoughts
Anthony Powell
What should my life be?
I ask that more now
than I did at 20
Is it too late to run away?
At 20 I knew:
live in country
be hippie
unconsume
I am no longer sure of anything at all
I’m on a train in Spain Read More
3 kings
August 16, 2015
My friend Bob, whose birthday is today, notes that he shares it with Madonna, but is more interested in pointing out that August 16 was the day three kings died:
* Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers
* Babe Ruth, Sultan of Swat
* Elvis Presley, King of Rock & Roll, or simply The King. Which makes me remember that Barbara Barg (who's from Arkansas) wanted to make a t-shirt with his picture & "I speak the King's English." Read More
* Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers
* Babe Ruth, Sultan of Swat
* Elvis Presley, King of Rock & Roll, or simply The King. Which makes me remember that Barbara Barg (who's from Arkansas) wanted to make a t-shirt with his picture & "I speak the King's English." Read More
Baaaaaack at last!
August 14, 2015
Angel Johnny, happy again.
Woke up at 4:30 this morning, so excited that B&H was scheduled to reopen. Johnny & I went there at 7 in our matching "Challah por favor" shirts but they had decided to open at 9 instead. Went back over there, by no means the only people in B&H shirts, and soon enough (finally!), we were sitting at the counter. A guy from NY1 asked me what I was going to order. I don't order, I said, Mike knows what to feed me. Mike agreed: whatever she tells me she wants, I give her challah french toast. Read More
Spain Poem (part IV)
August 13, 2015
IV. Famous for Oranges & Women
do you need to know every thought
between every thought
between doing & being
Alisa squirts tomato all over Robyn
I eat cheese, olives & an orange
it’s gone from 16°C to 21°C
not only do I not know everything
I don’t know simple, basic, useful, grounding
facts
who’s that actress? what was she in?
who wrote that book
what’s-its-name? Read More
do you need to know every thought
between every thought
between doing & being
Alisa squirts tomato all over Robyn
I eat cheese, olives & an orange
it’s gone from 16°C to 21°C
not only do I not know everything
I don’t know simple, basic, useful, grounding
facts
who’s that actress? what was she in?
who wrote that book
what’s-its-name? Read More
Rachelle, songbird
August 12, 2015
Rachelle Garniez, at Pangea, Second Avenue & 12th Street, East Village.
What a treat to hear Rachelle, for the first time in quite a while. She has some new songs, and as always has funny, quirky, East Village-y intros to less recent material that brings them into the here & now. The hear & now. I remember an opera singer telling me it takes 20 years to learn the stamina and how to project and all that. Rachelle is a better singer every time. Who has always written songs that are fresh but somehow simultaneously seem classic, like standards.
Food so-so but otherwise Pangea is a lovely, friendly place to hear live music.
Every day I am struck by how lucky I am. Read More
Food so-so but otherwise Pangea is a lovely, friendly place to hear live music.
Every day I am struck by how lucky I am. Read More
Spain Poem (part III)
August 11, 2015
III. Women & Poets See the Truth Arrive
Barcelona: New Orleans meets San Francisco meets Paris meets Berlin… on the Mediterranean!
The Palace of Music, a library of women’s studies, the Cultural Center of Catalan history where we have thick hot chocolate and Merce explains she isn’t a “Catalonia über alles” patriot Read More
Barcelona: New Orleans meets San Francisco meets Paris meets Berlin… on the Mediterranean!
The Palace of Music, a library of women’s studies, the Cultural Center of Catalan history where we have thick hot chocolate and Merce explains she isn’t a “Catalonia über alles” patriot Read More
Jersey girl!
August 10, 2015
I went to New Jersey twice this week! Wow! Gasp! On Tuesday I had dinner in Hoboken with my friends the beautiful sisters Pauline and Georgette, at a Thai place. I was so impressed with myself for getting to and on the PATH but really, it's so easy—you swipe your MetroCard & it costs the same as taking the subway, except it goes under the Hudson and you emerge in a new state: excitement, adventure, Jersey.
And then Johnny and I went there yesterday. We did exactly the same trip so I knew how to do it and didn't get nervous or even take a pamphlet of PATH information. We sat on a bench on the Hudson and read our summer's poem (having finished Read More
And then Johnny and I went there yesterday. We did exactly the same trip so I knew how to do it and didn't get nervous or even take a pamphlet of PATH information. We sat on a bench on the Hudson and read our summer's poem (having finished Read More
Spain Poem (part II)
August 9, 2015
II. If we had stayed in our world
What forms a people? The sea, the barriers, the ease or not of being fed. Did Spain die off during the plague? What makes a people cruel, sharp with money, musical, grudge-holding? Any individual may or may not be a “type” from her country, but if not, she is “against type” & therefore also typical.
Plane … plane … taxi … taxi … train … taxi … taxi … train … taxi … plane
how can I stop & live?
the words I know are wait & watch
Picasso was made honorary director of El Prado during the Civil War. The Prado reminds me I’m part of hundreds of years of Western civilization.
we are traveling 300 km an hour Read More
What forms a people? The sea, the barriers, the ease or not of being fed. Did Spain die off during the plague? What makes a people cruel, sharp with money, musical, grudge-holding? Any individual may or may not be a “type” from her country, but if not, she is “against type” & therefore also typical.
Plane … plane … taxi … taxi … train … taxi … taxi … train … taxi … plane
how can I stop & live?
the words I know are wait & watch
Picasso was made honorary director of El Prado during the Civil War. The Prado reminds me I’m part of hundreds of years of Western civilization.
we are traveling 300 km an hour Read More