Elinor Nauen

The 53 stations of the Tokaido were rest areas along a 300-mile-long coastal route from Edo (Tokyo) to Kyoto. They were originally places where travelers had to present a permit in order to continue their journey. How great it would be to walk in Hiroshige's footsteps & see what the whole stretch is like today.

Hiroshige made his famous series of woodcuts in the 1830s. A later artist,  Read More 

Not a hint of green & we're almost halfway through April. Such a strange year it's been, weatherly. Today it was awfully grand to sit outside without feeling like it was making a statement.

The Passover home stretch, so no work today. I've written this to post automatically. It's a taste of the end of the month when I'll be away & not posting for 10 days. More on that anon.

So relieved to go by B&H this afternoon & to find the place intact. They just need their gas hooked up & then they'll open, probably early next week. They're a couple of doors up from where the explosion two weeks ago took down 3 buildings.

And happy to see a local campaign to support them. They are a beloved neighborhood institution & support not only their workers but many of us. Two of the guys who work there were the first people to visit Johnny in the hospital after his accident in 2012. They sent him juice & soup every day, and wouldn't let me pay for anything until I threatened to stop coming in. I can't say enough good things about them, let alone their French toast.  Read More 

How cool that we got a green light show to celebrate St Paddy's Day! (I know I'm a little late with this.) And when was the last time there was an Irish pope? Never. There has never been an Irish pope. I guess this gorgeous sky was to make up for that. What colors are as deeply connected to a country as green with Ireland? Blue with ...? Orange with ... the Netherlands but I don't think people in general feel strongly about Holland. Red, white & blue with several countries but a color scheme isn't the same as a color. And no one ever says  Read More 

Check out Lally's terrific riff on Frank Sinatra: "I've always been impressed with humans who can extend the natural talents of our species beyond what anyone previously thought was possible. The great artists and scientists and athletes and thinkers and leaders etc. Sinatra was one of those."

Billie Holiday, born 100 years ago today, may not have been as tenaciously devoted to craft & technique, but she can blow your head off. It's the old dilemma: technique or passion—but great artists, like great lovers, have both.

Sinatra's mean attitude toward women is what comes out to me in his singing. Johnny says all singers learned from him—if you can understand Johnny Cash's words, it's because he understood Sinatra's phrasing.

Billie Holiday just seems beyond understanding.

Not so much comparing, just thinking about why I hands down prefer Holiday.

Also see: Frank O'Hara's fantastic poem "The Day Lady Died." Is there a great, moving poem about Sinatra?

No blog yesterday because it was Day 2 of Passover/Pesach. Days 1, 2, 7, and 8 are holidays, while 3 through 6 are what are called intermediate days. The distinction doesn't matter as much as that it's matzoh matzoh all the time matzoh. (I was sick of it by the end of the 1st seder.) I have this idea that my problem with Pesach is that it comes at the same time as spring allergies. That it's not the holiday or even the matzoh but the sneezing lightheadedness. I will try to be amusing for the rest of the week but I will prolly be sour & grumpy.  Read More 

Everybody has something that makes them feel secure, as long as they have enough of it. I buy dental floss pretty much every time I go to the drugstore. Maggie's grandpa had extension cords in every drawer of his house. Susan Cataldo's most memorable observation was that buying a four-pack of toilet paper made you feel like you were going to be around for a while. I guess that's it: I'll live long enough to need all this floss. Will I outlive the ink cartridge, the staples, the socks I just bought? When is it time to stop adding on?

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The tradition of fictional personae and false attribution goes back pretty much as far as writing has existed. There are Greek, Biblical, and classical works where the claimed author is not who really wrote it. Homer didn't write Homer, King David didn't write the psalms.

Some writers use pseudonyms: George Eliot, Mark Twain, and there are people who invent a whole separate person, an alter ego (Latin for "the other I"). In the literary world it's common: Chatterton attributed a series of poems to a 15th-century priest named Thomas Rowley; James Macpherson wrote the works supposedly composed by a 3rd century Scottish bard named Ossian (and incidentally gave a boost to Scottish cultural nationalism); Richard Hell wrote Theresa Stern's Wanna Go Out?, the KOFF poets gave us Maria (Surprise Surprise Surprise That's Not My Finger) Mancini.

I can barely think of a writer who hasn't fooled around with identity—it's part of what artists do: change words into poems, change personality into novels. We speak in the voices of Civil War veterans, Lord Byron, aliens. We become someone else in order to explore other lives, thoughts, ideas.

I edit the smallest magazine in the world, 16 pages, circulation 350. I ran a sweet 50-word story by a woman whom a few people believe to be an invention, & boy have I heard about it. They are not amused.

There's no financial fraud. The story was good, no matter the source. So why are they bugging? Why do they care? Is it that non-artists feel somehow cheated or fooled or that someone is getting away with something? Do they have no sense of humor? Do they feel like it's somehow a joke at their expense?

I really don't understand it. In art all that matters is if it works.

I think if you want gossip you’ll have to turn to Catullus: “Spaniards clean their teeth and scour their gums with the same water that issues from their bladders. So if your teeth are clean, my friend, we know how you have used your urine.” “It was only yesterday you snubbed the honest wives of foremen on your master’s farms, now your boyish charms are fallen.”  Read More 

As a lifelong learner (aprenc tant existeixo: I learn, therefore I am), I've been taking Coursera classes on economics, language, physics & more. I'm not sure how much I'm taking in—let alone retaining—but I do like how enthusiastic the teachers are & how much they want us to appreciate their subjects. This physics guy ("How Things Work") can't believe how cool these formulas are: don't we agree?!!?! I barely passed the first test, even though I was paying attention. That was yesterday, & if I had to take it today, I doubt if I could still remember velocity, mass, acceleration, the newton, & how they interact (or do they?).  Read More 

According to a wonderful article by Mark David Kaufman in the Public Domain Review (which finds & writes lovingly about all sorts of oddball bits from the past), 27 cartoons were made about Private Snafu, starting in 1943. They were intended to educate GIs what not to do: sleep under a tree without your gas mask, stick your rifle in the mud,  Read More 

I feel withered & delicate, the neighborhood & its terrible destruction, the helicopters, the gawkers. Instead, a poem, which I wrote for a reading I was invited by Diana Rickard to be part of last week at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, in conjunction with an art exhibit called "Home Again."

if you lived here, you’d be Home by now

1) Sioux Falls
Hometown
Homeland
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They’d thought no fatalities but now say 2 people are missing. Three buildings from the corner in, on the west side of the avenue, are down. A few blocks of Second Avenue still closed to traffic, foot or vehicular. Dozens of people homeless. Some hero Read More 

I tried not to even look, I didn't take photos, too many people doing that, what? what? is it "news," as though it's not suffering? relief that it was someone else's tragedy? do people just like being close to something out of the ordinary? I think this is why I like big snowstorms: that same impulse but largely benign. I have a headache like crazy, don't listen to me.

It's around the corner from me & the same block, Second Ave between 7th & St Marks, where B&H is. "Tanky God we ok B&H is fine next bulding of us drop down so sad." I love those guys.

I'm home now, suffering, having breathed terrible acrid air. Shaky. Read More 

Maggie & I went over to NYU this afternoon to talk to someone at the library + a guy who's writing a book about punk & poetry, and wanted to see & hear about KOFF magazine. He also wanted us to watch a video of a reading at a laundromat from the summer of 1977. Eileen said I was in  Read More 

Remember how condescending Joyce is in Portrait of the Artist to a friend for remembering something by thinking back to where he was and what he was eating when it happened? It is so like some Irish Catholics I know to have that condemnatory attitude toward the body (not you, Lal! & not Johnny either). They dismiss the physical self, live in head and heart as though there were no body. Your mind is part of your body: Isn’t that most clear when you have a cold & your brain is fuzzy? Or is your brain woolly, therefore you get a cold? Does foggy thinking cause illness? A dampness of the brain that settles in the lungs? Am I getting sick because I can’t write a stupid article for a stupid magazine? Does the Nobel Prize prevent (cure) illness? Which Joyce never won. AND he was a terrible hypochondriac. QED.

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I’m reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in a 1961 Cambridge University edition I got from a dead friend’s apartment, with a cranky intro by a blind editor. Pages fall out as I read, which reminds me of a story about an old woman who read one page of the Bible every morning in the outhouse, then used that page as toilet paper. Read More 

Charters I only met once but of course knew his work on behalf of the blues. Musicians I listen to all the time I only know of because of him. I met him when he was reading with Aram Saroyan at the Nuyorican Café. I was the only person who showed up! so the 3 of us  Read More 

O Danny! The smartest, most tireless, most infuriating, most persuasive person I've probably ever known has died of the horrible pancreatic cancer. Far too soon. His biography—radio "News Dissector," journalist, activist, filmmaker, author—could be that of half a dozen overly energized people; look him up. I am only going to  Read More 

Where is Chris Christie when I'm feeling like a good political scandal? I've noticed that I have to check to see if what I'm reading is from The Onion, so much seems exaggerated: 47 U.S. Senators who openly commit treason. Government panels and committees about women with no women members or experts. The straight arrows are just as bad as the corner cutters, ideologically driven as they are and unconcerned about exceptions or weakness. I can remember when it seemed like politics had sunk to an all-time low with Richard Nixon, who I still blame for the disgrace & disrespect in public life.  Read More 

Once again I was so happy to be with a person that I forgot to take a picture of him or of us. This was Mike (now Michael, of course) Sellz. We've known each other since 9th grade, I think, when we were both in a Jewish youth group in Cornbelt Region of BBYO: Sioux Falls, Omaha, where he's from,  Read More 

On my kitchen table are these books, all of which are in my "read immediately" stack: the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell; the autobiographies of William Carlos Williams and Yehuda Amichai; 2 or 3 Pot Thief mysteries; 2 new (used) books I got in the mail yesterday: Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam  Read More 

Johnny: "Watch out! Don't you see that old lady?!"

Me: "Why's she walking across the street? Why's she so slow?"

I have some of these on my bike but it's not the same. I miss having a car.

Johnny got called on to be a contestant in our granddaughter's high-school production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. When they asked him to spell ptomaine, he instead sang "The Alphabet Song." One thing I like about that man is how uninhibited he is. Put him onstage & you never know what will happen. He doesn't either. If he could ever do his spontaneous performance twice, he'd be a great actor.  Read More 

Not sure what this picture shows: that I can melt cheese on a whole wheat burrito? that it can form a suggestive picture? that it's Friday & I'm fading? that my new glasses give me a headache but that I keep trying to get used to them? that I have to go the library right this minute, or the next? that I might not make it to black belt promotion after all? that my desk is not as cleared off as I like it to be on Fridays? that I'm sad (& chuckling) thinking about my late sister, whose birthday is today? It's like modern poetry: there's a lot more here than meets the eye.  Read More 

I went to karate class & I ate a carton of yogurt & was shocked to read about an Arkansas state legislator who gamed the adoption system, then abused the girls he & his wife had taken in. It was so windy I almost couldn't move forward on my bike & I got whacked by flying gravel and paper. I found out that  Read More 

Working on a project that involves the union of the future. Work will be different then as it is different than it was when I had all these jobs.

Spring Forward Fall Back: A work about work


2 days: 2 gas stations: fresh out of high school, washing windshields, adding oil, pumping gas

2 semesters: Michigan State library where a girl named Mickey said, “These are the pants I wore at Woodstock.”

4 months: Kryptonics polyurethane factory in Boulder, where I was a sandblaster & met my first junkie. Would have been second but  Read More 

Sometimes I'm inspired or invested in this daily whatever-it-is, sometimes it's a chore, sometimes I surprise myself with how experiences or observations come together to make more than the sum of their parts. Kind of like my days in general, although many times my life is more  Read More 

Tim McCarver

In 1980 we called him Uncle Tim.
His nicely ruined American beauty.
We were in love with all Irish face.

Memphis voice calling games
knew why it rolled & how to do it all.
His fingers have more knuckles than ours.

Everyone still in love with everyone
Everyone still alive & we had uncles
we didn’t even need.

 

I helped a little on The Perfect Season, as Tim's co-author, Danny Peary, is an old pal of mine. I'd been at David Wells' perfect game that spring, so they picked my brain about that, & I think I maybe did some other research. It's always strange to have a strand of feeling about someone, for reasons that have little to do with them (the Irish connection in this case: Ted Berrigan & my husband, Irish amadons that I love wildly), then meet them in their real life, where you are not a strand at all, & they aren't either, not really.