Disjunct

A gadget, a card,
several USB cables.
Hot, tedious hours.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2021)

Note
Had nothing specific to say (seems to happen often ... I’m speechless in view of what’s happening in the world) but nonetheless felt the need to assert my cyber presence. Drastic change is needed – but who’s going to do it? 100,000 poets alone can’t. 

Doggone it

I've got the blues a-
gain. It is infectious, the
meanness of this world.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2015)

Notes
Not really needed. Could give you a long list of things that are wrong with this world – if you insist.

The coherent world view haiku

I do hope that a
coherent world view steps out
of these counted words.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2014)

Note
When a well-known poet does not have a major poem to his name (such as, for example, T. S. Eliot would have The Waste Land or Ezra Pound would have the Cantos), literary criticism focuses on the merits of the so-called coherent world view, i.e. it is good for a poet to have one (and, by implication, bad if you don't have one). I remember some article about the poetry of James Schuyler, where the critic spoke of this. Alas, I don't remember what the critic's ultimate conclusion was. I only remember that I strongly disagreed with both major notions of the article: 1. That there are no James Schuyler poems of major importance (to me, many of his poems are by far more important than anything erudite, contrived and sterile T. S. Eliot ever wrote), and 2. That it is difficult to discern a coherent world view in the body of James Schuyler's poetry. (To which I would say that there is hardly anyone else to rival the rendering of 20th century human experience I see in Schuyler's poetry with more coherence.)

The rear gear haiku

I’m in backwards mode
again today, where I want
nothing of this world.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2013)

Note
Do you ever go through these moods where everything seems futile? Where cell phones, movies, social media hoopla, poems, paintings, consumerism and poop seem all the same? Where you sort of feel like Buddha, wanting to spend the rest of your life sitting at some intersection somewhere in Bihar, having nothing and wanting nothing? You do? Then you know what this haiku is about.

Project Green with Peter Green

As a contribution to Anna Carson's Project Green I'm posting a video of Peter Green performing Man of the World – a song from the early blues days of Fleetwood Mac. Both the picture and sound quality are excellent. Lyrics below.



Man of the World

Shall I tell you about my life
They say I'm a man of the world
I've flown across every tide
And I've seen lots of pretty girls

I guess I've got everything I need
I would't ask for more
And there's no one I'd rather be
But I just wish that I'd never been born

...

And I need a good woman
To make me feel like a good man should
I don't say I'm a good man
Oh, but I would be if I could

I could tell you about my life
And keep you amused I'm sure
About all the times I've cried
And how I don't want to be sad anymore
And how I wish I was in love

Written by Peter Green (song released in 1969)

Looking around collage

The people across from the office have two yellow and one blue plastic flowers attached to their bathroom window. It is the bathroom window because it is made of that rough-textured glass that is no-see-through.

I'm sure the whole wide world has been waiting to read this.

On to other, equally notable things.

On my absent colleague's cabinet there are two miniature Mercedeses, one maroon, the other silver. One's stuck in sort of a tupperware bowl on a sheaf of papers, the other one on what looks like some sort of ramp. Black plastic. Neither Mercedes looks very happy.

The subprime rate mortgage crisis keeps throwing its weight around. Now it turns out that even the oh so successful on their own Chinese were hoping to make a fast buck on another bubble that was supposed to keep growing forever and that was mostly based on loans that should have never been given in the first place. Idiocy thy name is banking.

Darshini David wore bright orange yesterday. Big buttons again, even though the collar was less pronounced than usual. Made her upper body look humongous. I'd been looking forward to her daily appearance, but BBC did not put her on. Rico Hizon from Singapore, a man of vast knowledge, enigmatic smiles and succinct wording (albeit also guilty of some overuse of personal address interjections), was left out as well.

BBC World News has been showing the same AT&T formula 1 whine car racing commercial for weeks. Something about "ultimate speed," "enhanced performance" and "innovative solutions." Leaves me panting every single time. AT&T would be well advised to axe their commercial scribes for abundance of originality.

And oh the big business world is still complaining about the credit crunch that prevents them from sinking trillions into questionable megadeals.

In Bangladesh the police is sent after students that have been proclaiming loudly what everyone has known forever – niffy, inept, self-serving government. Not so different from most governments. More about this on Global Voices.

Oh well. Time to get on with work.

Out of the window, sharply

I've been sitting here on Sunday morning editing tags.
What a thing to do on Sunday morning, without even having had breakfast.

When I caught myself at this (after approx. 20 min of it),
I, for some reason, remembered through the past darkly,*

and that it was probably a wise idea to situate myself
in the world I live in consciously,

by looking out the window sharply. The world is out there
all right, it consists of thinly white clouds and baby-blue sky,

of quiet houses, grey walls, red roofs and spiky antennae.
Not a whisp of smoke out any chimney. Has it all died on me?

Now don't get rhetorical, I admonish myself. If it were dead,
my dear, you'd know first hand, because you'd be dead yourself.

– Len B.

* Apparently a song by the Rolling Stones. I'd thought it was the title of a poem by Henry Treece, recited by Joan Baez. Will have to verify. The world-so-wide web has failed, I'll have to revert to my empirical means.

Will let you know the results soon, like in about 5 minutes. This is, once again, blogging on the razor edge of time.

I'm back!

• Empirical means have failed. That Joan Baez record is not among the ones I have in my living room. Probably in the basement, where some of her stuff has been banned. My first record ever was Joan Baez' "The first ten years." Living in the country with no access to music stores, I'd mail-ordered it. Anxiously checking the mail for it every day for weeks. It took an awful long time to arrive. That was in 1970. I was 14.
  
• The poem by Henry Treece I remembered is called "Old Welsh Song" (I'll post it soon).
• I may have possibly and wrongly been thinking of García Lorca's "Gacela of the dark death", which Joan B. also recited on the same record. (To be posted as well; this is turning into a thread.)
  
• I'll have to listen to that Rolling Stones number.

Back again, some 10 minutes later:

• Riddle solved. The Joan Baez album is called "Baptism," and the piece on it I'd actually been thinking about was "Of the dark past" by James Joyce. There you go.
  

Oh the tricks that memory and association can play...

Cavils

Cavil – lovely word. Nothing you're supposed to do, but so easy to give in to. So here are my cavils for this morning:

1. The weather, even though not downright depressing, could definitely be better.
2. My head could be better. The well-known tension from too much computer work is coming on.
3. The world situation could be immensely better. Good people could be in power (unlike Junior Bush, Kim Jong-il, Pootin and a few other shining stars I could think of).
4. I could receive more e-mails from people I haven't written to. Still, they could be thinking of me and drop a line.
5. Ultimate success has failed me.
6. My fiancée could write or call. It's been too long.
7. I could be doing things I like to do.
8. Why do I have to do what I do? I mostly hate it.
9. Particularly right now.
10. Money, the most prevalent current incarnation of the constrictions of this material world, is the root of much evil.
11. If it weren't for a lack of money, I could publish so many books, stage so many plays with my love in them, and nobody would have to read respectively see them except if they absolutely wanted to!
    

Etc.

Gripes! Yikes! Enough!

Hello World!

This is Leon Blumfeld's contribution to the world, which he considers so wide that, even if you flitted around and around it, you would never reach the end of it, particularly because it is in constant change.

Leon has been and hails from many places, including the Florence of the Sinclair Lewis novel that gave its name to this blog.

He also feels an affinity for Kafka's Blumfeld, even though there's no blood relationship.