"Chupke Se" music video from "Saathiya"

A song from the film Saathiya by Mani Ratnam (2002), music by A. R. Rahman. Sung by Sadhna Sargam. Picturized are Rani Mukherjee and Vivek Oberoi.

This is in reference to the Hindi chupke se (चुपके से) used in the poem Evil Mood Fib in my previous post.

Actually, though, I had not thought of this song when I wrote the poem, but only of the literal meaning of the expression, which is secretly. And this is part of the lyrics of the song Chalo Na Gori (चलो ना गोरी) by C. H. Atma, an Indian singer popular in the 1950s, I was listening to when I wrote the poem.

The evil mood fib

I’m
in
an eve,
I’m in an
evil mood. Doctor,
take this evil mood off my soul.

Thin
vio-
lin, light
scratches, now
clarinet come in.
To music I fain make appeal.

Doc-
tor
my eyes,
my senses,
I’m fighting evil
mood with uncomprehended words.

Chup-
ke
se. With
stealth. To get
at them. Them who get
to me through clever evil stealth.

– Leonard B.

Notes
Some fairly cryptic poetry served as a statement of feeling and mantra-like speech to combat same.

Talked to N. before. She was in one of her down moods, where she is not amenable to uplift and wants to punish herself – and her surroundings – by looking at bleak things and keeping it that way.

Then my dear M. called to tell of all the cruelty committed against her, laying on more.

Sometimes I get irate with these efforts to load me up. I cannot possibly be the horse to pull all these carts out of the mud. Especially when they attempt to tether me to horses moving in other directions, tearing me apart with conflict.

I’m playing C. H. Atma to combat it, to not be dragged down; this is what I’m talking about here.

Fib not centered to show the sawing process that's going on here.

Goodbye Juan, goodbye Rosalita

When I used the word "aeroplane" in my previous post, it was not without reason. For the last 2 days I've had Woody Guthrie's poem Plane Wreck At Los Gatos in my head. There is a Wikipedia article about the incident that caused him to write it.

The article lists a number of cover versions, but not the one by Odetta, which is hauntingly beautiful and marked my first encounter with the song some time in the late 1970s. Her version starts with "Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita," and she distinctly sings "aeroplane" instead of "airplane."

I was at an Odetta concert much later, perhaps in 2003. She had difficulty walking and had to support herself while singing, but she was as stunning as ever.

Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee)

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?

– Woody Guthrie

Weather report: shiny, shiny, shiny

The weather I can report on with some lapse because it is stable, near-term surprises are not to be expected. It's the big baby-blue out there, with white streaks from aeroplanes.

The sun is shining down, and this should make me happy, just like everyone else.

Everyone else has been shedding layers.

I'm sitting in my office, feeling cooped up and nervous, as if on crystal lithium*.

Don't worry, I don't even know what that would be like.

Except that I have a nervous feeling. It feels like I should be doing something speedily, lots of things, in fact, to ameliorate the situation, to solve problems, to get rid of work, to no longer procrastinate with the breadless arts.

Don't worry, I won't go into the problems to be solved.

– Yours Lenny B., doggedly trying to remain cheerful in spite of it all

-----

*Borrowed from James Schuyler. He published a collection of poetry titled "The Crystal Lithium" in 1972.

The title derives from the fact that he had to take lithium for balance. There had been imbalances that forced hospitalization.

These imbalances included the incident where he washed money in the bathtub at Fairfield Porter's house, if I remember correctly.

First cuneiform results

Hittite is proving ultra-resistant. I hope I didn't promise more than I can keep.

However, to give my eclect audience a foretaste, here are the first fragments of the promised pastoral elegy translated from that very old and long extinct Indo-European language:

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? bemourn ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? mourn grief ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? lament cry? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ‘is flute ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? Hattupsilitas ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? fields of barley? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? onion ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? finest of minds of his? ?
? generation? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? moan grief cry? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? so cruelly blown away ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? moan grief cry? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? bemoan oh muses*? ?
? ? ? ? bemoan? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

* “Muses” is a later Greek concept. However, the divine beings appealed to here seem quite related as far as I can make out.

Note that this is far from final. The poetics and modes of thinking and expression in this ancient language were quite different from today's Indo-European or other modes.

Experience burnt into memory this morning

A
waft
of big
synthetic
coconut : Mister
Burnt Bronze exits tanning saloon
in yellow shorts and white tee in anemic April

– Len Blumfeld

Faithful poetic razor edge fib reporting as always.

Let's go and see if such things can be true

The Miracle Man

That doctor's amazing! They say the old sinner
Puts food in his mouth when he's eating his dinner,
And also feels hungry if starved of his bread,
And closes his eyes when he sleeps in his bed!
He walks with his feet always treading the ground,
His eyes can see things, and his ears can hear sound.
On his shoulders, they tell me, his head you can view:
O let's go and see if such things can be true!

– Sukumar Ray

(Translated from the Bengali by Sukanta Chaudhuri)

Note
Sukumar Ray (1887-1923) could be called the Indian Lewis Carroll. His nonsense verse is as known in Bengal as Mother Goose is in the English-speaking world. His son was the great film director Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), also a writer; the third generation in a family of multi-talents.

More on Sukumar Ray at At Home, Writing.

Playing St. Francis again

"What's all the twitter about?" I asked up into the air.

"Oh, Shruti tells me the nest is comfortable now.
Near finished.
Nothing better than a job well done."

"Right."

"Have a good day."

"Chirp on then."

Work in progress announcement

To all those holding their breath for additional pastoral elegies from the antique world:

I am currently working on the translation of a Hittite pastoral elegy about a shepherd (what else!) and archer against his will named Hattutaswili. The problem is that the cuneiform tablets it's on are in very poor shape, so that a lot of text is missing or blurred.

Their condition is nowhere near as good as the one shown above.

For consolation, I'm posting a quote from the Hittite Lullaby John Ashbery discovered:

More letters from the Sphinx
About what it was like [...]
All aspirations in the teeth
Of some pedantic ritual.

(from John Ashbery, As We Know, 1979)

The longings of a remote espresso bar

There’s
an
espres-
so bar on
the lonely planet’s
shoestring that needs more business now

– L. Blumfeld (copyright & you know what 2007)

Uninvited note
This came about as the result of an MSN search for "espresso bar at lonely planet" from somewhere in the Philippines executed on this blog. Whoever searched was probably disappointed in World So Wide. I suspect that they wanted someone like Douglas Adams, not Len Blumfeld.
Just in case, and to prevent any eventuality of more disappointment in the future, I simply had to add appropriate content.