Another poetic form: the rumor

And here's an example:

It has been said
that Helen had beautiful red lips,
but we have to take
Homer's word for it.

– Leon Blumfeld (copyright 2007)

N.B.
Of course, everything's copyrighted here (for all eternity!), but I think I should remind of it once in a while.

History of the sigh pt. 1: precursors

Famous example of a pastoral elegy –

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

The applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

– Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

Morning fib

Just
got
up, still
creaky. Will
need to get in first
gear now: drink, eat, make merry work

Así es, these are the good intentions of your humble servant, Lew Blumfeld

Warm-up fib for today | a sigh

Got
up
early
to do work,
had coffee and lye
crescent, but now crave red fruit.

Your morning report from the working front.

Accompanied by this sigh*:

Oh to be carefree and, perhaps,
have the best espresso ever tasted –
in a tiny bar on Pisa's main street.

Yours faithfully, L.B.

* Sigh: A poetic form loosely related to the pastoral elegy.

Time will not be cheated

Today, this Sunday, ended up being a BAD day.*
One of those where a universal remote control (URC)
for fast, fast forward would have come in very handy.
Including the autopilot function that gets all your work done
while you're sleeping. Yeah, right.

Except that, as we know from Click, the 2006 Adam Sandler comedy, Morty (aka Christopher Walken) will catch up with you if you press that button, and you will regret it – literally – for ever.

*Including an upchucking toilet, three hours of verbal abuse from an aging parent, fog from several planets, etc., etc.

I am surprised I have some sense of humor back.

Late night fibonacci

In
spä-
ter Nacht
treibt es auf
milchigem Mondlicht,
badet in blassem Gold, das Gedicht.

Submitted the English original to the bilingual Garden of Confusion by mistake, so the German goes here for a change.

Your moonstruck Lenny Blumfeld, author of this wind-down fibonacci (as opposed to the warm-ups I practiced a few times before).

All work, no blog

Oh life
could be
so much
blog w/o
work

In this cyber day and age we have finally come to realize that we were meant to do one thing: blog.

How I pity those umpteen million years manwomankind had to suffer through without access to blogging. All they had back then was blabbing.

Your always pilosopically meandering L.B.

BTW: The weather angels have put on another smiling face.

Bout to go out for lunch

¡Nada más!

Haven't even decided where to go, Indian is topmost in my mind.

There's a great Sri Lankan/South Indian restaurant in the neighborhood, but some people I know are boycotting it because of an unfriendly "Chinese-looking" waiter. He could be Indian, from one of the Northeastern States bordering Myanmar, like Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram.

Bamboo forest in Mizoram

This is definitely blabla, but also close to nothingness apart from showing off my shining knowledge of some more obscure geographical areas.

Perdóname.

Su humilde servidor,

Leonardo Flores

Chewin' n' bloggin'

I'll say!
Maximum efficiency, multitasking, whatnot!

Utterances of existence spat out, so to spit, on the run.

The roving, raging, ranting reporter.

So why's this so lame & tame?

I'll tell you, Lem, because it don't have nothin' to tell!

Said some critical alter ego with a firmly grounded eye.

By the way: the weather is laudable, even though a bit reticent with warmth.

You ain't no real Saint Francis

said the blackbird
I talked to
this morning,
dropped a turd
and flew on
to the next branch.

– Len Blumfeld

Note
All true! I did not make this up.

Sunday morning coming down

Some pets seemed to love this sunny Sunday morning just as much as I did.

On my walk I counted at least eight cats lounging in windows, plus one dog, a pekinese stretched flat to look like a spotted rug.

Something irked him about me standing there and looking at him, and he wouldn't quit barking even after I'd left his field of vision.

As opposed to the various cats, who took my presence more philosophically, even though a bit quizzically, like this one.

Blank

Blank can be safely
said to be less
than blabla

But blank is
not nothing
it is space

Shorty snuck in

He did, before I had to leave for work.

This be said, though, in all haste:

• The weather angels put on shiny garb today. Hooray!
• For those who don't care about weather: try a whole season with rain.
• Heard about such a season today, which lasted from October till March 2005, from one who had to endure it close to the coast of Croatia.
• Everything wet, no electricity because solar power can only last so long with rain.
• Cooped up in a room.
• Night falls at 5:30 p.m.
• Lots of opportunity for involuntary candlelight dinners.

This is how one turns chance conversations into blogs, which then become ... what? Evanescent? Pubescent? Nascent?

Lonely sheep on the blue planet

Company
Lonely sheep on the blue planet, wants to keep company with the Little Prince.

If you can't quote it, wryte it yourself

By the way:
Another poetic form was born from this dyp in the poetyc fountayn – the y-based minimalist quatrain (YBMQ). It is a dystant western relative of its eastern haykoo cousyn.

Up-to-the-second state of mind

What they call "zeitnah" in German, "close to time" – blogging on the razor edge of time.

• The weather is doing its thing – rather on the gray, cloudy side – and isn't really dying for my input as far as I can tell
• There, I've paid homage to the weather angels
• I tried reading poetry to look for a quote which might lend itself to being blogged right now, on the razor edge of time and with some cohesive relevance, but nothing on the pages I skimmed stuck
• I'm afraid this has more to do with my current burnt-out state than the state of poetry in general or in particular
• Ramble, ramble
• Did I manage to say anything useful, pertinent or essential that will go down in the annals of whatever?
• I don't believe I did
  
• Would I wish this onto many readers?
• Frankly or unfrankly, I don't know
  

Your cheap neighborhood philosopher and hang-out artist Lem B.

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!

Hits!

How many of us are out there, hoping to make it big, blogging away for
THE BIG BANG,
the stratospheric Harry Potter of blogs?

Google's AdSense providing the cash needed for that dream villa on some sunny beach, where we loll, blogging occasionally and languidly using our notebook computer or cell phone but mostly working on that tan and on our inebriation...

Ah cyberworld,
cyberspace,
cyberdreams,
blessèd be
thy cyberlure!

Starting the day with fibonacci

Oh
my!
Mud pie
thrown my way –
lethal lethe drunk
from purest river so early.

Self-congrats, L.B. You've done it again – gifted the world another fib still burning hot from the forn de pa poètic.

Extra strong copyright by Len Blumfeld 2007

Variations on nothingness no. 2

Even nothingness varies.

Your midwest hometown neighborhood philosopher Jerry Potter Blumfeld.

Thank you, weather

Weather is arguably man's and woman's most dependable companion. There's never a day without it. So here's to weather!

Perhaps the British have known about the importance of weather the longest, hence their famed weather conversation intros like "A bit nippy today, ay?"


An animal factor is added in Germany; here, the weather is made – or at least predicted – by frogs that climb ladders. Up is good, I believe.

I've been told that frogs in the wild are accurate to a tittle* in their predictions provided that they can find a ladder. Another problem is that they're hardly ever seen.

So the weather stations make do with ladder-equipped jarred frogs, which explains some of the inaccuracy of German forecasts.

* This expression dates back to at least 1607 (see World Wide Words). A simplified form is generally in use today, which will most likely be further simplified in the future.

Good morning

It is morning again

The computer fans are whirring at different frequencies

There is an occasional bird chirp outside, also at different frequencies

~~~~~

Nice to see you, I say to noone in particular

Variations on nothingness

More than this - there is nothing
More than this - tell me one thing
More than this - there is nothing

– Brian Ferry (Roxy Music)

Brings up the question of what this is
beyond which there is nothing
and what that one thing is
that needs to be told.

Your true subscriber to somethingness,

Leon Blumfeld

On the subject of pearls before swine

The average swine still mistakes yesterday’s kitchen slops for pearls.

Wind, wind, wind

The weather angels today are swift movers that make stairwells howl and shutters rattle.

Apology

I'll have to apologize to the weather angels for my previous post. There's blue sky out there now, with some fast-moving white clouds and some wind.

It's an "i" day in the vowel rating system.

The next NRWQ:

It comes as a surprise again and again
that dark skies
that linger
will eventually give way to blue.

Weather continues

The grayness today is such
that it could be said
that a consonant
has been added

If I were a certain creative character out there, I would now claim to have originated a new poetic form.

Maybe I have. It could be called the non-rhyming weather quatrain, for example, abbreviated NRWQ.

By the way: One of the main rules of the NRWQ is that the 2nd and 3rd lines have to start with that.

Nothing to say no. 3

There might be more to say than nothing (be warned). It has been said about me that I hardly ever run out of words, and that, if I do, that's a very bad sign.

Today's list of events (non-exhaustive):

• The rain gods meant well and opened their buckets.
  
• The chill gods meant equally well.
• Today's light was mostly grey. No, gray. One vowel grayer than grey.
  
• Some primroses for sale at the grocery store brightened things.

• I treated myself to some super expensive chocolate, the wrapper of which was more expensive than the taste.
• I got work done slightly after the deadline, and then felt it was too late to get started on more work.
• Failed miserably again in the fields of morning yoga & fibonacci.
  
• What am I going do about that fall vacation with scooters that Blogger keeps suggesting for tabs?

Today was good,
today was fun,
tomorrow there will be
another one.

– Dr. Leon Seuss

Shameful admission

I have been neglecting my warm-up fibs.

However, I seem to be doing just fine without them.

The gun is loaded with other shot.

– Gene Browdy

There's nothing to say no. 2

The only proper solution
to this condition
would be silence,
but that would be difficult,
wouldn't it?

It's good that we drink
from the well of loneliness
now and then,
how else would we
appreciate company?

(The above link is to give due credit to the inventor of the turn of phrase.)

PS: Can I ever avoid saying something?

PS2: Who gives a shit?

Let there be light

Let there be light,
let there be an invasion of light,
light to inhale, light to store,
light to shower
on our surroundings

– Louis Green

A poetic-phonemic-semantic development

ELLE
LP
LIP
FLIP
FLYURA
FLIPPER
FLAPPER

KNAP-SACKER

STALE CRACKER

A MONUMENT FOR FLYURA
SHE MIGHT CLIMB, SHE MIGHT FALL OFF OF,
SHE MIGHT LAUGH ABOUT, SHE MIGHT REMEMBER

Now a pro

Long ago I was also an amateur crastinator, but I have long since moved to the pro ranks.

– Gregory K.

Wonder if Greg's a relative of Tonio K.?

Anyway, I'm also a full-grown pro. Otherwise I wouldn't be blogging. I'd be doing something existential, necessary, economically valuable, you get the drift.

Not doing what they call stealing the good Lord's day in German.

N.B.

"There's nothing to say."
"Oh?"
"Yes, I'm typing letters, but there's nothing to say."
"Not even to blog?"
"Not even that. Even though that's close."
"You're making it sound like the end of something. Something so –"
"Final?"
"Yes. But then again –"
"But then again?"
"You just gushed a fib!"
"Well, yes, I guess I did."
"So?"
"That doesn't count. That's like professional. You know."
"I don't. But I suppose it's better than scooters during a vacation in fall."
"Where the hell did that come from?"
"Blogger."
"Oy cee."
"Toodleloo!"

A fib

An
arm
comes up,
breath in steam,
eleven chortles,
a new morning is rising fast.

A fibonacci poem. Don't ask me where the eleven chortles came from – they were somehow associated with the morning imagination that brought this forth.

Oh, for those who don't know: fibs are six-liners with 1/1/2/3/5/8 syllables.

This is my second one. The first one was more or less this in the language of Hölderlin, Goethe & co.

In response to a friend ...

with somewhat far-eastern leanings, who told me, in a heated discussion:

You better face it: it all boils down to nothing

I said:

Let me tell you, there is PLENTY!
And if only it’s the appearance of something.

Shall the twain ever meet?

Another one of Blumfeld's unnumbered wisdoms.

Blumfeld's Wisdom No. N

Some of my attempts at wisdom, wit, cuteness & meanness were posted at Garden of Literary Confusion in various skins I choose (like a snake, but I keep shedding them and putting them back on as convenient).

Oh, and by the way, life goes on today. As it always will – in one form or another.

Promise to stop counting my wisdoms! Solid promise. At wit's end for now. Good-bye.

He acted like God come down to earth

Having the great writer at my house was not all that enjoyable. We talked more about his aches and pains, sensitive bowels and eyes than about the wonderful novels and poems he’d written or future plans of his. That is, he talked. In the afternoon he wanted to go for a walk and headed back home five minutes later as a light rain came down. He asked for homeopathic ulcer medication and a light vegetarian meal, of which he devoured three servings. He also scarfed down most of the chicken korma I’d fixed for myself. I had originally planned to show him some of my own poems (in all humility), but abstained from it because my head was aching from all his talk. Two more days I’ll have this man around, I thought in desperation.

– Surendra Sparsh

(Sparked by a real experience with one who knew himself to be a great artist.)

In a dark monster of a building

Do only monsters live in that kind of building? Or is there somebody who'll carry up Granny Whip's shopping bag, make tea for the young man who's been down with a fever for days? Yes, there is: it is Elsie, who's in a sparkling mood at all times, what with her blonde pony tail, freckles and dimpled cheeks. Watch out, Elsie: not all of them deserve you!

- Leon Blumfeld (text and photo, Copyright 2007)

Note:
I wrote this story inspired by this picture I took a while ago and by a blog that publishes extremely short stories in German and submitted it on the off-chance they would also take something in English. The editor suggested that I supply a German translation, which I did. Hopefully he'll accept it.

Blumfeld, an elderly bachelor

One evening Blumfeld, an elderly bachelor, was climbing up to his apartment - a laborious undertaking, for he lived on the sixth floor. While climbing up he thought, as he had so often recently, how unpleasant this utterly lonely life was: to reach his empty rooms he had to climb these six floors almost in secret, there put on his dressing gown, again almost in secret, light his pipe, read a little of the French magazine to which he had been subscribing for years, at the same time sip at a homemade kirsch, and finally, after half an hour, go to bed, but not before having completely rearranged his bedclothes which the unteachable charwoman would insist on arranging in her own way. Some companion, someone to witness these activities, would have been very welcome to Blumfeld. He had already been wondering whether he shouldn't acquire a little dog. These animals are gay and above all grateful and loyal; one of Blumfeld's colleagues has a dog of this kind; it follows no one but its master and when it hasn't seen him for a few moments it greets him at once with loud barkings, by which it is evidently trying to express its joy at once more finding that extraordinary benefactor, its master. True, a dog also has its drawbacks. However well kept it may be, it is bound to dirty the room. This just cannot be avoided; one cannot give it a hot bath each time before letting it into the room; besides, its health couldn't stand that.

(The beginning of the story by Franz Kafka)

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.