Dumb and Dumber = The New Smartphones

Willy Pogany is widely seen as the greatest illustrator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His sketches are far and away the most beautiful. But the truly best illustrator is Tajvidi, a Persian fellow whose paintings I found in a bookstore in Teheran in 1969. Tajvidi’s work was weakly colored in the printed book I bought. So I copied is themes and designed new paintings using his ideas to illustrate Omar. I used colors like the French Fauvist painters that were bright, intense, and vivid, not weak faded and pale. My book is on Amazon.com for anybody that wants to buy it. I also wrote editorial comments on the Rubai, and some insights into their meaning and proper translation. To do this, I examined documents at NYC Public Library, the Widener at Harvard, and the Libraries at Oxford and Cambridge in England. I had to wear white cotton gloves to handle the rare books. People today want apps for their Smartphones not books about mortal philosophy. Push the digital buttons. Thinking went out years ago. So did books. So did poetry. So did T.S. Eliot and EE Cummings, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Even Bob Dylan. Even Robert Frost. 2026 is like floating in empty space for me. I am a ghost from other skies. I made a good living as a poetry reader, but now that’s gone too. I didn’t go down the drain, the world did. What we have now in the post Biden, wrecked world. With Trump wishing he could fix it, maybe with help from Pulte the home builder. I came, I saw, and what I saw was the greatest, and it’s gone now. Pusha da button, play on the app. Smart should be called Dumb and Dumber Phones.