Hollywood's Byron: James Dean (died 09/30/55)

Both of them share a name (James Byron Dean) and a mythology. Too fast to live, too young to die, bye bye. *



(Eagles, "James Dean).

Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896)

I love this passage from The Crack-Up:

This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain that you are, “a constant striving” (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it). only adds to this unhappiness in the end -- that end that comes to our youth and hope. My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books -- and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural -- unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over

Read more at the link above from Esquire, which published all three sections of this fine essay in 1936.

Chapbook Makes Its Debut

I'm so excited and grateful about this. Please check out the amazing job qarrtsiluni has done with the poems. The sound files, which were masterminded by Matt Markgraf, are fabulous, especially those where Harvey joins me in the two-part poems. And here's all you need to know about the cover: CARRIE ANN BAADE.

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN: TWO DAYS

till my first chapbook, A Walk Through The Memory Palace, is released...I'm so excited that I can barely stand it. There will be sound files and a beautiful cover and electronic poems and an order-me-on-Amazon spot.

I wish I could show you the cover--but it's definitely worth the wait. If I tell you the artist is Carrie Ann Baade, you'll understand why. (see the link).

Pins-and-needles-ly yours,

Pamela the Stoked

Tearsheet on Tears: Two Men in Hats

214.

TEARS! tears! tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears;
On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand;
Tears—not a star shining—all dark and desolate;
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head: 5
—O who is that ghost?—that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand?
Streaming tears—sobbing tears—throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering, with swift steps along the beach;
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind! O belching and desperate! 10
O shade, so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace;
But away, at night, as you fly, none looking—O then the unloosen’d ocean,
Of tears! tears! tears!

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892 edition
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Tears, Idle Tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

Tennyson, from The Princess, published 1847
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