Happy Birthday! And another repeat performance. Yet another loss. How we might have enj0yed him through the years. Not to be.
“The acting of James Dean is more animal than human. For this reason, it is unpredictable: what will happen next?” Francois Truffaut, Cahier du Cinema
“Jimmy may have had crabs, but he also had durable charisma.” Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon II
Born on this day: cinema’s bongo drum-playing quintessential doomed 1950s bad boy, James Byron Dean (8 February 1931 – 30 September 1955) – one of the most lusciously photogenic actors of all time. Pictured: portrait of Dean by Roy Schatt, 1954.
Posted by Lobotomy Room.
Someone once said that Dean was not at all the same person off camera. You would not know what you had until the camera made love to him. And indeed it did. It made him larger than life. Someone else once said upon meeting him you knew he was doomed. He was just plain too much and too small for this world. It was impossible to sustain.
“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
“George Eliot, orig. Mary Ann Evans later Marian Evans, (born Nov. 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, Eng.—died Dec. 22, 1880, London), British novelist. Eliot was raised with a strong evangelical piety but broke with religious orthodoxy in her 20s. She worked as a translator, a critic, and a subeditor of the Westminster Review (1851–54). Later she turned to fiction. Adopting a masculine pseudonym to evade prejudice against women novelists, she first brought out Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). This was followed by such classic works as Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871–72), provides a thorough study of every class of provincial society. The method of psychological analysis she developed would become characteristic of modern fiction. With the journalist, philosopher, and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78), a married man, she enjoyed a long and happy, though scandalous, liaison; their Sunday-afternoon salons were a brilliant feature of Victorian life.”
Impressions of Theophrastus Such/Chapter IV chapter 4 (1879)
Posted by AsAboveSoBelow.
They still taught her books when I was in highschool. And about her name, or the changing of it anyway. I always thought my true name was George and would have changed it to that were it not for both my brother and father named George. I felt rather cheated. It’s not too late now and I could embrace that much easier than as a child, but it would be worse than changing your phone number. Just consider the number of contacts involved. To say nothing of the explanations.
The subject of “Naming Things” itself would be several posts. There’s the biblical “As a man is called, so is he.” Or something like that. And children! The children who want to change their names. Do they all? Do they still? My brother wanted to be called Jim. Just because he liked it. Were I his mother I would have called him Jim. Not a sight or sound for my mother of course.
And this is, too, The Way Things Are. At least for today.
There are times I like to Prattle. As in “she prattled on and on and never said anything.” You know, like “Now I’d like to prattle and so nothing counts and nothing is for keeps.” [As of right now nothing counts.] See, there are rules for everything, even prattling. You know I never learned what horror would befall us if we broke neighborhood-gaming rules. Because I never broke them. No one did.
This painting below looks like a Basquiat to me but apparently it isn’t. Maybe it just looks like a Basquiat to me as that’s the only one I know who does this.
retroavangarda
On the other hand, I could firmly embrace the truth of the things here and now as they are here and now and maybe that’s how it is. Now. Here.
So I’m going to go and prattle on elsewhere as if I weren’t leaving the prattling behind.
I had written a poem. It took a long time. And it never took form, never got real. Just a word or two of truth and then some junk. I asked him once. I said, how do you know when to write a poem. He said when you don’t want to use any commas.
January 1, 2024 Soon there will be no one left to forgive me Your voice tumbling out violets grown wild in streams where fish jumped You were never tomorrow The moon glinted moving the peace so I wouldn’t stumble
The rounds made your laughter mean Sunlight kill ing behind the trees when I couldn’t see you move the branches back Too loud too late…limb and leaf blinded by boots slick from remembering one last line missing
Where your smile was as bright as the sun light where the fish jumped.
Eventually it comes to this. Someone dies and you must go through their items. Otherwise known as going through their junk. Then later, much later you’ll need to go through the leftovers and sort again, the things you kept and never used. You still can’t bear to do away with the treasures that are nothing but things.
Her plates. The ones she had to have to go with the fancy silverware. The silverware itself. Never used, never polished. Your own unused too. “No one entertains like that today.” That’s what we say, we hippies returned to hippy life.
Today we share gummies and play games or talk of Ethics or Morals or The Reality of God. Better yet, Who is God? Certainly no longer the “Father in Heaven” of our youth. What an answer to tide us over. An answer that doesn’t help with the sorting.
The holding onto is clearly an attempt to hold onto our youth. The memories of certain dinners. The memories of Safety that can no longer be replicated. Just as my son’s blanket won’t make me safe. My daughter once said, “Mom, Joel is not in that blanket.” And yet sometimes I found him there, sometimes as I cried and hung onto it, I saw him as a child, I heard his voice.
So now I wonder what I should do with those plates I’ve never used in all the time since she has been gone. Now here it is. The move to end all moves. The final move, out of the country yet. The move where only essentials are taken. Preparing for that is going to take a while. It’s a good thing I won’t be embarking until next year. But the plates are going to be long gone before then.
Joe Bentley Wisconsin post and photo. From the memory palace, if I were taking the back roads.
Writers Ink—Writing and Stuff 