Birthday

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Happy Birthday (Belated)

Once again it’s time to wish our all time favorite Poet—William Butler Yeats—a very Happy Birth on the days after and week and month he was born. We are so pleased to have him amongst the bipeds of light and love. Although I don’t know what sort of person he was. I’ve heard rumors that he was not the kindest of gentlemen. Not having read a biography of him I don’t know any real, that is truthful, information about his humanity.

WB Yeats, who was born on the 13th of June in 1865 and died in January of 1939, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. 

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

“I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

“For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.”

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”

These lovely quotes from different poems were posted by Dena Bain Taylor along with a photo. It’s nice that the photo is different from the ones we are used to seeing.

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Happy Birthday

Believe it or not, on the the actual day of birth I’ve made this post of our dear friend John Steinbeck.

Posted by Poetic Outlaws

“To be alive at all is to have scars.” – John Steinbeck, born on this day in 1902. That is one year before me mum was born.

There seems to be somewhat of a renaissance of Steinbeck’s work, his novels, East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath both making best-books lists this year. Of course Of Mice and Men always makes it on a list of the best.

I remember reading the book when I was a teenager. I also remember coming to the part in the novel where someone put vaseline on his hand and wears a glove over it. I asked Mother what that meant. Well, she said, it’s not very nice. OK then. Thanks for the help, Mom. And that, in a nutshell, is the extent of my sex education.

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Jimmy Dean

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.

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Thoughts on My Daughter’s Birthday

These are actually thoughts I’m having on the date of her birthday, not thoughts about her birthday. Sometimes too many words are involved in order to make something clear. Especially in a header. And more than once I have thought that the preposition carries a boat load on its little shoulders.

• The daughter was sitting on the floor in front of the TV, eating a toasted-cheese sandwich. This means that it is a Friday and the rules are set aside for “Wild Wild West.” Her hair is shimmering and shining its thousand shades of brown in the sunlight that streams though the window. The boy is sent to his room for some childhood offense and loses out on the broken rules and favored TV show. Just as he walks by, without turning around or looking,

This from the girl: “He’ll never learn.”

• Another TV night, this time on the front porch. The girl is sitting in a chair, not eating, and watching a show. It’s another shoot-em-up but not a western. At some point a man rushes into his bedroom and lands on his bed. As he does so, the bed explodes.

This from the girl: “Oh boy! Is he ever in trouble!”

• The girl and boy are sitting on the sofa. They are watching a TV show. I walk into the room and ask them what they are watching.

The girl answers: “I don’t know but it must be ‘Mission Impossible’ because I don’t know what’s going on.

• Baby Z and I just got our noses slammed by a door. It was the cat’s fault. Her last words were “CAT! NO! No cat.” Followed by a slam. I was stunned. So was baby Z. We just looked at each other.

• The point of it is that a true novel would never end. We are living it after all.

• What is the need to be doing two things at once? Or is it something else making a distraction or a comfort in the background? Nope. It’s about having something to distract the part of the person who becomes aware.

• When the boy was very young he came into the bedroom to tell me that he had a stomach ache in his head. And he came laughing into the kitchen the first time he got the hiccups. He’d hiccup and giggle, hiccup and giggle. Big brown eyes wide and grin the whole of his face.

• Religion and Sex are the same things…sooner or later someone is going to end up on their knees.

• Hey, if we start every new sentence or break with a capital letter why do we need periods at all? Aren’t they redundant?

• Slowly you fall back in love with the things that mattered to you.

• “Permission to leave the battle, sir? God? God, sir? Permission to leave sir?”

• Household rooms need to be renamed: living = group therapy; kitchen=anorexia /bulimia /gluttony, talk therapy; and so on.

• Fear is the dog that’s lapping at the heels same as the voice that calls you back to awareness…

This is a photo from the candlelight chamber-music concert that we went to when we celebrated my birthday here in Cleveland. It was so beautiful. Then the daughter went to Portugal to lease an apartment and celebrate her birthday which is on the 28th.

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Yesterday’s Birthday

Posted by Psyche’s Call with Donna May
  · Cervantes was BTD in 1547