(Source: pauloctavious)
Once A Day - Connie Smith -1965
Britt Daniel
Taylor and Dean on the set of Giant
John Steinbeck to Pascal Covici - Nov. 1, 1948
Dear Pat: Well that is over. Thanks for your letters. They helped. I’m leaving for Hollywood tomorrow and for Mexico on Friday. I’m pretty much relaxed, I think, things have been about as disgusting and nasty as they can get and they didn’t kill me. I wish I could thoroughly believe that this is to be a new leaf. I wish I could be sure I have learned something. I am not sure of either. But I can try. At least if I try it again there will be a shudder of apprehension. Gwyn once told me that she could do anything and I would come crawling back. At the time I was very much in love with her but even then I told her not to depend on it. A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred. And nearly no women or men realize that. We will not mention this again in a post-mortem sense. Only if it becomes active will it be necessary. I think I am getting strength back — perhaps more than I have had in 17 years and perhaps more than I have ever had. I want the hot words to come out again and hiss on the paper and I think they may. My needs are filled. I hope you will write to me. I thank you for the fine bale of yellow pads. I shall make good use of them, I hope. And on your next trip out here I will get you drunk on red wine and music and the old ghosts we have neglected will walk again and wail on the wet rocks. This is a time of change and maybe of destruction, but the waves and the tide will not change, no matter how much we blast or are blasted. The black roots of the little species may put own new leaves. It is about time. There has been nothing erected for a long time. Matter is creative, that we have known and studied, but we have forgotten that the grey lobes in the head are creative too — the only and unique creative thing in the whole world of our seeing and hearing and touching. A lot of high flown language but let it flow. Never again does it have to stoop to critics, or friends or lovers. It can be as good or as silly as it can be, not wise and smart and little. And that’s all for now. I will write to you from Mexico. I’m working on the life of a very great man but primarily a man. It would be good to study him closely. His life had a rare series — beginning, middle and end, and most lives dribble away like piss in the dust. I’ll be talking to you soon. John
Bad News from the Bronx for Opening Ceremony 2011
