...a nod to Maxwell Grant, writer of "The Shadow"...

As Anaheim Public Library was one of my many haunts as a child, there were just as similar a series of books that I would return to many times.  Like you, there were those books that inspire or ignite your thoughts.  One of those books I only discovered because I was a young fan of "The Shadow" radio series.  Though I was not close to being alive at the time they came out, I had been an audiophile and come across many a tape with compilation sets.  For some reason it is the summer where I like to pull these out, turn off the lights, crack open the window for some of that Southern California air and just listen.

From there, as radio shows are scarce, the series of original pulp novels were readily available at the Book Baron, which used to be on Magnolia and Ball.  [Used book stores are a sign of the modern age.  Ideas and life's works can be bought and sold for pennies of their original value.  Hollywood has bred fashion and its disposal: books can be a form of third rate entertainment.  Now the stores are a dying breed.]  The shelves were once stocked, from floor to (almost) ceiling of the 1960s re-release of the Maxwell Grant novels.  For a dollar a pop, one could but feel the 'cheapness' of the original pulp novels that used to sell for a dime or a quarter.

From these books, I wanted to know more.  It was there I discovered among the entertainment shelves of the first floor of APL (when the adult section was on the first floor, and the entertainment was on the eastern side, about six rows from the windows, top-left), the book, The Shadow Scrapbook.  And it was written by Maxwell Grant, author of the bulk of Shadow novels.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1467916.The_Shadow_Scrapbook

From that book, you would learn that Maxwell Grant was the pseudonym of Walter B Gibson.  Not much a mystery, but this was pre-internet kids.  The amazing thing in all of this was that Gibson could write some million words a year.  He made a legitimate living out of writing from the time he was a youngster until his death in 1985.  The Scrapbook was more than a survey of Shadow memorabilia, it was also a biography of Gibson and his prodigious output.

If you could cull what little web articles exist, the highest output, for a year, was 1,680,000 words.  With Shadow, he would write 282 of the 325 produced.  It was definitely improbable to a 15-year-old reading the book to believe that Gibson had to deliver, in a year, something like 1,440,000 words, or 24 stories at 60,000 words a piece.  This output prompted the Corona Typewriter Company to use him in an ad campaign.

Herculean feat!

A tribute at http://www.mysticlightpress.com/index.php?page_id=131 calculates that, at the end of his career (although it appears he worked in some fashion until his death), that he had some 29,000,000 words total.  There would be a 125 non-Shadow titles.  If you go to the Amazon author page for Gibson, you will see 49 titles listed to this day.

Of course, my young mind reeled.  I believed I would be able to master the amount of words Mr. Gibson did, but even he admits that he was a bit on the obsessive side when it came to writing.  Now that I am much older than that boy in a dark library, my admiration has grown.  The feat may be beaten by technical writers or others, but the profound effect on the written word, by a shadow that still has a following today (some 80 years later) is astonishing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Gibson

I'd imagine kids would stare at this image for hours, probably for more reasons than you think: television hadn't been invented yet!

...les updates de 23may13...

Is it spring or is it summer?  I can't tell: it's warm, then cold, etc.  I know it is that time of year to roll down the windows on the way home and belt out "She's Got a Way".  Two hours later and I still wasn't there.  Had to shift to some Conway Twitty half-way home: couldn't reach the CDs.  A man stood on an overhanging bridge with a yellow sign that warned the world of brimstone.  He looked patient enough to actually wait for it.  Meanwhile:

Charlie Guest recovers in the hospital: http://www.wattpad.com/17442154-charlie-guest-ix#.UZ78TkBJOAg.  And, no, I don't have him slapping a nurse's bottom...ugh.

The protagonist of Miss Kitty has trouble sleeping: http://www.wattpad.com/17550101-miss-kitty-x#.UZ78fEBJOAg.  Aww, take a pill, brother!

Jay-Z is attacked by the ancient order of Usan the Vampeer: http://www.wattpad.com/17105383-time-traveler-hova-meets-the-vampire-nicholai-cage#.UZ78p0BJOAg.

In an "Uncommon Downpour" on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZjZvaDtcX4 I hit an unusual spring storm that pounded my car something fierce.  It cleansed the City a bit, too.

A study in black and white with a Mission cemetary at San Gabriel on DeviantArt: http://edwardianjackal.deviantart.com/art/Da-Cemetary-Sangabriel-Je2012-371747166?q=gallery%3Aedwardianjackal&qo=0.

Starting to log most tweets with a graphic of some sort: http://twitter.com/jackedwardsshow.

...Keats' Bright Star and Ode to Psyche...

...it is well known that Keats died at a young age.  An impossibly young age I would say: not even realizing his twenty-sixth birthday.  Yet, his great light left behind him a blazing trail of Romantic prose.  Two poems in particular, both complete in 1819, embody the wild-haired temperament of young love.  One predated the meeting of Fanny Brawne, for whom Bright Star was revised upon meeting her, wanting her:

"Bright Star" - Keats

"...Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath..."

With Ode to Psyche, he goes to tremendous lengths to coalesce the imagery in his head as he describes that he can "see the winged Psyche with awakened eyes?"  From there, the mind is breathless trying to cram the amount of visceral senses:

"...'Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian...
...No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale mouthed prophet dreaming...
...A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign..."

There appears to be no correlation of Psyche to Fanny, the production of this work would have been in advance of their meeting.  But, as those that write poetry could attest, the final 'glow' of a piece could be tempered by a muse.  One would have been good, by the muse, much greater than before.  Although, reading this piece through a few times, he does sound more like a lover of a wistful idea than a being made of sinew and blood.

But for both muses, may they be gossamer or flesh-made, for they provide for us the lightening of the heart, and carry with it a voice that would span time.

[As an aside, I wonder if "Fanny" by the Bee Gees was somehow a nod to Keats.  I've attempted an e-mail to Mr. Barry Gibb and will be patient for an answer.]

...The Time Traveler H.O.V.A. Adventures...two chapters at Wattpad...

CLICK ME as you know it is time to
turn the page when you hear this sound...

With his Horary Obverse/Variance Assemblage, or H.O.V.A., Shaun Carter builds a time machine to fight the forces of evil across the centuries.  In "...Meets the Vampire Nicholai Cage", Jay-Z elicits the help of a vampire that has lived since 1329, to help him amass the necessary tools to take down the mechanization building in 1909.  Click the book cover above to start the adventure, be-yotches!

Jay-Z in 1930s NYC?  Of course, he was eliciting the help of
Langston Hughes.

Nicholas Cage, aka Nicholai Czage, 1867.

...countee cullen...a signature...

...passing through the web came across a signed copy of his earliest published work, "Color"  http://www.rrauction.com/bidtracker_detail.cfm?IN=695, Countee Cullen was a fascinating figure of Harlem Renaissance.  He admitted to himself the terrible anachronism of his life.  He was naturally gifted in poetry and oratory, but black, with possible ties to homosexuality, and the backdrop the 1930s.  Deeply reticent of Wordsworth and Blake, much of his temperament is classical in style.  Poems such like "A Brown Girl Dead"  are striking modernist themes http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-brown-girl-dead/, but the framing of the poem is classical.  From "Thoughts in a Zoo":

"That lion with his lordly, untamed heart
Has in some man his human counterpart,
Some lofty soul in dreams and visions wrapped,
But in the stifling flesh securely trapped."

The conflicts for such a soul in the epitome of turmoil had to have been immense.

A memorial collection is available for visiting at http://www.auctr.edu/rwwl/Home/CounteeCullen/tabid/320/Default.aspx.

...f scott fitzgerald an american novelist of the modernist - lost generation...

Recently released by the University of South Carolina, the Fitzgerald Ledger (http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/fitzledger.html), of the writer F. Scott to be clear, is a unique perspective of a writer who could enjoy the fruits of his labors in his lifetime.  From it we can glean the massive differences in scale between the release of a novel and the copyright, especially when Hollywood would option the work for film adaptation.  There are private parts, but, he led a private life with multiple biographies, where the ledger's contents shouldn't surprise most.  Equally unique, he was able to piece together parts of his life, no doubt with his mother's help or stories she had told him (http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/fitz/id/44).  I do enjoy going through the snippets that are obviously his memory (go for age 7 forward) and the stories that call to all of us if we ever have the time to be able to do so.

With the DiCaprio version of "...Gatsby" out soon, here is a .pdf version to tote about with you (http://greatgatsby.org/great_gatsby.pdf), and for those that want a copy of "... Benjamin Buttons" (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6695)...

The sudden beauty of Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" is the staidness of narrative.  It is the events and the shocking reactions of the five characters that drive the story forward, and, in most ways, their deviousness and shortsightedness of intentions.  Never overwrought in its prose, but reading almost as a tract of Platonist journalism, it's a quick read, and a brutal one.  So clear are the characters and their flaws, you will see them instantly, within and without.  I've not read many novels where the characters remain with you (only trumped, of course, by my penchant for Twain).

As an exercise of interest, I took the versions of each trailer below.  Amazing how the work survives, although I would love to see a modern take (if it could be done), with the milieu shifted to today's hyper-social, hyper-selfish culture.