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Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Poets in their Youth

So I just played and sang through the English Edition of the Mass for the Dead (Missa Pro Defunctis), Approved Official Text, by Cyr de Brant.

Faithful readers know that my private memorial sessions at the piano for the noted recent dead always feature Mozart’s Requiem, but as I read more and more today about the fascinating Syd Barrett,

I realized that something British would be better.

I don’t pretend to know much about Pink Floyd or Syd Barrett, but I’ve been reading obituaries and other accounts of him, and also reading the excellent lyrics he wrote, and he gets to me. I figure he must have been a major inspiration for Don DeLillo’s novel, Great Jones Street.













He reminds me of Glenn Gould.

Both of them were musical geniuses and mentally ill. Romantically handsome when young, both went ashen and anonymous as they got older and madder and more remote from the world.

You could bundle a writer like Delmore Schwartz into this story too.

I think we find these people compelling not because they’re so different from the rest of us, but because their quick lives express with shattering clarity every life’s passage from youth to age.


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Update: Barrett put a poem of James Joyce’s to music.

It’s increasingly clear that DeLillo used Barrett as his main inspiration for Great Jones Street. Among a number of other things, one of Barrett’s albums is Opel; DeLillo’s rock star’s girlfriend is named Opel...