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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  What would poets write of your dreams?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Almanac

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

do dreams,
come true…

havin’ fun
was never an issue
for us

long lunches,
cocktails parties,
the opera,
doin’ nothin’

none of it
ever more fun,
before or after us

but as much
as i miss
those times

i miss most of all
not bein’ there
for you to lean on

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

muse,
let your eyes close
by dreams caress
unto your breast,
upon your pillow lay
here, a world away
with no fears or tears

have i come and will i stay
a vision by your side
nothin’ claim i
nor touch, nor word,
but a lonely sigh,
to be near you
my only care

who would not go as i have gone
a poet on this dream could rhyme,
‘Here lies a dream, one for all time
Enter, this is where we belong’

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

 

For you a busy day here at TLC: A day in history story, a poem, lyrics and a song.  All for you.

Today is the birthday of Jean-Louis Forain (Reims, France 23 October 1852 – 11 July 1931 Paris); Impressionist painter and printmaker, working in media including oils, watercolour, pastel, etching and lithograph.

Forain’s quick and often biting wit allowed him to befriend poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine as well as many writers, most notably Joris-Karl Huysmans. He was one of only “seven known recipients” to receive a first edition of A Season in Hell directly from Rimbaud.  He was the youngest artist to frequent and participate in the feverish debates led by Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes in Montmartre.

A follower and protégé of Degas, Forain joined the Impressionist circle in time to take part in the fourth independent exhibition in 1879; he participated in four of the eight Impressionist Exhibitions (1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886). Influenced by Impressionist theories on light and color, he depicted scenes of everyday life: his watercolors, pastels and paintings focused on Parisian popular entertainments and themes of modernity—the racetrack, the ballet, the comic opera and bustling cafés.

Forain was the most famous caricaturist of the Belle époque, and drew, among others, for the Figaro for more than 30 years. From 1898–1899 Forain worked as an illustrator for the weekly French magazine Psst…!, a satirical publication to promote the anti-Dreyfus.

Aside from being influenced by his friend of over fifty years, Edgar Degas, Forain was greatly influenced by Honoré Daumier, and his treatment of subjects in his drawings for publications such as Le Figaro and Le Courrier Francais are often reminiscent of Daumier’s. In 1892 he published the first volume of La Comédie Parisienne, a collection of Forain’s illustrations and commentary on the major political stories that disrupted France’s Third Republic—such as the anarchic crisis and the Dreyfus affair. In 1891 Forain married the painter Jeanne Bosc with whom he had a son, Jean-Loup, born in 1895.

During the first World War, Forain’s illustrations honored the patriotism of his contemporaries, and he enlisted in the Section de Camouflage under Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola. In his later years, Forain created numerous scenes of the Law Courts and other Parisian institutions plus social satire caricatures of late 19th and early 20th century French life.

In 1931, shortly before his death, he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He was one of France’s most famous and revered artists during his time. He was, perhaps, most highly respected for his numerous drawings which chronicled and commented on Parisian city life at the end of the 19th century. Followers and admirers of Forain’s work included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Gallery

 

 

 

On this day in 1939, author Zane Grey died in Altadena, California.  Grey married Dolly Roth, an apparently fine and forgivin’ woman.  Durin’ his courtship of Dolly, Grey still saw previous girlfriends and warned her frankly, “But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that….But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good“.  He added, “I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women.”  It was in Altadena that he spent time with his mistress Brenda Montenegro.  The two met while hikin’ Eaton Canyon in California.  Of her he wrote, “I saw her flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon. I have seen the red skin of the Navajo, and the olive of the Spaniards, but her…her skin looked as if her Creator had in that instant molded her just for me. I thought it was an apparition. She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild.”  Just as I felt that you muse, had been molded for me.

 

And on this day in 1872, French poet Théophile Gautier died in Paris.  From TG we get the Poem of the Day which inspired me to write the lyrics of the day.  To borrow from Shakespeare: Once more unto the dreams we go dear muse.  And talk of phantoms as Halloween approaches.  First the poem, then the lyrics:

The Phantom of the Rose

The Phantom of the Dream

Mac Tag

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing. – Syvia Plath

If . . . I myself can understand what I’ve written, I feel the day hasn’t been totally wasted. — S. J. Perelman

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