Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Have you asked yourself; Is that all there is to love? Rhett
The Lovers’ Chronicle
Dear Muse,
© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved
© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved
Pale Love, Pale Rider
enough rope
and ballads
of weariness
did not care enough
or perhaps, too much
a medley of things
long gone
a cycle of songs…
bury myself while there
then as soon as i belong
means it is time to disappear
yes
this is all there is
© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved
i need to see the sky
in paintin’s and pictures
in every point of view
in my memories of you
the strength
and passion
and fire of you
were in your eyes
in the moonlit grove,
all courage summoned,
turnin’ suddenly,
you face me and lean
close, so we touch
and our eyes meet
in the end
when the awakenin’ comes,
you learn what you had known,
all along, all there is
hey, guess what
today was just
like yesterday
and the day before that
and the day before that
and the day before that…
missin’ you
© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved
| Dorothy Parker | |
|---|---|
Dorothy Parker
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Today is the birthday of Dorothy Parker (Long Branch, New Jersey; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967 New York City); poet, short story writer, critic, and satirist, best known for her wit and wisecracks. Parker became known for both her literary output in publications such as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist.
In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II (1893–1933), but they were separated by his army service in World War I. She divorced Parker in 1928, and had a number of affairs. Her lovers included reporter-turned-playwright Charles MacArthur and the publisher Seward Collins. Her relationship with MacArthur resulted in a pregnancy, about which Parker is alleged to have remarked, “how like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard.” She had an abortion, and fell into a depression that culminated in her first attempt at suicide.
In 1934, she married Alan Campbell, an actor with aspirations to become a screenwriter. Like Parker, he was half-Jewish and half-Scottish. He was reportedly bisexual. Parker claimed in public that he was “queer as a billy goat”. Their marriage was tempestuous, with tensions exacerbated by Parker’s increasing alcohol consumption and Campbell’s long-term affair with a married woman. They divorced in 1947, then remarried in 1950. Parker moved back to New York in 1952, living at the Volney residential hotel at 23 East 74th Street on the Upper East Side. She returned to Hollywood in 1961 and reconciled with Campbell. In the next two years, they worked together on a number of unproduced projects. Campbell committed suicide by drug overdose in 1963.
Verse
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
- “The Flaw in Paganism” in Death and Taxes (1931)
Enough Rope (1926)
Ballads of a Great Weariness
- Scratch a lover, and find a foe.
Observation
- If I didn’t care for fun and such,
- I’d probably amount to much.
- But I shall stay the way I am,
- Because I do not give a damn.
- First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925)
Comment
- Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
- A medley of extemporanea,
- And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
- And I am Marie of Roumania.
- First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925)
Résumé
- Razors pain you,
- Rivers are damp,
- Acids stain you,
- And drugs cause cramp.
- Guns aren’t lawful,
- Nooses give,
- Gas smells awful.
- You might as well live.
- First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925)
News Item
- Men seldom make passes
- At girls who wear glasses.
- First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925)
Unfortunate Coincidence
- By the time you swear you’re his,
- Shivering and sighing,
- And he vows his passion is
- Infinite, undying,
- Lady, make a note of this —
- One of you is lying.
- First printed in Life, (8 April 1926) p. 11
Experience
- Some men tear your heart in two,
- Some men flirt and flatter,
- Some men never look at you,
- And that clears up the matter.
- First printed in Life, (8 April 1926) p. 11
Rainy Night
- I am sister to the rain;
- Fey and sudden and unholy,
- Petulant at the windowpane,
- Quickly lost, remembered slowly.
- First printed in New Yorker, (26 September 1926) p. 10
Inventory
- Four be the things I am wiser to know:
- Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
- Four be the things I’d been better without:
- Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
- Three be the things I shall never attain:
- Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
- Three be the things I shall have till I die:
- Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
- First printed in Life, (11 November 1926) p. 12
Sunset Gun (1927)
Partial Comfort
- Whose love is given over-well
- Will look on Helen’s face in Hell;
- While they whose love is thin and wise
- May view John Knox in Paradise.
- First printed in Life, 24 February 1927 p. 5
A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature: Oscar Wilde
- If with the literate I am
- Impelled to try an epigram,
- I never seek to take the credit;
- We all assume that Oscar said it.
- First printed in Life, (2 June 1927) p. 13
Fair Weather
- They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
- First printed in New York World, (20 January 1928) p. 13
Thoughts for a Sunshiny Morning
- It costs me never a stab nor squirm
- To tread by chance upon a worm.
- “Aha, my little dear,” I say,
- “Your clan will pay me back some day.”
- First printed in New Yorker, (9 April 1927) p. 31
Today is the birthday of Henri Cartier-Bresson (Chanteloup-en-Brie, France; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004 Céreste, France); humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. Cartier-Bresson was one of the founding members of Magnum Photos in 1947.[2] In the 1970s he took up drawing—he had studied painting in the 1920s.
In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese dancer, Ratna Mohini. They lived in a fourth-floor servants’ flat in Paris at 19, rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs (now rue Danielle Casanova), a large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom where Cartier-Bresson developed film. Between 1937 and 1939, Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for the French Communists’ evening paper, Ce soir. With Chim and Capa, Cartier-Bresson was a leftist, but he did not join the French Communist party. In 1967, he was divorced from Ratna “Elie”. In 1970 Cartier-Bresson married Magnum photographer Martine Franck.
Gallery
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On this day in 1964, The Supremes started a two week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with the Holland-Dozier-Holland song, “Where Did Our Love Go” the girl group’s first No.1. That is a question I find often on my mind.
And today marks the anniversary of the death of lyricist Jerry Leiber (2011). He and Mike Stroller wrote many wonderful songs. The words that Leiber wrote that keep comin’ back to me today are these:
Then I fell in love, with the most wonderful girl in the world.
We would take long walks by the river or just sit for hours gazing into each other’s eyes.
We were so very much in love.
Then one day, she went away. And I thought I’d die — but I didn’t.
And when I didn’t I said to myself, “Is that all there is to love?”
I too thought I would die and of course, I did not. But I cannot bring myself to ask; Is that all there is to love?
Mac Tag
The Song of the Day is Tony Bennett‘s version of “Is That All There Is”.
I whispered, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
– W.B. Yeats
It is not far . . . . it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.
– Walt Whitman
For the heart is an organ of fire. – Kat von D
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