TeaWithTater.com

nowhere
though not often noticed
yet, someone planned it
you spend time there
for somethin’ you did
you sit there, breathin’
while time measures
your penance
but you believe in it
while you are there
because
you are on your way
to somewhere

© Copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (26 March 1794 – 24 May 1872); painter, chiefly of Biblical subjects. As a young man he associated with the painters of the Nazarene movement who revived the florid Renaissance style in religious art. He is remembered for his extensive Picture Bible, and his designs for stained glass windows in cathedrals.

Gallery

Female nude

Female nude back

Portrait of Klara Bianka von Quandt (1820)

Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1941)

Today is the birthday of Robert Frost (Robert Lee Frost; San Francisco; March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963 Boston); poet. Perhaps best known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. In my opinion, he is one of the most popular and critically respected American poets of the twentieth century.  Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works.

Verse

 I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

• “The Road Not Taken”, st. 4 (1916).

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

• “Fire and Ice” (1923).

• I stopped my song and almost heart,
  For any eye is an evil eye
  That looks in onto a mood apart.
  • “A Mood Apart” (1947).
• All those who try to go it sole alone,
  Too proud to be beholden for relief,
  Are absolutely sure to come to grief.
  • “Haec Fabula Docet” (1947).

• Courage is of the heart by derivation,
  And great it is. But fear is of the soul.
  • A Masque of Mercy (1947).

Unless I’m wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
I’m—bound—away!

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.

• “Away!, st. 5,6 (1962).

My November Guest (1915)

The third poem from the 1915 republished A Boy’s Will

• My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
  Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
  Are beautiful as days can be;
  She loves the bare, the withered tree;
  She walks the sodden pasture lane.

• Her pleasure will not let me stay.
  She talks and I am fain to list:
  She’s glad the birds are gone away,
  She’s glad her simple worsted gray
  Is silver now with clinging mist.

• The desolate, deserted trees,
  The faded earth, the heavy sky,
  The beauties she so truly sees,
  She thinks I have no eye for these,
  And vexes me for reason why.

• Not yesterday I learned to know
  The love of bare November days
  Before the coming of the snow,
  But it were vain to tell her so,
  And they are better for her praise.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)

• Whose woods these are I think I know.
  His house is in the village, though;
  He will not see me stopping here
  To watch his woods fill up with snow.
  • St. 1.

• My little horse must think it queer
  To stop without a farmhouse near
  Between the woods and frozen lake
  The darkest evening of the year.
  • St. 2.

• He gives his harness bells a shake
  To ask if there is some mistake.
  The only other sound’s the sweep
  Of easy wind and downy flake.
  • St. 3.

• The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
  But I have promises to keep,
  And miles to go before I sleep,
  And miles to go before I sleep.
  • St. 4.

Today is the birthday of Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams; Columbus, Mississippi (26 March 1911 – 25 February 1983 Manhattan); author of more than 24 full-length plays, including Pulitzer Prize-winners A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. He introduced “plastic theatre” in this play and it closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, Williams attempted a new style that did not appeal as widely to audiences.

Much of Williams’s most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays, and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Quotes from his plays:

Stairs to the Roof (1941)

• A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages
  • This is the subtitle of the play

The Glass Menagerie (1944)

• In memory everything seems to happen to music.
  • Tom (As Narrator Scene One)

• Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
  • Tom, as Narrator, in Scene One

• Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down… So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!
  • Amanda, Scene One

• Mother, when you’re disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus’ mother in the museum!
  • Laura, Scene Two

• I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren’t prepared to occupy a position. I’ve seen such pitiful cases in the South — barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister’s husband or brother’s wife! — stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room — encouraged by one in-law to visit another — little birdlike women without any nest — eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we’ve mapped out for ourselves?
  • Amanda, Scene Two

• Why you’re not crippled, you just have a little defect — hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it — develop charm — and vivacity — and — charm!
  • Amanda, Scene Two

• I took that horrible novel back to the library — yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them — BUT I WON’T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! No, no, no, no, no!
  • Amanda, Scene Three

• Every time you come in yelling that God damn “Rise and Shine!” “Rise and Shine!” I say to myself, “How lucky dead people are!”
  • Tom, Scene Three

• Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!
  • Tom, Scene Four

• You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don’t plan for it!
  • Amanda, Scene Five

• All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.
  • Amanda, Scene Six

• Yes, movies! Look at them — All of those glamorous people — having adventures — hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there’s a war. That’s when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone’s dish, not only Gable’s! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves — Goody, goody! — It’s our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island — to make a safari — to be exotic, far-off! — But I’m not patient. I don’t want to wait till then. I’m tired of the movies and I am about to move!
  • Tom, Scene Six

• All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes — and woman accepts the proposal! — To vary that old, old saying a little bit — I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!
  • Amanda, Scene Six

• Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.
  • Jim, Scene Seven

• I believe in the future of television! I wish to be ready to go up right along with it. Therefore I’m planning to get in on the ground floor. In fact I’ve already made the right connections and all that remains is for the industry itself to get under way! Full steam — Knowledge — Zzzzzp! Money — Zzzzzp! — Power!
  • Jim, Scene Seven

• I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less — freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don’t have horns…
  • Laura, Scene Seven

• I wish you were my sister. I’d teach you to have some confidence in yourself. The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They’re one hundred times one thousand. You’re one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here. They’re common as — weeds, but — you — well, you’re — Blue Roses!
  • Jim, Scene Seven

• Things have a way of turning out so badly.
  • Amanda, Scene Seven

• You don’t know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!
  • Amanda, Scene Seven

• Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! — for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura — and so goodbye…
  • Tom, Scene Seven

Summer and Smoke (1948)

• Eternity!—Didn’t it give you the cold shivers?
  • Alma, Prologue

• The tables have turned, yes, the tables have turned with a vengeance! You’ve come around to my old way of thinking and I to yours like two people exchanging a call on each other at the same time, and each one finding the other one gone out, the door locked against him and no one to answer the bell!
  • Alma, Scene Eleven

• You’ll be surprised how infinitely merciful they are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!
  • Alma, Scene Twelve

The Rose Tattoo (1951)

• The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
  • Rosa, Act Three, Scene Three

Camino Real (1953)

• When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
  • Don Quixote in Prologue

• I know this place. … Here it is on the chart. Look, it says here: “Continue until you come to the square of a walled town which is the end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real. Halt there,” it says, “and turn back, Traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place…
  • Sancho

• You said, “They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.” — “What,” I asked you, “is harmless about a dreamer, and what,” I asked you, “is harmless about the love of the people? — Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.“

Orpheus Descending (1957)

• We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
  • Val (Act 2, Scene 1)

Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

• We saw the Encantadas, but on the Encantadas we saw something Melville hadn’t written about.
  • Mrs. Venable, Scene One

• And the sand all alive, all alive, as the hatched sea-turtles made their dash for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped to attack and hovered and—swooped to attack! They were diving down on the hatched sea-turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh.
  • Mrs. Venable, Scene One

• Well, now I’ve said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow’s nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I’ve seen Him!—and he meant God . . .
  • Mrs. Venable, Scene One

The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963)

• We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
  • Christopher
• All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

“Are you acquainted with the opera La Bohème, ma’am?” he replied. “That’s my world.”

In the stage directions to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams wrote, “Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.”

He said, “I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”

And, “A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”

And, “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”

And “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”

It was on this day in 1920 that This Side of Paradise was published, launching 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald to fame and fortune. It is the story of a young man named Amory Blaine who falls in love with a beautiful blond debutante named Rosalind Connage and then loses her because she does not want to marry someone with so little money.  He goes on a drinking spree and has a series of bohemian adventures.

Fitzgerald was at the end of a series of failures.  He had dropped out of Princeton in 1917 because of poor grades, spent time in the Army during WWI and never saw combat or went overseas, had a New York advertising job that he hated, and his novel had been rejected.  When southern belle Zelda Sayre broke off their engagement because she was afraid he could not support her, he spent a week drowning his sorrows.  He said, “I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.”

From This Side of Paradise:

• Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter…
  And the rain and over the fields a voice calling…

• The shadow of a dove
  Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;
  And down the valley through the crying trees
  The body of the darker storm flies; brings
  With its new air the breath of sunken seas
  And slender tenuous thunder . . .
  But I wait . . .
  Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain —
  Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate,
  Happier winds that pile her hair;
  Again
  They tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air
  Upon me, winds that I know, and storm.

Gregory Corso

And today is the birthday of Gregory Nunzio Corso (New York City; March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001 Minnesota); poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs).

Verse 

Marriage

Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky—
When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where’s the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap—
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?
Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we’re losing a daughter
but we’re gaining a son—
And should I then ask Where’s the bathroom?
O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food—

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea

Mac Tag