Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

one knows about the obvious
but there is no way in hell
to anticipate how it feels
just to be with you…

days grow longer, winter lingers
walk among the fallin’ flakes
ponder turnin’s taken by life

in the changin’ light
you are everywhere
beside me, unmasked,
in laughter and pain

in partin’, hold on
yet somethin’
in the sad left unsaid

listen now, close
lover, friend
this is not farewell,
not now

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“I must tell you what happens
when I read one of your poems.
I enjoy them and I want to reply
in a similar fashion, but I’m no poet.
So I step away, and search
for a smart, fun, sexy,
interesting response.
Then life intervenes
and I never respond.”

“In my perfect world,
I would read
one of your poems
and then paint a response.
It would take all day.
I wish life could be lived
like this, for love
and nothing more.”

“I’m already deep
in a bottle of wine.
Wish you were here
with some Sambuca.
The night would end
in places we have only
dared to dream.”

darlin’,
were wishes
mine to command,
i would be there
and it would be
beyond our dreams

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

at the station, tired,
waitin’ for the train
a clock tolls
and as is often the case
thoughts of you emerge

of course, with you
a song comes
a seguidilla, the one
we heard in Seville
before a night
of dancin’ and passion

i will never forget
the way you looked
standin’ there
in the late winter dusk
by the Glorieta de Bécquer

one knows about loss
but there is no accountin’
for what was left unsaid
in the end-of-it-all light

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

1875 – Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen receives its première at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.

Synopsis

Place: Seville, Spain, and surrounding hills

Time: Around 1820

Act 1

A square, in Seville. On the right, a door to the tobacco factory. At the back, a bridge. On the left, a guardhouse.

A group of soldiers relaxes in the square, waiting for the changing of the guard and commenting on the passers-by (“Sur la place, chacun passe”). Micaëla appears, seeking José. Moralès tells her that “José is not yet on duty” and invites her to wait with them. She declines, saying she will return later. José arrives with the new guard, which is greeted and imitated by a crowd of urchins (“Avec la garde montante”).

As the factory bell rings, the cigarette girls emerge and exchange banter with young men in the crowd (“La cloche a sonné”). Carmen enters and sings her provocative habanera on the untameable nature of love (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”). The men plead with her to choose a lover, and after some teasing she throws a flower to Don José, who thus far has been ignoring her but is now annoyed by her insolence.

As the women go back to the factory, Micaëla returns and gives José a letter and a kiss from his mother (“Parle-moi de ma mère!”). He reads that his mother wants him to return home and marry Micaëla, who retreats in shy embarrassment on learning this. Just as José declares that he is ready to heed his mother’s wishes, the women stream from the factory in great agitation. Zuniga, the officer of the guard, learns that Carmen has attacked a woman with a knife. When challenged, Carmen answers with mocking defiance (“Tra la la… Coupe-moi, brûle-moi”); Zuniga orders José to tie her hands while he prepares the prison warrant. Left alone with José, Carmen beguiles him with a seguidilla, in which she sings of a night of dancing and passion with her lover—whoever that may be—in Lillas Pastia’s tavern. Confused yet mesmerised, José agrees to free her hands; as she is led away she pushes her escort to the ground and runs off laughing. José is arrested for dereliction of duty.

Act 2

Lillas Pastia’s Inn

Two months have passed. Carmen and her friends Frasquita and Mercédès are entertaining Zuniga and other officers (“Les tringles des sistres tintaient”) in Pastia’s inn. Carmen is delighted to learn of José’s release from two month’s detention. Outside, a chorus and procession announces the arrival of the toreador Escamillo (“Vivat, vivat le Toréro”). Invited inside, he introduces himself with the “Toreador Song” (“Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre”) and sets his sights on Carmen, who brushes him aside. Lillas Pastia hustles the crowds and the soldiers away.

When only Carmen, Frasquita and Mercédès remain, the smugglers Dancaïre and Remendado arrive and reveal their plans to dispose of some recently acquired contraband (“Nous avons en tête une affaire”). Frasquita and Mercédès are keen to help them, but Carmen refuses, since she wishes to wait for José. After the smugglers leave, José arrives. Carmen treats him to a private exotic dance (“Je vais danser en votre honneur … La la la”), but her song is joined by a distant bugle call from the barracks. When José says he must return to duty, she mocks him, and he answers by showing her the flower that she threw to him in the square (“La fleur que tu m’avais jetée”). Unconvinced, Carmen demands he show his love by leaving with her. José refuses to desert, but as he prepares to depart, Zuniga enters looking for Carmen. He and José fight, and are separated by the returning smugglers, who restrain Zuniga. Having attacked a superior officer, José now has no choice but to join Carmen and the smugglers (“Suis-nous à travers la campagne”).

Act 3

A wild spot in the mountains

Carmen and José enter with the smugglers and their booty (“Écoute, écoute, compagnons”); Carmen has now become bored with José and tells him scornfully that he should go back to his mother. Frasquita and Mercédès amuse themselves by reading their fortunes from the cards; Carmen joins them and finds that the cards are foretelling her death, and José’s. The women depart to suborn the customs officers who are watching the locality. José is placed on guard duty.

Micaëla enters with a guide, seeking José and determined to rescue him from Carmen (“Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante”). On hearing a gunshot she hides in fear; it is José, who has fired at an intruder who proves to be Escamillo. José’s pleasure at meeting the bullfighter turns to anger when Escamillo declares his infatuation with Carmen. The pair fight (“Je suis Escamillo, toréro de Grenade”), but are interrupted by the returning smugglers and girls (“Holà, holà José”). As Escamillo leaves he invites everyone to his next bullfight in Seville. Micaëla is discovered; at first, José will not leave with her despite Carmen’s mockery, but he agrees to go when told that his mother is dying. As he departs, vowing he will return, Escamillo is heard in the distance, singing the toreador’s song.

Act 4

A square in Seville. At the back, the walls of an ancient amphitheatre

Zuniga, Frasquita and Mercédès are among the crowd awaiting the arrival of the bullfighters (“Les voici ! Voici la quadrille!”). Escamillo enters with Carmen, and they express their mutual love (“Si tu m’aimes, Carmen”). As Escamillo goes into the arena, Frasquita warns Carmen that José is nearby, but Carmen is unafraid and willing to speak to him. Alone, she is confronted by the desperate José (“C’est toi ! C’est moi !”). While he pleads vainly for her to return to him, cheers are heard from the arena. As José makes his last entreaty, Carmen contemptuously throws down the ring he gave her and attempts to enter the arena. He then stabs her, and as Escamillo is acclaimed by the crowds, Carmen dies. José kneels and sings “Ah! Carmen! ma Carmen adorée!”; as the crowd exits the arena, José confesses to killing the woman he loved.

Beatrice Wood
Beatrice Wood, 1908

Untitled (Two Women) earthenware with glazes by Beatrice Wood, 1990

Today is the birthday of Beatrice Wood (San Francisco, March 3, 1893 – March 12, 1998 Ojai, California); artist and studio potter involved in the Avant Garde movement in the United States. She founded The Blind Man magazine in New York City with French artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Henri-Pierre Roché in 1917. She had earlier studied art and theater in Paris, and was working in New York as an actress. She later worked at sculpture and pottery. Wood was characterized as the “Mama of Dada.”

She partially inspired the character of Rose DeWitt Bukater in James Cameron’s 1997 film, Titanic after the director read Wood’s autobiography while developing the film. Beatrice Wood died nine days after her 105th birthday in Ojai, California.

Contrary to her parents’ opposition, Wood insisted on pursuing a career in the arts. Eventually her parents agreed to let her study painting. Because she was fluent in French, they sent her to Paris, where she studied acting at the Comédie-Française and art at the prestigious Académie Julian.

The onset of World War I forced Wood to return to the United States. She continued acting with a French Repertory Company in New York City, performing over sixty roles in two years. She worked for several years performing on the stage.

Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Beatrice Wood, 1917

Wood’s involvement in the Avant Garde began with her introduction to Marcel Duchamp. He and his friend Henri-Pierre Roché, a man fourteen years her senior, met her in New York in 1916. The three worked together to create The Blind Man, a magazine that was one of the earliest manifestations of the Dada art movement in the United States. The publication was intended to defend the submission of a urinal by R. Mutt to the First Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in April 1917. Wood wrote the oft-quoted statement that appeared in the publication as an unsigned editorial: “As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”

Though she was most involved with Roché, the two often spent time with Duchamp, creating a love triangle. Since the late 20th century, biographies of Wood have associated Roché’s 1956 novel Jules et Jim (and the 1962 film adaptation), with the relationship among Duchamp, Wood, and Roché. Other sources link their triangle to Roché’s unfinished novel, Victor.

Beatrice Wood commented on this topic in her 1985 autobiography, I Shock Myself:

Roché lived in Paris with his wife Denise, and had by now written Jules et Jim … Because the story concerns two young men who are close friends and a woman who loves them both, people have wondered how much was based on Roché, Marcel, and me. I cannot say what memories or episodes inspired Roché, but the characters bear only passing resemblance to those of us in real life!

More likely, Jules et Jim is about the triangle among Roché, German writer Franz Hessel, and Helen Grund, who married Hessel.

Marcel Duchamp encouraged her to draw, inviting her to use his studio as a place in which to work. She later illustrated her autobiography, “I Shock Myself”. She signed her early drawings “Bea,” her name in French, but after taking up pottery, she signed most of her work as “Beato,” her nickname. In 2014, a series of her drawings were exhibited as part of the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, California.

At the age of 90, Wood became a writer, having been encouraged to write by her friend, Anais Nin. Her best-known book is her autobiography, I Shock Myself (1985). When asked the secret to her longevity, she would respond, “I owe it all to chocolate and young men.”

Gallery

Perfect lovers

Today is the birthday of Arnold Newman (Arnold Abner Newman; Manhattan; March 3, 1918 – June 6, 2006 Manhattan); photographer, noted for his “environmental portraits” of artists and politicians. He was also known for his carefully composed abstract still life images.

Newman is often credited with being the photographer who articulated and who consistently employed the genre of environmental portraiture, in which the photographer uses a carefully framed and lit setting, and its contents, to symbolise the individual’s life and work; a well known example being his portrait of Igor Stravinsky in which the lid of his grand piano forms a gargantuan musical note representative of the melodic structure of the composer’s work.[2] Newman normally captured his subjects in their most familiar surroundings with representative visual elements showing their professions and personalities. A musician for instance might be photographed in their recording studio or on stage, a Senator or other politician in their office or a representative building. Using a large-format camera and tripod, he worked to record every detail of a scene.

Gallery

Ava gardner

Jean seberg

Billie Holiday with orchestra leader Ray Ellis

And today is the birthday of James Merrill (James Ingram Merrill; New York City; March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995 Tucson, Arizona); poet who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1977) for Divine Comedies (1976).  His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover (published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980).  Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.  He also made a cameo in the 1992 film Lorenzo’s Oil in a symposium scene where he played a questioning doctor.

Continue reading

beatrice wood, carmen, georges bizet, james merrill, the lovers almanac

Dear Zazie,

Hey there Zazie!  Good to hear from you.  Made me feel good to see your note.  Though I wish it were under better circumstances.  Sounds like you have run afoul of relationship love.  Well, I cannot help you with that.  Relationships are not my bag.  I was de-bagged long ago, thankfully.  But Jett is an expert, as you know.  So I gave your note to him.  And I shared it with Mac Tag and of course he turned the whole thing into verse, as he is want to do.  Hope it helps.  Let us know.

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Jett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

already so many
“To be held on to”
to be carried
from one to the next
“It sustains, breathes life”
sustenance, inspiration
even the smallest, shortest
“They all matter”
in a time when it seems
increasin’ly that forces
are conspirin’ to eliminate them
“We will keep creating”
and cherishing these moments

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

yes, tracin’ the lines of your face, holdin’ your curves, your hair cascadin’ down, the look in your eyes, fingertips on your skin, fingers strong with weights, pens and delicate touches, do you love these hands, cup of warm calloused palm on your cheek, the way i memorize you

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

in that soft Texas drawl
talkin’ ’bout creativity
and purpose
not always knowin’
what in the hell
it is all about

and keep on
writin’ everyday,
laconically of course,
with all senses wide open,
words, music, lights, sounds, touch…
lightnin’

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

have i told you
in the last five minutes
that you are the best
if not
then i am five minutes
overdue for tellin’ you,
you are the best

are we makin’ this
way harder
than it needs to be
is the obvious
answer
right before us
i realize
we would be
tradin’ one problem
for another
but the problem solved
is the oldest one known

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a return to a place
one of our places
looks the same
feels empty
remember
when we talked
about how no place
would ever feel the same
after we had been there

sit and order coffee
take out my notebook
and begin to write

when a break happens
what is it that we miss
certainly not the hurt

do we miss the person
or the presence
and what to do
with the memories,
the naggin’
what could have been
thoughts

how much time
needs be spent
on playin’ things out
in the mind,
on imaginin’
how it would be
if they were here

simple reminders
lyin’ around
a scent,
an image,
a feelin’

think back on ways
you could have changed
on ways you wish they had

you try, you imagine
if you try again,
will it be different

but you know better
you take a deep breath
and try to push those thoughts away

of course, they come back
and you ask, what exactly
has you holdin’ on

do you miss the manipulation
and the negative emotions
or, hold on here comes fear,
have you become dependent
and can no longer feel
anything good

must it be so hard

is it hard, because
the sweet moments,
oh they were there,
are so hard to let go of
you long for them,
you need them,
they are a drug
trickin’ your mind

what is it that we miss
so much in these moments

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Loves of Mars and Venus

The Loves of Mars and Venus by John Weaver was arguably the first modern ballet, the first dance work to tell a story through dance, gesture and music alone. Its first performance was at London’s Drury Lane Theatre on this day in 1717. 

Before then, ballet had always been part of operas and plays and dependent on their words to narrate the drama. The Loves of Mars and Venus was a danced drama, equal to the plays seen on London’s stage, described in its own time as a ‘Dramatic Entertainment of Dancing’, “the first of this kind produced upon the British Stage or in the Kingdom”. All the action was conveyed in dance and mime alone, setting a pattern for future ballets.

Weaver’s ballet tells the story of the love affair between Venus, the goddess of love, and Mars, the god of war, and the revenge enacted on them by her husband Vulcan. It draws on classical mythology, but contemporary passions abound, and its immediate source was Peter Anthony Motteux’s play, The Loves of Mars and Venus, written in 1695. Despite Weaver’s appeal to the revered performances of the ‘mimes and pantomimes’ of classical antiquity, who he wished to emulate, his ballet was a modern work in tune with the sophisticated comedies of his own time.

The Loves of Mars and Venus told the familiar story in six short scenes full of dancing and gestures. It lasted, perhaps, 40 minutes. Mars appears with his soldiers and performs a war dance. Venus is shown surrounded by the Graces and displays her allure in a sensual passacaille, but when Vulcan arrives she quarrels with him in a dance ‘of the pantomimic kind’. Vulcan retires to his smithy to devise revenge with the help of his workmen the Cyclops. Mars and Venus meet and, with their followers, perform dances expressive of love and desire. Vulcan completes his plan of revenge against the lovers. In the final scene, Vulcan and the Cyclops catch Mars and Venus together and expose them to the derision of the other gods, until Neptune intervenes and harmony is restored in a final ‘Grand Dance’.

At the first performances of The Loves of Mars and Venus, Mars was danced by Louis Dupré, Venus was Hester Santlow and John Weaver himself danced Vulcan. Dupré was a virtuoso dancer who was probably French, although he was probably not the famous ‘Le grand’ Dupré of the Paris Opera. Mrs Santlow was an English dancer-actress, greatly admired for her beauty as well as her dancing skills. One contemporary described her as ‘incomparable’. Weaver’s stage skills were essentially those of a comic dancer, although he was obviously also a master of rhetorical gesture. They were supported by Drury Lane’s best dancers as the ‘Followers’ of Mars and Venus, with the company’s comedians as Weaver’s workmen the Cyclops.

The Loves of Mars and Venus was a success, with seven performances during its first season and revivals at the Drury Lane Theatre until 1724. Colley Cibber the English actor- manager, playwright and Poet Laureate, said of it ‘To give even Dancing therefore some Improvement; and to make it something more than Motion without Meaning, the Fable of Mars and Venus, was form’d into a connected Presentation of Dances in Character, wherein the Passions were so happily expressed, and the whole Story so intelligibly told, by a mute Narration of Gesture only, that even thinking Spectators allow’d it both a pleasing and a rational Entertainment’. It may well have been seen by the young French ballerina Marie Sallé, who would herself later experiment with narrative and expressive dancing. Sallé, of course, influenced the choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre when he came to create his ballets d’action. They led to the story ballets of the romantic period and onwards to the narrative dance works for which English ballet became famous in the 20^th century.

Today is the birthday of Tamara Toumanova (Tyumen, Russia SFSR; 2 March 1919 – 29 May 1996 Santa Monica, California); Georgian-American prima ballerina and actress. A child of exiles in Paris after the Russian Revolution of 1917, she made her debut at the age of 10 at the children’s ballet of the Paris Opera.

She became known internationally as one of the Baby Ballerinas of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo after being discovered by her fellow émigré, balletmaster and choreographer George Balanchine. She was featured in numerous ballets in Europe. Balanchine featured her in his productions at Ballet Theatre, New York, making her the star of his performances in the United States. While most of Toumanova’s career was dedicated to ballet, she appeared as a ballet dancer in several films, beginning in 1944. She became a naturalized United States citizen in 1943 in Los Angeles, California.

In 1944, Toumanova married Casey Robinson, whom she met as the producer and screenwriter of Days of Glory, her first film. The union was childless. The couple divorced on 13 October 1955.

Mac Tag

Continue reading

the lovers almanac, the loves of mars and venus

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

wrote about that often
“Yes you did”
how at times it felt like flyin’
“I know that feeling”
the song from Crazy Heart
gets it right
“It sure does”
there are two distinctly
different ways that phrase
can go
“As in romantically”
yes, and tragically
“I like it as in you for me”
moi aussi

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

when i first went there
i did not think much about it
just thought it was another
other way to be

some see a stigma there
some let it devour them

some deny they are there
some try to take you with them

for me, it is always there
i come and go as i please,
at least i like to think so

have not thought about stayin’
though i suppose the gene is there

i view bein’ there
as kinda like visitin’
an old friend
there is a certain comfort,
a known expectation

a better than nothin’ fate
for the fallen

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

inspiration
to not hold feelin’s too close
then everything else faded
for awhile and all
that went before
is as if it had never been

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

to us and our
complicated outlook,
our broad interests,
and elusive moods
and the search
for ‘le mot juste’

for therein lies discovery
of real charm and beauty
just requires a degree
of constant plungin’
into the shadows

we are of substance
of flesh and bone
of sometimes
fairly sound minds
we have it, we know it
we discover who we are

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

sometimes when i write
the vision
seems clear,
heightened
by deserved
penance,
but paralyzed
by truth
yet how do you not write
about what happened

no pity, although
all that was, is gone
a certain peace
with the fall
until the end

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Nikolaos Gyzis (Sklavochori, on the island of Tinos ; 1 March 1842 – 4 January 1901); in my opinion, one of Greece’s most important 19th-century painters.  Perhaps most famous for his work Eros and the Painter, his first genre painting.  He was the major representative of the so-called “Munich School”, the major 19th-century Greek art movement.

Gallery

Dance of the muses

Archangel, study for the Foundation of the Faith

• 

  Capuchin monk

• 

  Eros and the Painter

• 

  Learning by Heart

• 

  The Barber (1880)

• 

  After the destruction of Psara

• 

  The orphans

• 

  Oriental man with pipe

• 

  Artist’s psyche

• 

  Oriental Warrior

• 

  Old man wearing a red fez

• 

  Advertising for a tobacco company

Oskar Kokoschka
The Bride of the Wind or The Tempest, oil on canvas, a self-portrait expressing his unrequited love for Alma Mahler, widow of composer Gustav Mahler, 1914

Today is the birthday of Oskar Kokoschka (Pöchlarn, Austria-Hungary 1 March 1886 – 22 February 1980 Montreux, Switzerland); artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes. 

Kokoschka had a passionate, often stormy affair with Alma Mahler.  It began in 1912, shortly after the death of her four-year-old daughter Maria Mahler and her affair with Walter Gropius.  After several years together, Alma rejected him, explaining that she was afraid of being too overcome with passion.  He continued to love her his entire life, and one of his greatest works, The Bride of the Wind (The Tempest), is a tribute to her.  Kokoschka’s poem Allos Makar was inspired by this relationship.

Gallery

Portrait of Lotte Franzos 1909, (oil on canvas, 114.9 cm × 79.4 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Lovers

Kokoschka in 1963, by Erling Mandelmann

Mercedes de Acosta
Arnold Genthe (1869-1942) Mercedes Hede de Acosta, 1919 or 1920

Today is the birthday of Mercedes de Acosta (New York City, March 1, 1893 – May 9, 1968 New York City); poet, playwright, and novelist. De Acosta wrote almost a dozen plays, only four of which were produced, and she published a novel and three volumes of poetry. She was professionally unsuccessful but is known for her many lesbian affairs with famous Broadway and Hollywood personalities and numerous friendships with prominent artists of the period.

De Acosta married painter Abram Poole (January 1883 Chicago, Illinois – May 24, 1961) in 1920. They divorced in 1935.

She was described in 1955 by Garbo biographer, John Bainbridge, as “a woman of courtly manners, impeccable decorative taste and great personal elegance… a woman with a passionate and intense devotion to the art of living… and endowed with a high spirit, energy, eclectic curiosity and a varied interest in the arts.”

Arnold Genthe (1869-1942). Mercedes Hede de Acosta, after 1919

De Acosta was involved in numerous lesbian relationships with Broadway’s and Hollywood’s elite and she did not attempt to hide her sexuality; her uncloseted existence was very rare and daring in her generation. In 1916 she began an affair with actress Alla Nazimova and later with dancer Isadora Duncan. Shortly after marrying Abram Poole in 1920, de Acosta became involved in a five-year relationship with actress Eva Le Gallienne. De Acosta wrote two plays for Le Gallienne, Sandro Botticelli and Jehanne de Arc. After the financial failures of both plays they ended their relationship.

Over the next decade she was involved with several famous actresses and dancers including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ona Munson, and Russian ballerina Tamara Platonovna Karsavina. Additional unsubstantiated rumors include affairs with Pola Negri, Eleonora Duse, Katherine Cornell, and Alice B. Toklas.

It has been reported that she once stated, “I can get any woman away from any man” but there is no evidence to substantiate this claim.

De Acosta died at age 75 in poverty. She is buried at Trinity Cemetery in Washington Heights, New York City.

And today is the birthday of Richard Wilbur (Richard Purdy Wilbur, New York City, March 1, 1921 – October 14, 2017 Belmont, Massachusetts); poet and literary translator. In my opinion, one of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur’s work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. In 1987 he was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and again in 1989.

Continuing the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur’s poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences. Less well-known is Wilbur’s foray into lyric writing. He provided lyrics to several songs in Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 musical, Candide, including the famous “Glitter and Be Gay” and “Make Our Garden Grow.” He also produced several unpublished works including “The Wing” and “To Beatrice”.

Wilbur died on October 14, 2017, at a nursing home in Belmont, Massachusetts from natural causes aged 96.

Verse

• Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings
  The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings,
  And Nijinsky hadn’t the words to make the laws
  For learning to loiter in air; he merely said,
  “I merely leap and pause.”
  • “Grace” in The Poems of Richard Wilbur (1963)

• Try to remember this: what you project
  Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
  With any passion, be it love or terror,
  May take on whims and powers of its own.
  Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection
  Will serve you best — unless you overdo it,
  Watching your step too narrowly, refusing
  To specify a world, shrinking your purview
  To a tight vision of your inching shoes,
  Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing
  An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle.
  • “Walking to Sleep” (1969)

• What you hope for
  Is that at some point of the pointless journey,
  Indoors or out, and when you least expect it,
  Right in the middle of your stride, like that,
  So neatly that you never feel a thing,
  The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead
  And blow your brains out.
  • “Walking to Sleep” (1969)

• What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.
  • “Opposites” (1973)

• In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.
  • As quoted by John Gery in Ways of Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry (1996)

• A thrush, because I’d been wrong,
  Burst rightly into song
  In a world not vague, not lonely,
  Not governed by me only.
  • “Having Misidentified a Wild-Flower”

• Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
  They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
  In such kind ways,
  Wishing ever to sunder
  Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
  For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
  • “The Beautiful Changes”

The Beacon

• Founded on rock and facing the night-fouled sea
  A beacon blinks at its own brilliance,
  Over and over with cutlass gaze
  Solving the Gordian waters …

• The beacon-blaze unsheathing turns
  The face of darkness pale
  And now with one grand chop gives clearance to
  Our human visions . . .

Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World

• The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
  And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
  Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
  As false dawn.
  Outside the open window
  The morning air is all awash with angels.

• Now they are rising together in calm swells
  Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
  With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing…

• The soul shrinks
  From all that it is about to remember,
  From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
  And cries,
  “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
  Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
  And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

• The soul descends once more in bitter love
  To accept the waking body

A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness

• The tall camels of the spirit
  Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud
  With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the
  arid
  Sun. They are slow, proud,
  And move with a stilted stride
  To the land of sheer horizon…

• O connoisseurs of thirst,
  Beasts of my soul who long to learn to drink
  Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst
  That shimmer on the brink
  Of absence; auras, lustres,
  And all shinings need to be shaped and borne.

• Wisely watch for the sight
  Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,
  Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit’s right
  Oasis, light incarnate.

Mac Tag

Continue reading

mercedes de acosta, nikolaos gyzis, Oskar Kokoschka, richard wilbur, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

one of my favorite words
in regards to present company
“Oh thanks my dear”
went straight to the Kahn/Jones
song, because it had to be
“The theme of When Harry Met Sally”
yes, well done
“And if asked why, would you
the same answer give”
absolutely, simply
tu es toi
tu eres tu

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

we are
i know
not how
we believe
and cannot
rid ourselves
of how we got here

in this simple fashion
these feelin’s i portray

diverse and undulatin’
sense, discernin’ the difference
understandin’ what matters most
are the extraordinary experiences

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

you then
at first sight
you bet
recall the clumsy
first attempts
the first moves
all filed away
different now, though
plaited with experience,
the weight of joy
and loss and sadness,
collected over years
the innocence
and simplicity
gone
but you
remain

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

we are what we are
we have what we have
we are, i know not how,
our dreams, our wishes

an ideogram,
writ in waves
a train station
saddenin’ clouds
time, tick, tick, tick
weave no warped words
paint no draped desire

if asked why you
i would say
because you are you
if asked why
i came to you
i simply had to

© copyright 2017 Mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Michel de Montaigne

Today is the birthday of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (Château de Montaigne, Guyenne; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592 Château de Montaigne, Guyenne); in my opinion, one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre.  His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with serious intellectual insight.  His Essais (translated literally as “Attempts” or “Trials”) contains some of the most influential essays ever written.

Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying the spirit of freely entertaining doubt.  Perhaps most famously known for his skeptical remark, “Que sçay-je?” (“What do I know?”, in Middle French; now rendered as Que sais-je? in modern French).

Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne’s attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance.  Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal storytelling.

Quotes

 Qui songe à oublier se souvient.

Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout, a la française.

• A little of all things, but nothing of everything, after the French manner.

Si on me presse, continue-t-il, de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant: parce que c’était lui; parce que c’était moi.

• L’homme d’entendement n’a rien perdu, s’il a soi-même.
  • A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.
  • Book I, Ch. 39
• La plus grande chose du monde, c’est de savoir être à soi.
  • The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
  • Book I, Ch. 39

 Ceux qui ont apparié notre vie à un songe ont eu de la raison… Nous veillons dormants et veillants dormons.

• Those who have compared our life to a dream were right… We are sleeping awake, and waking asleep.
• Book II, Ch. 12

Today is the birthday of John Tenniel ( 28 February 1820 – 25 February 1914); illustrator, graphic humorist and political cartoonist prominent in the second half of the 19th century. An alumnus of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, he was knighted for artistic achievements in 1893, the first such honour ever bestowed on an illustrator or cartoonist.

Tenniel is remembered mainly as the principal political cartoonist for Punch magazine for over 50 years and for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Tenniel’s detailed black-and-white drawings remain the definitive depiction of the Alice characters, with comic book illustrator and writer Bryan Talbot stating, “Carroll never describes the Mad Hatter: our image of him is pure Tenniel.”

Gallery

Pygmalion

Geraldine Farrar

Farrar in Julien in 1914

Today is the birthday of Geraldine Farrar (Alice Geraldine Farrar, Melrose, Massachusetts, February 28, 1882 – March 11, 1967 Ridgefield, Connecticut); soprano opera singer and film actress, noted for her beauty, acting ability, and “the intimate timbre of her voice.” She had a large following among young women, who were nicknamed “Gerry-flappers”.

Farrar as the Goosegirl, Metropolitan Opera, 1910. Farrar trained her own flock of live geese for the World Premiere, expressing hope that future performers would do the same.

Farrar as Manon

Farrar had a seven-year love affair with the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Her ultimatum, that he leave his wife and children and marry her, resulted in Toscanini’s abrupt resignation as principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in 1915. Farrar was close friends with the star tenor Enrico Caruso and there has been speculation that they too had a love affair, but no conclusive evidence of this has surfaced. It is said that Caruso coined her motto: Farrar farà (“Farrar will do it”).

Her marriage to cinema actor Lou Tellegen on February 8, 1916 was the source of scandal. The marriage ended, as a result of her husband’s numerous affairs, in a very public divorce in 1923. The circumstances of the divorce were brought again to public recollection by Tellegen’s bizarre 1934 suicide in Hollywood. Farrar reportedly said “Why should that interest me?” when told of Tellegen’s death.

Advertisement for The Stronger Vow, a 1919 silent film starring Farrar.

The headstone of Farrar

• 

  Farrar as Marguerite in Faust

• 

  Farrar in an evening gown

• 

  Farrar on the set of Carmen

• 

  Farrar and Enrico Carusoin Julien

• 

  Farrar in costume as Nedda in Pagliacci

• 

  Farrar in performance

• 

  Farrar in public

• 

  Farrar with Pedro de Cordoba in Carmen

• 

  Portrait printed in Motion Picture Magazine, June 1920

• 

  Farrar as Joan of Arc for Joan the Woman

   

Today is the birthday of Stephen Harold Spender (Kensington, London 28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995 Westminster, London); poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work.  He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.

Verse

But what we are? We are, we have
Six feet and seventy years, to see
The light, and then resign it for the grave.

Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon’s fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses…

• “Not Palaces”(l. 12–16). . .

Ah, like a comet through flame she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.

• “The Express” (l. 25–27)

• What I had not foreseen
  Was the gradual day
  Weakening the will
  Leaking the brightness away
  • “What I Expected Was” (l. 9–12)

• For I had expected always
  Some brightness to hold in trust,
  Some final innocence
  To save from dust
  • “What I Expected Was” (l. 25–28). . .

• Across this dazzling
  Mediterranean
  August morning
  The dolphins write such
  Ideograms:
  With power to wake
  Me prisoned in
  My human speech
  They sign: ‘I AM!’
  • “Dolphins”

• In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,
  They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
  And only measuring Time, like the blank clock.
• No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament
  To make them birds upon my singing tree:
  Time merely drives these lives which do not live
  As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.
  • “In Railway Halls, on Pavements Near the Traffic”

• Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds
  Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity.
  But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds
  This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.
  • “In Railway Halls, on Pavements Near the Traffic”

• At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle
  Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.
  • “Daybreak”

• Then, in a flush of rose, she woke and her eyes that opened
  Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned.
  From her dew of lips, the drop of one word
  Fell like the first of fountains: murmured
  ‘Darling’, upon my ears the song of the first bird.
  ‘My dream becomes my dream,’ she said, ‘come true.
  I waken from you to my dream of you.’
  Oh, my own wakened dream then dared assume
  The audacity of her sleep. Our dreams
  Poured into each other’s arms, like streams.
  • “Daybreak”

Mac Tag

Continue reading

geraldine farrar, michel de montaigne, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

said before, during and after
“Yes”
whispered in warm embrace
“Often please”
the first time i heard you say it
the first time i said it
“I like hearing it from you”
though i cain’t drawl it up
“That is funny”
by any other, thou
wouldst be as sweet
“Careful Will”
and you wear it so well, Anna

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

spent a life
tryin’ to git here
a story teller
askin’ you to feel
and to tell me
yes, it was that way

only thoughts, and dreams,
and longin’ can reach
no little appetite
or pain escapes
the necessary
loneliness
to explain
the inexplicable
only you

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“Those were wonderful nights.
We should have done more.”
yeah, we shoulda

i understand
i was offered somethin’
few are ever offered
a gift given
such as few
have ever known
and i ignored it

if i say
often enough
that you
are not the one

if i write it in verse
if i fill a book
if i write a song,
a libretto
if i shout it
from the mesa top

would i then
believe

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

hear the trailin’ whispers
sweep through the halls
look then, inside and commence

the Revelator speaks…
so beautiful, yet
dark and sorrowful
it comes not again
look not mournfully
go forth and meet
the shadowy future

with many scars
so accursed
or blessed
for the hurt
sustains

floatin’ upon
a river of dreams

standin’ on a mesa
at midnight
as the hour comes
and the moon rises

ever here, always near
all the partin’ and sorrow
always near, ever here
time, doin’ what it does
say it again,
whisper
the same refrain
i hear

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1868

Today is the birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Portland, Maine; February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882 Cambridge, Massachusetts); poet and educator whose works include “Paul Revere’s Ride”, The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline.  He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, and was one of the five Fireside Poets.

He studied at Bowdoin College.  After spending time in Europe he became a professor at Bowdoin and, later, at Harvard College.  His first major poetry collections were Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841).  Longfellow retired from teaching in 1854, to focus on his writing, living the remainder of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a former Revolutionary War headquarters of George Washington.  His first wife Mary Potter died in 1835, after a miscarriage.  His second wife Frances Appleton died in 1861, after sustaining burns when her dress caught fire.  After her death, Longfellow had difficulty writing poetry for a time and focused on translating works from foreign languages.

Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend.  He became the most popular American poet of his day and also had success overseas.

Verse 

• I stood on the bridge at midnight,
  As the clocks were striking the hour,
  And the moon rose o’er the city,
  Behind the dark church-tower.
  • The Bridge, st. 1 (1845).
• Never here, forever there,
  Where all parting, pain, and care,
  And death, and time shall disappear,—
  Forever there, but never here!
  The horologe of Eternity
  Sayeth this incessantly,—
  “Forever — never!
  Never — forever!”
  • The Old Clock on the Stairs, st. 9 (1845).

Mary Storer Potter became Longfellow’s first wife in 1831 and died four years later.

After a seven-year courtship, Longfellow married Frances Appleton in 1843.

Longfellow circa 1850, daguerreotype by Southworth & Hawes

Joaquín Sorolla
Platinum print of Sorolla by Gertrude Käsebier, c1908

Today is the birthday of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (Valencia, 27 February 1863 – 10 August 1923 Madrid); painter.  Sorolla excelled in the painting of portraits, landscapes, and works of social and historical themes.  His most typical works are characterized by a dexterous representation of the people and landscape under the bright sunlight of his native land and sunlit water.

In 1888, Sorolla married Clotilde García del Castillo, whom he had first met in 1879 while working in her father’s studio.  In 1890, they moved to Madrid, and for the next decade Sorolla’s efforts as an artist were focussed mainly on the production of large canvases of orientalist, mythological, historical, and social subjects, for display in salons and international exhibitions in Madrid, Paris, Venice, Munich, Berlin, and Chicago.

Sorolla suffered a stroke in 1920, while painting a portrait in his garden in Madrid. Paralyzed for over three years, he died on 10 August 1923. He is buried in the Cementeri de Valencia, Spain.

Gallery

La siesta

Desnudo de mujer de 1902

Otra Margarita, 1892

Trata de blancas (1894)

Retrato de Raquel Meller, 1918

The Horse’s Bath, Sorolla Museum, Madrid

Portrait of Dr Simarro at the microscope, 1897, (Luis Simarro Legacy Trust, Fundación General, Complutense University)

Beach at Valencia, 1908.

My Wife and Daughters in the Garden, 1910.

Castilla or La fiesta del pan, 1913. First completed of The Provinces of Spain, 14 murals at the Hispanic Society in Manhattan.

Walk on the Beach or Paseo a orillas del mar, 1909. Sorolla Museum, Madrid

John Steinbeck
Steinbeck in Sweden during his trip to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962

And today is the birthday of author John Steinbeck (born John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. in Salinas, California, February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968 New York City). He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception”. In my opinion one of the giant’s of American letters. Many of his works are considered classics of Western literature.

During his writing career, he authored 27 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. His works include Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck’s masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. Most of Steinbeck’s work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.

Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English Literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins.

In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn “Gwyn” Conger.

Rocinante, camper truck in which Steinbeck traveled across the United States in 1960

In May 1948, Steinbeck’s close friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when a train struck his car, died. Later, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce, which became final in August. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts’ death in deep depression.

In June 1949, Steinbeck met stage-manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship and in December 1950 Steinbeck and Scott married, within a week of the finalizing of Scott’s own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. This third marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968.

The Steinbeck family graves in the Hamilton plot at the Salinas Cemetery

John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968, of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.

In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred on March 4, 1969 at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. He had written to his doctor that he felt deeply “in his flesh” that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.

Cannery Row in Monterey

• We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”
  • “In Awe of Words,” The Exonian, 75th anniversary edition, Exeter University (1930)

• The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
  • “In Awe of Words,”

• No little appetite or pain, no carelessness or meanness in him escaped her; no thought or dream or longing in him ever reached her. And yet several times in her life she had seen the stars.
  • The Moon Is Down (1942), p. 7

• I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
  • “…like captured fireflies” (1955)

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

• When asked his reaction to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address

Cannery Row (1945)

• Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. [Opening sentence.]

• “It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.”

The Wayward Bus (1947)

• He was a fine steady man, Juan Chicoy, part Mexican and part Irish, perhaps fifty years old, with clear black eyes, a good head of hair, and a dark and handsome face. Mrs Chicoy was insanely in love with him and a little afraid of him too, because he was a man, and there aren’t very many of them, as Alice Chicoy had found out. There aren’t very many of them in the world, as everyone finds out sooner or later.
  • Ch. 1

• Her body and her mind were sluggish and lazy, and deep down she fought a tired envy of the people who, so she thought, experienced good things while she went through life a gray cloud in a gray room. Having few actual perceptions, she lived by rules. Education is good. Self-control is necessary. Everything in its time and place. Travel is broadening. And it was this last axiom which had forced her finally on the vacation to Mexico.
  • About Bernice Pritchard in Ch. 5

• He wondered why he stayed with her. Just pure laziness, he guessed. He didn’t want to go through the emotional turmoil of leaving her. In spite of himself he’d worry about her and it was too much trouble. He’d need another woman right away and that took a lot of talking and arguing and persuading. It was different just to lay a girl but he would need a woman around, and that was the difference. You got used to one and it was less trouble.[…]
  But there was another reason too. She loved him. She really did. And he knew it. And you can’t leave a thing like that. It’s a structure and it has an architecture, and you can’t leave it without tearing off a piece of yourself. So if you want to remain whole you stay no matter how much you may dislike staying. Juan was not a man who fooled himself very much.
  • Ch. 8

• She envied Camille. Camille was a tramp, Mildred thought. And things were so much easier for a tramp. There was no conscience, no sense of loss, nothing but a wonderful, relaxed, stretching-cat selfishness. She could go to bed with anyone she wanted to and never see him again and have no feeling of loss or insecurity about it. That was the way Mildred thought it was with Camille. She wished she could be that way, and she knew she couldn’t. Couldn’t because of her mother. And the unbidden thought entered her mind—if her mother were only dead Mildred’s life would be so much simpler. She could have a secret little place to live somewhere. Almost fiercely, she brushed the thought away. “What a foul thing to think,” she said to herself ceremoniously. But it was a dream she often had.
  • Ch. 13. Mildred is the daughter of Elliot and Bernice Pritchard.

Burning Bright (1950)

• Mordeen said: “I used to wonder why this love seemed sweeter than I had ever known, better than many people ever know. And then one day the reason came to me. There are very few great Anythings in the world. In work and art and emotion—the great is very rare. And I have one of the great and beautiful. Now say your yah, yah, Victor, like a child unanswerably answering Wisdom. You will have to do that, I think.”
  • Mordeen on her love for Joe Saul in Act One: The Circus

• His guard was up now and he wasn’t listening; he was only angry because here was a world he could not enter and so he had to disbelieve in its existence. He fell back on the world he knew.
  • Act One: The Circus. “He” is Victor.

• “I do understand. I understand that you are offered a loveliness and you vomit on it, that you have the gift of love given you such as few men have ever known and you throw on it the acid of your pride, your ugly twisted sense of importance.”
  • Friend Ed to Joe Saul in Act Three, Scene I: The Sea

• “It is so easy a thing to give—only great men have the courage and courtesy and, yes, the generosity to receive.”
  • Friend Ed to Joe Saul in Act Three, Scene I: The Sea

East of Eden (1952)

• Maybe that’s the reason,” Adam said slowly, feeling his way. “Maybe if I had loved him I would have been jealous of him. You were. Maybe-maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure-never sure of her because you aren’t sure of yourself? I can see it pretty clearly. I can see how you loved him and what it did to you. I did not love him. Maybe he loved me. He tested me and hurt me and punished me and finally he sent me out like a sacrifice, maybe to make up for something. But he did not love you, and so he had faith in you. Maybe — why, maybe it’s a kind of reverse.

• “What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.”

Mac Tag

Continue reading

henry wadsworth longfellow, joaquin sorolla, john steinbeck, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

-i’m gonna try to put myself
back in that place again-
always starts with
london homesick blues
“I know that song”
sure have taken
some fancy ones
“I’m glad you did
because they led you here”
absolutely, the good,
the bad and the ugly
“The necessary”
well put, now
what are my chances

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

oh, here comes that dream

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

passeth away
frail, our words
shall play the parts

what will be
hath not limits
where we are
must we ever be

turnin’ an eye to the past
inconsolable otherwise
i keep lookin’
at that moment

Hugo said,
aimer c’est agir

shall we

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“C’est ici le combat
du jour et de la nuit…
Je vois de la lumière noire”
this is the battle
between day and night…
i see black light

what makes night
within us
may leave stars…
come make night
with me

jouir en bien
literally,
enjoy in good
idiomatically…
well, come with me
and together
we will find out

after all,
time gits away

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

time, too much perhaps,
spent turnin’ an eye
towards the past
the broken trail behind
the chances taken
and not taken
not so much
a review of regret
have those stacked
up like cord wood,
dealt and done with

but, there is one
chance not taken,
one regret, one moment
i keep lookin back on

i will see that moment
clearly, for whatever
is left of my days,
you walkin’ away
on that stormy evenin’

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

a struggle
for damn sure
between light and dark
i see black
time gits away
and life is frail

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Christopher Marlowe
An anonymous portrait in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, believed to show Christopher Marlowe.

Today is the baptismal day of Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (Canterbury, Kent; baptised 26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593 Deptford, Kent); playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era.  Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day.  He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe’s mysterious early death.  Marlowe’s plays are known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists.

A warrant was issued for Marlowe’s arrest on 18 May 1593.  No reason was given for it, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy—a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain “vile heretical conceipts”.  On 20 May, he was brought to the court to attend upon the Privy Council for questioning.  There is no record of their having met that day, however, and he was commanded to attend upon them each day thereafter until “licensed to the contrary”.  Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer.  Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved.

Verse

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Or woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies.

• The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (unknown date), stanzas 1 and 2

Tamburlaine (c. 1588)

• Time passeth swift away;
  Our life is frail, and we may die to-day.
  • Mycetes, Act I, scene i, line 68

• Our swords shall play the orators for us.
  • Techelles, Act I, scene ii, line 132

• Accurst be he that first invented war.
  • Mycetes, Part 1, Act II, scene iv, line 1

• Let Earth and Heaven his timeless death deplore,
  For both their worths shall equal him no more.
  • Amyras, Part 2, Act V, scene iii, lines 252–253

Doctor Faustus (c. 1593) 

• Che serà, serà:
  What will be, shall be.
  • Faustus, Act I, scene i, lines 47–58

• Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d
  In one self place; but where we are is hell,
  And where hell is, there must we ever be.
  • Mephistopheles, Act II, scene i, line 118

• When all the world dissolves,
  And every creature shall be purified,
  All places shall be hell that are not heaven.
  • Mephistopheles, Act II, scene i, line 120. In the first line, Marlowe references Isaiah in Isaiah 24:19 and 34:4; in the second line, he references Daniel in Daniel 12:10.

• Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
  Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
  • Faustus, Act V, scene i, lines 91–93

• Pray for me! and what noise soever ye hear, come not unto me, for nothing can rescue me.
  • Faustus, Act V, scene ii, lines 57–58

• He that loves pleasure, must for pleasure fall.
  • Evil Angel, Act V, scene iv

Hero and Leander (published 1598)

• A pleasant-smiling cheek, a speaking eye,
  A brow for love to banquet royally.
  • First Sestiad

• It lies not in our power to love or hate,
  For will in us is overruled by fate.
  • First Sestiad

• Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
  • First Sestiad. The same statement occurs in As You Like It (1600) by William Shakespeare, and a similar one in The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596) by George Chapman.

• Like untuned golden strings all women are,
  Which long time lie untouch’d, will harshly jar.
  Vessels of brass, oft handled, brightly shine.
  • First Sestiad

• All women are ambitious naturally.
  • First Sestiad

• Love always makes those eloquent that have it.
  • Second Sestiad

• Above our life we love a steadfast friend.
  • Second Sestiad

Victor Hugo
Woodburytype of Hugo by Étienne Carjat, 1876

Today is the birthday of Victor Marie Hugo (Besançon, Doubs; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885 Paris); poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement.  In my opinion, one of the greatest and best-known French writers.  Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris), 1831.  In France, Hugo is known primarily for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations (The Contemplations) and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages).  He produced more than 4,000 drawings and also campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment.

Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo’s views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism; his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time.  He is buried in the Panthéon in Paris.  His legacy has been honoured in many ways, including his portrait being placed on French currency.

Verse 

Hélas ! vers le passé tournant un œil d’envie,
Sans que rien ici-bas puisse m’en consoler,
Je regarde toujours ce moment de ma vie
Où je l’ai vue ouvrir son aile et s’envoler!

Je verrai cet instant jusqu’à ce que je meure,
L’instant, pleurs superflus !
Où je criai : L’enfant que j’avais tout à l’heure,
Quoi donc ! je ne l’ai plus !

Alas! turning an envious eye towards the past,
inconsolable by anything on earth,
I keep looking at that moment of my life
when I saw her open her wings and fly away!

I will see that instant until I die,
that instant—too much for tears!
when I cried out: “The child that I had just now—
what! I don’t have her any more!”

C’est ici le combat du jour et de la nuit… Je vois de la lumière noire.

• This is the battle between day and night… I see black light.

Aimer, c’est agir

• To love is to act
  • Last words of his diary, written two weeks before his death, published in Victor Hugo : Complete Writings (1970)

• La musique…est la vapeur de l’art. Elle est à la poésie ce que la rêverie est à la pensée, ce que le fluide est au liquide, ce que l’océan des nuées est à l’océan des ondes.
  • Music…is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what revery is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.
    • Part I, Book II, Chapter IV

• Ce qu’on ne peut dire et ce qu’on ne peut taire, la musique l’exprime.
  • Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
    • Part I, Book II, Chapter IV

Victor Hugo in 1853

Portrait of “Cosette” by Émile Bayard, from the original edition of Les Misérables (1862)

Among the Rocks on Jersey (1853–55)

Photogravure of Victor Hugo, 1883.

 Juliette Droucet

 Hugo on his deathbed, 1885

Catafalque below the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 1 June 1885

Tomb of Victor Hugo at the Panthéon

His faithful mistress, Juliette Drouet, died in 1883, only two years before his own death.

Two days before dying, he left a note with these last words: “Aimer, c’est agir” (To love is to act).  Hugo’s death from pneumonia at the age of 83, generated intense national mourning.  He was not only revered as a towering figure in literature, he was a statesman who shaped the Third Republic and democracy in France.  More than two million people joined his funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he was buried. He shares a crypt within the Panthéon with Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola.

Hugo left five sentences as his last will, to be officially published:

Je donne cinquante mille francs aux pauvres. Je veux être enterré dans leur corbillard.
Je refuse l’oraison de toutes les Églises. Je demande une prière à toutes les âmes.
Je crois en Dieu.

“I leave 50,000 francs to the poor. I want to be buried in their hearse.
I refuse [funeral] orations of all churches. I beg a prayer to all souls.
I believe in God.”

C’est ici le combat du jour et de la nuit… Je vois de la lumière noire.

• This is the battle between day and night… I see black light.
  • Last words

Gallery

• 

  Crépuscule (“Twilight”), Jersey, 1853–1855.

• 

  Ville avec le pont de Tumbledown, (“Town with Tumbledown Bridge”),1847.

• 

  Pieuvre avec les initiales V.H., (“Octopus with the initials V.H.”), 1866.
• 

  Le phare (“The Lighthouse”)

• 

  Gavroche a onze ans, (“Gavroche is eleven years old”).

And today is the birthday of Honoré-Victorin Daumier (February 26, 1808 – February 10, 1879); painter, sculptor, and printmaker, whose many works offer commentary on the social and political life in France, from the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the second Napoleonic Empire in 1870. He earned a living throughout most of his life producing caricatures and cartoons of political figures and satirizing the behavior of his countrymen in newspapers and periodicals, for which he became well known in his lifetime and is still known today. He was a republican democrat who attacked the bourgeoisie, the church, lawyers and the judiciary, politicians, and the monarchy. He was jailed for several months in 1832 after the publication of Gargantua, a particularly offensive and discourteous depiction of King Louis-Philippe. Daumier was also a serious painter, loosely associated with realism.

Passants, vers 1858-1860, musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.

Figure sedute

théâtre

Continue reading

the lovers almanac, victor hugo

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

flickered and went out
“I know it did”
some say, or sang,
you gotta have it
“An overused and abused word”
no question, contorted to fit
all kinda spurious opinions
“I think it is best held close”
yes, used that way
it is a fine word
“As in, I have in you”
and i in you

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

on Peachtree against
the neon skyline
where the scene
fills with city life
and glasses of wine
at a cozy table

or hangin’ out
at my funky place
on Aberdeen

either way
you know
you are all
that matters

either way
une petite spécialité
called l’amour….

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

dream a little dream

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a tree covered hilltop
against the High Plains sky
where the scene is painted
by two who have waited
a very long time

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

on the High Plains
against a cloudless sky
where the scene
fills with stars

or downtown
with martinis
at a cozy table

either way
you know
you are all
that matters

either way
une petite spécialité
called l’amour….

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

heavy burdens
hurt, madness, fear,
guttural grief

tough month
for the Carolina Girl
and the soi disant poet
apart, but not
need escape, relief
found perhaps,
in imagined ambiance…

torchlit porch, emptyin’
glass after wineglass
watchin’ the night
and the flame flutter

rememberin’
what once was
under the Carolina sky
the night at the opera,
cocktail parties, lunches,
shared dreams and scenes
of how together should feel

candlelit room, empty
whiskey bottle
searchin’ for words
and faith flickers

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Today is the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, commonly known as Auguste Renoir (Limoges, Haute-Vienne; 25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur); artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style.  As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that “Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau.”

While living and working in Montmartre, Renoir employed Suzanne Valadon as a model, who posed for him (The Large Bathers, 1884–87; Dance at Bougival, 1883) and many of his fellow painters.  During that time she studied their techniques and eventually became one of the leading painters of the day.

In 1890, he married Aline Victorine Charigot, who, along with a number of the artist’s friends, had already served as a model for Le Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party – she is the woman on the left playing with the dog) in 1881.  After his marriage, Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life including their children and their nurse, Aline’s cousin Gabrielle Renard.

Gallery

Nu couché

The Theater Box, 1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London

The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette), 1876

Renoir, c. 1910

Two Sisters, oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of Chicago

Girls at the Piano, 1892, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

• 

  Lise Sewing, 1866, Dallas Museum of Art

• 

  La Grenouillère, 1868, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

• 

  Portrait of Alfred Sisley, 1868

• 

  Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, 1873, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

• 

  Portrait of Claude Monet, 1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

• 

• Mme. Charpentier and her children, 1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  By the Water, 1880, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

• 

  Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–1881, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

• 

  Portrait of Charles and Georges Durand-Ruel, 1882

• 

  Dance at Bougival, 1882–1883, (woman at left is painter Suzanne Valadon), Boston Museum of Fine Arts

• 

  Dance in the Country (Aline Charigot and Paul Lhote), 1883, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

• 

  Pencil study for Dance in the Country, 1883, Honolulu Museum of Art

• 

  Children at the Beach at Guernsey, 1883, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

• 

  “Jeune garçon sur la plage d’Yport”, 1883, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

• 

  Girl With a Hoop, 1885, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

• 

  Girl Braiding Her Hair (Suzanne Valadon), 1885

• 

  Still Life: Flowers, 1885, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

• 

  Julie Manet with cat, 1887

• 

  Portrait of Berthe Morisot and daughter Julie Manet, 1894

• 

  Gabrielle Renard and infant son Jean Renoir, 1895

• 

  The Artist’s Family, 1896, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

• 

  Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1908

• 

  Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel, 1910

• 

  Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1917

Self-portraits

• 

  Self-portrait, 1875

• 

  Self-portrait, 1876

• 

  Self-portrait, 1910

• 

  Self-portrait, 1910

Nudes

• 

  Diana the Huntress, 1867, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

• 

  Nude in the Sun, 1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

• 

  Seated Girl, 1883

• 

  The Large Bathers, 1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art

• 

  After The Bath, 1888

• 

  Three Bathers, 1895, Cleveland Museum of Art Cleveland, Ohio

• 

  Nude, National Museum of Serbia, Belgrade

• 

  After The Bath, 1910, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

• 

  Woman at the Well, 1910

• 

  Seated Bather Drying Her Leg, 1914, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

• 

  Women Bathers, 1916, National Museum, Stockholm

• 

  Bathers, 1918, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881)

Close-ups

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) – Details of the Women

Aline Charigot

Angèle Legault

Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise

Ellen Andrée

Jeanne Samary

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) – Details of the Men

Alphonse Fournaise, Jr.

Pierre Lestringuèz

Paul Lhôte

Jules Laforgue

Antonio Maggiolo

Gustave Caillebotte

Charles Ephrussi

Raoul Barbier

Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess in 1986

Today is the birthday of John Anthony Burgess Wilson (Harpurhey, Lancashire 25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993 St. John’s Wood, London) – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess –; writer and composer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Catholic family in Manchester, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Perhaps best known for his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange.  In 1971 it was adapted into a highly controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book.  Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers.  He wrote librettos and screenplays, and the 1977 TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth.  He worked as a literary critic for several publications, including The Observer and The Guardian, and wrote studies of classic writers, notably James Joyce.  A versatile linguist, Burgess lectured in phonetics, and translated Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and the opera Carmen, among others.

Burgess also composed over 250 musical works; he sometimes claimed to consider himself as much a composer as an author.

Verse 

• Oh, love, love, love —
  Love on a hilltop high,
  Love against a cloudless sky,
  Love where the scene is
  Painted by a million stars,
  Love with martinis
  In the cabarets and bars.
  Oh, love, love, love…
  • Beds in the East.
• Find a cosy table
  Inside a restaurant,
  Somewhere formidable
  Where you’ll be très contents.
  Let your lady fair know
  That she is all you see,
  Prime her with a Pernod
  Or three.
  Watch her crack a lobster
  And strip it to the buff,
  Rough as when a mobster
  Gets tough.
  Keep the wine cascading
  And you’ll ensure
  Une petite spécialité called l’amour….
  • Earthly Powers.

Mac Tag

Continue reading

anthony burgess, pierre-auguste renoir, the lovers almanac, the lovers chroncile

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

no need to follow Kees tonight
“Will go wherever you lead”
that is where the phrase
came from, and it is
“Dark yet evocative”
was a time, everywhere
i turned it was there,
so i started goin’ in deeper
“Glad you found a way out”
still mostly there when we met
“Now for a different kind of moan”

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

wander through thoughts yet,
and gaze upon thy memory

where feeds countless notes,
from remembered looks,
worn by the waste of time

listen
at the close of day,
hear the story
whispered
will be the cry
a murmur
against the wail
of the lone night

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

like all the others
ended abruptly

takin’ chances for years
just intensified
the episodes

a blue moan

tried not to fall
but could not manage it

talked of leavin’
another country
gittin’ lost
become a mystery

“What keeps you going?”
do you know…

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

loneliness
to fill the void
with thoughts

happiness,
no too strong,
contentment
in dreamin’,
awakenin’
wretched
must be
livin’ without
soundin’

i shall find you,
i shall find…

can you find
what you do not know
you are lookin’ for
the promise
has no end

nightfall comin’ on,
late February, snow falls
driftin’ in piles, the wind
whippin’
across the plains

a song, playin’
a blue moan
i see now,
mapped and marred,
the trail behind
and the years ahead

hurt, madness, fear
threaten, escape, survive

may this night
open Her comfort
to these tired eyes

i look at you
across time
and darkness
and wonder
can you feel
can you hear

do you know…

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer, 1880, photo by Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896)

Today is the birthday of Winslow Homer (Boston; February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910 Prouts Neck, Maine); landscape painter and printmaker, perhaps best known for his marine subjects.  In my opinion, he is one of the foremost painters of 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art.

Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator.  He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium.  He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.

As a result of disappointments with women or from some other emotional turmoil, Homer became reclusive in the late 1870s, no longer enjoying urban social life and living instead in Gloucester.  For a while, he even lived in secluded Eastern Point Lighthouse (with the keeper’s family).  In re-establishing his love of the sea, Homer found a rich source of themes while closely observing the fishermen, the sea, and the marine weather.  After 1880, he rarely featured genteel women at leisure, focusing instead on working women.

Homer died at the age of 74 and was interred in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  His painting, Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River, remains unfinished.

Gallery 

The new novel

The Bathers, wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly, 1873

Prisoners from the front, 1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oil on canvas. 24 x 38in

Long Branch, New Jersey, 1869

Crossing the Pasture, 1871-72, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

A Visit from the Old Mistress, 1876, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 1868, oil on panel (Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine)

Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), 1873–76, oil on canvas (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Eastern Point Light, 1880, Princeton University Art Museum

• Early landscapes and watercolors
• 

  Girl in the Hammock, 1873

• 

  The Four Leaf Clover, 1873

• 

  The Green Hill, 1878

• 

  On the Stile, c. 1878

• 

  Peach Blossoms, 1878

Three Fisher Girls, Tynemouth, watercolor on paper 1881, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

The Fog Warning, 1885, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Fox Hunt, 1893. Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 174 cm. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The Gulf Stream, 1899, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Northeaster, 1895

• Seascapes by Winslow Homer
• 

  Moonlight, 1874

• 

  Crab Fishing, 1883

• 

  The Herring Net, 1885

• 

  Sunlight on the Coast, 1890 (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio)

• 

  Moonlight, Wood Island Light, 1894

The Fisher Girl, 1894

Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River, unfinished. (1910) Country life

• 

  Fresh Eggs, 1874

• 

  Song of the Lark, 1876, oil on canvas. Chrysler Museum of Art

• 

  The Reaper, 1878

• 

  The Milk Maid, 1878

• 

  Girl and Laurel, 1879

• Pastoral landscapes
• 

  Bo-Peep, 1878

• 

  Shepherdess Tending Sheep, 1878

• 

  Warm Afternoon (Shepherdess), 1878

• 

  The Blue Boy, 1876

• 

  Twilight at Leeds, 1876

• Shores and beaches
• 

  On the Beach, 1869

• 

  Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts, 1870

• 

  Dad’s Coming!, 1873

• 

  Clear Sailing, 1880

• 

  Two boys watching schooners, 1880

• 

  A Fresh Breeze, c. 1881

• 

  Girl Carrying a Basket, 1882

• 

  Girl with Red Stockings, 1882

• 

  Summer Night, 1890

• 

  Watching the Breakers, 1891

• Mountain landscapes
• 

  The Bridle Path, 1868, oil painting (Clark Art Institute)

• 

  A Huntsman and Dogs, 1891

• 

  Mink Pond, 1891

• 

  The Hudson River, 1892

• 

  The Adirondack guide, 1894

• Croquet
• 

  A Game of Croquet, 1866

• 

  Croquet Scene, 1866

• 

  The Croquet Match, ca. 1869

• 

  Croquet Players, 1865

   

Rosalía de Castro

Today is the birthday of María Rosalía Rita de Castro (Santiago de Compstela, Galicia; 24 February 1837 – 15 July 1885 Padrón, Galicia); romanticist writer and poet.

Writing in the Galician language, after the Séculos Escuros (lit. Dark Centuries), she became an important figure of the Galician romantic movement, known today as the Rexurdimento (“renaissance”), along with Manuel Curros Enríquez and Eduardo Pondal.  Her poetry is marked by saudade, an almost ineffable combination of nostalgia, longing and melancholy.

She married Manuel Murguía, member of the Galician Academy, historian, journalist and editor of Rosalía’s books.

The date she published her first collection of poetry in Galician, Cantares gallegos (gl) (“Galician Songs”), 17 May 1863, is commemorated every year as the Día das Letras Galegas (“Galician Literature Day”), an official holiday of the Autonomous Community of Galicia, and has been dedicated to an important writer in the Galician language since 1963.

Relative poverty and sadness marked her life, although she had a sense of commitment to the poor and to the defenseless.  She was an opponent of abuse of authority and defender of women’s rights.  She suffered from uterine cancer and died of this illness.

She is buried in the Panteón de Galegos Ilustres, a pantheon (mausoleum) in the Convent of San Domingos de Bonaval at Santiago.

Verse 

¿Qué es soledad?
Para llenar el mundo
basta a veces
un solo pensamiento.

Es feliz el que soñando, muere.
Desgraciado el que muera sin sonar.

Yo te hallaré y me hallarás.
No, no puede acabar lo que es eterno,
ni puede tener fin la inmensidad

Weldon Kees

Today is the birthday of Harry Weldon Kees (Beatrice, Nebraska; February 24, 1914 – July 18, 1955 San Francisco); poet, painter, literary critic, novelist, playwright, jazz pianist, short story writer, and filmmaker.  In my opinion, he is an important mid-twentieth-century poet of the same generation as John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell.  His work has been influential on subsequent generations of poets writing in English and other languages and his collected poems have been included in many anthologies.

 In 1937, he married Ann Swan.

8XX, oil on canvas, Weldon Kees, 1949

In 1948, Weldon and Ann began summering at the artist colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.  In the autumn of that year, Kees had his first one-man show at the Peridot Gallery and one of his paintings was included in a group show of established and rising artists at the Whitney Museum.  Despite these initial successes, however, Kees’s work only had modest sales.

Kees and Ann drove cross-country to San Francisco in late 1950.

From 1951 to 1954, Kees also made many new contacts as well as renewed old ones in the San Francisco Renaissance, among them Kenneth Rexroth and the founder of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  Kees’s poetry, however, did not embrace the kind dionysiac character and became increasingly sardonic and confessional in poems such as “1926.”

Verse

The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

from “1926”

Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day
May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes

I look at you
Across those fires and the dark

A good night for the fireplace to be
crackling with flames – or so he figured,
Crumpling the papers he could only see
As testimonials to long plateaus of emptiness.

• The Heat in the Room

Restless and often estranged from his poetry, Kees began to collaborate with the jazz clarinetist Bob Helm in 1953 on ballads and torch songs (some written for the singer Ketty Lester).

In 1954, Kees separated from Ann, whose alcoholism led to a psychotic episode triggered by watching the Army–McCarthy hearings on television.  After having her institutionalized, Kees divorced her around the time that his last book appeared, Poems, 1947–1954 (San Francisco, Adrian Wilson, 1954).  He then focused on organizing a musical revue, Pick Up the Pieces, which eventually became a much more elaborate venue of literary burlesque, titled Poets Follies, which premiered in January 1955 and featured a stripper reading the poetry of Sara Teasdale.

In July 1955, Kees spent time with a woman he had met while working at Langley Porter, a Jungian psychiatrist named Virginia Patterson.  Like other relationships Kees had following his divorce, this ended abruptly.  Kees, too, had been taking barbiturates for the past two years, which also had intensified his episodes of manic depression.  He confessed to trying to jump over the rail of the Golden Gate Bridge, but he could not physically manage it.  He talked of going to Mexico as an alternative, a country that fascinated him, in books such as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.  Kees returned to his home in the Marina District on the evening of July 17, 1955.  What he did the following day is a mystery.  He telephoned a friend, the memoirist Janet Richards, asking her, “What keeps you going?”  On July 19, 1955, Kees’s car was found deserted on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge.  He was never found.

Mac Tag

Continue reading

Rosalía de Castro, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, weldon kees, winslow homer

Today is the birthday of George Frederic Watts (Marylebone, West End London 23 February 1817 – 1 July 1904); painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. He said “I paint ideas, not things.”  Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life. These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the “House of Life”, in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language.

Gallery

Hope

Kazimir Malevich
Photograph of Malevich

Today is the birthday of Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (Kiev Governorate of Russian Empire, now Ukraine; February 23, 1878 – May 15, 1935 Leningrad); painter and art theoretician.  He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement.  He was a devout Christian mystic who believed the central task of an artist was that of rendering spiritual feeling.

Malevich’s family was one of the millions of Poles who lived within the Russian Empire following the Partitions of Poland.

Gallery

Flowergirl

Bathers

Party

Flowergirl ii

Black Square, 1915, oil on linen, 79.5 x 79.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York

A section of Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich exhibited at the 0.10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 1915

Malevich Portrait of Mikhail Matjuschin, 1913

Self-portrait, 1933 (detail)

• 

  Winter, 1909

• 

  Taking in the Rye, 1911

• 

  Self-portrait, 1912

• 

  The Knifegrinder, 1912

• 

  Head of a Peasant Girl, 1912-1913
• 

  Composition with the Mona Lisa, 1914

• 

  Black Circle, 1915, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

• 

  Suprematist Composition, painted in 1915

• 

  Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions, 1915

• 

  Suprematist Composition, 1916

• 

  Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles, 1915

• 

  Untitled (Suprematist Composition), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, c. 1919-1926

• 

  Untitled (Suprematist Composition), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, c. 1919-1926

• 

  Black Square, c.1923, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

• 

  Suprematism, 1921-1927

• 

  Boy, 1928-1932

• 

  Red-cavalry, 1928-1932

• 

  Summer Landscape, 1929

• 

  Mower, 1930

• 

  Running man, 1932

• 

  Complex Presentiment: Half-Figure in a Yellow Shirt, 1928-1932

Sin

Sounds of spring

Wind and wave

Continue reading

cowboy coleridge, down by the river, kazimir malevich, live, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, song of the day, tea with tater, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, the river, tla, twt, Zazie