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Dear Zazie,  Hope your day is goin’ well.  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  I like where Mac Tag is goin’ with this one; the images of rain are soothin’ in this hot summer and one of my favorite subjects, dreamin’.  Are you alone, dreamin’ someone will come to you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Almanac

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

wanderer, your verse
is the trail and nothin’ more
you turn to look behind
you see where you have been
and you know where you should go
wanderer, this is the only way out

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

my mornin’ dream over me
as i rise, not ready to let you go
but the sunrise is comin’
and my day awaits

i am made better by these mornin’s
i marvel at the memories of you
and the promise of the sunrise

what was it,
that held us together
a thing that has no word

now, the long summer light
finally yieldin’ to clouds
and a shower
takes me back to the nights
we would listen to the rain
fallin’ on the metal roof
of the house we loved in

i close this day
hopin’ it will end
as it began
with a dream,
with you comin’ to me

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

George Catlin
George Catlin by William Fisk, 1849

 Today is the birthday of George Catlin (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; July 26, 1796 – December 23, 1872 Jersey City, New Jersey); painter, author, and traveler who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West.  Travelling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin was the first white man to depict Plains Indians in their native territory.

Catlin met Clara Bartlett Gregory in 1828 in her hometown of Albany, New York.  After their marriage, she accompanied him on one of his journeys west.

Many historians and descendants believe George Catlin had two families; his acknowledged family on the east coast of the United States, but also a family started with a Native American woman.

Gallery

Tchón-su-móns-ka, Sand Bar, Wife (épouse) of the Trader François Chardon

lithograph of Buffalo Harbor, 1825

Painting of Stu-mick-o-súcks (Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat), a Blood chief

Sha-có-pay, a Plains Ojibwe chief. Painted at Fort Union, 1832

The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowa

Painting of Wah-ro-née-sah (The Surrounder), a chief of the Otoe tribe, 1832

George Linen, Clara Bartlett Gregory Catlin, ca. 1840

 

• 

  Tipis

• 

  An Indian Ball-Play c. 1846-1850

• 

  Ball-play Dance 1834

• 

  Attacking the Grizzly Bear

• 

  Ah-yaw-ne-tak-oár-ron

• 

  The Cutting Scene, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony, 1832

• 

  Little Bear, Hunkpapa Brave, 1832

• 

  Wi-jún-jon, Going To and Returning From Washington

• 

  Buffalo Bull Grazing,1845

• 

  Lithograph of Lacrosse players

   

George Bernard Shaw
Shaw in 1911, by Alvin Langdon Coburn

Today is the birthday of George Bernard Shaw (Dublin 26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950 Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom ), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw; playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond.  He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923).  With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Quotes

The Philanderer (1893)

• It’s well to be off with the Old Woman before you’re on with the New.
  • Act II

• The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
  • Act II

• The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
  • Act IV

Man and Superman (1903)

• The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

• This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

• There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.
  • Statement by Mendoza, whom some have declared an Oscar Wilde-like figure; this line is apparently derived from one of Wilde’s in Act III of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892): In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

• There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

• The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

Getting Married (1908)

• There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
  • Preface

• Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
  • Preface

• When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
  • Preface
• Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.
  • Preface

Heartbreak House (1919)

• When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
  • Ellie Dunn, Act II

Back to Methuselah (1921)

• I hear you say “Why?” Always “Why?” You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I : In the Beginning, Act I

• Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• THE SERPENT: The voice in the garden is your own voice.
  ADAM: It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a part of it.
  EVE: The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that.
  ADAM [throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish]: Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word —
  THE SERPENT: Love. Love. Love.
  ADAM: That is too short a word for so long a thing.
  • The Serpent, Adam, and Eve, in Pt. I, Act I

 

Antonio Machado

Today is the birthday of Antonio Machado (Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz; Seville 26 July 1875 – 22 February 1939 Collioure, France); poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of ’98.

Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más; caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar. Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar.

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. Walking makes the road, and turning to look behind you see the path that you will never tread again. Wanderer, there is no road, only foam trails on the sea.

from “Proverbios y cantares” in Campos de Castilla, 1912

Aldous Huxley

Today is the birthday of Aldous Huxley (Aldous Leonard Huxley; Godalming, England 26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963 Lots Angeles); writer, novelist, philosopher, and poet.

Huxley married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, Oxfordshire, in 1919.  In 1955, Maria died of cancer.

In 1956, Huxley married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author as well as a violinist and psychotherapist.  She wrote This Timeless Moment, a biography of Huxley. Laura illuminated the story of their marriage through Mary Ann Braubach’s 2010 documentary, “Huxley on Huxley”.

He wrote the followin’ poem which I have always enjoyed and I hope you do as well.

Winter Dream

Oh wind-swept towers,
Oh endlessly blossoming trees,
White clouds and lucid eyes,
And pools in the rocks whose unplumbed blue is pregnant
With who knows what of subtlety
And magical curves and limbs—
White Anadyomene and her shallow breasts
Mother-of-pearled with light.

And oh the April, April of straight soft hair,
Falling smooth as the mountain water and brown;
The April of little leaves unblinded,
Of rosy nipples and innocence
And the blue languor of weary eyelids.

Across a huge gulf I fling my voice
And my desires together:
Across a huge gulf … on the other bank
Crouches April with her hair as smooth and straight and brown
As falling waters.
Oh brave curve upwards and outwards.
Oh despair of the downward tilting—
Despair still beautiful
As a great star one has watched all night
Wheeling down under the hills.
Silence widens and darkens;
Voice and desires have dropped out of sight.
I am all alone, dreaming she would come and kiss me.

Mac Tag

Song of the day – Kelly Andrew – “Winter’s Dream”

Youngling, thou canst not love so dear as I. – Shakespeare

Ever love . . . . ever the sobbing liquid of life… – Walt Whitman

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aldous huxley, all alone dreaming, Antonio machado, cowboy coleridge, george bernard shaw, George catlin, kelly andrew, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, poem of the day, shakespeare, song of the day, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, walt whitman, winter dream, winters dream, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Visit us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  What stirs your mortal frame?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

so i co-opted this
from the real Coleridge
see what you think…

all thoughts, all delights,
whatever stirs me,
all are but mirrors of you,
this i thrive on

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

when She came callin’…
from Ecclesiastes;

“For who knoweth what is good
for you in this life, all the days
of your vain life which you spendeth
as a shadow? for who can tell you
what shall be after you under the sun?”

“A good name is better
than precious ointment;
and the day of death
than the day of one’s birth.”

“It is better to go to the house of mourning,
than to the house of feasting:
for that is the end of all of us;
and the living will lay it to your heart.”

“Sorrow is better than laughter:
for by the sadness
of the countenance
the heart is made better.”

she wrote it down for me,
that day, chapter six, verse twelve
and chapter seven verse one through three
she was gonna write out chapter nine
verse eleven, but she did not have time
so she read it to me instead

she sat there next to me
in the bright, dry sunshine
slowly, my head came to rest
on her shoulder,
and the tears came too

nothin’ else was said
what is understood
need not be discussed
that night, we spoke
in movements, in touches
in motions and looks

i have not felt since that day,
the day life wrung the last of me
not that life has not tried since

that is how i tell it, anyway
maybe it was not life,
maybe it was the desert sun
that took it out of me

or maybe it is, that i accept
what comes after me in the sun

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today marks the anniversary of the death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  He was not lucky in love.  He married Sarah Fricker but the marriage proved unhappy.  He evidently had no great love; other than poetry and opium.  Here is an excerpt from his poem “Frost at Midnight”:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

And, just for you muse, here is his poem;

“Love”

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

Oft in my waking dreams do I
Live o’er again that happy hour,
When midway on the mount I lay,
Beside the ruined tower.

The moonshine, stealing o’er the scene
Had blended with the lights of eve;
And she was there, my hope, my joy,
My own dear Genevieve!

She leant against the armèd man,
The statue of the armèd knight;
She stood and listened to my lay,
Amid the lingering light.

Few sorrows hath she of her own,
My hope! my joy! my Genevieve!
She loves me best, whene’er I sing
The songs that make her grieve.

I played a soft and doleful air,
I sang an old and moving story—
An old rude song, that suited well
That ruin wild and hoary.

She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes and modest grace;
For well she know, I could not choose
But gaze upon her face.

I told her of the Knight that wore
Upon his shield a burning brand;
And that for ten long years he wooed
The Lady of the Land.

I told her how he pined: and ah!
The deep, the low, the pleading tone
With which I sang another’s love,
Interpreted my own.

She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes, and modest grace;
And she forgave me, that I gazed
Too fondly on her face!

But when I told the cruel scorn
That crazed that bold and lovely Knight,
And that he crossed the mountain-woods,
Nor rested day nor night;

That sometimes from the savage den,
And sometimes from the darksome shade,
And sometimes starting up at once
In green and sunny glade,—

There came and looked him in the face
An angel beautiful and bright;
And that he knew it was a Fiend,
This miserable Knight!

And that unknowing what he did,
He leaped amid a murderous band,
And saved from outrage worse than death
The Lady of the Land!

And how she wept, and clasped his knees;
And how she tended him in vain—
And ever strove to expiate
The scorn that crazed his brain;—

And that she nursed him in a cave;
And how his madness went away,
When on the yellow forest-leaves
A dying man he lay;—

His dying words—but when I reached
That tenderest strain of all the ditty,
My faultering voice and pausing harp
Disturbed her soul with pity!

All impulses of soul and sense
Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve;
The music and the doleful tale,
The rich and balmy eve;

And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
An undistinguishable throng,
And gentle wishes long subdued,
Subdued and cherished long!

She wept with pity and delight,
She blushed with love, and virgin-shame;
And like the murmur of a dream,
I heard her breathe my name.

Her bosom heaved—she stepped aside,
As conscious of my look she stepped—
The suddenly, with timorous eye
She fled to me and wept.

She half enclosed me with her arms,
She pressed me with a meek embrace;
And bending back her head, looked up,
And gazed upon my face.

’Twas partly love, and partly fear,
And partly ’twas a bashful art,
That I might rather feel, than see,
The swelling of her heart.

I calmed her fears, and she was calm,
And told her love with virgin pride;
And so I won my Genevieve,
My bright and beauteous Bride.

Thomas Eakins
Self portrait National Academy of Design, New York

Today is the birthday of Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (Philadelphia; July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916 Philadelphia); realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and teacher.  Widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history.

For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins chose as his subject the people of his hometown ofPhiladelphia.  He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy.  Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In addition, Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city.  These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion.  In the process he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight.  Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator.

Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. 

“She [the female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited… It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up & down the hills especially up. I hate affectation.“

The nature of Eakins sexuality and its impact on his art is a matter of intense scholarly debate.  An early romance with a Philadelphia girl, Emily Sartain, foundered after Eakins moved to Paris to study, and she accused him of immorality.  It is likely Eakins had told her of frequenting places where prostitutes assembled.  The son of Eakins physician also reported that Eakins had been “very loose sexually – went to France, where there are no morals, and the french morality suited him to a T”.

In 1884, Eakins married Susan Hannah Macdowell, the daughter of a Philadelphia engraver.  Two years earlier Eakins’ sister Margaret, who had acted as his secretary and personal servant, had died of typhoid.  It has been suggested that Eakins married to replace her.

Macdowell was 25 when Eakins met her at the Hazeltine Gallery where The Gross Clinic was being exhibited in 1875.  Unlike many, she was impressed by the controversial painting and she decided to study with him at the Academy, which she attended for 6 years, adopting a sober, realistic style similar to her teacher’s.

After their childless marriage, she only painted sporadically and spent most of her time supporting her husband’s career, entertaining guests and students, and faithfully backing him in his difficult times.

She and Eakins both shared a passion for photography, both as photographers and subjects, and employed it as a tool for their art.  She also posed nude for many of his photos and took images of him.  Both had separate studios in their home.

Gallery

Self portrait
National Academy of Design, New York

Max Schmitt in a single scull (1871), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Eakins, circa 1882

William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River, 1908. Brooklyn Museum

Study in Human Motion

The Gross Clinic, 1875, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Portrait of Ashbury W. Lee, oil on canvas, 1905. Reynolda House.

Miss Amelia Van Buren, ca. 1891, The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Wrestlers, 1899, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California.

The Swimming Hole, 1884-5, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

Portrait of Maud Cook (1895), Yale University Art Gallery

Thomas Eakins Carrying a Woman, 1885. Photograph, circle of Eakins.

Mac Tag

Song of the day – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – Symphony in A Minor Op. 8 (1896) I. Allegro Appassionato

And she is still there, busied with a dance

Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,

Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.

– W.B. Yeats

You would drink freely: but my love to ye Shall show itself more openly hereafter. – Shakespeare

I read some Shakespeare every year, Lear always. Cheers you up if you read that. – Ernest Hemingway

Reality is relative, depending on what lens you look through. – Sylvia Plath 

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samuel taylor coleridge, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, Thomas eakins

Dear Zazie,  So, howzit goin’ Z?  Hope all is well.  Hot and dry here.  We could sure use some rain.  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Oh and hey, another Z featured and quoted below!  Do you agree with the other Z?  Love first, live incidentally?  See ya’, Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“i ain’t askin’ nobody for nuthin’
if i cain’t git it on my own
if you don’t like the way i’m livin’
you just leave this long haired country boy alone”

you really should
divorce yourself of need
it will be your undoin’

but, i will admit
still the highest purpose
the reason for bein’

if you find it
take care of it
and hold on
till your knuckles turn white

if not
well, there you have it
move on to next best
reason for bein’
the search
for mirrors of you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a dream, a haunt,
a memory
been so long
been so long

funny how you cannot see
through the self-made confusion
and how the searchin’ brings no end
you should have gotten the word

and how did it all get so contorted
twists that cannot be explained
sooner or later, you gotta take it straight

the one thing i think i do, decent,
is write what i am feelin’
but often words fail
when it comes to missin’ you

it is a particular brew of perdition
that some must taste
again and again

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Love First, Live Incidentally

© Cowboy Coleridge mac tag copyright 2012 all rights reserved

Alexandre Dumas
in 1855

Today is the birthday of Alexandre Dumas (born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie; Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne; 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870 Puys (near Dieppe), Seine-Maritime), also known as Alexandre Dumas, père; writer.  One of the most widely read French authors, his works have been translated into nearly 100 languages.  Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later.  His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century for nearly 200 films.  Dumas’ last novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, unfinished at his death, was completed by a scholar and published in 2005, becoming a bestseller.  It was published in English in 2008 as The Last Cavalier.

On 1 February 1840, Dumas married actress Ida Ferrier (born Marguerite-Joséphine Ferrand) (1811–1859).  He had numerous liaisons with other women, in the tradition of Frenchmen of higher social class.  He was known to have several illegitimate children, including a boy named after him.  This son became a successful novelist and playwright and was known as Alexandre Dumas fils (son), while the elder Dumas became conventionally known in French as Alexandre Dumas père (father).  Among his affairs, in 1866 Dumas had one with Adah Isaacs Menken, an American actress then less than half his age and at the height of her career. 

Les Mohicans de Paris (The Mohicans of Paris) (1854 novel)

• Cherchez la femme, pardieu! cherchez la femme!»
  • Dumas, Alexandre (1871) (in French). Les Mohicans de Paris. I. Paris: Michel Lévy frères, éditeurs. p. 232. Retrieved on 2009-08-07. 

Les Mohicans de Paris (The Mohicans of Paris) (1864 play)

• Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires; aussitôt qu’on me fait un rapport, je dis: «Cherchez la femme!»
  • There is a woman in every case; as soon as they bring me a report, I say, ‘Look for the woman’.
    • Dumas, Alexandre (1889) (in French). Théâtre complet. XXIV. Paris: Michel Lévy frères, éditeurs. p. 103

Today is the birthday of Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta (Rome 24 July 1841 – 15 September 1920 Versailles); painter from the Madrazo family of artists who worked in the Realistic style, although his later work shows signs of Rococo and Japanese influence. He was known primarily for his genre paintings and portraits. His grandfather was José de Madrazo, his father was the portrait painter Federico de Madrazo and his brother was Ricardo de Madrazo.

He was a frequent exhibitor at the Paris Salon, won a major medal at the Exposition Universelle (1889) and was a regular at the salon of Madeleine Lemaire. The model for nearly all of the female figures in his genre paintings was Aline Masson, the daughter of the doorman at the Paris residence of the Marqués de Casa Riera [es].

After 1862, he lived in Paris for much of his life. In the late 1860s, he spent some time in Rome with his brother, working in the studios of Mariano Fortuny, who had married their sister Cecilia. During the Franco-Prussian War, he lived in Granada. His wife died during childbirth in 1874, the same year as his brother-in-law, Fortuny.

In 1894, he donated a collection of works by Francisco de Goya that he had acquired in 1869 to the Museo del Prado.  In 1914, he moved to Versailles, where he died six years later. His son, Federico de Madrazo y Ochoa (known as “Coco”) also became a notable painter.

Gallery

• 

  Portrait of Federico de Madrazo Painting, 1875

• 

  Fond Memories

• 

  After the Bath, c. 1895

  • 

    The Reluctant Mistress

  • 

    Reading, c. 1880-85

  • 

    Portrait of Aline Masson in a Mantilla, c. 1875

  • 

    Portrait of María Guerrero as Doña Inés. 1891

   

  • 

    A gypsy, 1872

  • 

    The Beautiful Bandurria Player, 1870

  • 

    Aline with mask

   

  • 

    Spring Beauty

  • 

    Confidences (The Morning Visit), c. 1870. Clark Art Institute

  • 

    Beautiful and singing

  • 

    Coming Out of Church

  • 

    The Music Lesson

  • 

    Antics of the model, c. 1885

  • 

    Girl on swing

  • 

    Portrait of Aline Masson Leaning on a Sofa

  • 

    Preparing for the Costume Ball

  • 

    María Hahn, wife of the painter, 1901

  • 

    Portrait Of A Lady In Pink Ribbons

  • 

    Woman with a Picnic Basket, c. 1890. Clark Art Institute

   

Today is the birthday of Alfons Maria Mucha (Ivančice, Margraviate of Moravia, Austrian Empire 24 July 1860 – 14 July 1939 Prague), often known in English and French as Alphonse Mucha; Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist, perhaps best known for his distinct style.  He produced many paintings, illustrations, advertisements, postcards, and designs.

Mucha married Maruška (Marie/Maria) Chytilová on 10 June 1906, in Prague.  The couple visited the U.S. from 1906 to 1910, during which time their daughter, Jaroslava, was born in New York City.

Gallery

in about 1906

The artist’s daughter Jaroslava, 1920s

 

F. Champenois Imprimeur-Éditeur, lithograph, 1897

 

• Decorative art
• 

  Biscuits LeFèvre-Utile

• 

  Bières de la Meuse

• 

  Byzantine Heads: Brunette

• 

  Job Cigarettes

• 

  Poetry

• 

  Zodiac

• 

  Summer

• 

  Spring, 1896

• 

  Summer, 1896

• 

  Autumn, 1896

• 

  Winter, 1896

• 

  The Arts, Painting

• 

  The Arts, Dance, 1898

• 

  Moët & Chandon Crémant Impérial, 1899

• 

  Joan of Arc, Maude Adams 1909

• Other
• 

  Study of a seated man, 1891

• 

  Illustration from Le Pater

• 

  Illustration from Le Pater

• 

  Madame Deschamps

• 

  Mucha’s The Slav Epic

• 

  Mucha’s The Slav Epic

• 

  Portrait of a woman

   

Zelda Fitzgerald
at age 17

Today is the birthday of Zelda Fitzgerald (née Sayre; Montgomery, Alabama; July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948 Asheville, North Carolina); socialite and novelist, and the wife and muse of American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose work she strongly influenced.

The Fitzgeralds were icons of the 1920s; she was dubbed by her husband “the first American Flapper”.  After the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the Fitzgeralds became celebrities and were seen as embodiments of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties: young, seemingly wealthy, beautiful, and energetic.  They were the center of attention at parties, where their drunken exploits became the stuff of legend.  The couple has been the subject of popular books, movies and scholarly attention.  Their love ended not well.  The marriage was plagued by wild drinking, infidelity and bitter recriminations.  After being diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was increasingly confined to specialist clinics, and the couple were living apart when Scott died suddenly in 1940.  Zelda died later in a fire at her hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.

But I think she was right; love first, live incidentally……

Today is the birthday of Wilhelm Gallhof (24 July 1878 in Iserlohn – June 1918); painter and sculptor. At the beginning of the 20th century he was one of the most important German painters of female nudes in the Impressionist and Jugendstil movements.

Gallery

The coral necklace

Today is the birthday of John D. MacDonald (John Dann MacDonald; Sharon, Pennsylvania; July 24, 1916 – December 28, 1986 Milwaukee, Wisconsin); American writer of novels and short stories.  MacDonald was a prolific author of crime and suspense novels, many of them set in his adopted home of Florida.  His best-known works include the popular and critically acclaimed Travis McGee series, and his novel The Executioners, which was filmed twice as Cape Fear in 1962 and again in 1991.  Travis McGee is one of my literary heroes.  Wish I had a Busted Flush moored somewhere.

Ever, Mac Tag

The song of the day is Nazareth – “Love Hurts” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pHNkOQCIzk

I am wary of a lot of things, such as … time clocks, mortgages, sermons, … pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. – John D MacDonald

I don’t want to live — I want to love first, and live incidentally. – Zelda Fitzgerald

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession. – Robert Graves

I thought of the perpetual desire of all lovers to talk of their love and how many lovers’ quarrels have come from it. – W.B. Yeats

Quiet – as when long bitterness breaks in tears… – Dag Hammarskjöld

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alexandre dumas, alphonse mucha, cowboy coleridge, dag hammarskjold, f scott fitzgerald, john d macdonald, love hurts, love letter, muse, nazareth, robert graves, tea with tater, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, travis mcgee, twt, wb yeats, Zazie, zelda fitzgerald

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

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

nice state of affairs
indulgin’ my dreams here

as if you bendin’ over me
and my blood begins to move

as if you and i doin’ anything
we used to do, or could do

do you understand now
i know i have only said it
in ’round about ways
but i can tell you
i believe it

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

meanwhile, everything
slips away, it all reels
as i try to rise up
i touch my chest
the hurt
how did it start
i try to remember
i cannot

a rhythm to it all
even the hardest part
has a find-able rhythm
which is why, i suppose,
i keep comin’ back

regret, like pity,
changes nothin’
the instinct to panic
slackens each time
helps if you avoid
lookin’ in the rearview

each time a little farther
(why should it matter)
each time a little harder
(why should it matter)
until that is how i like it

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

 

Today is the birthday of Peder Severin Krøyer (Stavanger, Norway 23 July 1851 – 21 November 1909 Skagen), known as P. S. Krøyer; painter.  One of the best known, beloved, and the most colorful of the Skagen Painters, a community of Danish and Nordic artists who lived, gathered or worked in Skagen, Denmark, especially during the final decades of the 19th century.  Krøyer was the unofficial leader of the group.

On a trip to Paris in 1888 he ran into Marie Martha Mathilde Triepcke, whom he had known in Copenhagen.  They fell in love and, after a whirlwind romance, married on 23 July 1889 at her parents’ home in Germany.  Marie Krøyer, who was also a painter, became associated with the Skagen community, and after their marriage was often featured in Krøyer’s paintings.  They were divorced in 1905 following a prolonged separation.

Gallery

Self portrait, 1897

 Portrait of Krøyer by Laurits Tuxen

 

Hip, Hip, Hurrah!, 1888

 

Summer Evening on the Skagen Southern Beach with Anna Ancher and Marie Krøyer, Krøyer, 1893

• 

  The Hirschsprung family, 1881

• 

  In the store when there is no fishing, 1882

• 

  Artists’ Luncheon at Skagen, 1883

• 

  Fishermen hauling nets, North Beach, Skagen, 1883

• 

  Summer Day on Skagen’s Southern Beach 1884

• 

  Committee for the French Art Exhibition in Copenhagen 1888, 1888

• 

  Osteria in Ravello, 1890

• 

  Loggia in Ravello, 1890

• 

  Marie Krøyer, 1891

• 

  Summer Evening at Skagen. The Artist’s Wife and Dog by the Shore, 1892

• 

  A breakfast. The artist, his wife and the writer Otto Benzon, 1893

• 

  Roses, 1893

• 

  From the Bourse of Copenhagen, 1895

• 

  The Benzon daughters, 1897

• 

  Summer Evening at Skagen Beach – The Artist and his Wife, 1899

• 

  Midsummer Eve Bonfire on Skagen Beach, 1906

Mac Tag

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peder severin kroyer, the lovers almanac

Dear Zazie,  Here is todays’ Lover’s Chronicle from Mac Tag.  What are your pained memories?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Je suis toujours…

the clock tick, tick, ticks
je reste avec vous

get this dream unstuck
free from the prattle
of reality
forget about time
words fall,
wave upon wave,
through the variations

except for you
nothin’ matters

sweet-scented
eloquence
sleeps a deep poetry

the maudlin painted night
dreamin’ of hurried,
sad rendevous

so sinks the evenin’
thus, into mirrors
and now it is so
alone
with the lack thereof

the potential,
of all that could have been,
minglin’ with the regrets
elaborate on the prairies
of the inner silence

now without you
between as is
and never was

is there ever
any comin’ back

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Another for the lack thereof and the Dark Muse.  This one is also dedicated to French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker, Jean Cocteau.  Without you unforgiven, without lucidity and left with……

Pained Memories

Je suis toujours malade
et sans courage
I am still sick,
without courage

A meetin’ with despair
The clock, sand and water
Epitaph: Je reste avec vous
I am strugglin’ to stay with you

Get this dream unstuck now
Free from the prattle
of reality
Forget about
the tickin’ clock
The explosive words fall,
vengefully eternal,
wave upon wave,
through the variations,
through sands of time

Except for you
nothin’ matters

Sweet-scented destruction
Eloquence of despair
Empty sail, drift off course
Words nick, and there
and there
and there
and there
sleeps a deep poetry

The maudlin painted night
Pained memories
Wave on wave of chills
Dreamin’ in a heap of dreary
hurried, sad rendevous
Adorned with a chronic malaise
Adrift in a cold midnight sun
Slowly founderin’, light fadin’

And so sinks the evenin’
thus, into mirrors of sadness
And now it is so
Thin phenomena alone
in front of the memory pained
night, left but with the lack thereof

An obstinate miner
of the exploited void
The potential,
of all that could have been,
in the rough, glitters there
minglin’ with the regrets

Princess of the dark sleep
listen to my protracted plea,
deliver me from the mountain
where upon this spell, this way came

By the pen one with the other
wedded on the pages
Sobs of anguish
Betray you fair stanzas
to run and awaken elsewhere
Plot no admonition
Simply deaf like you and bereft
Blind like you, endless time
Elaborate in the prairies
of the inner silence

Born yet unborn
The words of the dark birth
and the poem of the words
and the stanza
of the poem and
the group of the stanza
and the words of the group
and the letters
of the words and
the last loop of letters

Now without you
between as is and never was
Time gives a shake
and I walk to the other side
unforgiven
without lucidity

© Copyright 2013 mac tag Cowboy Coleridge All rights reserved

 

Today is the birthday of Edward Hopper (Upper Nyack, New York; July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967 Manhattan); realist painter and printmaker.  While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.  Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.

He re-encountered his future wife Josephine Nivison, an artist and former student of Robert Henri, during a summer painting trip in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  They were opposites: she was short, open, gregarious, sociable, and liberal, while he was tall, secretive, shy, quiet, introspective, and conservative.  They married a year later.  She remarked famously, “Sometimes talking to Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn’t thump when it hits bottom.”  She subordinated her career to his and shared his reclusive life style.  The rest of their lives revolved around their spare walk-up apartment in the city and their summers in South Truro on Cape Cod.  She managed his career and his interviews, was his primary model, and was his life companion.

Hopper’s The House by the Railroad inspired the look of the Bates house in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho. The painting is a fanciful portrait of the Second Empire Victorian home at 18 Conger Avenue in Haverstraw, New York.

Gallery

Self-Portrait, 1906

 

New York Interior, c. 1921 whitney museum

Night on the El Train (1918) by Edward Hopper

 

Nighthawks (1942)

Office in a Small City

The House by the Railroad

 

Stephen Vincent Benét
Yale College B.A., 1919

Today is the birthday of Stephen Vincent Benét (Bethlehem, Pennsyvania; July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943 New York City); author, poet, short story writer, and novelist.  Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body (1928), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and “By the Waters of Babylon” (1937).

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

• “American Names” (1931)

The Lover in Hell

• Eternally the choking steam goes up
  From the black pools of seething oil…

• For ever… well… it droops the mouth. Till I
  Look up.
  There’s one blue patch no smoke dares touch.
  Sky, clear, ineffable, alive with light,
  Always the same…
  Before, I never knew
  Rest and green peace.

• She is all peace, all quiet,
  All passionate desires, the eloquent thunder
  Of new, glad suns, shouting aloud for joy,
  Over fresh worlds and clean, trampling the air
  Like stooping hawks, to the long wind of horns,
  Flung from the bastions of Eternity…
  And she is the low lake, drowsy and gentle,
  And good words spoken from the tongues of friends,
  And calmness in the evening, and deep thoughts,
  Falling like dreams from the stars’ solemn mouths.
  All these.

 

The Song of the Day is “Painted from Memory” written by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello and performed by Costello.  We do not own the rights to this song.  All rights reserved by the rightful owners.  No copyright infringement intended.

 

Mac Tag

Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge

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edward hopper, stephen vincent benet, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,  Here is Mac Tag‘s Lover’s Chronicle to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Rhett

The Lover’s Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

ready for repentance
is that not what this is
all about

and regrets,
well sure,
they will be there
for now though,
they are at rest

what of redemption
more like, a second act
gotta get right
what time is left

the only constant
the familiar refrain,
you remain, the only
worth all grantin’
© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Lovis Corinth (born Franz Heinrich Louis; Tapiau, in Prussia; 21 July 1858 – 17 July 1925 Zandvoort, Netherlands); artist and writer whose mature work as a painter and printmaker realized a synthesis of impressionism and expressionism.

Self-portrait with Skeleton, 1896, oil on canvas, 66 x 86 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus

The Artist and His Family, 1909, oil on canvas, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover

Morning Sunshine, 1910, Hessian State Museum, Darmstadt

 Portrait Ernst Oppler, Neue Galerie Kassel

Today is the birthday of Carlos Schwabe (Altona, Holstein July 21, 1866 – 22 January 1926 Avon, Seine-et-Marne); Symbolist painter and printmaker.

After studying art in Geneva, he relocated to Paris where he worked as a wallpaper designer, and he became acquainted with Symbolist artists, musicians and writers. In 1892, he was one of the painters of the famous Salon de la Rose + Croix at the Galerie Durand-Ruel. His poster for the first Salon is an important symbolic work of the idealist new art. He exhibited at the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts, at the Salon d’automne and was present at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (Gold Medal), but also in Munich, Zürich, Vienna, and Brussels. His paintings typically featured mythological and allegorical themes with a personal and idealist vision and a social interest. His important work La Vague (The Wave), and its preparatory drawings are a testimony of the engagement of the artist during the “Affaire dreyfus”. He illustrated the novel Le rêve (1892) by Émile Zola, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1900), Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), and Albert Samain’s Jardin de l’infante (1908), but also texts by Haraucourt, Mallarmé, Blondel, Mendès, Lamennais etc. The most important works by Schwabe belongs to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Bruxelles and in private collections. Schwabe received the French Légion of Honor in 1902.

Gallery

Self portrait, circa 1900

• 

  La douleur, 1893

• 

  Cloches du soir (Evening bells, 1895)

• 

  Death and the Gravedigger, 1895

• 

  Les Fleurs du mal, 1900

• 

  l’Ame du vin, 1900

• 

  Spleen et Idéal, 1907

• 

  Lotte, the artist’s daughter, 1908

   

Hart Crane
in 1930 as photographed by Walker Evans

Today is the birthday of Hart Crane (born Harold Hart Crane; Garrettsville, Ohio; July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932 At sea, off the Florida coast); poet.  Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope.  In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot’s work.  In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has been hailed by playwrights, poets, and literary critics alike as being one of the most influential poets of his generation.

The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.

From “Repose of Rivers”
from White Buildings (1926)

• His thoughts, delivered to me
  From the white coverlet and pillow,
  I see now, were inheritances—
  Delicate riders of the storm.
  • Praise for an Urn (l. 5-8). In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair (1988)
• There are no stars to-night
  But those of memory.
  Yet how much room for memory there is
  In the loose girdle of soft rain.
  • My Grandmother’s Love Letters (l. 1-4). In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair (1988)

• And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
  As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
  Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,
  Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
  • The Bridge. In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair (1988)

• O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
  (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
  Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
  Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,
  • To Brooklyn Bridge, Stanza 8; from The Bridge

• O Sleepless as the river under thee,
  Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
  Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
  And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
  • To Brooklyn Bridge, Stanza 11; from The Bridge

Ernest Hemingway
working at his book For Whom the Bell Tolls at Sun Valley, Idaho in December 1939

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway (Ernest Miller Hemingway; Oak Park, Illinois; July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961 Ketchum, Idaho); novelist, short story writer, and journalist.  His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations.  Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.  He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works.  Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously.  Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

After high school, he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers.  In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home.  His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives.  The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s “Lost Generation” expatriate community.  He published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926.  After his 1927 divorce from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War where he had been a journalist, and after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).  Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they separated when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II.  He was present at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.

Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in two successive plane crashes that left him in pain or ill health for much of his remaining life.  Hemingway maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida (1930s) and Cuba (1940s and 1950s), and in 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.  Perhaps my favorite writer.  During the month of July, every year, I re-read his short stories.

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

• ‘Listen Jake… don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you are not taking advantage of it?’
  • Robert Cohn to Jake Barnes, in Book 1, Ch. 2

• A bottle of wine was good company.

• All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.

• This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.
  • Count Mippipopolous, in Book 1, Ch. 7

• You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.
  • Bill Gorton to Jake Barnes, in Book 2, Ch. 12

• ‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked.
  ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’
  • Book 2, Ch. 13
  • Mike’s response is often misquoted as “It occurs first very slowly, then all at once.”

• ‘You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.’
  ‘Yes.’
  ‘It’s sort of what we have instead of God.’
  • Lady Brett Ashley to Jake Barnes, in Book 3, Ch. 19

• ‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’
  Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’
  • Book 3, Ch. 19 (the last lines of the novel)

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

The title of this work comes from “Meditation XVII” by John Donne

• I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen.
  • Ch. 13

• What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria.
  • Ch. 13

• ‘But are there not many Fascists in your country?’
  ‘There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes’.
  • Ch. 16

• He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.
  • Ch. 30

• If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
  • Ch 43

• There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.
  • Ch 43

• For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.
  • Ch. 13

• If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, “Impossible,” when orders came?

• Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It’s been that way all this year. It’s been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

• That tomorrow should come and that I should be there.

Today is the birthday of Russell Lee (Ottawa, Illinois; July 21, 1903 – August 28, 1986 Austin); photographer and photojournalist, best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). His technically excellent images documented the ethnography of various American classes and cultures.

Gallery

c. 1942

• 

  Conversation at the General Store, near Jeanerette, Louisiana, 1938

• 

  Cajun fiddler, Crowley, Louisiana, 1938

• 

  Hot orchestra performs specialty number, Crowley, LA

• 

  Resting farmer, Crowley, LA

• 

  Shop window

• 

  Segregated facilities, Oklahoma City, OK, 1939

• 

  Drawing water from a hand pump, Oklahoma City

• 

  Old man born in slavery displays the horn formerly used to call slaves, Texas

• 

  Llano de San Juan church, New Mexico, 1940

• 

  Serving food in Pie Town

• 

  Quilt, Pie Town, New Mexico

• 

  Shasta Dam under construction, 1942

• 

  Montana shepherd

• 

  U.S. Airman

• 

  Japanese American internment, 1942

• 

  Snake handling in a Kentucky church, 1946

Mac Tag

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carlos schwabe, ernest hemingway, hart crane, lovis corinth, russell lee, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,  Howzit goin’?  Same here.  Git some early porch time in before the day heats up.  Tend to the chores.  Maybe go down to the swimmin’ hole.  Cook up somethin’ good.  Drink some mezcal.  Do some readin’ and writin’.  The life of a cowboy poet.  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Well, the last line, “For he makes a fine end who dies loving well.”, certainly makes me pause to reflect.  What do you think?  And, I love the song of the day; even if, even if I am no good at forgiveness!  Be good, Rhett

The Lover’s Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“And you,
how do you survive?”
i take pleasure
in great beauty

now in the twilight
this is enough
for it must be
this vision
this pursuit
these words for you

this can be counted on
and not taken away

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“Have you known
unrequited love?”
oh yes, several
one might say
it is my speciality
it is perhaps
the best of all
the loves for me

one could argue
that my entire
output of verse
is an “Il Canzoniere”
for the Laura’s
i have known

in my youth
i struggled constantly
with the notion that the one
was out there waitin’ for me

i would still be strugglin’
had not repeated heartbreak,
bitter but salutary for me,
extinguished the coolin’ flames

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Petrarch

Today is the birthday of Francesco Petrarca (Arezzo; July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374 Arquà), commonly anglicized as Petrarch; Italian scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists.  Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance.  Petrarch is often considered the founder of Humanism.  In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch’s works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio, and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri.  Petrarch would be later endorsed as a model for Italian style by the Accademia della Crusca.  Petrarch’s sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry.  He is also known for being the first to develop the concept of the “Dark Ages.”

On 6 April 1327, after Petrarch gave up his vocation as a priest, the sight of a woman called “Laura” in the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the Rime sparse (“Scattered rhymes”).  Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch’s style named this collection of 366 poems Il Canzoniere (“Song Book”).  Laura may have been Laura de Noves, the wife of Count Hugues de Sade (an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade).  There is little definite information in Petrarch’s work concerning Laura, except that she is lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing.  Laura and Petrarch had little or no personal contact.  According to his “Secretum”, she refused him because she was already married.  He channeled his feelings into love poems that were exclamatory rather than persuasive, and wrote prose that showed his contempt for men who pursue women.  Upon her death in 1348, the poet found that his grief was as difficult to live with as was his former despair.  Later in his “Letter to Posterity”, Petrarch wrote: “In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair – my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did”.

Laura

Sonnet 227

Love, who lives and reigns in my thought and keeps his principal seat in my heart, comes like an armed warrior into my forehead, there places himself and there sets up his banner. She who teaches me to love and to suffer and who wishes that reason, modesty and reverence should restrain my great desire and burning hope, thrusts aside and disdains our ardour. Wherefore Love in terror flies to my heart, abandoning all his enterprise, and laments and trembles; there he hides himself and no more appears without. What can I do, when my lord is afraid, except stay with him until the last hour? For he makes a fine end who dies loving well.

Today is the birthday of Max Liebermann (Berlin 20 July 1847 – 8 February 1935 Berlin); painter and printmaker, and one of the leading proponents of Impressionism in Germany.  He was married in 1884 to Martha Marckwald (1857–1943).

 Gallery

in 1904

Jesus in the Temple (detail), 1879.

Flachsscheuer in Laren

Im Schwimmbad, late 1870s, Dallas Museum of Art

 Portrait of Max Liebermann, by his German contemporary Fritz von Uhde.

 

 Martha Liebermann by Anders Zorn, 1896

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  The Studio of the artist, 1902

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  Two Riders on the Beach, 1901

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  Riding Donkey at the Seashore, 1900

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  Restaurant Terrace in Nienstedten, 1902

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  Boys Bathing, 1898

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  Allée in Overveen, Netherlands, 1895

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  Portrait of President von Hindenburg (1927)

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  Die Rasenbleiche

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  Sampson and Delila, 1902

For the song of the day, Don Henley – “The Heart of the Matter”

Always,

Mac Tag

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

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

here again
to choose you

only one way
to close these thoughts
and the path that leads them
where they must go

perhaps
some sort of madness,
but is there not
some reason as well

whatever it is that pulls,
past the ordinariness
even for a moment,
it is enough

listen still

© copyright 2018 mag tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

on the prairie
at night alone
stars comin’ on
thinkin’ the thoughts
that interweave
the possibilities
and choices
that await

Laura de Noves

Today, a day in history story of unrequited love, my favorite kind.  On this day in 1374, scholar, poet, humanist, “The Father of Humanism”, “The Father of the Renaissance”, Petrarch died at his home in Arquà Petrarca, Veneto, Italy one day before his 70th birthday.  Born Francesco Petrarca on 20 July 1304 in Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy.  He rediscovered many Ancient Greek and Roman writers and his belief that there was no real conflict between Classical and Christian thought anticipated the Renaissance spirit.  He did not see a conflict between realizing humanity’s potential and having religious faith.  Petrarch is perhaps best known for his Il Canzoniere (Song Book) a collection of  366 poems which address his lifelong unrequited love for a mysterious woman named Laura.  In many of these he developed and perfected the sonnet form, and the “Petrarchan sonnet” still bears his name.  Apparently, on 6 April 1327, Good Friday, the sight of a woman called “Laura” in the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion.  Laura may have been Laura de Noves, the wife of Count Hugues de Sade (an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade).  According to his “Secretum”, she refused him for the very proper reason that she was already married to another man.  Petrarch channeled his feelings into love poems.  Upon her death in 1348, he found that his grief was as difficult to live with as was his former unrequited longing.  Later in his “Letter to Posterity”, Petrarch wrote: “In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair – my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames.  I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.”  The Romantic composer Franz Liszt set three of Petrarch’s Sonnets (47, 104, and 123) to music for voice, Tre sonetti del Petrarca, which he later would transcribe for solo piano for inclusion in the suite Années de Pèlerinage.

Today is the birthday of Edgar Degas (born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, Paris; 19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917 Paris); artist of paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings.  He is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers.  He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, although he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist.  His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation.  At the beginning of his career, Degas wanted to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classic art.  In his early thirties, he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life.

He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris.

Gallery

Self-portrait (Degas au porte-fusain), 1855

Degas c. 1850s

 

A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873

 

The Dance Class (La Classe de Danse), 1873–1876, oil on canvas

L’Absinthe, 1876, oil on canvas

 

Place de la Concorde, 1875, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

 

Musicians in the Orchestra, 1872, oil on canvas

 

 At the Races, 1877–1880, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

 

La Toilette (Woman Combing Her Hair), c. 1884–1886, pastel on paper, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Self-portrait (photograph), c. 1895

 

 Dancers, 1900, Princeton University Art Museum

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  Achille De Gas in the Uniform of a Cadet, 1856/57, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

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  The Bellelli Family, 1858–1867, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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  Young Spartans Exercising, c. 1860–62, National Gallery, London

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  Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers, 1865, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

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  The Amateur, 1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

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  Édouard Manet and Mme. Manet, 1868–1869, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan

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  Dance Class, 1871, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

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  Ballet Rehearsal, 1873, The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

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  Rehearsal on Stage, 1874, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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  Portrait of Miss Cassatt, Seated, Holding Cards, 1876–1878

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  At the Café-Concert: The Song of the Dog, 1875–1877

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  Fin d’Arabesque, with ballerina Rosita Mauri, 1877, Musée d’Orsay.

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  The Singer with the Glove, 1878, The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

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  Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879, The National Gallery, London

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  Dancer with a Bouquet of Flowers (Star of the Ballet) (with also ballerina Rosita Mauri), 1878

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  Stage Rehearsal, 1878–1879, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

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  Woman in Street Clothes, Portrait of Ellen Andrée, 1879, pastel on paper

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  Waiting, pastel on paper, 1880-82.

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  Before the Race, 1882–84, oil on panel, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

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  The Millinery Shop, 1885, The Art Institute of Chicago

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  Dancers at The Bar, 1888, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

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  Woman in the Bath, 1886, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut

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  The Tub, 1886, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

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  The Bath: Woman Supporting her Back, c. 1887, pastel on paper, Honolulu Museum of Art

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  Kneeling Woman, 1884, Pushkin Museum, Moscow

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  Three Dancers in Yellow Skirts, circa 1891, oil on canvas, The Detroit Institute of Arts

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  After the Bath, Woman Drying her Nape, pastel on paper, 1898, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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  After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself, c. 1884–1886, reworked between 1890 and 1900, pastel on wove paper, 40.5 x 32 cm, Musée Malraux, Le Havre

Of course the song of the day is Liszt’s “Tre sonetti di Petrarca”, I´vidi in terra.  Luciano Pavarotti, tenor.  John Wustman, piano.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU3E5FjtZh8

All for you muse,

Mac Tag

Only Death can close from my thoughts

the loving path that leads them

to the sweet doorway of their blessing.

– Petrarch

There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness. ~ Petrarch

And here choose i; joy be the consequence! – Shakespeare

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough. – Jeanette Winterson

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Does the softness come to you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the only “ship”
i have ever been
worth a damn at
is friendship…

remembrance
these years later
of the softness
that came from your touch

to say that i was changed
is a gross understatement

but of course
it was not enough

to say that i miss that touch,
there are no words

to say that it lingers still,
is that not obvious

but it was not fair
to expect that touch,
or you to be enough

there were too many
old tragedies
that had to be
set aside

only time
and a lot of verse
could do that

and now that they have been
only one question remains,
is it too late

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

And A Softness Came

© Cowboy Coleridge mac tag copyright 2012 all rights reserved

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Self-portrait in a turban, 1698, Perpignan, Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud.

Today is the birthday of Hyacinthe Rigaud (born Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra in Perpignan,1659 – 29 December 1743 Paris); baroque painter of Catalan origin whose career was based in Paris.

Gallery

Rigaud self portrait

Louis de France, duc de Bourgogne (1682-1712)

 

 “Gaspard de Gueidan playing the musette” (Gaspard de Gueidan en joueur de musette, 1738), Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence.

 

Christ expiant sur la Croix, 1695

 

Louis XIV King of France and Navarre (1701)

Jean-Baptiste Monginot

 

 Mary Magdalen

The Lafitte family

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  Robert de Cotte (1656-1735)

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  Portrait of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1674–1723)

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  Louis de France, Dauphin (1661-1711), le Grand Dauphin

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  Gian Francesco II Brignole Sale, Doge of Genoa

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  Portrait of Charles Le Brun

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  Frederick IV of Denmark as crown-prince

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  Portrait de Louis XV, (1727–1729), Versailles

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  Augustus III of Poland

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  La Menasseuse

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  Portrait of Suzanne de Bourbers de Bernâtre

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  Charles de Saint-Albin, Archbishop of Cambrai

   

William Makepeace Thackeray
1855 daguerreotype of William Makepeace Thackeray by Jesse Harrison Whitehurst (1819–1875)

Today is the birthday of William Makepeace Thackeray ( Calcutta, British, India 18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863 London); novelist and author. He is known for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.

Thackeray portrayed by Eyre Crowe, 1845

Thackeray married, on 20 August 1836, Isabella Gethin Shawe (1816–1894), second daughter of Isabella Creagh Shawe and Matthew Shawe, a colonel who had died after distinguished service, primarily in India. The Thackerays had three children, all girls: Anne Isabella (1837–1919), Jane (who died at eight months old) and Harriet Marian (1840–1875), who married Sir Leslie Stephen, editor, biographer and philosopher.

Tragedy struck in Thackeray’s personal life as his wife, Isabella, succumbed to depression after the birth of their third child, in 1840. Finding that he could get no work done at home, he spent more and more time away until September 1840, when he realised how grave his wife’s condition was. Struck by guilt, he set out with his wife to Ireland. During the crossing she threw herself from a water-closet into the sea, but she was pulled from the waters. They fled back home after a four-week battle with her mother. From November 1840 to February 1842 Isabella was in and out of professional care, as her condition waxed and waned.

Caricature of Thackeray by Thackeray

She eventually deteriorated into a permanent state of detachment from reality. Thackeray desperately sought cures for her, but nothing worked, and she ended up in two different asylums in or near Paris until 1845, after which Thackeray took her back to England, where he installed her with a Mrs Bakewell at Camberwell. Isabella outlived her husband by 30 years, in the end being cared for by a family named Thompson in Leigh-on-Sea at Southend until her death in 1894. After his wife’s illness Thackeray became a de facto widower, never establishing another permanent relationship. He did pursue other women, however, in particular Mrs Jane Brookfield and Sally Baxter. In 1851 Mr Brookfield barred Thackeray from further visits to or correspondence with Jane. Baxter, an American twenty years Thackeray’s junior whom he met during a lecture tour in New York City in 1852, married another man in 1855.

Thackeray’s grave at Kensal Green Cemetery, London, photographed in 2014

Thackeray’s health worsened during the 1850s and he was plagued by a recurring stricture of the urethra that laid him up for days at a time. He also felt that he had lost much of his creative impetus. He worsened matters by excessive eating and drinking, and avoiding exercise, though he enjoyed riding his horse. He has been described as “the greatest literary glutton who ever lived”. His main activity apart from writing was “guttling and gorging”. He could not break his addiction to spicy peppers, further ruining his digestion. On 23 December 1863, after returning from dining out and before dressing for bed, he suffered a stroke. He was found dead in his bed the following morning. His death at the age of fifty-two was entirely unexpected, and shocked his family, his friends and the reading public. An estimated 7,000 people attended his funeral at Kensington Gardens. He was buried on 29 December at Kensal Green Cemetery, and a memorial bust sculpted by Marochetti can be found in Westminster Abbey.

The History of Pendennis (1848-1850)

• Yet round about the spot
  Ofttimes I hover;
  And near the sacred gate
  With longing eyes I wait,
  Expectant of her.
  • Pendennis: At the Church Gate, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all. Some of us can’t: and are proud of our impotence, too.
  • Ch. 6.

• Yes, I am a fatal man, Madame Fribsbi. To inspire hopeless passion is my destiny.
  • Ch. 23.

• Remember, it’s as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.
  • Ch. 28.

• As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.
  • Ch. 40.

Mac Tag

The song of the day is from Bobby Fuller who died on this day in 1966 – “Love’s Made a Fool of You” –

I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy.  Sylvia Plath

…And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone. – W.B. Yeats

When at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter. – Sylvia Plath

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And a softness came, bobby fuller, cowboy coleridge, hyacinthe rigaud, love letter, love poem, love song, loves made a fool of you, muse, poem of the day, song of the day, sylvia plath, tea with tater, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, twt, wb yeats, William Makepeace Thackeray