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Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

another of uncertain origin
for the one not found
“Well, at that point”
oh yes, that was pre-you
“I thought you were going
to say, it was about a girl”
they are all about a girl
from the one not found,
to friends and at last,
of, for and about you
the one that fills
every need

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

round and round on this one
not how i saw things playin’ out

Jimmy sang about rollin’ with the punches
and Jerry Jeff about just lettin’ it roll
either works as for how and why

you were gonna ask that, right
that is the best i can do
when someone knows
absolutely
what they want
and how to get it

well, there you have it

© copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

never anything
more important

wiser than
any experience,
those moments
with you

normal
has left the buildin’
and ordinary

those things
have no meanin’
no place
ever

not since
this vision
this inspiration

of you

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a dream of which
this can be asked

cuttin’ up dead,
felled trees
in our forest
then draggin’ ’em
to the burn pile

that night,
together
watchin’ the flames
and sparks dance
in the darkness

what we made
by the fire
in the forest,
then
the fire
in the forest

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the one who never was
wherefore art thou
ha, no need for that

just stay right here
focus on creatin’
this is the one

anything else
would be mere distraction
no point in bein’ beatin’
further about the head

not meant to be
is not meant to be

of you, yes you
and stayin’ that way

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

no longer upon work
or the Appaloosa,
does his talk seem to run,
or anything recent,
just her

she flowin’ly merges
with whatever scene
he is inventin’ or livin’ again,
as he wanders unendin’ly
in the world he dreams in

© copyright 2016 Mac Tag all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Giacomo Casanova (Giacomo Girolamo Casanova; Venice 2 April 1725 – 4 June 1798 Dux, Bohemia, Holy Roman Empire (Czech Republic)), an Italian adventurer and author.  His autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century.  He has become so famous for his often complicated and elaborate affairs with women that his name is now synonymous with “womanizer”.

For Casanova, as well as his contemporary sybarites of the upper class, love and sex tended to be casual and not endowed with the seriousness characteristic of the Romanticism of the 19th century. Flirtations, bedroom games, and short-term liaisons were common among nobles who married for social connections rather than love.

Although multi-faceted and complex, Casanova’s personality, as he described it, was dominated by his sensual urges: “Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I never found any occupation more important. Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite of mine, I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.” He noted that he sometimes used “assurance caps” to prevent impregnating his mistresses.

Casanova’s ideal liaison had elements beyond sex, including complicated plots, heroes and villains, and gallant outcomes. In a pattern he often repeated, he would discover an attractive woman in trouble with a brutish or jealous lover (Act I); he would ameliorate her difficulty (Act II); she would show her gratitude; he would seduce her; a short exciting affair would ensue (Act III); feeling a loss of ardor or boredom setting in, he would plead his unworthiness and arrange for her marriage or pairing with a worthy man, then exit the scene (Act IV). As William Bolitho points out in Twelve Against the Gods, the secret of Casanova’s success with women “had nothing more esoteric in it than [offering] what every woman who respects herself must demand: all that he had, all that he was, with (to set off the lack of legality) the dazzling attraction of the lump sum over what is more regularly doled out in a lifetime of installments.”

Casanova advises, “There is no honest woman with an uncorrupted heart whom a man is not sure of conquering by dint of gratitude. It is one of the surest and shortest means.” For him, attentiveness and small favors should be employed to soften a woman’s heart, but “a man who makes known his love by words is a fool“. Verbal communication is essential—”without speech, the pleasure of love is diminished by at least two-thirds“—but words of love must be implied, not boldly proclaimed.

Mutual consent is important, according to Casanova, but he avoided easy conquests or overly difficult situations as not suitable for his purposes. He strove to be the ideal escort in the first act—witty, charming, confidential, helpful—before moving into the bedroom in the third act. Casanova claims not to be predatory (“my guiding principle has been never to direct my attack against novices or those whose prejudices were likely to prove an obstacle“); however, his conquests did tend to be insecure or emotionally exposed women.

Casanova valued intelligence in a woman: “After all, a beautiful woman without a mind of her own leaves her lover with no resource after he had physically enjoyed her charms.”

Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life) is his memoir and autobiography. A previous, bowdlerized version was originally known in English as The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova (from the French Mémoires de Jacques Casanova) until the original version was published in 1960.

From 1838 to 1960, all the editions of the memoirs were derived from the bowdlerized editions produced in German and French in the early nineteenth century. Although Casanova was Venetian, the book is written in French, which was the dominant language in the upper class at the time. The book covers Casanova’s life only through 1774, although the full title of the book is Histoire de ma vie jusqu’à l’an 1797 (History of my Life until the year 1797).

Today is the birthday of William Holman Hunt (Cheapside 2 April 1827 – 7 September 1910 Kensington), an English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

His paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, vivid colour, and elaborate symbolism. These features were influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, according to whom the world itself should be read as a system of visual signs. For Hunt it was the duty of the artist to reveal the correspondence between sign and fact. Of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt remained most true to their ideals throughout his career. He was always keen to maximise the popular appeal and public visibility of his works.

Hunt married twice. After a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller, he married Fanny Waugh, who later modelled for the figure of Isabella. When she died in childbirth in Italy, he sculpted her tomb at Fiesole, having it brought down to the English Cemetery in Florence, beside the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He had a close connection with St. Mark’s Church in Florence, and paid for the communion chalice inscribed in memory of his wife. His second wife, Edith, was Fanny’s sister. At the time it was illegal in Great Britain to marry one’s deceased wife’s sister, so Hunt travelled abroad to marry her. This led to conflict with other family members, notably his former Pre-Raphaelite colleague Thomas Woolner, who had once been in love with Fanny and had married Alice, the third sister of Fanny and Edith.

Hunt died on 7 September 1910 and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral in London, England.

Gallery

Max Ernst
1920, Punching Ball ou l’Immortalité de Buonarroti, photomontage, gouache, ink on photograph (self-portrait)

Today is the birthday of Max Ernst (Brühl, German Empire 2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976 Paris); painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism.

In 1918 he married art history student Luise Straus, whom he had met in 1914. Ernst’s marriage to Luise was short-lived. In 1921 he met Paul Éluard, who became a close lifelong friend. Éluard bought two of Ernst’s paintings (Celebes and Oedipus Rex) and selected six collages to illustrate his poetry collection Répétitions. A year later the two collaborated on Les malheurs des immortels, and then with André Breton, whom Ernst met in 1921, on the magazine Littérature. In 1922, unable to secure the necessary papers, Ernst entered France illegally and settled into a ménage à trois with Éluard and his wife Gala in Paris suburb Saint-Brice, leaving behind his wife and son.

In 1924 Éluard left, first for Monaco, and then for Saigon, Vietnam. He soon asked his wife and Ernst to join him. After a brief time together in Saigon, the trio decided that Gala would remain with Paul. The Éluards returned to Eaubonne in early September, while Ernst followed them some months later. He returned to Paris in late 1924 and established a studio at 22, rue Tourlaque.

In 1927 Ernst married Marie-Berthe Aurenche, and it is thought his relationship with her may have inspired the erotic subject matter of The Kiss and other works of that year. Ernst appeared in the 1930 film L’Âge d’Or, directed by self-identifying Surrealist Luis Buñuel. In 1938, the American heiress and artistic patron Peggy Guggenheim acquired a number of Ernst’s works, which she displayed in her new gallery in London. Ernst and Guggenheim later were married (1942–1946).

In September 1939, the outbreak of World War II caused Ernst to be interned as an “undesirable foreigner” in Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence. At the time, he was living with his lover and fellow surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington who, not knowing whether he would return, saw no option but to sell their house to repay their debts and leave for Spain. Thanks to the intercession of Éluard and other friends, he was released a few weeks later. Soon after the German occupation of France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo, but managed to escape and flee to America with the help of Guggenheim and friends. Ernst and Guggenheim arrived in the United States in 1941 and were married at the end of the year.

His marriage to Guggenheim did not last and in Beverly Hills, California in October 1946, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet P. Browner, he married Dorothea Tanning.

The couple made their home in Sedona, Arizona from 1946 to 1953, where the high desert landscapes inspired them and recalled Ernst’s earlier imagery. Despite the fact that Sedona was remote and populated by fewer than 400 ranchers, orchard workers, merchants and small Native American communities, their presence helped begin what would become an American artists colony. Among the monumental red rocks, Ernst built a small cottage by hand on Brewer Road and he and Tanning hosted intellectuals and European artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson. Sedona proved an inspiration for the artists and for Ernst, who compiled his book Beyond Painting and completed his sculptural masterpiece Capricorn while living there. From the 1950s he lived mainly in France. He died at the age of 84 on 1 April 1976 in Paris, and was interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Gallery

Ernst & Tanning, New York, 1947.
© Irving Penn
(Art institute of Chicago)

The robing of the bride

Wavering Woman

The Elephant Celebes. Oil on canvas. 125.4 x 107.9 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Ubu Imperator, (1923), Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

 

L’Ange du Foyer, (1937)

 

Peggy Guggenheim, c.1930, Paris, photograph Rogi André (Rozsa Klein). In the background, Notre Dame de Paris, and on the right, Joan Miró, Dutch Interior II (1928)

 

Ernst and Tanning

 

• Etna

Grave-digger

at your post for thirty years

like Jesus Christ

you seldom grant yourself…

fully content with a little exercise

exercise makes you strong

I like you

• first couplet of his poem ‘Etna’, in: ‘Literature’, Paris, October 15, 1923; as quoted in Max Ernst sculpture, Museo d’arte contemporanea, Edizioni Charta, Milano, 1969, p. 15

• What is a dream? You ask too much of me: it is a woman cutting down a tree. What are forests for? For making the matches one gives children to play with. Is the fire in the forest, then? The fire is in the forest. What do plants feed on? On mystery. What day is it today? Shit..

• A painter may know what he doesn’t want. But woe be to him if he desires to know what he wants. A painter is lost if he finds himself. Max Ernst considers his sole virtue to be that he has managed not to find himself.
  • In Beyond Painting, Max Ernst, 1948, p.14; as quoted in Max Ernst: a Retrospective, ed. Werner Spies & Sabine Rewald, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2005, p. 6

• Woman’s nakedness is wiser than the teachings of the philosophers. [the title of his essay]
  • In: Max Ernst, Gonthier-Seghers, Paris, 1959; as quoted in Max Ernst sculpture, Museo d’arte contemporanea. Edizioni Charta, Milano, 1996, p. 37

• A painter may know what he does not want.

But woe betide him if he wants to know

what he does want! A painter is lost if he finds himself.

The fact that he has succeeded in not finding

himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only

‘achievement’.

• Max Ernst in ‘Max Ernst’, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Stangl, Munich, 1967, U.S., pp.6-7, as quoted in Edward Quinn, Max Ernst. 1984, Poligrafa, Barcelona. p. 12

‘Ecritures’ (1970)

‘Écritures’ pp. 221, 223., as quoted in Max Ernst, Edward Quinn, Poligrafa, Barcelona, 1984,

• Eternity

Hide yourself

eternity

beloved eternity

• p.290

• The painter

The painter allows you not to know

what a face is

Escaped from the museum of man,

he has chosen to be mortal!

Mortal like

the kiss of the Mona Lisa

• p. 352

• Laymanship

Don’t confuse

the fairy’s kiss

with

the priest’s spanking

• p. 360

• Sanctuary

All windows fall silent The earth closes its eyes

• p. 366

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giacomo casanova, max ernst, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, william homan hunt

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

that happened
often back then
“I thought it was from
personal experience”
yes, not fiction sadly
also had Escovedo’s
”Pissed Off 2 A.M.”
playin’ in my head
i was the walkin’
definition of fatigue
“Not anymore my dear”
no, so now if i wake up
at three, definitely not
pissed off, but grateful
and i roll close and fall
back asleep

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights

those days are past
became a matter
of unwanted routine
though it did lead
to some decent verse

myriad reasons why
all of which have been
plumbed ad nauseum
no need for a rewind

just leave it here, doin’ well
not gonna count the ways
but heap gratitude where due

© copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the limit of the song
is this prelude
to the journey inward,
the penetratin’ verse,
music, art, books,
movies, good light,
the way out shaped
by you, the days
purpose themselves
as necessary, everything
here and you readin’ this
at three in the mornin’

what more to ask

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a promise
made a little closer
or more accurately,
a confession
wantin’ to be confirmed

an accent on the verb
we both need

it takes your breath
from my mouth
to your ear

a moment
can you hear it

a communion
where will it take us
no idea
but we should go

it is only three

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

how can you find yourself…

paint a portrait

someone you know
someone whose attention
you cannot catch
someone you feel you understand
but certainly you cannot see
inside their complicated mind
*shrugs *

ambiguous,
mix of virtues and vices
perpetual conflict
between expectations
and what was meant to be

search and find
only to wander from
fall on base desire
faithless, false, unforgiven
everlastin’ lack thereof
amen

always
take the measure
accordin’ to the means
of satisfyin’ desires

3 a.m.  thoughts

© copyright 2017 Mac Tag All rights reserved

Today is the birthday of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (Ditchley, 1 April 1647 – 26 July 1680 Woodstock); poet and courtier of King Charles II’s Restoration court.  The Restoration reacted against the “spiritual authoritarianism” of the Puritan era.  Rochester was the embodiment of the new era, and he is as well known for his rakish lifestyle and poetry.  A few of my favorite Wilmot verses:

Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblest,
Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,
And lose my everlasting rest.

• Absent from thee, I languish still, ll. 13-16.

• Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
  I filled with love, and she all over charms;
  Both equally inspired with eager fire,
  Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.
  With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace.
  • The Imperfect Enjoyment (published 1680).
• Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
  False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
  Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
  So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
  • The Imperfect Enjoyment.

• But oh, how slowly minutes roll
  When absent from her eyes,
  That feed my love, which is my soul:
  It languishes and dies.
  • The Mistress: A Song, ll. 5–8.

Today is the birthday of Antoine-François Prévost d’Exiles (Hesdin, April 1 1697 – November 25 1763 Chantilly), also known as the Abbé Prévost; novelist, historian and journalist.  His best-known story, L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, has formed the basis of several operas, most notably Puccini‘s Manon Lescaut.  One of my favorite books and operas.

J’ai à peindre…un caractère ambigu, un mélange de vertus et de vices, un contraste perpétuel de bons sentiments et d’actions mauvaises.

• The portrait I have to paint is of…an ambiguous character, a mixture of virtues and vices, a perpetual contrast between good impulses and bad actions.

• Combien trouve-t-on de déserteurs de la sévère vertu et combien en trouvez-vous peu de l’amour?
  • How many deserters there are from the rigours of virtue, how few from the cause of love!
• Il faut compter ses richesses par les moyens qu’on a de satisfaire ses désirs.
  • We should measure our wealth according to the means we have of satisfying our desires.

• Un cœur de père est le chef-d’œuvre de la nature.
  • A father’s heart is nature’s finest work.

• Rien n’est plus capable d’inspirer du courage à une femme que l’intrépidité d’un homme qu’elle aime.
  • Nothing inspires more courage in a woman than fearlessness in the man she loves.

Today is the birthday of Edwin Austin Abbey (Philadelphia, April 1, 1852 – August 1, 1911 London); muralist, illustrator, and painter.  He flourished at the beginning of what is now referred to as the “golden age” of illustration, and is perhaps best known for his drawings and paintings of Shakespearean and Victorian subjects, as well as for his painting of Edward VII’s coronation.  His most famous set of murals, The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail, adorns the Boston Public Library.

In 1890, Edwin married Gertrude Mead, the daughter of a wealthy New York merchant. Mrs Abbey encouraged her husband to secure more ambitious commissions, although with their marriage commencing when both were in their forties, the couple remained childless.  After her husband’s death, Gertrude was active in preserving her husband’s legacy, writing about his work and giving her substantial collection and archive to Yale. She was a sponsor of the Survey of London.

Gallery

The Play Scene in Hamlet, 1897

King Lear, Act I, Scene I (1897-98), Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fair is My Love

Young Woman in the Woods

And today is the birthday of Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand (Marseille, 1 April 1868 – 2 December 1918 Paris); poet and dramatist most famous for his fictional play Cyrano de Bergerac, based upon the life of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Cyrano de Bergerac : Eh bien ! oui, c’est mon vice.
Déplaire est mon plaisir. J’aime qu’on me haïsse.

Cyrano de Bergerac : Que dites-vous ?… C’est inutile ?… Je le sais !
Mais on ne se bat pas dans l’espoir du succès !
Non ! non, c’est bien plus beau lorsque c’est inutile !

• Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand, éd. Pocket, 2005, acte III, scène 10

• Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand, éd. Pocket, 2005, acte V, scène 5

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abbe prevost, edmond eugene alexis rostand, edwin austin abbey, john wilmot, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

no more to be found,
nor sound the echoin’
song since those days

the long denied
was within reach
yet proved to be
too far away

now turn to ashes all
that came before

for this
a fine and private place,
with none to embrace
but therein is a certain
safety and comfort

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

might we yet
that would be nice

i would
and would you
for what awaits
what lies before us
what we never had

what we have dreamed
between then and now
between solitude
and half of a whole
between have
and have not
between without
and with

might we yet
there is still enough

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge

yes, had we
that would have been nice
but we had not
i s’pose the coyness
and the readin’
between the lines,
were not enough

i am sorry

i could not,
perhaps cannot,
give more than i gave
my imperfections,
my fear, my doubt
too much to overcome

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

by Unknown artist,painting,circa 1655-1660

Today is the birthday of Andrew Marvell (Winestead, 31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678 London); metaphysical poet.  Here is my favorite Marvell poem:

To His Coy Mistress (1650-1652)

• Had we but world enough, and time,
  This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
  We would sit down and think which way
  To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

• I would
  Love you ten years before the Flood,
  And you should, if you please, refuse
  Till the conversion of the Jews.
  My vegetable love should grow
  Vaster than empires and more slow.

• An age at least to every part,
  And the last age should show your heart.

• But at my back I always hear
  Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
  And yonder all before us lie
  Deserts of vast eternity.

• Thy beauty shall no more be found;
  Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
  My echoing song; then worms shall try
  That long preserved virginity,
  And your quaint honor turn to dust,
  And into ashes all my lust.
  The grave’s a fine and private place,
  But none, I think, do there embrace.

• Now therefore while the youthful hue
  Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
  And while thy willing soul transpires
  At every pore with instant fires,
  Now let us sport us while we may,
  And now, like amorous birds of prey,
  Rather at once our time devour
  Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

• Let us roll all our strength and all
  Our sweetness up into one ball,
  And tear our pleasures with rough strife
  Thorough the iron gates of life:
  Thus, though we cannot make our sun
  Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Today is the birthday of The Prince of Montparnasse, Jules Pascin (Vidin, March 31, 1885 – June 5, 1930 Montmartre); artist known for his paintings and drawings. He later became an American citizen. His most frequent subject was women, depicted in casual poses, usually nude or partly dressed.  Here are a few of my favorite Pascin paintings:

Pascin was educated in Vienna and Munich. He traveled for a time in the United States, spending most of his time in the South. He is best known as a Parisian painter, who associated with the artistic circles of Montparnasse, and was one of the emigres of the School of Paris. Having struggled with depression and alcoholism, he died by suicide at the age of 45.

Gallery

Jules Pascin, painting by Albert Weisgerber, 1906

Today is the birthday of Octavio Paz (Octavio Paz Lozano, Mexico City 31 March 1914 – 19 April 1998 Mexico City), poet, writer, diplomat, and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Mexican writer to become a Nobel Laureate.  Paz wrote:

Merece lo que sueñas.

(Deserve your dream.)

• • “Hacia el Poema (Puntos de Partida)” [Toward the Poem (Starting Points)] (1950)
• La poesía.
  Se desliza entre el sí y el no:
  dice
  lo que callo,
  calla
  lo que digo,
  sueña
  lo que olvido.
• Entre lo que veo y digo
  Entre lo que digo y callo,
  Entre lo que callo y sueño

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andrew marvell, jules pascin, octavio paz, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse. This is one of our favorite days in TLC. Beauty and sorrow, our two favorite topics, were never done better than by the trio of today’s birthday boys.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

that you understand
certainly one reason
there are many

you, who have read
’em all, know ’em

the dark pull surfaces
know and again and
this day serves as reminder
to channel that impulse
through verse or color

to express the possibilities
in every scene, over and over

© copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

the worst pain
not to understand
without

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

her paintin’s were strikin’
the blackest i ever saw
but life gave her that
she never asked for it

she would talk of tears
that would not fall
and the long ache

she would paint
the darkness
and i would write
tryin’ to keep up,
to understand
her full heart

then
done, standin’ there
tell me what is left

because without you
rien ne suis
rien ne puis

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

look forward to this day
to seek the possibilities
of black in everything
in movies, in books
in art, in verse
in bars, in the eyes
of the ones encountered
who knew it as well or better

what else matters
these stories
these scenes
what they know
those who have been

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

wish we were in Madrid
at the Museo del Prado
to see them again
the pain, the fear
the beauty
later, we would
drink absinthe
and read Verlaine
and offer ourselves
to each other
to be consumed

© copyright 2016 Mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Self-portrait, c. 1796-97. Museo del Prado

Today is the birthday of Francisco Goya (Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes; Fuendetodos, Aragón, Spain 30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828 Bordeaux); romantic painter and printmaker.  In my opinion, the most important Spanish artist of late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Goya is often referred to as both the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns.  Far and away, my favorite Goya paintings are his so called Pinturas negras (Black Paintings).  They are a group of fourteen paintings from the later years of his life, likely between 1819 and 1823.  The paintings portray intense, haunting themes, reflective of both his fear of insanity and his bleak outlook on humanity.  In 1819, at the age of 72, Goya moved into a two-story house outside Madrid that was called Quinta del Sordo (Deaf Man’s Villa).  All of the paintings were executed in oil directly onto the plaster walls of the house.  Goya apparently, did not intend for the paintings to be exhibited, nor did not write of them.  It was not until around 1874, about 50 years after his death, that they were taken down and transferred to a canvas support.  The effects of time on the murals, coupled with the inevitable damage caused by the delicate operation of mounting the crumbling plaster on canvas, meant that most of the murals suffered extensive damage and loss of paint.  Today they are on permanent display at the Museo del Prado, Madrid.  Goya did not give titles to the paintings, or if he did, he never revealed them.  Most names used for them are designations employed by art historians.  Initially, they were catalogued in 1828 by Goya’s friend, Antonio Brugada.  Pinturas negras have inspired my verse, time and again.  I have a long, unfinished, epic poem about them.  Here they are:

Images of the Pinturas negras

(Saturno devorando a su hijo), Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-1823 (El perro), The Dog, 1819-1823 (Dos viejos/Un viejo y un fraile), Two Old Men, 1819-1823 (Hombres leyendo), Men Reading, 1819-1823 (Judith y Holofernes), Judith and Holofernes, 1819-1823 (Mujeres riendo), Women Laughing, 1819-1823 Heads in a Landscape (Cabezas en un paisaje, possibly the fifteenth Black Painting) (Una manola/La Leocadia), Leocadia, 1819-1823

(Átropos/Las Parcas), Atropos (The Fates), 1819-1823 (Duelo a garrotazos), Fight with Cudgels, 1819-1823 (Dos viejos comiendo sopa), Two Old Men Eating Soup, 1819-1823 (Vision fantástica/Asmodea), Fantastic Vision, 1819-1823 (Peregrinación a la fuente de San Isidro/Procesión del Santo Oficio), Procession of the Holy Office, 1819-1823

(El Gran Cabrón/Aquelarre), Witches’ Sabbath, 1819-1823 (La romería de San Isidro), A Pilgrimage to San Isidro, 1819-1823

The Song of the Day is Peter Gabriel Fourteen Black Paintings. we do not own the rights to this song. all rights belong to rightful owner.

Portrait by Eugène Carrière 1890

Today is the birthday of Paul Verlaine (Paul-Marie Verlaine, Metz 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896 Paris); poet associated with the Symbolist movement.  In my opinion, he is one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.  Here are a few of my favorite Verlaine verses:

Il pleure dans mon cœur
Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénètre mon cœur?

• Falling tears in my heart,
  Falling rain on the town.
  Why this long ache,
  A knife in my heart.
• “Il pleur dans mon cœur” line 1, from Romances sans paroles (1874); Sorrell p. 69

• C’est bien la pire peine
  De ne savoir pourquoi
  Sans amour et sans haine
  Mon cœur a tant de peine!
  • By far the worst pain
    Is not to understand
    Why without love or hate
    My heart’s full of pain.
  • “Il pleur dans mon cœur” line 13, from Romances sans paroles (1874); Sorrell p. 71

Qu’as-tu fait, ô toi que voilà
Pleurant sans cesse,
Dis, qu’as-tu fait, toi que voilà
De ta jeunesse?

• What have you done, you standing there
  In floods of tears?
  Tell me what you have done
  With your young life?
• “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit”, line 13, from Sagesse (1880); Sorrell p. 111

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym…
Et tout le reste est littérature.

• You must let your poems ride their luck
  On the back of the sharp morning air
  Touched with the fragrance of mint and thyme…
  And everything else is literature.
• Line 33, Sorrell p. 125

Aime-moi
car sans toi
rien ne suis
rien ne puis

Vincent van Gogh
Self-Portrait, 1887, Art Institute of Chicago

Today is the birthday of Vincent Willem van Gogh (Zundert, Netherlands 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890 Auvers-sur-Oise, France); Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life in France. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. His suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty.

Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions and though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. His friendship with Paul Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor, when in a rage, he severed part of his own left ear. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, he came under the care of the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet. His depression continued and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died from his injuries two days later.

Van Gogh was unsuccessful during his lifetime, and was considered a madman and a failure. He became famous after his suicide, and exists in the public imagination as the quintessential misunderstood genius, the artist “where discourses on madness and creativity converge”. His reputation began to grow in the early 20th century as elements of his painting style came to be incorporated by the Fauves and German Expressionists. He attained widespread critical, commercial and popular success over the ensuing decades, and is remembered as an important but tragic painter, whose troubled personality typifies the romantic ideal of the tortured artist.

Gallery

Donna al Cafè Le Tambourin

 

in 1873, when he worked at the Goupil & Cie’s gallery in The Hague. Theo (pictured right, in 1878) was a life-long supporter and friend to his brother.

 

Rooftops, View from the Atelier The Hague, 1882, private collection

The Potato Eaters, 1885. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Worn Out, pencil on watercolour paper, 1882. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam ^[90]

• 

  Still Life with Open Bible, Extinguished Candle and Novel also Still Life with Bible, 1885. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, 1885–86. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Peasant Woman Digging, or Woman with a Spade, Seen from Behind, 1885. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, 1887, pastel drawing, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Courtesan (after Eisen), 1887. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Portrait of Père Tanguy, 1887. Musée Rodin, Paris

• 

  Flowering Plum Orchard (after Hiroshige), 1887. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Still Life with Glass of Absinthe and a Carafe, 1887. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The Yellow House, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  The Sower with Setting Sun, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries, June 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Bedroom in Arles, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  The Old Mill, 1888. Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Paul Gauguin, The Painter of Sunflowers: Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  The Night Café, 1888. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

• 

  The Red Vineyard, November 1888. Pushkin Museum, Moscow. Sold to Anna Boch, 1890

• 

  Van Gogh’s Chair, 1888. National Gallery, London

• 

  Paul Gauguin’s Armchair, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, 1889, private collection

• 

  The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles, 1889, Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur, Switzerland

• 

  Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

• 

  Ward in the Hospital in Arles, 1889, Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur, Switzerland

The Starry Night, June 1889. Museum of Modern Art, New York

• 

  The Round of the Prisoners (after Doré), 1890. Pushkin Museum, Moscow

• 

  The Sower, (after Millet), 1888. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

• 

  Two Peasant Women Digging in a Snow-Covered Field at Sunset, (after Millet), 1890. Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection, Zurich, Switzerland

• 

  Sorrowing Old Man (‘At Eternity’s Gate’), 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

White House at Night, 1890. Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, painted six weeks before the artist’s death

Tree Roots, July 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The Church at Auvers, 1890. Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Vincent and Theo’s graves at Auvers-sur-Oise

Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888. Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background, 1889. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Memory of the Garden at Etten (Ladies of Arles), 1888. Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

L’Arlésienne: Madame Ginoux with Books, November 1888. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  Portrait of Artist’s Mother, October 1888, Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California

• 

  Eugène Boch, (The Poet Against a Starry Sky), 1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

• 

  Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (1841–1903) early August 1888, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

• 

  La Berceuse (Augustine Roulin) 1889, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Self-Portrait, September 1889. Musée d’Orsay, Paris

• 

  Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, Winter 1887–88. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, Paris, Winter 1887–88. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  Self-Portrait, 1889. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. His Saint-Rémy self-portraits show his side with the unmutilated ear, as he saw himself in the mirror

• 

  Self-Portrait Without Beard, c. September 1889. This painting may have been Van Gogh’s last self-portrait. He gave it to his mother as a birthday gift

Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers, August 1888. National Gallery, London

• 

  Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, August 1888. Neue Pinakothek, Munich

• 

  Irises, 1889. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

• 

  Almond Blossom, 1890. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background, May 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Still Life: Pink Roses in a Vase, May 1890, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Road with Cypress and Star, May 1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

• 

  Cypresses in Starry Night, a reed pen drawing executed by Van Gogh after the painting in 1889

• 

  Cypresses and Two Women, 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

• 

  Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  Cypresses, 1889. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pink Peach Tree in Blossom (Reminiscence of Mauve), watercolour, March 1888. Kröller-Müller Museum

• 

  The Pink Orchard also Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees, March 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• 

  Orchard in Blossom, Bordered by Cypresses, April, 1888. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

• 

  View of Arles, Flowering Orchards, 1889. Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

• 

  Enclosed Wheat Field with Rising Sun, May 1889, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

• 

  Rain or Enclosed Wheat Field in the Rain, November 1889, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

• 

  Wheat Fields (Van Gogh series), early June 1889. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

• 

  Wheat Field at Auvers with White House, June 1890, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

Painter on the Road to Tarascon, August 1888 (destroyed by fire in the Second World War)

Que de beautés dans l’art, à condition de pouvoir retenir ce que l’on a vu. On n’est alors jamais désoeuvré ni vraiment solitaire, jamais seul.
– Vincent Van Gogh

Mac Tag

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black paintings, francisco goya, paul verlaine, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, vincent van gogh

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle. Rhett

Dear Muse,

this came from the letter
Carrington wrote
to Lytton Strachey
“Lovely and heart breaking
at the same time”
if those words do not move you
“Then you might need
to have your pulse checked”
right, and i thought, this is it
there can be no higher purpose
than to find words to stir someone
and i amazed that that became you

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

to understand fully
to endure and overcome
this journal, this verse…
the picture of struggle
painted in depth

now grateful, hereafter
the height of ambition
to read, to think, to write
and study for you beloved,
the recurrin’ ideal
to write with clarity

words that stir

© copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

there is naught else
to do on a Southern
cool early spring evenin’

nor higher purpose
for you, this verse,
this vision crafted
from feelin’s
rediscovered
with us

this is who i am
this is what i do
nothin’ else mattered
till you and i welcome
this new vision

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

you have to imagine
a waitin’ that spans a life

comfort in the echoes
because they are timeless

sometimes
windows happen
sometimes
they must be made

so the soi disant poet,
with his martini in the slow haze
of an old bar writin’, while the world
goes blithely by, flippant with prose

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

there is not else to do
on a high plains chilly
early spring mornin’

convenient that want
and need are aligned
with what is possible

it occurs that had
this been discovered,
say thirty years ago,
we would all be
better off

the trick now
is not to screw it up
with any other
wants or needs

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

to understand fully
to endure and overcome
journals, verse…
the picture of struggle
painted in depth

perhaps glad hereafter…
now the height of ambition
to read, to think, to write and study
leave for the bereaved, each moanin’
whatever disappointment there may be
thus it is; no point in tryin’

stark and spare, as unforgivin’
as a barren landscape
the recurrin’ ideal…
that of simplicity
to write with clarity

words that stir

© copyright Mac tag 2016 all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Adolfo Müller-Ury (Airolo, Switzerland; March 29, 1862 – July 6, 1947 Manhattan); portrait painter and impressionistic painter of roses and still life.

In 1937 he painted a portrait of Ellen Dunlap Hopkins, founder of the New York School of Applied Design for Women which he presented to the School in 1938 (Private collection, Brooklyn).

In 1940, he painted the then famous radio soprano Jessica Dragonette (Georgian Court College, New Jersey) and several times thereafter, his last portrait in 1946 depicting her bust-length in a gold fez. In 1941 he produced a portrait of her sister Rosalinda (always called Nadea) Loftus looking over her shoulder.

Gallery

Lillian russell

• 

  Edith Wilson
• 

  Will he come
• 

  A Lady Wearing A Plumed Hat
• 

  A Lady Wearing Pearls And A Fur Wrap
• 

  A Woman In Lavender
• 

  A Young Woman – Modesty
• 

  Dark-Haired Beauty In A White Veil
• 

  Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona And Mount Royal
• 

  Edith Bolling Galt Wilson (wife of President Woodrow Wilson)
• 

  Emma Calvé, French Opera Star
• 

  Gustav Muheim
• 

  James J. Hill
• 

  Jesse Maxwell Overton
• 

  Kaiser Wilhelm II Of Germany
• 

  Mrs. Claire Quinn
• 

  Portrait Of A Gentleman
• 

  Saidee Williams Overton (Sarah Gladys Cheeney Williams)
• 

  Seated Nude Lady
• 

  Self-Portrait of Muller-Ury
• 

  Still Life With Chinese Vase And Pink Roses
• 

  Still Life With Roses
• 

  Still Life With Vase Of Roses
• 

  Thomas Watt Gregory
• 

  Title unknown 2
• 

  Title unknown
• 

  William McKinley
• 

  Woman In Profile

Today is the birthday of Dora Carrington (Dora de Houghton Carrington; Hereford, England, 29 March 1893 – 11 March 1932 Newbury, Berkshire,  England), known generally as Carrington; painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be “vulgar and sentimental”.  She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.

For many years, Carrington’s art was neglected by the public, and her main notoriety was her relationship with Strachey. On the day that she agreed to marry Ralph Partridge she wrote to Strachey, who was in Italy, what has been described as “one of the most moving love letters in the English language”.  She wrote, “I cried last night Lytton, whilst he slept by my side sleeping happily—I cried to think of a savage cynical fate which had made it impossible for my love ever to be used by you…”. Strachey wrote back that “you do know very well that I love you as something more than a friend, you angelic creature, whose goodness to me has made me happy for years, and whose presence in my life has been and always will be, one of the most important things in my life …”.  On his deathbed Strachey said, “I always wanted to marry Carrington and I never did”. His biographer calls that sentiment “not true; but he could not have said anything more deeply consoling”.  Upon his death, Strachey left Carrington £10,000 (the equivalent of £240,000 in 1994).

Gallery

Self portrait

And today is the birthday of R. S. Thomas (Ronald Stuart Thomas; Cardiff 29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000 Pentrefelin); poet and Anglican priest who was noted for his Welsh nationalism, intense spirituality, and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales.

Here are some of my favorite verses from Thomas:

You have to imagine
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.

• “The Echoes Return Slow” in The Echoes Return Slow (1988)

“Sunlight‘s a thing that needs a window
Before it enters a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.”
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

• “Poetry For Supper”

He arose, pacing the floor
Strewn with books, his mind big with the poem
Soon to be born, his nerves tense to endure
The long torture of delayed birth.

• “A Person From Porlock”

I have been all men known to history,
Wondering at the world and at time passing;
I have seen evil, and the light blessing
Innocent love under a spring sky.

• “Taliesin 1952”

I have known exile and a wild passion
Of longing changing to a cold ache.
King, beggar and fool, I have been all by turns,
Knowing the body’s sweetness, the mind’s treason;
Taliesin still, I show you a new world, risen,
Stubborn with beauty, out of the heart’s need.

• “Taliesin 1952”

It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.

• “Here”

The darkness
is the deepening shadow
of your presence; the silence a
process in the metabolism
of the being of love.

• “Alive”, p. 51

What was the shell doing,
on the shore? An ear endlessly
drinking?
What? Sound? Silence?
Which came first?
Listen.

• “Questions”

Mac Tag

Continue reading

Adolfo Müller-Ury, r s thomas, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  What is your certainty?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

this has a dark origin,
shockin’ i know,
from the note Virginia Woolf left
before she drowned herself
“Such a tragic, desperate act
I can see there was drama
you couldn’t resist”
as we have discussed,
because you had your share
of darkness, writin’ verse
was the only way i had
to poke it and prod it
“Processing it is important ”
and i have to the point
that can be said,
with certainty,
here with you
is the only probin’
that needs doin’

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

i understand
absolutely
i do not condone it
but i understand

i never got close
i could see
but i did not get close

now
that can be said
sittin’ here
lookin’ back
at the trail of verse

had that not
been there…

all bets are off
and i might have
found some rocks

© copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i go there because
you are there
because it is
the only place
i know with certainty

sometimes the specter comes
She is silent but She knows
i have done this to myself

She feels, She sees
it is not me anymore,
but the hurt itself
that moves her

i stop and think
how to forget
how can this be

for if i choose
what will that take of me
cannot touch, make conscious
it would cost too much

but to look
and not turn away,
to see and all
hesitation gone,
i god, i think,
it has to be here
it has to include you

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

of somethin’
for certain

a quest
part way there
at least
though it was
a helluva late start

time at last
to focus
on what matters

origins, vision,
inspiration, desire
the reasons for bein’

and of course,
you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the effect is all consumin’
time spent searchin’ words
to send to you

and survivin’
nights at best, in dreams, with you
weavin’ in and out of time and places
laughin’, livin’, and lovin’,

over and over again
just bein’, not havin’ to be apart
such pleasure bein’ wanted…
until the totem wobbles

can you see
here, now, all you will ever need
journeys end in lovers meetin’

to be without you,
what to come is certainty
in delay there lies no comfort
mine is a time that endures not

dancin’ with madness

on the trails i roam,
go through this again
recover and go again
i hear verse; concentrate
so i am doin’ what seems best to do
you see

what i want to say…

i owe to you
whatever hope I have
and only you could have been
but it is as is and comes down

to degrees of acceptance
and the certainty

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today marks the anniversary of the death of Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941).  She put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse near her home in Lewes, East Sussex, England, and drowned, at the age of 59.

So what happens when the Dark Muse demands and you combine a love note from Woolf, another Inception reference, Shakespeare and Woolf’s suicide note?  Read on……

Certainty Of Nothin’

Today is the birthday of painter and architect of the High Renaissance, Raphael (Urbino 6 April or 28 March 1483 – 6 April 1520 Rome). Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Raphael was quite productive, running an unusually large workshop and, despite his death at 37, leaving a large body of work. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. Perhaps, the best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings.

His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (1504–1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates.

Gallery

• 

  The Mond Crucifixion, 1502–3, very much in the style of Perugino (National Gallery)

• 

  The Coronation of the Virgin 1502–3 (Pinacoteca Vaticana)

• 

  The Wedding of the Virgin, Raphael’s most sophisticated altarpiece of this period (Pinacoteca di Brera)

• 

  Saint George and the Dragon, a small work (29 x 21 cm) for the court of Urbino (Louvre)

• 

  The Ansidei Madonna, c. 1505, beginning to move on from Perugino

• 

  The Madonna of the Meadow, c. 1506, using Leonardo’s pyramidal composition for subjects of the Holy Family.

• 

  Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1507, possibly echoes the pose of Leonardo’s Leda

• 

  Deposition of Christ, 1507, drawing from Roman sarcophagi

• 

  The Fire in the Borgo, 1514, Stanza dell’incendio del Borgo, painted by the workshop to Raphael’s design

• 

  Triumph of Galatea, 1512, his only major mythology, for Chigi’s villa (Villa Farnesina)

• 

  Il Spasimo 1517, brings a new degree of expressiveness to his art. (Museo del Prado))

• 

  Transfiguration, 1520, unfinished at his death. (Pinacoteca Vaticana))

• 

  The Holy Family, 1518 (Louvre)

• 

  Portrait of Elisabetta Gonzaga, c. 1504

• 

  Portrait of Pope Julius II, c. 1512

• 

  Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, c. 1514

• 

  Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, c. 1515

• 

  Study for soldiers in this Resurrection of Christ, ca 1500.

• 

  Red chalk study for the Villa Farnesina Three Graces

• 

  Sheet with study for the Alba Madonna and other sketches

• 

  Developing the composition for a Madonna and Child

• 

  Drawing for a Sibyl in the Chigi Chapel.

• 

  The Massacre of the Innocents, engraving by (?) Raimondi from a design by Raphael. The version “without fir tree”.

• 

  Judgement of Paris, still influencing Manet, who used the seated group in his most famous work.

• 

  Galatea, engraving after the fresco in the Villa Farnesina

Self-portraits

• 

  Probable self-portrait drawing by Raphael in his teens

• 

  Self-portrait, Raphael in the background, from The School of Athens

• 

  Possible Self-portrait with a friend, c. 1518

• 

  Portrait of a Young Man, 1514, Lost during the Second World War. Possible self-portrait by Raphael

Today is the birthday of Abraham Walkowitz (Siberia March 28, 1878 – January 27, 1965 New York City); painter, usually grouped in with early American Modernists working in the Modernist style.  Walkowitz’ close relationship with the 291 Gallery and Alfred Stieglitz placed him at the center of the modernist movement.  His early abstract cityscapes and collection of over 5,000 drawings of his muse, Isadora Duncan also remain significant art historical records.

Walkowitz’s dedication to Duncan as a subject extended well past her untimely death in 1927. The works reveal shared convictions toward modernism and breaking links with the past. In 1958, Walkowitz told Lerner, “She (Duncan) had no laws. She did not dance according to the rules. She created. Her body was music. It was a body electric.”

Gallery

Les Baigneuses

Isadora duncan

Isadora duncan

Isadora duncan

Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren, 1956

Today is the birthday of Nelson Algren (born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham, Detroit, Michigan, March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981 Long Island, New York); writer. Perhaps best known for The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1949 novel that won the National Book Award and was adapted as the 1955 film of the same name. The lover of French writer Simone de Beauvoir, he is featured in her novel The Mandarins, set in Paris and Chicago.

He is considered a sort of bard of those down on their luck, based on this book and his novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). The latter was adapted as the 1962 film of the same name (directed by Edward Dmytryk, screenplay by John Fante).

Nelson Algren married Amanda Kontowicz in 1937. He had met her at a party celebrating the publication of his book, Somebody in Boots. They eventually would divorce and remarry before divorcing a second and final time.

Algren and Beauvoir summered together in Algren’s cottage in the lake front community of Miller Beach, Indiana, and also traveled to Latin America together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins (1954), Beauvoir wrote of Algren (who is ‘Lewis Brogan’ in the book):

At first I found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer. Now, I began taking an interest in Brogan. Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no rights to life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of modesty and eagerness.

Algren expected the world’s most famous feminist to love him in a traditional way, with the man being dominant, but Beauvoir’s relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre dominated her life. Algren and Beauvoir eventually became disenchanted with each other.

In 1965, he met Betty Ann Jones while teaching at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. They married that year and divorced in 1967. According to Kurt Vonnegut, who taught with him at Iowa in 1965, Algren’s “enthusiasm for writing, reading and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man.”

In 1980, he moved to a house in Sag Harbor, Long Island where he died of a heart attack at home.

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bobby o, certainty, certainty of nothing, cowboy coleridge, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, nelson algren, poem a day, poem of the day, Rhett, shakespeare, song of the day, tea with tater, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, tla, twt, virginia woolf, Zazie

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag. Perhaps, the most meaningful, important TLC post.

The Lovers’ Chronicle 

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

can you hear
now, the music
from the beginnin’

the circle
of the past
has been broken

at last

chances traveled on,
voices in accord,
lead us here

the proof of what
and to what end
within our grasp

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

time runnin’ out
nothin’ new there
seems to help
though you might best
judge that

i know
keep comin’ back
to the same thing
but you tell me,
how can i not

when the only possible
thing that can ever matter
is becomin’ half of a whole

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

lost
do not know or cannot find
a way to attest to existence
a matter of faith
or the lack thereof

a form of seduction
a chosen solitude
rather than a prescribed future
eventually become ordinary
in time and fade in obscurity

if only…

lovers
a chance to be a part
of the only thing that matters,
time transients escapin’
the problems posed
by daily existence
speak the language
heroes

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Statius

Today is the traditional day to celebrate the birth of Publius Papinius Statius (Naples; c. 45 – c. 96 AD Naples); Roman poet of the 1st century AD (Silver Age of Latin literature). His surviving Latin poetry includes an epic in twelve books, the Thebaid; a collection of occasional poetry, the Silvae; and an unfinished epic, the Achilleid. He is also known for his appearance as a guide in the Purgatory section of Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy.

Verse 

Exedere animum dolor iraque demens
et, qua non gravior mortalibus addita curis,
spes, ubi longa venit.

Statius

• Grief and mad wrath devoured his soul, and hope, heaviest of mortal cares when long deferred.

Nec frons triste rigens nimiusque in moribus horror
sed simplex hilarisque fides et mixta pudori
gratia.

Statius

• Yet no stiff and frowning face was hers, no undue austerity in her manners, but gay and simple loyalty, charm blended with modesty.

Today is the birthday of Jan van Beers (Jean Marie Constantin Joseph van Beers; Lier 27 March 1852 – 17 November 1927 Fay-aux-Loges); painter and illustrator, the son of the poet Jan van Beers. They are sometimes referred to as Jan van Beers the elder and Jan van Beers the younger. In 1884, Jan Van Beers produced the pen-and-ink sketches for the edition de luxe of his father’s poetry.

In 1880 he moved to Paris and immediately abandoned historical pictures, producing instead genre and portrait works of the middle classes and developing a successful line in attractive draped young ladies reading a letter or a book or day-dreaming about a lover. Van Beers said that he wanted to paint what he saw and that the best and most interesting things that one saw in Paris were her women.

Gallery

in his studio, Paris, late 1880s

An 1891 Vanity Fair caricature of Van Beers titled “The Modern Wiertz”

posing as Sir Anthony van Dyck

• 

  A balcony, undated

• 

  The letter, 1885

• 

  Portrait of a young woman, 1883

• 

  With thoughts of him, undated

• 

  In the hammock, undated

• 

  Portrait of a noble woman, 1880s

• 

  Henri Rochefort, undated.

• 

  Portrait of a man, undated. Possibly Franz von Wertheim, Jr.

• 

  When stars set

• 

  Boy with hummingbird

• 

  Souvenance

• 

  The melon seller

Gallery

Les deux amies

1906, Fécamp (The Beach at Sainte-Adresse), oil on canvas, 64.5 x 80 cm

1916, Port of Marseilles, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, Ohara Museum of Art

1919, La femme blonde (Femme blonde sur un fond de châle espagnol), oil on canvas, 98.5 x 98.5 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen, photographed by Fred Holland Day (1901)

And today is the birthday of Edward Jean Steichen (Bivange/Béiweng; March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973 West Redding, Connecticut); photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator. Steichen was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz’ groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Together Stieglitz and Steichen opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which eventually became known as 291 after its address.

His photos of gowns for the magazine Art et Décoration in 1911 are regarded as the first modern fashion photograph. From 1923 to 1938, Steichen was a photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair while also working for many advertising agencies including J. Walter Thompson. During these years, Steichen was regarded as the best known and highest paid photographer in the world. In 1944, he directed the war documentary The Fighting Lady, which won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

After World War II, Steichen was Director of the Department of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art until 1962. While at MoMA, he curated and assembled the exhibit The Family of Man, which was seen by nine million people.

Steichen married Clara Smith in 1903. In 1914, Clara accused her husband of having an affair with artist Marion H. Beckett, who was staying with them in France. The Steichens left France just ahead of invading German troops. In 1915, Clara Steichen returned to France with her daughter, staying in their house in the Marne in spite of the war. Steichen returned to France with the Photography Division of the American Army Signal Corps in 1917, whereupon Clara returned to the United States. In 1919, Clara Steichen sued Marion Beckett for having an affair with her husband, but was unable to prove her claims. Clara and Steichen eventually divorced in 1922. Steichen married Dana Desboro Glover in 1923. She died of leukemia in 1957. In 1960, aged 80, Steichen married Joanna Taub and remained married to her until his death, which occurred two days before his 94th birthday. Joanna Steichen died on July 24, 2010, in Montauk, New York, aged 77.

Gallery

Fay Wray posing as Ophelia for Vanity Fair 1930

Henri Matisse and La Serpentine, fall 1909, Issy-les-Moulineaux, photograph by Edward Steichen

Young American Artists of the Modern School, L. to R. Jo Davidson, Edward Steichen, Arthur B. Carles, John Marin; back: Marsden Hartley, Laurence Fellows, c. 1911, Bates College Museum of Art

The Pond—Moonlight, multiple gum bichromate print, 1904.

For more details on this topic, see The Pond—Moonlight.

• 

  Landscape with Avenue of Trees, a painting, 1902

• 

  Portrait of Auguste Rodin by Steichen, 1902

• 

  The cover of Camera Work, showing Steichen’s design and custom typeface. Also, in this specific issue, Issue 2, the entire volume was devoted to Steichen’s photographs.

• 

  Self-portrait. Published in Camera Work No 2, 1903

• 

  Portrait of J.P. Morgan, taken in 1903

• 

  The Flatiron Building in a photograph of 1904.

• 

  Experiment in Three-Color Photography, published in Camera Work No 15, 1906

• 

  Pastoral – Moonlight, published in Camera Work No 20, 1907

• 

  Eugene, Stieglitz, Kühn and Steichen Admiring the Work of Eugene, by Frank Eugene from 1907. From left to right are Eugene, Alfred Stieglitz, Heinrich Kühn, and Steichen.

• 

  Picture of Brâncuși’s studio, 1920

• 

  Portrait of Constantin Brâncuși, taken at Steichen’s home & studio at Voulangis, in 1922.

• 

  Wind Fire. Thérèse Duncan, the adopted daughter of Isadora Duncan, dancing at the Acropolis of Athens, 1921

• 

  Isadora Duncan in the Parthenon, Athens, 1921

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albert marquet, edward steichen, jan van beers, statius, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag. Rhett

Dear Muse,

not sure the genesis of this one
“A lot going on this day with
Frost, Tennessee, Corso,
and This Side of Paradise”
right, coulda come from
somethin’ i was readin’
but i think it is about
my long lost feelin’s
“You were a long time
in a wilderness”
if it is a question,
now i know the answer
“And it is”
right here
where we belong

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

though not often noticed
yet, somehow planned
you spend time there
for somethin’ you did
you sit here, breathin’
while time measures
your penance
but you believe
while you are here
because
you are on your way
to somewhere
and if asked just say,
neither one cares

© copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

her pleasure will not let me go

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

an orison
for those not kept

more and more
time spent
in the pleasant
disguise of illusion
where the scene
through the rear view
comes with music
and the past
can be controlled
so it cannot turn

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

neither
an idea
nor a clue
in the rear view
searchin’ without knowin’
what the search was for
lookin’ in all the wrong faces
‘spect you can trace the way back
by the trail of broken hearts

here
a solitary man
amidst voices
from the past
a fascination
borne of time spent
walkin’ marble halls
of forever

this was fought hard for
sacrifices were made
and the pull is strong
there is certainty
and comfort
on this trail

there
you
us
does ever after exist
is there such a thing
is the effort worth the all

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

well,
i might be mistaken
but i only obey
one urge,
the urge of the verse

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Neither Here Nor There

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

© Copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

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

Gallery

Female nude

Female nude back

Portrait of Klara Bianka von Quandt (1820)

 

Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1941)

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

Verse

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

• “The Road Not Taken”, st. 4 (1916).

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

• “Fire and Ice” (1923).

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

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

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

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

• “Away!, st. 5,6 (1962).

My November Guest (1915)

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

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

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

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

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

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from his plays:

Stairs to the Roof (1941)

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

The Glass Menagerie (1944)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer and Smoke (1948)

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

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

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

The Rose Tattoo (1951)

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

Camino Real (1953)

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

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

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

Orpheus Descending (1957)

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

Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

From This Side of Paradise:

---

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

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

 

Gregory Corso

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

Verse 

Marriage

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

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

Mac Tag

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Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

constantly

whenever above
the verse
climbs
to a high wire
of its own makin’

pavin’ the way
with taut rhythm
maybe an entrechats
or two but generally
avoidin’ theatrics

all without mistakin’
for what it may not be

perforce perceive
before takin’ each step
towards purpose
where stands and waits
what we seek

we
who know
spread out
in possibilities

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

tell me
your hopes
your dreams
your fears
tell me
your wants
and needs
tell me
what fascinates you
what inspires you

that is all i want
that is all i ask

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i was ok, i knew
where i was goin’,
what i was doin’,
what i wanted
i was convinced
then you came along
with your talk of hope

a word, a concept
i had given up on
i mean, i told it
to go to hell
i just figured it had

then one day
there you were

so now what,
do i believe
i god, not sure
i can do that
it has been
so long

tell me again
tell me i can

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

And this verse, an homage to Flannery O’Connor (see below):

wise blood; indeed
even though
the violent
bear it away

and while it is true,
a good man
is hard to find,
comes down to this…

everything that rises
must converge

Today is the birthday of Juan Carreño de Miranda (Avilés, Spain 25 March 1614 — 3 October 1685 Madrid); painter of the Baroque period.

Gallery

Maria theresa of spain

Marie Louise d’Orléans, wife of Charles II of Spain

“Doña Inés de Zúñiga, Condesa de Monterrey

Today is the birthday of Patrick Henry Bruce (Campbell County, Virginia; March 25, 1881 – November 12, 1936 New York City); cubist painter.

Intensely self-critical, Bruce destroyed a great many of his paintings, and only about one hundred works remain. He overdosed with the drug Veronal.

Gallery

Still-life, 1924

• 

  Plums, 1912

• 

  Still Life, ca. 1912

• 

  Landscape, c. 1910-1914

• 

  Composition I, 1916

• 

  Composition II, c. 1916

• 

  Composition III, 1916

• 

  Composition IV, 1916

• 

  Composition V, 1916

• 

  Painting, 1917–1918

• 

  Forms, 1918

Flannery O’Connor

And today is the birthday of Flannery O’Connor (Mary Flannery O’Connor, Savannah, Georgie, March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964 Milledgeville, Georgia); writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and odd characters. Her writing also reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

She died, at the age of 39 in Baldwin County Hospital. Her death was caused by complications from a new attack of lupus following surgery for a fibroma. She was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia, at Memory Hill Cemetery.

O’Connor said;

“anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

“I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. …When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”

“To the hard of hearing shout, and for the almost blind, draw large and startling figures.”

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

It was on this day in 421 – Venice is founded at twelve o’clock noon, according to legend.  (Fondazione (secondo la leggenda) della chiesetta di san Giacomo in una delle isole realtine, il gruppo di isole su cui sorgerà Rialto, poi Venezia.)  Mac Tag can trace his genealogy back to the Tagliaferro’s from Venice. Need more Venice?  Read Mac Tag’s poem, Venetian Lovers.

Mac Tag

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