Van Gogh & Co.

 

 

 

 

 

The Louvre is over-rated it’s just not my cup of tea
The Pharaoh’s gear is awesome but the rest’s vacuity;
From Mona Lisa’s stamp-size frame to dorks in battle trounced
And weirdly outsized saintly sorts whose names I can’t pronounce
I much prefer the action on the counter-facing quai
Just straight across the Pont Royal to the Musée d’Orsay;
Perhaps it’s that I’m plebeian (sans-grade in Bourgeoisie)
The artists who real truths pursue are those I want to see.
More dirt under their fingernails than all their studio peers
These chaps just took their work outdoors in spite of other’s jeers;
With Nature’s inspiration under Heaven’s candid light
They set new standards, studies, styles, all unsurpassed delights.
I hail Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne and all their splendid oeuvre
Who live across the river from the pompous, lofty Louvre.

The Villanelle of Reading Goal

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Queen gave gay love Royal Assent today,
The bells rang out provoking hype and spin
Some hundred years too late for Oscar Wilde

A Movable Feast by Earnest Hemingway

Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast will usher you into the romance (and it was romantic) of 1920s Paris just like Woody Allen transported Owen Wilson there in his 2011 Academy Award-winning screenplay, Midnight in Paris. As in the movie and this celebrated book, you will meet such luminaries as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and of course, Hemingway himself amongst many other notables from all schools of the arts. I personally was moved to pound the pavements of Paris tracing the journey of these pages and would do so again before ever traipsing through the Dublin of Ulysses like so many Joyce aficionados do on Bloomsday each year. And I’m Irish!

But before any inspirational people populate the pages, the book is principally un hommage to the city itself.

An overdue letter.

Dear Vincent,

As we are unacquainted it is somewhat presumptuous of me to write this unsolicited letter. I felt compelled to do so following my visit to the Museé d’Orsay this afternoon, where I had the pleasure of viewing the gallery dedicated to you.

Like many of my generation, you were humanised for me in Don McLean’s 1971 tribute composition ‘Vincent’. The song described you, your tragic life and a number of your works, in particular ‘The Starry Night’ 1889 which has since become the most representational of your works worldwide.

Currently on display at d’Orsay is ‘Starry Night’ 1888,