I must plead guilty as charged and ask for many other counts of charlatanism to be taken into account. However, whilst you may all give up on me, please don't give up on poetry.
"To have great poets, there must be great audiences." - Walt Whitman
"One merit of poetry few will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose." - Voltaire
As for including the Raphael yesterday:
"Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting that speaks." - Plutarch
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| The Summons |
The painting above is by Tim Cole aka Colartz and is reproduced with no permission whatsoever; although I'm sure that he wouldn't mind. It was always my favourite, but someone else bought it before we could.
Naturally I would not subscribe to such a view, but there are those who would suggest that publicly admitting to cultural pretensions is not exactly self-effacing.
ReplyDeleteI confess I was unaware of National Poetry Day, but my devotion to poetry is unaffected by the event. I'm still working on the relevance of the Raphael picture - I fear you'll have to explain that one, doc. The Plutarch quote (did you know you wrote that out loud?) doesn't help much.
"There is more crap in our art galleries than the country can afford." - Arthur Dooley
I think the key word is 'pretensions'.
ReplyDeleteThe supposed subject of the Raphael painting was a mistress of Pope Alexander VI. I did say it was tenuous. Obviously there were other Pope Alexanders, but he's the interesting one. In, I think, 2007 James Roach developed an immensely complicated campaign system to generate battles for his Italian Wars figures (I believe it's still available on the web somewhere). I got to play the Pope and I always assumed that I was Alexander VI although I can't remember if that was literally the case. Through a combination of having read the rules and a lucky dice roll I got to be a 'warrior Pope' which was quite beneficial during battles. I allied with the Spanish and we were doing OK before I got sent to Little Rock, Arkansas in a futile attempt to borrow $100m and had to stand down - an idea that Pope Benedict stole from me some years later.
Excellent - I like it - tenuous is good. Last week I was in Regensburg - Pope Benedict's home patch. One of the old churches there has a honking great new organ - the Church of Rome donated an organ to Benedict (not my understanding of 'organ donor', but no matter) and he chose to put it in his home town. Maybe that's where the Little Rock money finished up. The campaign sounds pleasantly surreal.
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