Author: Christian

Author for Pigtails in Paint since September 2014; associate editor since November 2015. Administrator of the late Agapeta on WordPress (2015/01/09 - 2019/03/01), and now of Poets and Lovers.

New flight

Gustave Moreau - La Péri: Rêve d'Orient
Gustave Moreau – La Péri: Rêve d’Orient (c1881) – from Art Renewal Center

Poets and Lovers lives since three years and a half, regularly facing threats. Our Internet provider had registered the domains of his sites with the domain registrar Njalla. On April 20, without any warning or explanation, Njalla decided to block the domain names of of all sites hosted by our provider, in particular Pigtails in Paint, Poets and Lovers and the sites of Graham Ovenden and Garage Press. Moreover, Njalla blocked our provider’s access to the virtual server that they hosted for his sites, they did not even allow him to download the latest contents before terminating it. The pretext was a supposed complaint against the contents of Pigtails in Paint, about which we have no details. After requests for information by our provider, they claimed “child porn,” then later “sexual objectification of kids.” They told him that he was “free” to move the domains to another registrar, but for several days, they refused to transmit him the authorisation codes for transferring the domains to another registrar. After a few days, Pigtails in Paint got its codes for registering the domain name with another company, but for Poets and Lovers it took a month to get the correct codes. The sites of Graham Ovenden and Garage Press had to change their domain names. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Sur la Mort d’une Cousine de sept ans, par Hégésippe Moreau

Victorian post mortem photograph
Victorian post mortem photograph – from pixieandrotter.com

Le poème suivant rappelle les deux sonnets de Nicolas Boileau sur la mort d’une de ses nièces. Le poète regrette avoir ennuyé sa cousine avec ses leçons tant qu’elle vivait. S’il avait su qu’elle mourrait si tôt, il aurait profité de sa jeunesse, fait avec elle l’école buissonnière et empli sa vie de plaisirs. Il lui aurait donné tout son amour. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Rondeau, by Ernest Dowson

Saturno Buttò - Mixed technique on paper
Saturno Buttò – Mixed technique on paper cm. 58×39 – from saturnobutto.com

In Greek mythology, Maenads were the female followers of Dionysus, the god of winemaking and ecstasy. Dowson cultivated the ecstasy of alcohol, while his love life was split between a platonic devotion for little girls and purely sensual affairs with adult women, often prostitutes met in bars. In this poem, he contrasts the pleasures of wine and women with the virginal beauty of young girls. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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L’Écolière, par Hégésippe Moreau

Jules Bastien-Lepage - Petite fille allant à l'école
Jules Bastien-Lepage – Petite fille allant à l’école (1882) – Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums, sur Art UK

Hégésippe Moreau (Pierre-Jacques Roulliot) est un écrivain, poète et journaliste français. Né le 8 avril 1810 à Paris, il exerça plusieurs métiers, dont correcteur d’imprimerie, et se lança dans le journalisme et la poésie. Comme ses deux parents, il fut fauché par la tuberculose, et il mourut à Paris le 20 décembre 1838. Il reste un poète méconnu, mort trop jeune.

Dans ce poème, le maître tente de discipliner une jeune fille rétive aux études. Elle préfère user de séduction, par des sourires, un bras dénudé et des baisers, plutôt que de s’appliquer. Ici Lhomond est un pédagogue français du 18e siècle, auteur du célèbre manuel pour latinistes De viris illustribus urbis Romæ. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Ernest Dowson’s last text: The Princess of Dreams

Hanna Pauli - The Princess
Hanna Pauli – The Princess – National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, from Tutt’Art

Ernest Dowson’s collection of poems Decorations: in Verse and Prose, published in 1899, ends with 5 poems in prose. The first is The Fortunate Islands. Then three of them are included in a selection by The New Formalist: Markets (after an old Nursery Rhyme), Absinthia Taetra and The Visit; note that in the latter, the sentence “I have wanted you all my life” has been changed into “I have waited for you all my life.” CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Settela, the girl with the headscarf

Rudolf Breslauer - Settela Steinbach
Rudolf Breslauer – Settela Steinbach (1944) – from Romedia Foundation

The above picture shows a girl looking terrified as she is locked inside a goods wagon in a train bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. She wears a headscarf made from a torn sheet, because the Nazis shaved her head under the pretext of preventing lice. It was taken from a film shot on May 19, 1944 in the Westerbork transit camp (The Netherlands) by a Jewish prisoner, Rudolf Werner Breslauer, on the orders of the commander of the camp, Albert Konrad Gemmeker. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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