April 27, 2012
Birth was the death of him, but it took 83 years. Now he's 106 years young, and getting better all the time.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
April 11, 2012
Yes, one hundred years ago precisely the great ship departed on her maiden voyage. Here she is seen in the last photograph ever taken of her as she heads from Queenstown out to sea and into legend.
Farewell, Ireland. Farewell, Europe. Farewell, world.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
April 9, 2012
“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding
pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our
lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in
any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already
inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose
boundaries would be at first undiscernible.”
This and other passages in Julian Barnes’s new novel The Sense of an
Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize, evoke adolescence as I (and,
I’m sure, you) remember it. But how accurate are our memories?
Not very, says Barnes, who is something of a specialist in the subject. [Read more here.]
Posted by Roger Boylan.
March 1, 2012
The
gloomy chap in the photo is Frederic Chopin. What with the TB that was
soon to kill him and the collapse of his affair with George Sand (aka
Aurore Dupin), he had reason enough to look bummed. Anyway, it's his
202nd birthday, or near enough (Feb. 22nd). Honor the memory of the
greatest composer for the piano by listening to one of his greatest
interpreters, Martha Argerich, play the sublime Andante Spianato. Poor Chopin. Happy birthday anyway, maestro
Posted by Roger Boylan.
February 24, 2012
Dimitri Nabokov, pictured above, has died, aged 77. I corresponded with him
about his father's work--he was especially generous in his praise of an
essay of mine on that topic--and about the cars in his life. There were
many. He was an expert racing driver and an aficionado of Italian iron,
especially that produced under the sign of the rearing horse, in
Maranello. I wrote an article about his automotive career for
Autosavant, using generic photos of the cars referred to. He, having
read it, promptly sent me an entire album of photos of Ferraris and MGs
and Dodge Vipers and one splendid Bizzarini. Later, as a Christmas present, he sent me a copy of his father's controversial posthumous semi-novel "The Original of Laura."
In thanking him, I expressed the hope that I might call on him on my next
visit to Switzerland. The option remained open, until yesterday. RIP,
Dmitri.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
February 22, 2012
Barney
Rosset, one-of-a-kind editor, publisher, and free-speech crusader, is dead at 89. He led the charge against obscurantism and puritanism in the Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer court cases, and was the first to publish Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eugene Ionesco in this country. Without him, modern literature would have been very different. It was a
signal honor for me to have a small part in his publishing history, via my recent submission to The Evergreen Review and my novel The Great
Pint-Pulling Olympiad, published by the great house he founded,
Grove Press--since, alas, sold to others, but still bearing the mark of his
genius.
If there's justice in heaven, he's up there in some celestial version of his favorite Parisian hangout, La
Closerie des Lilas, downing martinis and holding forth with the shades of Beckett and Henry Miller and Albert Camus and all the
other great souls he cherished and, through his unremitting efforts, gave voice
to in this country. RIP, Barney.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
February 20, 2012
It's been nearly six years since the third novel of my Killoyle trilogy was published in German, as Killoyle Wein und Kaese (Killoyle Wine and Cheese) by Rogner und Bernhard Verlag, then of Hamburg, now of Berlin. Then, in 2007, the rights were sold to a Swiss publisher, Kein und Aber, who issued the trilogy in a boxed set, also in German. Meanwhile, it aroused no interest in the English-speaking world--until now. The legendary editor Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press and Evergreen Review, who introduced the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Burroughs, and others to an American readership, has published the first three chapters of my modest yet fabulous opus in the latest issue of his revived flagship review, Evergreen. It's a special honor for me as an admirer of Beckett, having already been published by Grove Press, which, under Barney's aegis,published all of the Great Sam's works.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
January 27, 2012
Happy 256th birthday to that great billiards player, imbiber, letter-writer, ladies' man and (oh yes) pretty good composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, known as WAM to his friends and admirers. I've been tending to ignore this blog, and to let commemorative occasions pass uncommemorated, but Mozart has given me so much pleasure, and will continue to do so to the end of my days--and will do so to generations yet unborn--that I had to say "Herzlichen Gluckwuensch, Maestro."
Posted by Roger Boylan.
January 23, 2012
Of all the drinking cultures I'm familiar with, and they are legion, England's is the booziest, not in the sense of actual amounts consumed but as a cultural phenomenon, one that celebrates intoxication, one--as an article in a recent issue of The Economist points out--refined and exalted by the upper, not working, classes. "Do you drink?" Jennie Jerome's American father asked her upper-class English suitor, Lord Randolph Churchill. "Of course I drink, man," snapped Lord Randolph. "I'm a gentleman." From The Economist: "Outside London, ritualized heavy drinking arrived not just in pamphlet form but also in the shape of returning sons as men of influence. One story . . . involves a cleric and two lawyers in Yorkshire. Sitting in an alehouse, the trio 'began to be merry' in a manner that started with a faux-Latin competition and ended with the cleric's penis hanging out of his trousers while one of the lawyers burned it with his pipe." Ouch. What drunken semblance-of-rational-though provoked that, I wonder? An urge for mortification of the flesh? Sudden self-disgust? Conflict between church and state? Any of the foregoing will do, washed down with several pints of Yorkshire's best.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
January 9, 2012
Dublin Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals -
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.
This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.
The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.
She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.
Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought
And by a juggler's trick
You poise the toppling hour -
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.
-- Louis
MacNeice
Posted by Roger Boylan.
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