the-snug

Sam's Birthday

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:21:21 +0100

Birth was the death of him, but it took 83 years. Now he's 106 years young, and getting better all the time.

And The Ship Sails On

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:12:07 +0100

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.

Barnes Looks Back

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:32:35 +0100

“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.]

Bon Anniversaire, Cher Maitre de la Tristesse

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:30:33 +0100

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

Ave Atque Vale: Dmitri Nabokov, 1934-2012

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:28:07 +0100

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.

Barney Rosset, 1922-2012

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:24:14 +0100

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.

Jetzt, ein Bisschen auf Englisch

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:15:55 +0100

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.

Happy 256th to WAM

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:03:18 +0100

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."

Drink and Time in Old England

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:59:07 +0100

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.

MacNeice's Dublin (and mine)

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:07:20 +0100

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