Known to locals as simply Llanfair, this charming Welsh-speaking village is on the isle of Anglesey. I passed through as a lad in '64, en route to my ancestral Ireland for the first time, via ferry to Dun Laoghaire from the Irish Sea port of Holyhead, from where boats have been sailing to Ireland for 4,000 years. You might suppose this magnificent moniker originated in the dawn of Welsh history, or at least at some point before the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffyd in 1282, when, according to the ...
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This just in from Sofia, nexus of trans-galactic civilizations: The distinguished Bulgarian Space Research Institute tells us to stop trying to get in touch with extraterrestrial civilizations, because they're already among us (this is from the Daily Telegraph, perhaps needless to say). Lachezar Filipov, Deputy Director of the Institute, says, "Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time," but adds reassuringly, "they are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to h...
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I just read John Updike's 2002 novel Seek My Face, a meditation on art and life centered on a day-long interview with Hope Chafetz, widow of the Abstract Expressionist painter Zack McCoy and a painter herself, that elides effortlessly into a memoir of a woman's life and loves and a recreation of the 1950s New York art scene. The characters are based on Lee Krasner and her husband, the paint-spattered artist Jackson Pollock. Pollock's works have never conveyed anything to me except violence, e...
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From The Independent: 

A Society of Authors survey five years ago found that half of all authors made less than the minimum wage, and that three-quarters earned less than £20,000 a year.
  

"Most authors struggle," says Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the body. "The gap between the few top authors and the rest of them is widening all the time," he says. "The vast majority of authors earn very little and most authors keep up their job until they can afford to write full time."

"If you are g...

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My Lord, I loved strawberry jam

And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.

Also, well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,

Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.

So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit

Have visited such a man? Many others

Were justly called, and trustworthy.

Who would have trusted me? For they saw

How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,

And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.

Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,

Able to recognize greatness wh...

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One of my students at Western Connecticut State U. was planning an essay and presentation for me on the film "Aces High," a 1976 cinematic version of "Journey's End," the great R. C. Sheriff play about World War I. He suggested bringing his neighbor into a three-way conference call to discuss the niceties of adapting a play into a film. Why his neighbor, I inquired. Because he starred in the film, he said, referring to the eminent Canadian actor Christopher Plummer, whom my student encounters...
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Two of my lifelong passions come together in the person of Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir: his father’s work, and cars. Dmitri is an authority on both, having assisted his father in the translation of the latter's works from Russian and English into French and Italian (in all of which languages he is, apparently, entirely fluent) and having raced cars for a living while, in counterpoint, touring the world as an opera singer--in which guise, singing basso, he debuted (awkward hybrid of a ...

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At the end of the day (no, I mean that literally), feeling entitled to a brief blurring of the harsh contours of the world, I usually have a couple of stiff drinks (vodka or whiskey), followed by wine with dinner. Then a digestif (whiskey or cognac); and so to bed. It's hardly a bacchanalia, but it meets with the disapproval of big chunks of the medical profession, who are forever wagging the nanny finger about having more than one drink, if that, and never mind the obvious benefits of red ...

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More about Nabokov, about whom I could go on and on--and will. He is cold and unfeeling, a mere manipulator of human pawns, say the ignorant or bloody-minded (or career Nabokov-haters, a rabid school of troglodytes motivated as much by class hatred and inverted snobbery as anything: Les aristos à l'échafaud). That this is utter nonsense can be proved at a glance, by reading any of his works; few writers I know of have anything like his instinctive, heartfelt reaction to adumbrations of cr...

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One of the more beneficial side effects of the stir created by Dmitri Nabokov's decision to publish his father Vladimir's last, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura (never mind VN's express injunction against ever doing so) has been the posthumous second wind accorded to the twentieth century's greatest writer as once again we revisit, in the company of literary-minded journalists, the Berlin years, the Paris years, and the Cornell years--especially the latter, between the tragic obscu...
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Here in Texas, exposed as we are to tropical fronts and Northern ones alternately, the weather can change with cinematic abruptness, and does. In fall and winter the temperature may plunge 40+ degrees in a day when a cold front of the kind Texans call a Blue Norther blows through, frequently accompanied by all kinds of meteorological melodrama--tornadoes, hailstorms, and the like--but thankfully disposing of the steamy tropical fug and sweeping clean the skies. Then, for a couple of days, b...

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Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Nobel '01, is a man whose personality may have its unlovely side, and he isn't alone in that, but whose perspicacity and genius are beyond question, notably (I find) in The Enigma of Arrival and A Bend in the River. I've always thought of him as being, like Updike, a pure writer--that is, a man who is first and foremost a writer, not a man, or an Indian, or a Trinidadian, or an agnostic, or British. Or whatever (as they say). I was pleased to discover that...

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 What's a Warholic? One addicted to the works of Andy Warhol? No, it's the name of Alexander Theroux's latest protagonist, Laura of that name. Theroux, Paul's older brother (by 2 years), is an interesting fellow and one of our best writers. The novels of his that I've read, Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat, linger yet in my mind as being prolix, fantastic, bitter, and hilarious. His latest, Laura Warholic, The Sexual Intellectual, has been described (in the Barnes & Noble Review) as "the ...

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Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), self-styled "Darwin's Bulldog," on belief vs. its opposite. (He was the chap who coined the very useful word "agnostic.")

 "I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and in...
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Pursuant to yesterday's list of the world's funniest books, here's another, more informal list. A good writer's voice is distinctive from the very first line, and the following first lines of novels, some painfully famous, others less so, are ideal instances of this.

 Call me Ishmael.

 —--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick  

 It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

 —--Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice  

 Loli...

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Dalkey Archive Press compiled this list of the funniest works of fiction of all time from responses to questions they sent to various booksellers and book people across the U.S.A. I was especially enthusiastic about No. 13 on the list. And to be on a list, any list, with Italo Calvino, Oscar Wilde, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett, is honor enough for me.

Funniest Works of Fiction

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Kangaroo, Yuz Aleshkovsky

Reservation Blues, Sherman...

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Music is the least understood of the arts, and the most abused. No one seriously speaks of Shakespeare and Peanuts (or Tintin) in the same breath, but "music"--especially here in Austin, "live music capital of the world"--is open to all, with no barriers of taste or education. Bob Dylan's Beethoven's equal, and yo Ludwig, roll over anyway, there's a new game in town. (But who seems more dated now, Beethoven or Chuck Berry?) You have to say "Classical Music" if you want to be understood as r...

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And, because it's Veterans' (ex-Armistice) Day, a famous ode that verges on kitsch but still manages to be moving:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands...

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Of Patrick Kavanagh, a poet and novelist from the same County Monaghan in historic South Ulster from which my own darlin' O'Boylans originally hailed, Seamus Heaney (another Ulsterman) had this to say: "[Kavanagh] was forever seesawing between anger and equipoise, the anger brought on by the sight of artists of less talent and, in his view, less integrity, flourishing while he suffered poverty and unfair neglect, the equipoise achieved in the writing of poems and prose works where, as he say...
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          A Swiss couple I know have just returned from Turkmenistan, ex-Turkmen S.S.R. in Soviet days. Their description makes it sound like a cross between the Marx Brothers and 1984. Ashgabad, the capital, is a whited sepulcher of marble and gold. Most of all the old Soviet buildings have been replastered in white marble, and all the new buildings are made of it.  The city is spread out, all in marble--hotels, apartments, government buildings, etc., all lit up at night by thousands of st...

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Oh, all right. I can't resist it. I love this poem. Suggested soundtrack while reading: "Four Sea Interludes," from Britten's Peter Grimes.

Sea-Fever
 
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call ...
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...it's what's-his-name. Masefield. John Masefield, Poet Laureate of England, 1930-1967. This pub, in Wirral, Merseyside, near Liverpool, was intended to honor the poet, who trained to become a merchant seaman along the Mersey. But the local punters thought they recognized you-know-who and started calling the place "the Adolf." I mean, honestly. Hasn't hurt business, though. Quite the contrary. 

Masefield was a fine old-fashioned journeyman-poet who led a fine old-fashioned Victorian kind...

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Back in September, 2008, when the Large Hadron Collider, the super-duper atom smasher outside Geneva (near the airport, as you can see in the photo; about three miles, in fact, from where I once lived in total ignorance of Hadron Colliders and their ilk), was about to go online and start hurling particles of stuff around in an attempt to replicate post-Big Bang conditions, or something, and thereby reveal the existence of the Higgs Boson, a really tiny particle that theoretically should exist...
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We're all radicals until we have kids. Then we start listening to the likes of C.S. Lewis.

"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of...

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What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I:

I, this incessant snow,

  This northern sky;

Soldiers, this solitude

  Through which we go

      Is I.

                                   Walter de la Mare

 

...
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This pensive gentleman is the late Brazilian novelist Osman Lins (1924-1978), of whom I've only recently heard but whose work I fully intend to explore: the novel Avalovara, for instance, in which--in a surrealistic manner reminiscent of his cultural cousin, the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, with his "heteronyms"--Lins introduces the "Yolyp," a person who is two people in one, a kind of spiritual hermaphrodite. (Well, we'll see how it goes.) But I enjoyed this passionate comme...

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Francis Kilvert (1840-1879) was a learned Victorian country curate who ministered to his flocks in the Anglo-Welsh border country, along the tranquil and lovely Wye valley (now best known for Hay-on-Wye, "the book town," Mecca or Vatican of the world's literary wheeler-dealers). Kilvert, who died young, poor man, of peritonitis, made voluminous diary entries on the nonevents of his day-to-day existence that have since, through the backward glance of Time, become defining events of a Victorian...
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Milan Kundera, he of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Joke (that failed to amuse the Czech Communist censors), has long been in my pantheon of modern greats and remains there, despite the recent allegations made against him that he was a state spy. Well, if he was, one way or another half of Czechoslovakia was, too; not an excuse, but I've always been very wary of passing judgment on people who live under circumstances unimaginable to pampered, Western me. Anyway, what he says abo...

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The great Swiss writer Jacques Chessex is dead at 75. He won the Goncourt Prize in 1973 for his novel "L'ogre" ("The Ogre"), a vivid analysis of a dead father's continued psychological dominance of the hero's life. Tortuous family relationships, especially those between parents and children, framed most of Chessex's work, including the novels "Les Yeux Jaunes" ("Yellow Eyes") and "L'Ardent Royaume" ("The Kingdom of Passion"), and affected his own life: his father committed suicide when Jacque...
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One of my all-time favorite eating and drinking establishments anywhere was the Café de Cluny, ideally located at the best intersection in the world, that of the Boulevard St. Germain and the Boulevard St. Michel, across from the eponymous museum (and former abbey), in the heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris. The Cluny was cozy and easy-going and much less pretentious and expensive than the Flore and Deux Magots, just up St. Germain. Founded in 1869, and patronized over the years by such as...
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Julian Barnes is the author of Flaubert's Parrot and Arthur & George, both fictional explorations of the personalities and legacies of two prominent, if completely different, authors: Gustave Flaubert and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (His analysis of the latter is especially insightful.) In this manifesto, he invokes the spirit of Flaubert again as a rebuke to writers who would settle for less than their best. He's quite right, too.

"Writers should have the highest ambition: not just for themselv...

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Jorge Luis Borges lived in Geneva as a youth, died there at 86, and was buried in the same cemetery as John Calvin. Here's his take on the city.                                                         "Of all the cities in the world, of all the homelands that a man seeks to earn, Geneva seems to me to be the one most likely to bring happiness. Thanks to her I discovered, since 1914, French, Latin, German, Expressionism, Schopenhauer, the doctrines of Buddha, Tao...

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I've been reading More Matter, a collection of John Updike's essays and reviews, and enjoying, as I always do, the reach of the late master's mind. This collection contains perceptive pieces on such disparate topics as Eastern Europe, Lana Turner, Irish writers (although in the latter essay, oddly, he gets John McGahern's name wrong, calling him "Thomas" instead: good editing, Knopf), Normans Mailer and Manea, food, drink, travel, and, best of all, art; specifically, that found in the Frick ...
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