Browsing Archive: September, 2009
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, September 30, 2009,
Fascinating. An etching purporting to be of Hitler and Lenin playing chess in an attic in Vienna in 1909 is being put up for auction in England. The artist, Emma Goldschramm, claimed to have been Hitler's art teacher and to have hosted a political salon at which on this occasion the two chess opponents were present. Now, I did a lot of Hitlerian research for my novel The Adorations, which has several scenes set in Vienna around 1909 in which Hitler's a character, and I found no evidence that ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, September 29, 2009,
I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, September 24, 2009,
"Half an hour to drink a beer, no wonder he can't get a job!" Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, September 23, 2009,
Some writers can hardly write at all, but they can plot like nobody's business. I recently finished rereading Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, which I'd assigned to one of my creative-writing students as an example of blockbuster historical fiction, and which I decided I should actually reread, too, if I intended to comment intelligently on it. Reading it was very enjoyable in an undemanding kind of way, like reading a 1000-page magazine, and most instructive in the craft of how to wri... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, September 21, 2009,
Inspired in part by a couple of excellent Belgian beers (Duvel–also the name of our doughty little Schipperkee), I was thinking about the Gueuze, my favorite beer bar in Paris. So fond am I of this place, in fact, that it figures prominently in my novel The Adorations as a rendezvous place for Stefanie, my Austrian heroine, and her SS contact, during the (obviously) German occupation. The fact that the bar was founded in 1976 is neither here nor there; indeed, it makes it easier for me to c... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, September 18, 2009,
I've always admired Jean Sibelius. Gorgeous and melodic as his early music is (Karelia;Tapiola; Finlandia; Luonnotar; etc.), there's an austere beauty in his later works, notably the Fourth Symphony, that reminds me of Samuel Beckett's prose. In fact, the famous (amicable) disagreement Sibelius had with Gustav Mahler–in which Mahler challenged Sibelius' contention that a symphony should be precise and severe in its intentions by saying "No, no, a symphony must be like the world. It must ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, September 17, 2009,
Snug. Noun (Brit.). A small, cosy public room in a pub or small hotel. Oxford English Dictionary.
This is the first day in the life of the Snug, as I'm calling my blog, with its deliberate overtones of a pub. I spent many of my happiest moments in pubs in Ireland, Scotland, and England, and in the old days the snug was where you took the family, or your girlfriend, and huddled or cuddled next to the coal fire glowing in the grate, on an ideal blustery night, say in mid-October, and lowered the... Continue reading ...
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