Browsing Archive: August, 2010
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, August 31, 2010,
Same sunflowers, different day (I think), plus classic Citroen 2CV. Not mine, alas. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, August 30, 2010,
An excerpt from George Kennan's memoirs, worth reproducing in full, subject: Iraq. (Photo: TIME Magazine cover image of Kennan.)
So much for the
handicaps; what of the possibilities of service in Baghdad? A country in which
man's selfishness and stupidity have ruined almost all natu... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, August 29, 2010,
Back from Dallas to discover in my e-mailbox a repository of photographs from my old pal Dave Mackie, who now lives in Bradford, Yorkshire, for his sins. It was at the tumbledown farm he was renting in the Dordogne, in the southwest of France, that I spent the glorious summer of 1989, the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, which was celebrated in song and dance and wine and more wine. All that's 21 years gone now, and the hirsute would-be bard contemplating the sunflowers is ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, August 27, 2010,
Barely a rut in the prairie in 1850, Dallasis now the center of a vast urban area of more than 6 million. I'm here with my wife to escort our daughter into the next stage of her life, neo-adulthood, as defined by the college years. Her future alma mater is a quiet campus on the leafy outskirts of the metropolis, within earshot of DFW Airport and, paradoxically, the chime of church bells. Prosperity, technology, dynamism, architecture: all are on display here, and life moves at a pace that far... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, August 25, 2010,
I just finished watching, for about the eighth time, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray's novel. It's Kubrick's masterpiece, if not Thackeray's; I found the novel dry and second-rate, but the film deepens and seems more beautiful every time I watch it. It's the finest picaresque epic in film, better--more melancholy, lovelier to look at--even than Tom Jones. And Kubrick's genius for matching music to image is well-known; just think of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. But in Barry ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, August 24, 2010,
Most Expensive Cocktail in the World Located BELFAST—Before you balk at your next bar tab, feel fortunate you didn’t stumble into the Merchant Hotel in Belfast, Northern Ireland.The upscale hotel’s bar is the home of the $1400 Mai Tai, the most expensive cocktail in the world according to the Guinness Book of World Records.“It’s all about the rum,” swears manager Sean Muldoon, referring to the J. Wray & Nephew 17-year-old Jamaican rum used in the cocktail, the exact same liquor “... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, August 23, 2010,
If you turned the other way while passing the Caran D'Ache pencil factory, this is what you saw: the Avenue de Frontenex...Note the looming purplish mass of the Jura mountains, above the rooftops. They, and the trees, hint at early spring. I can almost feel the cool breeze and smell the pencil lead behind me...this photo was taken in 1967 or thereabouts, my halcyon days as a Genevese schoolboy.And to think that once I was so eager to leave that city that I'd have gone anywhere. (And did: the ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, August 23, 2010,
I passed this huge pencil every day on my way to school, back in my salad days in Geneva in the '60s. The pencil was the emblem of the famous Caran D'Ache pencil factory, now a purveyor of fine writing instruments of high prestige and established elsewhere in the city, in sleeker surroundings. Back then, it was all about pencils, which we schoolkids actually used in great numbers; the entire neighborhood of this factory was, as I recall (my olfactory glands leading the rearward charge), heavi... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, August 20, 2010,
Bill Millin died on August 17 at 88. Those who have seen The Longest Day will remember the scene where Millin, personal piper to Lord Lovat (portrayed by Leslie de Laspee, the Queen Mother's personal piper, and Peter Lawford, respectively, in the film), played the bagpipes on D-Day in the midst of exploding mortar shells and grenades. "Unarmed apart from the ceremonial dagger in his stocking, he played unflinchingly as men fell all around him." Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, August 19, 2010,
More re: publishing one's own work oneself (see previous post). I have especially good reasons to consider it: the state of the market these days, in which nothing except easily identifiable genre fiction is considered by the big publishing houses and the small houses are becoming fussier and fussier (see this one, which requires a bookstore receipt for one of their books to accompany every unsolicited submission) and less and less accommodating of original work; the length and highly origina... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, August 17, 2010,
Could this be the straw in the wind? My buddy Ed Combs sent me an
article about Ray Connolly, a British novelist and pop-music critic, who
has become his own publisher, "doing a Dickens" as he says
here, publishing his latest novel himself, chapter by chapter, on
his web site.
I've done something similar here, with my memoir Shoplifting at
Dracula's and bits and pieces of my magnum opus The Adorations;
but I've been anything but organized about it. Ray might just be the
catalyst. Watc... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, August 16, 2010,
Dublin(More Irish verse, this from MacNeice again, on the subject of dear once-dirty Dublin, where I spent many a day with my dad, an eon ago).This never was my town,I was not born or bredNor schooled here and she will notHave me alive or deadBut yet she holds my mindWith her seedy elegance,With her gentle veils of rainAnd all her ghosts that walkAnd all that hide behindHer Georgian facades -The catcalls and the pain,The glamor of her squalor,The bravado of her talk. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, August 12, 2010,
Old Ireland
It seems a thousand years ago now: tires swish by on the road
And the woody pong of dad’s old pipe salts the rainy air.
My head throbs with the burden of recalling
The succulence of rashers on a bell-loud Sunday
And the scalding sweetness of overmilked tea
And ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, August 11, 2010,
The cowardice of appeasers, vintage 1975. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had just taken up residence in the US. One day, he was addressing a meeting literally blocks from the White House, in which resided at the time Nixon's appointed successor, the forgettable and mostly forgotten Gerald Ford, who was readying himself for a trip to the Soviet Union and a good old kowtow at the feet of Leonid Brezhnev, Moscow's then-tyrant-in-chief. Solzhenitsyn expressed interest in shaking the head of the leader of... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, August 10, 2010,
As the author of comic novels myself, I can say without hesitation that Howard Jacobson, my brilliant British colleague (Coming From Behind, The Mighty Walzer) has it exactly right. "That's the great test, if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a
humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make
laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing? There's
nothing more wonderful than when the comedy's got horror in it, got
blood in it. And the serio... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, August 9, 2010,
The historian and political scientist Tony Judt, author of Postwar and Ill Fares the Land, has died at 62 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, of which it has been said, "The body dies, but there is no direct effect upon the mind. You’re in
there, but trapped." Judt himself described it as "progressive imprisonment without parole." It's one of Nature's worst tricks on suffering humanity. Judt, an old-fashioned man of the left--the social democratic left, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, August 7, 2010,
Carrickfergus
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams
The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn-milled called... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, August 6, 2010,
About the "Ground Zero Mosque," I'm torn, as I so often am, between my libertarian and neo-con halves. Others are, too. Two who aren't are Alex Massie and R. Emmett Tyrrell.Here's Massie in The (U.K.) Spectator:This is much more a civil war within the Islamic world than it is a confrontation with the west (though it is that too). Osama bin Laden's real enemies are the Muslims he considers heretics and moderates. That's the struggle he's interested in and the fight with "the west" is merely a ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, August 5, 2010,
This photo is of the perimeter fence around the former RAF base at Rudloe Manor, Wiltshire, described by "ufologists" as "Britain's Area 51," where deceitful government stooges concealed evidence of extraterrestrial tourists (as here, in "the Welsh Roswell") and, of course, their dead bodies. True? I dunno. Probably not, on balance. But as a secular humanist who sometimes gets tired of secular humanism I've always been a sucker for UFO sightings and the whole ambient woolly-headed mythology t... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, August 4, 2010,
A sneak preview from my current novel, Ohiowa Impromptu, in which Dr. Ramsultanajam, Head of Geriatric Medicine at Eisenbahn Memorial Hospital in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, encounters a Hindu god in the Emergency Ward.
"My God."
The doctor's exclamation was prompted less by the visually certifiable fact of the divine apparition standing in the middle of the room, halfway between Mrs. Hillendale and Mrs. Gong–the elephant-god Ganesha, he of the elephant head, single tusk, and... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, August 3, 2010,
Albert Kahn was a banker, philanthropist, amateur scientist, and man of action, in the Victorian mode–or rather, in the Belle Epoque mode, since he was French. He is shown above on the balcony of his bank on the Rue Richelieu in Paris in the summer of 1914. (What an evocative phrase: The summer of 1914...) This site contains highlights of Kahn's immense photographic archive, most of it in autochrome (early color) plates collected around the world, from New York to Mongolia to Angkor Wat, be... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, August 2, 2010,
from The Adorations
Tristan always attracted a crowd, even at the matinee
performance, and the conductor, young Bruno Walter, the late great Mahler’s
understudy and second-in-command, was himself a powerful attraction,
ramrod-straight, lithe and—paradoxically, in a mostly cl... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, August 1, 2010,
Today is August 1st, the Swiss national holiday. It's the 719th anniversary of the Oath of Gruetli, by which Switzerland was founded in 1291. All Swiss, please stand for the national anthem. All others, raise your glasses to the well-being and continued prosperity of a civilized and truly multicultural nation.
When the morning skies grow red
And o'er their radiance shed,
Thou, O Lord, appeareth in their light.
When the Alps glow bright with splendour,
Pray to God, to Him surrender,
For you fe... Continue reading ...
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