Browsing Archive: July, 2010
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 30, 2010,
I was mildly critical of Ron Rosenbaum (above) below, re: his spurious Pale Fire controversy. But I'm entirely on his side on the topic of agnosticism vs. atheism. As he says in this week's Slate, "Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer."
Well said, sir. Atheism is as absurdly chil... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 29, 2010,
And 15 years before the horror came roaring out of Berlin that resulted in the crushing of Paris (below), a young Russian emigre living there on the proceeds of tennis lessons and translations wrote, "And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 29, 2010,
Seventy years ago: The dust has settled, the armistice is signed, the nation lies prostrate. Usually you go for a stroll down the Rue de Rivoli around this time of day, to clear your head, browse the shopwindows, sit for awhile in the Tuileries. But today this is the sight that greets you: not a relaxing one. And for four more years this is Paris, second city of the Third Reich. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, July 27, 2010,
Ron Rosenbaum, at his best an intelligent and entertaining culture sleuth (I found his Explaining Hitler fascinating, although it came nowhere near to an explanation), is at it again. Hard on the heels of the controversy over Vladimir Nabokov's posthumous novel The Original of Laura--in the course of which RR first publicly urged Dmitri, VN's son, to burn the manuscript, then recanted and exhorted him Publish! Publish! (he published)--we have what looks to me like a nostalgic attempt on RR's ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, July 25, 2010,
From the Entertainment Weekly obit for Harvey Pekar, by Ken Tucker: "Pekar remained an ardent champion of the lowly comic book, as well as a highly original reader of such neglected authors ranging from the forgotten humorist George Ade to the contemporary novelist Roger Boylan."
Nice of Ken not to repeat "lowly." That's George Ade in the photo. He ain't neglected. He's my brother. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 23, 2010,
Charles de Gaulle with his daughter Anne, who had Down syndrome.
Normally undemonstrative, the General was open and affectionate with the
little girl. When she died, aged 20, he said "Maintenant elle est
comme les autres" ("Now she's like the others"). Nothing becomes a
man of dignity so much as a well-tempered display of emotion. There was something
Roman about De Gaulle. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 22, 2010,
A poignant photo of Paul Verlaine sitting alone in a
cafe, post-Mathilde, post-Rimbaud, hastening his descent into drug addiction and alcoholism with a bottle of (what else?) absinthe. The story of the original
poète
maudit has inspired more self-destructive artistic martyrdoms than any other, b... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, July 21, 2010,
From The Adorations (cont'd): The thought passed through Stefanie’s mind,
otherwise aswim with pro-Adolf (or at least pro-artist) feelings (or at the
very least responding favorably to the mating dance of the eager male), that
young Herr Hitler could on occasion be quite over... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, July 20, 2010,
On July 20, 1944, Col. von Stauffenberg et al. failed signally to put AH and Germany out of their misery.
On that date in 1951 I came along. Good for me. Still here. Bit of a miracle, that.
Then, on the same date in 1969, another colonel made news by setting foot on the Moon. As he did so, I was watching him on the TV in the restaurant I was working in, rather than the customer I was serving; upshot: spaghetti alla carbonara all over Mr. Hassam, of Beirut. This was one of the few occasions when... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 16, 2010,
From
The Adorations (Continued)
They
left the riverbank, crossed the nearby Hofgasse, and made their way to the
Hauptplatz, the bustling heart of Linz. It was a little before eleven, and
preparations were underway for the great day ahead. Banners stirred feebly in... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 15, 2010,
From the Telegraph:"One American reviewer wrote of [Beryl Bainbridge]: 'The highest compliment I can pay Beryl Bainbridge is an admission that I’ve been reading her books for almost 30 years and still don’t quite know what to make of them. Her novels may be uniformly spare, but they’re hardly tight; each one seems as weirdly elastic as the whole slippery oeuvre.'”I feel that way, too. But I also feel that way about quite a few other fine writers, such as John Banville, Thomas Berger, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, July 14, 2010,
Two hundred twenty-one years ago today, the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille. This, and the subsequent Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, constituted the third event of the French Revolution. (The first had been the revolt of the nobility, refusing to aid King Louis XVI through the payment of taxes; the second, the formation of the National Assembly and the Tennis Court Oath.) It's hard to find another event in all of history that had such far-reaching consequences, good an... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, July 13, 2010,
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) lived on the island of Guernesey, where he wrote Les Misérables. His house, Hauteville, was a remarkable light and airy hilltop domain, with vast views of the Channel and his French homeland on the horizon.Nigel Richardson says:"Hauteville's secret doors, dark carved wood, chinoiserie, mirrors, and constant play of light and dark make it feel more like being inside a fertile imagination than a house."Oh, to be in exile there. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 12, 2010,
Alas, poor Harvey, I knew him. Shortly after Killoyle came out in
'97 I was on the road from Texas to Washington, D.C., to promote the book
at various bookstores in the nation's capital and nearby Virginia, and
had stopped on my first night at the Super 8 Motel in Hope,
Arkansas. After a sumptuous fried-chicken takeout from the local KFC,
just down the street from Bill Clinton's childhood home, I was lying on
my bed watching par-per-view when the phone rang and a raspy voice
mispronoun... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 12, 2010,
News comes of renewed tribal riots in Northern Ireland, occasioned
by the traditional July 12 marches when the Protestant Orangemen go around with big drums jeering at the Catholics because Protestant King William of Orange defeated Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne on this date in 1690. Such news dismays but doesn't surprise. I've never really believed in the Peace Process. It's a good idea, but naive: tribalism is inimical to peace, and Northern Ireland is Europe's tribal B... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 12, 2010,
Oh, all right, well done. I was for the Dutch, but Spain deserved the win. The more so for their elegant play and the sense of unity it'll bring back home, no small consideration in a loose amalgam of Catalans, Basques, Galicians, Andalusians, etc., each region with its own language and parliament. Such an arrangement could be a formula for dissolution, Belgian-style, but the central idea of Spain has a greater hold on the collective imagination of its citizens than the idea of Belgium has on... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 9, 2010,
Clive James on the ongoing horror of "honor" killings in certain Muslim, Hindu, and/or Sikh precincts around the world and the wretched silence from Western feminists and liberals:"When a girl in a British Pakistani community is set on fire by her brothers, or has her face ruined with acid by a rejected candidate for the role of husband, we hear about it in the newspapers, although seldom for long; but in Pakistan such incidents aren’t news at all. They happen three times a day. They are pa... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 8, 2010,
If I had a single composer's works to have with me on the proverbial desert island, I would be torn between Beethoven's, Mozart's, and Gustav Mahler's; but Mahler would get the nod, by a whisker. He's a novelist in music who leaves nothing out, a John Cowper Powys of near-infinite, glorious sound. He was born 150 years ago; of those years he only lived 51. I've loved his work since the revelatory moment at age ten or so when I heard the Ninth Symphony for the first time. Here it is performed ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, July 7, 2010,
Zulfikar Ghose is a writer born in that part of pre-Partition India that is now Pakistan and who now lives just down the road from me, here in Austin, Texas. He is a fine writer, and pretty much sui generis, although elements of Rushdie and Garcia Marquez (and Beckett, and Joyce) can be detected in his novels, among which are such whimsical masterpieces as The Incredible Brazilian, The Triple Mirror of the Self, and Figures of Enchantment."I have no interest in the reader," says Ghose. "I nev... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, July 7, 2010,
Best luck to the Flying Dutchmen in the World Cup final. In Madison Square
Garden, in 1978, I watched their agonizingly close defeat by Argentina.
They lost 3–1 after two extra time Argentinian goals. Dutch champion Rensenbrink
struck the Argentinian goalpost in the last minute of regular time, with
the score 1–1. I watched it with a French-speaking Belgian, but he was entirely Dutch for the occasion. As was I. Lang leve de Nederlandse! Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, July 6, 2010,
from The Adorations
Linz on the Danube; Linz, third
city of Austria; Linz, placid, contented, aloof; Linz, June 28, 1907. The city
simmered in the heat of the summer morning. It was ten o’clock by the bells of
t... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 5, 2010,
More on the late admirable Bainbridge, from A.N. Wilson. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 5, 2010,
This review was written for the Texas Observer, which decided not to publish it on the provincial grounds that it wasn't Texan enough. Indeed, on close inspection, it isn't Texan at all. But it sure strikes a chord in this ex-Miamian. Good book, too.
His Man in Havana
King Bongo... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 2, 2010,
Beryl Bainbridge, a highly original and appealing writer, has died at 77. From the Telegraph:"Philip Hensher, author of Man Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, described her prose as 'beautifully balanced and funny.' But he said her ingrained modesty made her unwilling to accept praise for her work."My Adorations would never have worked (if indeed it does) without her Young Adolf. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 2, 2010,
The Twelve Caesars
Suetonius
Satires
Juvenal
Hamlet/ Henry IV Part
I / Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare
Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Candide
Voltaire
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
Life of Johnson
James Boswell
Vanity Fair
William M. Thackeray
A Christmas Carol... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 1, 2010,
Back
in '78, fed up with New York, I spent three months in Montréal, that
self-styled Paris of North America, hoping for cultural epiphany, but through
all my rambles up and down the boulevards of St. Denis and Outremont and
Sherbrooke and Côte des Neiges, I found none. The city an... Continue reading ...
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