Browsing Archive: November, 2010
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 29, 2010,
I remember the first days of snow in Geneva, generally a wet November blizzard blown across the lake overnight that soon half melts to slush and promptly freezes in the icy teeth of the Bise howling down from the Alps. Your feet, no matter how well-shod, will inevitably plunge into deceptively deep puddles of slush in the gutters, as you squish and squelch your shivering way onto a crowded city bus or trolley car reeking of damp wool and stale exhalations, the floor slick with mud and puddles... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 26, 2010,
Sutton Bank, in North Yorkshire, under its first mantle of snow this year. Hang gliders take off from a ridge near here, and the splendid old city of York's not far away. A good time to go for a bracing walk over the high moors, then warm up in a pub with a pint of Tetley's and a Glenmorangie chaser. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 24, 2010,
As part of my other life as a car
reviewer, I get the occasional perk, one of which
is access to rare vehicles like this one: the Toyota Prius Plug-In
Hybrid Vehicle, or PHV, which showed up unexpectedly in my driveway when
the original tester had to cancel. So for three days I was one of fewer
than 100 people nationwide privileged to be cruising around in a PHV.
It has a short electric-only range, but I made the best of it, plugging
the car into an outlet in my garage and scooting aro... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 22, 2010,
Forty-seven years ago today, in our house in a quiet suburb of Geneva, I was awakened by my father, who was exuding beer fumes and a certain triumphalism. "I said so, didn't I?" he said. "I said they'd get him. Well, they got him." News had just come in of President Kennedy's assassination, in a place called Dealey Plaza in the faraway city of Dallas, Texas. I'm not sure who Dad's "they" were, but I remember the giant black headlines and the never-seen-since black border around the fr... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 19, 2010,
Riffling through the more obscure reportages in the latest issue of The Economist, I came across one datelined Laayoune, capital of the disputed territory of Western Sahara. I realized that I'd last heard of it as El Aiun, "The Spring," hopefully so named by the Spanish-controlled Berbers who founded it in 1928, long before the Polisario uprising of the 1960s that led to independence being declared from Spain for Western Sahara (Sahrawia) and the whole process brought to a sudden halt in 1975... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 17, 2010,
"I have always lived in freedom; let me end my
life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no
school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to
any régime except the régime of liberty.'"Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, November 16, 2010,
I find the world of Corot (see previous post) so evocative and tranquil that I'm posting another of his canvases, this one also dating from ca. 1850, called Le Sentier (The Lane). It's early spring, and the brisk breeze carries with it the scent of earth's renewal and the last vestiges of winter. We're in Ville-d'Avray, west of Paris, near where Corot lived.“M. Corot's compositions," said Baudelaire, "which are always entirely free of pedantry, are seductive just because
of their simplicit... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 15, 2010,
This painting is of the Quai des Pâquis in Geneva, ca. 1850, by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, a fine painter neglected then and now who took a modest view of his talent and influence (he is considered a progenitor of Impressionism). “Men should not puff themselves up with pride," he said, no doubt over a ballon de rouge, "whether they are emperors
adding this or that province to their empires or painters who gain a
reputation.”There are about a half million more people in and around the... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 12, 2010,
A medieval lament to the Virgin Mary and the words written by a teenage girl on the walls of her Gestapo prison cell formed the lyrical centerpiece of Gorecki's famous Third Symphony, the "symphony of sorrowful songs." Heartrendingly beautiful and poignant, it incredibly became a worldwide hit. Not that Gorecki, a down-to-earth Pole who has just died aged 76, was smitten by his unexpected success. He was a working composer, and kept on composing and teaching music in his home town of Katowice... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, November 11, 2010,
This day, although now officially Veterans' Day, will always be Armistice Day to me, and will always evoke the horrible sacrifices of the Great War. France lost more men at the battle of Verdun in 1916 than the U.S. has lost in all her wars. The statue above is a memorial at Verdun to the 714,000 French and German casualties there. Let's try to remember them for a little longer than a nanosecond, shall we? And what was the point of their sacrifice? To erase an entire generation from France, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, November 9, 2010,
Since I've had a couple of Mark Twain posts recently, not to mention my articles in Boston Review and The Dabbler, it's perfectly natural to mention the Mark Twain awards, if only to lament the absence of actual writers in the list of winners. Richard Pryor? Lily Tomlin? Stand-up comedians, sure, but hardly worthy names to honor America's greatest comic writer. More mush for the booboisie, as H. L. Mencken might have said. What Twain–clearly totally unqualified for the Mark Twain award, as ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 8, 2010,
I lived for a few years mere blocks from the legendary McSorley's Ale House, in Manhattan's Lower East Side. I remember the cheese sandwiches with sliced raw onions and the pair of light or dark ales you got with each order; no single drinks and, until the 1970s, no women. From Joseph Mitchell's McSorley's Wonderful Saloon:"At midday McSorley’s is crowded. The afternoon is quiet. At six it fills up with men who work in the neighborhood. Most nights there are a few curiosity-seekers in the p... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, November 7, 2010,
I'm renaming my novel Killoyle Wine and Cheese The Maladjusted Terrorist. Big deal, eh? No, but to those few who know of it, the name "Killoyle" in the title is too specific a reference to my other novel of that name, especially to the bean counters at the publishing houses who track sales and exert a heavy inlfuence on the decisions of the acquisitions departments. And anyway, this book's more of a character study than an evocation of place, and the new title is an apt description of Ferdia ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, November 4, 2010,
The place is a Saturday market; the town, Bergerac of Cyrano fame, in the Dordogne region of southwestern France; the time, July 1989; the occasion, a working vacation at an old farmhouse that needed restoring. Prominently displayed on this vintner's stall is a jeroboam of wine, probably a rich robust cabernet from just up the road in the vineyards of Sainte-Foy, in the Bordeaux region. Soon after this photo was taken, I purchased the bottle to share with my landlord and his friends. As a dir... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, November 2, 2010,
Mark Twain, whose spirit is with me on this election day as on so many other occasions, once encountered a man whose utter devotion to one party struck Twain as ludicrous, if not downright slavish. Consequently, he says, "I have never voted a straight ticket from that day to this. I have never belonged to any party from that day to this. I have never belonged to any church from that day to this. I have remained absolutely free in those matters. And in this independence I have found a spiritua... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 1, 2010,
Harry Mulisch, the pre-eminent Dutch novelist, has died at age 83 without having won the Nobel, which many of his admirers, myself included, thought he should have won years ago. Too late now; never mind. He was a great writer, and never needed the showy accolade of awards to prove it. I greatly admire his WW2 masterpiece The Assault, a grim tour de force whose atmosphere–provincial Holland, the Nazi Occupation, the bone-cold winter of 1944–never leaves you, indeed for me continues to def... Continue reading ...
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