Browsing Archive: October, 2010
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, October 29, 2010,
James Boswell was born on this day in 1740. Were it not for Samuel Johnson, and Boswell's prodigious Life of the great man, the name of Boswell would be forgotten; but because he was a biographer of genius of a genius, his name will be remembered as long as there are books (another ten years?). He was, otherwise, a wealthy dilettante, a playboy of the Enlightenment, son of a rich landowner in the Scottish Lowlands. He could well afford to undertake long and leisurely European travels in the 1... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, October 28, 2010,
I'm usually so far behind the curve when it comes
to pop
phenomena and trends that I don't bother mentioning them, but
even if I'm bringing up the rear on this one, it's just too good to pass
up, especially with Hallowe'en around the corner. Seems George Clarke, a
filmmaker
in
Belfast, was sitting around one day watching his collection of Chaplin
DVDs–The Circus, to be precise–and in the special features they clutter these
things up with, he saw a short newsreel of the movie's pr... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, October 26, 2010,
Such is the title BR has, wittily, given my review of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol.1, which you can read here. The full quotation is well-known but deserves to be repeated, this election season: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." The more I read Twain the more fascinated I am by him and the more enigmatic he seems, like the greatest of writers, among whom he definitely takes his place. He's more: The walking embodiment of the A... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, October 25, 2010,
James Ellroy, author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential, has published a memoir. In an interview with The Guardian, he lobs a few at contemporary society."The most important male figure in my life has been Beethoven. I'd say he is my closest friend. He is the most unfathomable and inexplicable genius in world history. I guess I identify with him because I'm a megalomaniac, and if you want to identify with a great artist, go right to the top.""I can't think of any things I admire about ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, October 22, 2010,
From Ohiowa Impromptu: Nuala, his agent, was sure a memoir was
the right thing at this time.
"Just
don't write about drinking," she'd said that morning over the phone from
the Costa Blanca, where she was spending bank holiday weekend with Tariq, the
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, October 19, 2010,
Albert Peter "Mickie" O'Brien, who once described his blood type as "Johnnie Walker," has died, aged 89. In Normandy in July 1944 Capt. O'Brien's heroism in the face of heavy German fire saved the lives of many in his squadron, Y Troop of 47 Royal Marine Commandos, and got him awarded the Military Cross on the spot. O’Brien later ascribed his sang-froid to his temperament: "a strong sense of fatalism and no imagination." The DTel's obituarist (nice to see they still display some of the clas... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, October 19, 2010,
Pursuant to the aviation theme of the past couple of posts, I found this photograph, dated July 1961, of a Sud-Aviation Caravelle, an innovative and highly successful French jetliner of the '50s and '60s, in Swissair livery. I almost certainly saw this very plane not once but several times, since my favorite pastime as an innocent youth was plane-spotting at Geneva's Cointrin Airport, a short bike ride from the house I grew up in; no doubt this beauty, HB-ICX, paid me several visits. I may ev... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, October 18, 2010,
From the excellent Century of Flight website, a treasure trove for us airplane-lovers: In
the history of civil aviation, Germany may hold a unique
distinction—that
of having an airship service as its first airline, considered also
by many
as the world's first passenger airline. On November 16, 1909,
German
entrepreneurs created a company named DELAG (Deutsche
Luftschiffahrt
Aktien Gesellschaft). The company used one of the large airships
built b... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, October 15, 2010,
I wrote about James Hamilton-Paterson in Boston Review in 2002, here. He's a remarkable, reclusive artist, an Englishman who once divided his time between homesteads in Austria, the Philippines, and Italy but now, I believe, lives mostly in Austria. His novel Gerontius, about the great English composer Sir Edward Elgar taking a cruise up the Amazon (true story), is a masterpiece. ("Oh Edward," says his Elgar to himself, "what a stupid doltish ass you've been to waste your life on the idea tha... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, October 14, 2010,
This photo, writes my friend Gordon, who took it, is of Elses Farm on the outskirts of Sevenoaks
Weald, Kent. Gordon says "it was restored about 7 years ago, until which time the floors were
still of
pounded earth." The poet Edward Thomas lived there with his wife Helen before being sent to France, where he was killed in action in 1917.
Here's a sample of Thomas's work.
In Memoriam
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the me... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, October 13, 2010,
From The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson, a passage that describes to perfection my own university career:"He’d been a modular, bits-and-pieces man at university, not studying
anything recognizable as a subject but fitting components of different
arts-related disciplines, not to say indisciplines, together like Lego
pieces. Archaeology, Concrete Poetry, Media and Communications, Festival
and Theatre Administration, Comparative Religion, Stage Set and Design,
the Russian Short Stor... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, October 12, 2010,
Good news for comic novelists everywhere: The finest living comic novelist in English, Howard Jacobson, has won the Man Booker Prize, at age 68, for his novel The Finkler Question. This coming hard on the heels of the Nobel going to much-deserving Mario Vargas Llosa means we've had a bumper crop of deserving writers being honored, for a change. But even more important, to a comic novelist such as your humble servant, is the possibility that, with the imprimatur of the Man Booker--and people a... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, October 12, 2010,
The village green in Sevenoaks Weald, Kent, England. Courtesy of Gordon McKechnie. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, October 11, 2010,
This is Long Barn, a house in the picture-perfect village of Sevenoaks
Weald, Kent, bought by Arthur Koestler and lived in by him from 1956 to 1959. These were halcyon years for AK, during which he tried to reinvent himself as a man of letters of Renaissance scope, leaving politics (mostly) behind and focusing on fiction, science, and history. He also made a last-ditch attempt to become an English squire, but ultimately gave it up as hopeless, brought down every time he opened his mouth by h... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, October 11, 2010,
I (re)watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle the other night, and thoroughly enjoyed the sad and squalid atmosphere, Peter Boyle's enigmatic stare, Robert Mitchum at his most charismatic and seedy, and most of all the you-are-there feel of Boston in the 1970s–because I was there, in 1978, for a few weeks, wondering if I could fit in, visiting an old friend who was doing grad studies at Harvard, wandering about. I saw Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain at the Beacon Theatre, and drank in the atmosphere ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, October 7, 2010,
Terpsichore O’Hanlon
and Stan MacKnee lived together on a barge, the Rumpelstiltskin, under an enshading willow on the Mangan Canal,
just down from the Slumbeg Bridge, a hop skip and jump across the lock from Moylan’s
Canal Bar and Grocery, the ensemble (plus St. Thor’s R.C... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, October 7, 2010,
Congrats to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa on his new status as Nobel Laureate in Literature. Of his work, I know only his War of the End of the World, wonderful title for a wonderful book. He's an anomaly in Latin America for having grown up politically, starting out on the left as so many of us do, but slowly coming to the realization that communism and its offshoots are theoretically flawed in the extreme and, when practically applied, result in sheer insanity and massive suffering... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, October 5, 2010,
Thanks to Patrick Kurp at his excellent Anecdotal Evidence blog for reminding us that today's the birthday of several men in one, that one having started off on Oct. 5, 1911 as Brian O'Nolan and later morphing into Brother Barnabus, Flann O'Brien, and Myles na gCopaleen. Along the way these gentlemen gave the world the comic masterpieces At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, the latter aptly described by Kurp as being something like an amalgam of Dante and Chuck Jones .O'Nolan died at 55... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, October 4, 2010,
Time for some heavensent Nabokovian prose. From Lolita:The rain had been cancelled miles before. It was a black warm night, somewhere in Appalachia. Now and then cars passed me, red tail-lights receding, white headlights advancing, but the town was dead. Nobody strolled and laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe. I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my terrible thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular about acceptable con... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, October 4, 2010,
That's the title the good folks at The New York Times came up with for my latest piece for them, and it's not a bad title, either, since the book I'm reviewing, Ken Follett's massive Fall of Giants, deals precisely with the domino-landslide quality of the end of Europe's crowned heads, post-WWI. Ken's a pro; if you like that kind of thing–blockbuster non-literary storytelling in serviceable but uninspiring prose–no one does it better. He makes a good living at it, too. I'd be happy with h... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, October 2, 2010,
That means "German reunification," It took place twenty years ago, against the advice of the hard Left, such as Guenter Grass, who called it "a second Anschluss," and the politicians of the dying German Democratic Republic (East Germany), who accurately foresaw not much of a future for Communist apparatchiks in a free, genuinely democratic Germany. But many of them made the transition successfully, notably the current Chancellor, Frau Merkel. And overall the reunification, mind-blowingly expe... Continue reading ...
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