Browsing Archive: February, 2011
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 28, 2011,
I avoid political spats, but enough of this adulation of public-sector unions, already. I hand the mircophone to my esteemed colleague John Derbyshire:
"Why do public-sector workers need unions? The purpose of unions is to protect employees against unscrupulous bosses, who might seek to maximize profits by taking advantage of those who work for them. In the public sector, however, there are no profits to be maximized, no shareholders to appease. The work that is being done is being done in the... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, February 26, 2011,
I can't seem to get enough of the old boy: The Economist has just published a little piece of mine, "Mark Twain, Midwestern Cosmopolitan." Boston Review and The Dabbler have two other articles by me on the same subject. And sometime in the next year, Vol. 2 of his Autobiography will appear, containing even more unexpurgated material than Vol. 1. I can't wait. After all, it's the next best thing to having him among us again. And, as his friend William Dean Howells said, "There was never anybo... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, February 23, 2011,
The past is not always prologue. This snapshot of my own past, dated July 1989, might imply that cycling would assume a prominent role in my future. It did not. Indeed, this may have been the last time I mounted a bike, on a very mini-Tour de France, around the idyllic hamlets of Eymet and Ste.-Innocence, down Bordeaux way.
I love the name Ste.-Innocence. Somehow, it belongs in the past. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, February 22, 2011,
“Merde. I hate these conferences.”
Thus Chief Inspector Antoine Nicod to Inspector Tissot, his subordinate, after nearly a week of conference duty. Nicod’s dislike ran deep. He believed that civic order and high culture were laboriously achieved and precariously defended, and he wanted to see the defenses fully manned. He had no patience with those willing to abandon the work of centuries for the kind of institutional do-goodery to which his own city of Geneva had itself beco... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, February 19, 2011,
The Geneva Murders
[Chapter One of a police procedural I'm working on on and off.]
Bettina Viviani had two remaining passions in life, if “passions” isn’t too strong a word for an 83-year-old widow: the Italian game shows on television (especially Sesso A Gogo and Crazy? Anche Lei!) and the mongrel dog that had followed her back to her concierge’s apartment on the corner of Rue de Richemont and Rue Pradier one cold December morning ten years ago and had been, since then, taken in, chri... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, February 16, 2011,
While not wishing to detract from the genuine heroism and courage of most of the demonstrators in Egypt, I'd like to hit the brakes on the Optimism Express re: that nation's prospects of genuine democracy. Here's a survey by Pew Research Center that found, inter alia, that most Muslim countries take the "we are all Hizbollah" line, and, rather more depressingly, that "three-quarters of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan say they would favor making each of the following the law in their countries: ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 14, 2011,
Facebook smothers with its “friends’” insistent trivia and preening. (Worst of all are the arch-domesticated men who can’t stop posting photos of their offspring and blathering on about little Sabina’s third birthday party. Women are less likely to do this, possibly because they have more to do with the brats.) But the network does have its uses, mainly the ability to hook you up with people long forgotten who also happen to be people you wouldn’t mind getting in touch with. Recen... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, February 10, 2011,
In violent contrast to Nabokov, than whom it would be impossible to be more civilized in art and life, is Louis-Ferdinand Céline, author of Journey to the End of the Night and Castle to Castle, than whom it would be almost impossible to be more of a bastard. Indeed, the bastardness of the man is the topic of a heated debate in France: Is it justifiable to celebrate the life of a brilliant writer who was also a misanthrope and anti-Semite? Maybe "celebrate" is the wrong word. But there's noth... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 7, 2011,
John Updike famously said, "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." In my frequent moments of rereading Nabokov's thankfully-large oeuvre, I'm still arrested by passages I've already read a dozen or more times. Like Horowitz playing Chopin, no one does it better. Here's Professor Pnin in the eponymous novel sitting in the college library at Waindell (read: Cornell) at night:
"Doffing his spectacles, he rubbed with the knuckles of the hand that held them ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, February 4, 2011,
Awoke to a hushed, trackless whiteness: snow in South-Central Texas. (The tracks came as soon as the kids were out.) Palms trees garlanded with icicles. Over 200 crashes on the highways as idiots desperate to get out of the house at all costs hurl themselves into the void. Staying put for now, working on a review, not entirely looking forward to the inevitable sortie, but it must be done, with barely a finger's-breadth of whiskey left in the liquor cabinet. Silly of me not to have been more p... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, February 3, 2011,
Jason Wallace, 41 (above), was going for a world record in the Rejection Sweeps, a contest in which I fancied my own chances of victory, with The Adorations going for 40 thumbs-down or more, until I read about Wallace, whose novel Out of the Shadows was rejected over 100 times before winning the Costa (ex-Whitbread) Award. "I think I may have had a few low points when trying to get the book noticed, but in truth I don't think I would ever have given in," he said, according to The Independent.... Continue reading ...
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