Browsing Archive: the-snug, 2011
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, January 30, 2011,
Back to the Périgord, an inexhaustible nostalgia-ride: Yers truly gazing out over the Dordogne valley from the escarpment of Domme, July 1989. Beyond the horizon the world was changing, as it is, again, today. Meanwhile, the word-artist has only himself to contemplate, regardless of what's before him. So this could be called "Boylan gazing out upon his navel." Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, January 29, 2011,
Well, well. Seems that today's the birthday of Edward Abbey, the inspired looney anarcho-ecologist, prophet of the American West, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey-Wrench Gang...and fellow University of Edinburgh alumnus. I read and thoroughly enjoyed his Fool's Progress, in which his love of the vast emptiness of the American West is at loggerheads with his reluctant nostalgia for the older worlds of the Northeast and, especially, Europe; his protagonist listens to Mahler while dirvi... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 27, 2011,
Every January 27th I think with fondess and awe of that expert billiards player, tippler, and all-around bon vivant Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, known to his fans as WAM, or just "The Greatest." Because it's his birthday, you see. He'd be 255 this year. Too bad he never made it past just-under-36. It's almost frightening to think what he could have done, had he been granted the Biblical three score and ten. Oh, well. We'll just have to content ourselves with 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, Don... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, January 26, 2011,
Vladimir Nabokov, the great lepidopterist, theorized that various species of blue butterfly found in the western reaches of the Americas originally came from Asia. Nonsense, sniffed his peers. Absolutely right, researchers said last week. Vindicating VN's formulation that he brought to his work the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, January 24, 2011,
A few choice quotations from Sir Winston Churchill, who died on this date 46 years ago (I remember the black-bordered Sunday Times, the huge photograph of his funeral regatta down the Thames, the Queen in mourning).
"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out...."
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 20, 2011,
One of my on-and-off obsessions of long standing has revived, thanks to my having stumbled across a spirited little article on the Internet by one Pascal Cazottes, a member of the International Napoleonic Society (and a gentleman of pleasant enough appearance with, perhaps, a touch of the zealot's gleam in the eye) whose learned thesis, translated here into a ludicrous kind of Clouseauesque English (the original is far more palatable, if you can read French), is that the great Marshal Ney, Na... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, January 18, 2011,
From a recently resurrected album: The Pavarotti-like figure, 'tis (or 'twas) I; the place, Sarlat in the Perigord, in southwestern France; the year, 1989; the month, July; my fellow drinker, Pete Battley, an excellent fellow from London, who was staying, as was I, in the half-ruined farmhouse rented by our mutual chum Dave Mackie. (Cheers, gents.) It was a wine-tasting tour on a budget. Glorious weather for the 200th anniversary of the Revolution. In the garden of the world. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, January 16, 2011,
Orwell died 61 years ago on the 21st, far too soon.
"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, January 12, 2011,
You can read Paul Theroux's complete autobiography in this article from Smithsonian magazine, all four paragraphs of it. Theroux rejects the idea of writing a memoir, for reasons that seem to be a combination of ennui, reticence, and superstition. He reckons he's been autobiographical enough in his travel books, and quotes V. S.Pritchett to the effect that a writer writing about his own life is writing about himself writing, hence a total bore. What you need is the picaresque element, as in C... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, January 10, 2011,
DFW formerly meant Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and now means David Foster Wallace, the contemporary Young Werther whose posthumous career seems to be gathering steam in a fit of celebrity worship by the media cognoscenti. We're still Romantics enough to delight in a story of genius brought low, or artistic sensitivity extinguished by the crude, cruel world. Wallace obliged. He acquired in his short life everything that many of us lesser-known auteurs have worked for in vain in our longer ones: ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, January 4, 2011,
In the long and slow process of publishing my magnum opus, The Adorations, online, despite encountering the usual pesky setbacks and glitches common to all computers and software I've managed to soldier on sufficiently for 21 chapters to now be online. The most recent one, posted this morning, describes a most unusual phone call received by the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, in his private office in the Reichs Chancellery, in the waning days of peace, 1939, a phone call so unusual that it gives even ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, January 3, 2011,
Here's a reminder, from a review by the estimable Michael Dirda, that the freelancer's lot has frequently been a hard one, especially if the freelancer involved is anything like Thomas De Quincey, author of the celebrated Confessions of An English Opium Eater: "An opium addict, an alcoholic in all but name, and a man who spent years dodging creditors, constantly moving from one rented room to another. What money he didn't spend on laudanum - his preferred opium-alcohol mixture - he spent on b... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, January 2, 2011,
Scientific American has an article about the last days of Hermann Goering and the improbable bond he formed with his American psychiatrist, Dr. Kelley. Even more improbable is the fact that, 12 years after Fat Hermann offed himself via cyanide capsule, Dr. Kelley, by then an enraged alcoholic back in California, did the very same thing. There's a touch of Vonnegut about this story. But it's true. Continue reading ...
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