It's Armistice Day, or Veterans Day if you prefer, and time for a bit of schmaltz.

          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 ...

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...

From Ohiowa Impromptu

A billboard displaying smiling cows and buxom pastures, and vice versa, and the words “Welcome to Ohiowa,  breadbasket of the Midwest!” greets traffic entering that great state from Chicagoland on the Governor Wendell J. "Sherlock" Holmes Memorial Parkway...

From Ohiowa Impromptu:

       Marina learned from the Nutlanders about odd weekend events called "yard sales," or "garage sales," at which American families flung open their front doors and garages and divested themselves for a price of unwanted belongings that would have furnis...

From Ohiowa Impromptu:

Truth to tell, Marina was proud of her yagoditsy and proud of being Russian, too. But she knew her country was doomed, so she busied herself with the task of building an outpost of Russian civilization here, in far America (also doomed, but not yet). She hung ...

More encouraging words for us stragglers at the lower end of the cognitive elite, from Charles Simic:

Writers and poets are only noticed in totalitarian regimes. They are either imprisoned and shot, or they become highly-privileged flunkies of the regime. In democracies, they are margi...

So much for the handicaps; what of the possibilities of service in Baghdad? A country in which man's selfishness and stupidity have ruined almost all natu...

Old Ireland

It seems a thousand years ago now: tires swish by on the road

And the woody pong of dad’s old pipe salts the rainy air.

My head throbs with the burden of recalling

The succulence of rashers on a bell-loud Sunday 

And the scalding sweetness of overmilked tea

And ...

A sneak preview from my current novel, Ohiowa Impromptu, in which Dr. Ramsultanajam, Head of Geriatric Medicine at Eisenbahn Memorial Hospital in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, encounters a Hindu god in the Emergency Ward.

"My God."

The doctor's exclamation was prompted less by the visually certifiable fact of the divine apparition standing in the middle of the room, halfway between Mrs. Hillendale and Mrs. Gong–the elephant-god Ganesha, he of the elephant head, single tusk, and...

from The Adorations

Tristan always attracted a crowd, even at the matinee performance, and the conductor, young Bruno Walter, the late great Mahler’s understudy and second-in-command, was himself a powerful attraction, ramrod-straight, lithe and—paradoxically, in a mostly cl...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

From The Adorations:

He looked at the black-bordered picture of the dead Archduke, for whom he felt no pity (an increasingly alien emotion)—indeed, the anticipation of what was already rumored (mobilizations, ambassadors recalled, Austrian troops shelling Belgrade) tingled in his ...

From The Adorations:

Stefanie put down her pen, suddenly aware of distant noise, her attention distracted by a growing commotion outside. The even pitch of traffic sounds had been jarred into dissonance. A concentrated shouting rose from the busy street below, the knotted clamor of ...

Boston Review, which has been my refuge, my soapbox, and my part-time employer for the past 10 years, has published  an essay of mine on Arthur Koestler, here–or, more precisely, an essay of mine on Michael Scammell's biography of Koestler, the reading of which reignited my interest in the great Anglo-Hungarian polymath, whom I revered during my youth. The Scammell bio has been widely reviewed–here, by Christopher Hitchens–and none of the reviewers has failed to observe that Koestl...

Reputations are made here, as in Russia, on political respectability, or by commercial acceptability. The worse the author, the more he is known.

                                                                                                James Purdy (1914–2009)

  At Arthur Rubinstein’s farewell performance at the Usher Hall in Edinbu...

To jump ahead a year in my World War II time line, to June 22-23, 1941, the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, when 4.5 million German and Axis-allied troops  invaded the Soviet Union, Germany's erstwhile ally, with history's largest army. A direct descendant of Napoleon's invasion of ...

When my mother died in March 2002, I was living in Texas and had (and have) the dual responsibilities of family and job, so I was away from her side. But I went over for her funeral, and went back a year later to sell the old house in Ferney-Voltaire. Mother, thankfully, went like th...

            After Dad's funeral I returned temporarily to France and kept my mother company at her expense. Then, ever on the move, I headed back to New York via Reykjavik, Iceland, on Icelandair, in those days the airline of choice for penurious trans-Atlantic travelers. A bli...

 Not long after I moved to New York I renewed contact with my father in Delaware, at first to touch him for cash, then I started going down to visit him on weekends with increasing and more relaxed frequency as it became apparent that we were more or less congenial, especially if...

A useful caveat from the ever-useful Clive James (whose endlessly entertaining website is a panacea for those long dull afternoons at the office):

"The perpetual dimwit-left consensus will disgust any liberal eventually, but the trick is to reclaim the democratic centre, not to take re...

For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and ...

The 29th Infantry Division trained in Scotland and England for the crosschannel invasion, October 1942-June 1944. Teamed with the 1st Division, a regiment of the 29th Division (116th Infantry) was in the first assault wave to hit the beaches at Normandy on D-day, 6 June 1944. Landing on Omaha Beach on the same day in the face of intense enemy fire, the Division soon secur...

As part of my homage to the memory of fallen France, I'm posting this excerpt from my as-yet unpublished novel The Adorations, which deals, among many other things, with that cataclysmic event in June, 1940.

           Paying attention, are we, o influential editors and publishin...

As an Irish-American writer raised in Europe and currently living in Texas after many years in New York, I sometimes wonder if there's an ideal place for me anywhere, or if it matters at all. Any of the places I've lived in would suit me fine, if I moved back, but if destiny decrees...

My wife is a scholar; I, a novelist. Sometimes she seems amazed by the wandering indiscipline of my brain, with its tendency to free-associate and invent. I, on the other hand, can only admire the firm, steady discipline of her scholar's mind. But I find that, as always, others have been...

  Oh Great New York, Tomb of my Youth!

    It was a discouraging time. All I had to show for a lifetime’s literary ambitions were four clumsy short stories, a few translations, and the age-yellowed reams of juvenilia. Yet, having no choice, I remained a student, of life and the...

      Becoming a New Yorker was as close as I got to tailoring an Ameri...

I don't go to church except to admire the art, but I sympathize with this sentiment of G. K. Chesterton's:

"The Church is the one thing that prevents a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time."

Actually, that's another reason to got to church: to leave the mode...

        I have no doubt about the veracity of climate change. It's been happening for as long as Earth has existed. And I have no doubt that the causes are various and changing, and that they include the toxic effects of human industry and manufacturing. But "climate change" is different from "global warming," which extends the debate from the scientific and climatological to the emotional, if not purely political: Bush vs. Gore; liberal vs. conservative; Republican vs. Democrat; First Worl...

          I was back in Paris for an interview for an interpreter’s job at the La Villette exhibition center. It was the sweaty, sagging fag-end of summer 1977. I was, as usual, nearly broke; notwithstanding which I booked a room at the swank Hotel Pierre 1er de Serbie on the elegant street of that name, off the Champs-Elysées. I planned a quiet evening, as usual (Dr. Jekyll firmly in charge): the hotel room, a frugal dinner and the train journey, sans plus. With cunning foresight, howev...

My daughter, senior class valedictorian, is graduating from her high school this Sunday, so The Snug will be closed until the festivities are over. I leave you with this observation by Elizabeth Taylor-NoNotThatOneTheWriter–the eminent English novelist, that is, who died too young (63) in 1975. "Writers are ruined people," she said. "As a person, you’re done for. Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper..."

Too true. M...

Gustave Flaubert read and thought a great deal; he was fortunate to have the leisure to do so, thanks to inherited money. Browsing his comments and observations is like sitting down with him in his parlor, over an aperitif. "A superhuman will is needed in order to write," he said, "and I am only a man." But not just a man: "I am a man-pen," he added. "I feel through the pen, because of the pen." But what he felt was hopelessly inadequate, for (he said, sighing), "Human language is like a cr...

        Then there was a week in October of '77 during which my search for employment took me to Germany. An advertisement in the International Herald Tribune announced an employment opportunity. It was not for the secretary-generalship of the United Nations or the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but rather—more appropriately for my qualifications, such as they were (and weren’t)—for an English teacher at the Opel car plant in Russelsheim, Germany, near Frankfurt/Main. Payment i...

Memories long unvisited can startle with their freshness and vividness–and their resuscitated aromas, the fastest time machine being, of course, the sense of smell. A recent visit on a rainy day to a local Austin coffee shop, for example, and its attendant mingled odors of roasted coffee and damp streets, and a whiff of diesel fumes from an adjacent parking lot, brought into ever-sharper mnemonic focus a) Europe; b) France; and c), with that precise olfactory combination, a visit to diese...

In that year (1977) I traveled as much as I could around France. Traveling was my escape from myself, as for most travelers. With what I saved from my teaching I went on a grand old vinous ramble down France’s Routes du Vin with the spirits of Gargantua and Pantagruel and enough varieties of Burgundy and Bourgeuil and Vouvray and sundry vins de table to make me ...

Of Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), American-born English critic and essayist, author of the forgotten memoir Unforgotten Years and Trivia, a collection of aphorisms, the art historian Lord Clark waspishly wrote, "His tall frame, hunched up, with head thrust forward like a bird, was balanced unsteadily on vestigial legs." Vestigial they may have been, but those ...

  In my five-and-a-bit years in the British Isles I’d let my Frenchness (or Swiss-Frenchness) slip a bit. But the ferry that took me from the shores of Blighty docked in Calais on a windy day in March, under clouds whipped across patches of royal Artois blue. There must have been a stray whiff of Gauloise in the air, and there were Renaults and Citroens on quay...

A new John Banville novel is as great a pleasure as a new Nabokov once was. Banville is Nabokov's stylistic heir; he's the greatest living artist of English prose. I'm delightedly immersed in The Infinities, his latest, whose conceit is that the gods of Olympus have never gone away but watch over us yet; the novel is narrated by one of them, Hermes. In the hands of a lesser artist this would be an irritating affectation, but Banville is a greater, not a lesser, artist. It works.

I pop two ...

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) verged on–indeed, occasionally fell into–sentimentality in his work (Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), but without him my experience of reading, as a boy, would have been much poorer, and his verse always sang to me.

My House

My house, I say. But hark to the sunny doves  

That make my roof the arena of their loves,  

That gyre about the gable all day long  

And fill the chimneys with their murm...

Thoughts and memories of England dominate. And where there's England, there's Thomas Hardy. God willing, there'll always be both.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

H...

By the time I’d been down and nearly out in London for four or five months I was rejected everywhere I applied for employment. Indeed, my lifelong talent for harvesting rejections in the face of all odds took wing during my year in London. Job hunting went from ludicrous to impossible. When I complained, my landlord pointed out that I dressed like an out-of-work 1920s-era socialist: baggy corduroys, faded tunic, and scuffed boots, and that this would inevitably dim my luster, except possi...

Boston Review, which has been my refuge, my soapbox, and my part-time employer for the past 10 years, will publish next month an essay of mine on Arthur Koestler–or, more precisely, an essay of mine on Michael Scammell's biography of Koestler, the reading of which reignited my interest in the great Anglo-Hungarian polymath, whom I revered during my youth. The Scammell bio has been widely reviewed–here, by Christopher Hitchens–and none of the reviewers has failed to observe that Koestl...

       My first London lodging was in an attic in the far suburb of Friern Barnet, an hour’s tube ride north of Charing Cross on the Northern Line. The attic was in a redbrick semidetached house rented by three young men from Scotland, of whom only one, some kind of economist or higher accountant, was willing to put me up, he being the only one I knew. The other two were hash-smoking pop musicians and ungenerous chaps of decidedly narrow disposition. I was, therefore, enjoined to secrecy,...

To compliment yesterday's portrait of the Nabokovs, here's one of Aleksandr and Natalya Solzhenitsyn outside the general store in Cavendish, Vermont, in the late '70s. This photo gives the lie to the story that AS never mingled with the locals; in fact, during his 18 years in Cavendish, he was frequently seen at the general store or the post office, and took part in at least one town meeting. But his English was shaky, which restricted his sociability. Later on, his sons, who grew up as Ame...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

“Chairman Mao, WHO LED CHINA TO CHAOS AND GLORY, is Dead at 82.”

        So thunders The Thunderer. It is Wednesday, September 10, 1976. Imagine the calendar pages spinning backwards, as in a 1940s film noir. Your time machine deposits yo...

         Samuel Beckett lived much of his life among the intellectuals of Paris's Latin Quarter, almost all of whom were on the political left, and who for the most part assumed Beckett to be, too. Such is the myopia of the politically credulous. Not much effort would have been required to ascertain that in both his work and his life Beckett lived as if in a fortress, overlooking the world and apart from it. He observed, but did not emulate, those around him, and disdained their beliefs and...

             Back in Edinburgh for my final year, at first I avoided all pubs and spent a great deal of time in the university library and the National Library of Scotland, but instead of attending to my course books I was distracted by memories of a girl I'd met over the summer and disturbing reading like Gogol’s Nose and M. R. James’s ghost stories and the original London Times dispatches from Waterloo and other finds beyond measure, including Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood; I e...

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that makes things happen.

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         When I went home from Edinburgh to visit my mother it was to a different room in a different house, and even a different country; for her home was no longer in Switzerland, but across the border, in France. Subsequent to a series of rent hikes by greedy landlords, she and old Pete Toy had at last moved out of the "English" villa on Chemin Bonvent in Geneva, with its sheep field and ambivalent neighbors and purple mountains’ majesty, and into an o...

My great ambition is to write a funny book; but, as you know, it’s the most difficult thing of all.

                                                         Alberto Moravia

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

    Greater fame than Dracula's crowned the career of another eccentric Edinburgh retailer, Madame Doubtfire, owner of a used-clothing shop on Great King Street in the New Town that doubled or tripled as a bookstore and general junk depot. Madame D., real name Annabella Coutts, was one of Edinburgh’s star turns. Bill and I laughed at her on our way home from the pub and she cackled back at us like an enormous dotty hen. She inspired the local writer A...

         "Trouble is, Kevin’s seen his fair share of movie air disasters."

         And not much else; but that's about to change. Kevin is Kevin Quinn, the protagonist of James Hynes's new novel Next. Kevin's nothing special. He's not a bad fellow, but not particularly good, either. He's bored with his life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so he's flown down to Austin for a one-day job interview, but arrives hours early. Meanwhile we wander with him around Texas's capital which, in...

Philip Hensher reminds us of literature's advantages over film, with Bleak House as case in point:

"It isn't, moreover, just a question of leaving out wonderful little corners of plot, or irresistible characters. It's really a matter of not doing a tenth of the things a book does. A book can switch into historical narration, dense description, authorial comment. It can, as Bleak House does, alternate between past tense and present tense–it's an extraordinarily sinister moment when Richar...

I’ve been enjoying the rueful, humorous, and melancholy writing of Richard Ford. I first read The Sportswriter, whose title, evocative to me of hollow heartiness, low levels of culture, and rampant provincialism, had put me off for years, until I reminded myself that you can write about anything as long as you do it well—and I discovered that Ford does it very well, and that the fact of the main character’s being a sportswriter is of no more importance than is Leopold Bloom’s being an...

Another insight from the sage Czech in exile.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The novelist destroys the house of h...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            Dracula’s was where–in the form of several out-of-print volumes in a box–I first came upon that most eccentric of immortals, John Cowper Powys, “Old Earth Man,” Prester John of the Welsh Mountains. The mere mention of the mad old bugger’s name brings peace to my soul. I'm devoted to the man now, but back then, like most people, I’d never heard of him. He’s an acquired taste, and for a minority at that, but once sampled he...

            Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         Dark and capacious as its namesake’s castle, Dracula's occupied two gloomy floors in a Georgian building across the street from Tariq’s Indo-Pak Restaurant and conveniently just down from the Meadow Bar, our local when on campus, and, less conveniently, the French Department, where most of the lectures I was supposed to attend (but usually didn’t) took place, finding myself distracted en route by Tariq’s or the M...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            At Edinburgh, like Boswell, we drank deep and now and then studied hard and even wrote a bit. We were indebted to politics, especially Scottish Nationalism and old-line Clydeside socialism, both primarily for romantic reasons—Rob Roy and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists—but we were more receptive to culture and world affairs, so pub talk was relatively elevated when we were sober, and when we were drunk fights could and did b...

    Thanks to impending fiançailles between Victor, the Registrar at the University of Ulster (and fellow-member of the “Gaelic Club”) and Aisling, a young lady in the registrar’s office at the University of Edinburgh, as well as to some serious liquid bribery of Victor by me at the Harbour Bar and elsewhere, the formalities of transferring my files from one little-known brand-new institution of higher learning in the wilds of Ireland’s black North to one of the most august and an...

I am too firm in consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural.

                                                                                                Joseph Conrad

Georges Haldas (b. 1917), a French-Swiss writer, has written more than sixty works of fiction, poetry, and criticism in his long life. His main subject has always been Geneva, his city (and once mine). I've read a number of his books, which are, unfortunately, unavailable in English, as far as I know. But if you can read French at all, you'll enjoy them. He brilliantly evokes the sounds and smells of the city: Boulevard des Philosophes; Chronique de la Rue Saint-Ours; La Légende des Cafés...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         So walking became my bond with the external, eternal, earth-redolent Ireland. But there was the other, the Ireland of people. Still the naïve outsider, when neither walking nor attending lectures I became an habitué of the few local bars of any distinction, less so now of the Harbour in Portrush, whose literary milieu was of no interest to my new, unliterary companions, and in some of these pubs I became so ill-advisedly outspoken, metamor...

Well into his maturity, the great English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889), for all his erudition, was unacquainted with vulgar slang. Under the impression that a "twat" was a nun’s headgear, he misused the word in a spectacularly naive fashion in his verse play  Pippa Passes (best known for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world"):

Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

When asked why, later ...

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

Marshal Ferdinand Foch, under whose dashing command the French and their Allies defeated the Germans in WWI, had panache. During the second battle of the Marne in 1918, in response to fear-mongering reports from the front, he sent the following telegram:

My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I am attacking.

And, of course, like his fellow Gascons D’Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac, one quality he possessed in abundance was audacity: “L’audace, toujours l...

Of all the arts, sculpture is the most accessible but the least prized. Most people go right on by: oh, just another general on horseback or long-dead poet. But surely it's nothing short of miraculous to elicit from solid rock (or molten bronze) the myriad subtleties of human expression or the precise fall of a garment. I was reminded of this the other day when reading an article on Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828), the great French sculptor whose life straddled France's greatest upheavals: ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's cont'd.

     That first term I lived in a narrow attic room in the Seaview Hotel in Portrush, Co. Antrim, about ten miles from the university campus, with a view through a tiny window of red-brick Victorian buttresses, the gray northern sea and, on clear days, of the long low shank of Inishowen Head in Co. Donegal. Portrush was then famous throughout Ireland as a slightly rundown family holiday resort, a smaller, second-rate version of Blackpool, if anything mor...

Kipling believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

                                                Evelyn Waugh

Colour, old man, is what, au fond, clinches a creed. Colour and the light of God behind it.

                                                                          Rudyard Kipling, after visiting Chartres

As a writer, I am not of the minimalist school. On the contrary, I tend toward the prolix. But I hope I have enough of an innate sense of the structure and limitations of language to avoid overwhelming--or, worse, boring--my readers. A good writer needs an instinctive feel for honesty in his writing. John McGahern had this. He never overwhelmed; he was unsparingly spare, even austere, more of a word-painter, adding a daub here, wiping away a stroke there, than a word-musician orchestrating ...

The writer is driven by his own vocation to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist State.

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country.

                            Edna O'Brien

At last...Ireland! (How suitable to re-connect with the Ireland of my youth on St. Patrick's Day.) Well, technically, yes, but it was actually Northern Ireland I ended up in. I worked that out from the name of the institution that accepted me as a student: the University of Ulster....

Beannachtaí na Feile Pádraig oraibh go leir.

Warmest greetings to all on St. Patrick’s Day.

The harp that once through Tara’s hall

The sound of music shed,

Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls,

As if that soul were fled.

           Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

What with certain Middle Eastern rulers calling for holy war against Switzerland, and a general and quite unusual Swiss jitteriness about themselves and their future, I felt a nostalgic fondness for the place and turned to memories of my own Swiss past and French-Swiss scribblers largely unknown beyond the Confederation’s borders: the late Jacques Chessex (L’Ogre) and his predecessors, Guy de Pourtalès (La Peche Miraculeuse), and C. F. Ramuz (Derborance). The intensity of these Swiss w...

[Drink] unlocks secrets, bids hopes be fulfilled, thrusts the coward onto the battle-field, takes the load from anxious hearts. The flowing bowl — whom has it not made eloquent? Whom has it not made free even amidst pinching poverty? 

My task is to chronicle those little daily lacerations upon the spirit.                                      Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

          White, blue; blue, white. Like her flag and the original cover of Ulysses. The prism-sharp light of Greece. Blindingly white, from the dark and increasingly fetid shelter of my train compartment, were the boxy houses, porcelain-blue the sky. Intimidated by the sudden foreignness of everything, exhausted from three days on the Yugoslav horror express, and homesick for our overgrown garden, old Stinko II, and Pete Toy, I lugged my steamer...

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.                                                                                                                                   The train journey itself, which took three days and three nights from Lausanne to Athens (via Milan, Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje, and Salonika), and my subsequent sojourn in Greece, introduced me to the most extreme form of two sensations: loneliness and nost...

Beware the writer who sets himself or herself up as the voice of a nation. This includes nations of race, gender, sexual orientation, elective affinity. . . The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it substitutes political values for literary ones. It is the murderer of thought.

                                           ...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Crete had come as part of my all-in-one wanderjahr in Greece. A car trip with two schoolmates through Italy and Greece in the summer after graduation had revived my juvenile Hellenism and turned me into a proto-Hellene. I’d been immersing myself in the bleak and blistering books of Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, later parsed for me in Athens by a friend of ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            I glimpsed the wilderness again in Crete. I was at the foot of Mt. Ida, after about two hours’ gut-churning trundle in an old bus from Knossos, the restored Minoan palace just outside Heraklion. It was a hot morning in September 1970, forty summers and a thousand years ago. I was looking for the cave on Mt. Ida in which, it was said (by the D’Aulaires and others), Zeus was born to the goddess Rhea. Coincidentally, in that very sa...

As a young would-be writer and budding professional Irishman, I was infatuated with The Ginger Man, the comic masterpiece by Irish-American maestro J. P. Donleavy. I must have read it five times or more, enraptured by its picaresqueness and the absurd tenacity of the hero, Sebastian Dangerfield. Much of the book's influence trickled into my own Killoyle (which had several midwives: Donleavy, Flann O'Brien, Kingsley Amis, Laurence Sterne) ... I've always admired old J.P., not only for his ta...

While attending the University of Ulster I lived for a year in the pleasant seaside town of Portstewart on the northern coast of Northern Ireland, across from Co. Donegal in the Republic (placing the northernmost point of Ireland in the South: how very Irish). The Scottish islands of Eigg, Mull, and Rhum were visible on the horizon on clear days. The picture above shows the town in the 1960s; it had changed little when I arrived in 1971. I shared a bungalow with three Catholic rebels, one o...

Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner's slip he came across in Prague, which warned clients "Some stains can only be removed by the destruction of the material itself." Unknown until he was in his fifties, banned on and off by the Communists, Hrabal had ample opportunity to hone his sense of life's absurdity, a perspective on life specialized in by the Czechs and the Irish (or perhaps I should say the Slavs and the Celts). Another shrewd observation from ...

A new, humorless generation is now arising

It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,

Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

                                    Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.

                        P. G. Wodehouse

        We had the fat years, and then Dad’s hubris caught up with him and we had the lean ones. And exactly what does the hubris of an itinerant electronic-bell salesman consist of? Well, I’ll tell you. It consists of not being satisfied with a job that takes you one week to Trondheim and the next to Venic...

To have the clarity of mind and wit of Voltaire, along with his wealth, and to live where and how he did, would be heaven enough for me.

After youth comes old age; after happiness, unhappiness, and vice versa; nobody can be healthy and cheerful all their lives... you have to be ready for anything. You just have to do your duty as best as you can.

                                                        Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Bruges la Morte, or Bruges the Dead, a novel published in 1892 by the Belgian Symbolist Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898; photo above), is the story of a grief-stricken widower, Hugues Viane, who travels to the then-decaying Belgian inland port city of Bruges (now a flourishing tourist attraction) and develops an obsession there with a local danseuse who is, he thinks, the spitting image of his dead wife. The narrative culminates in a deranged murder. Sound a bit familiar, Hitchcock fans? Well,...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         By way of contrast to Russia, it was two years later, in the sands of the Sahara, or at least in that desert’s gravelly outcroppings, where, as previously noted, I caught one of my periodic glimpses of true wilderness. I was traveling in the south of Tunisia with another school group, friends from Geneva. We were on a malodorous bus on a narrowing ill-paved road south of the dusty and dreary town of Sousse. The bus stopped for refueling ...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.    

Travels and friends were inextricably linked, in those early years. With Paul I took another trip, a few years later, when he was old enough to be driving his dad’s Citroen GS: we went to Zurich for a dirty weekend (yes! Zurich!!), but the less said about that the better. Paul went on to become a beacon and pundit, whereas my light has remained firmly hidden under many bushels.

     Around the same time, as a star member of the Ecolint Rus...

The Indian author G. V. Desani may be a footnote in the annals of world literature, but what a footnote! He was the author of All About H. Hatterr, one of the most original, rambunctious, incandescent, and just plain bizarre novels ever written, a delirious and startling debut–but his debut was his end, for he never again produced a novel. Salman Rushdie said of him, "If Narayan is India's [Samuel] Richardson, then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose ...

Among British Prime Ministers, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), who was also a novelist (Sybil, or The Two Nations; Vivian Grey; Tancred, or The New Crusade; etc.), ranks second only to Winston Churchill in the quality and variety of his wit. When ordered in the House [of Commons] to withdraw his declaration that half of the cabinet were asses, Disraeli replied, `Mr. Speaker, I withdraw. Half the cabinet are not asses.'" Assiduous in his attendance to the business of the House, he commented, ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

My first journey unsupervised by adults took place when I was 14, and it came about quite spontaneously. Early one ordinary Saturday morning I met Paul,[1] an Ecolint schoolmate, in downtown Geneva. We wandered about a bit, then took the F bus across the French border to Ferney-Voltaire, quondam home town of the eponymous philosophe, and wandered about there for awhile, enjoying the French-small-town feeling and having a tartine or thé citron. Then, after...

When Beethoven was in a bad mood and no one could go near him, a little girl named Katherina Fröhlich used to be sent to him with his favorite newspaper, the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. Cheerful by name ("fröhlich" = "cheerful"), cheerful by nature, young Kathie usually succeeded in placating the irascible genius. She later became quite prominent as the founder of the Schwestern-Fröhlich-Stiftung, an organization whose aim was to advance the arts and sciences (in those days, consider...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.        

    It occurred to me the other day while watching a TV program about the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic wilderness that I’d never actually been in the wilderness—now that, then, was true wilderness, as Franklin and those poor bastards found out soon enough—but that I’d been near it a few times: in Crete, in Canada, in Tunisia, in northern Scotland, and in Iceland. I then went to on to reflect, in my egotistical fashion, ho...

I always enjoy the bold, perceptive, and humorous ruminations of John Derbyshire, Anglo-American philosopher, novelist, essayist, and mathematician, affectionately known throughout the blogosphere as "Derb." Brought up in the dying light of once-great England and her once-great education system, undeterred by convention or political correctness, but inspired by the examples set by the likes of Dr. Johnson, Baruch Spinoza, and George Orwell, he looks at things sub specie aeternitatis, which ...

As Toyota stumbles through its worst patch ever, with new setbacks popping up every day–yesterday it was the brakes on the Prius, today it's the steering on Camrys–it's worth a look back at the early days of the Japanese giant's conquest of America's hearts, minds, and car lots, courtesy of John Updike's Rabbit is Rich (hat tip: Nigeness):

"Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Spring Motors display room watching the traffic go ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         Alone with M. Achkar in the sparsely-populated Ecolint Pantheon of Teaching Excellence we find my history teacher, Mr. McKean-Taylor, an Anglicized Scot. McKean-Taylor was no teacher, actually, but masqueraded as one. He was a raconteur who enjoyed the diversions of history and was stimulated by young minds, white Valais wine, and being on the Continent instead of at some damp comprehensive back home in Blighty. He was plump, and he dra...

Hans Koning, born Hans Koningsberger in Amsterdam in 1921, was a sergeant in the British Army during World War II. In 1951 he came to the United States from the chaos of ex-Dutch Indonesia and became an outstanding novelist and reporter. I reviewed one of his best novels, Zeeland, in 2002. Koning was always quirky, humorous, and observant, and he spent his life on that margin of respectability where a writer must dwell. He wrote me a courteous letter thanking me for my review, and hoped, ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         And so back to school, realm of bullies and the bullied and of me, who was neither.

         I spent thirteen years at the International School of Geneva, through all its grades and forms, in two languages, English and French, with smatterings of four others, German, Russian, Spanish, and Italian; doing well in some classes, badly in others, and making a few friends along the way. The school’s great virtue was its heterogeneity...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen. 

Benjamin Disraeli

    Now I am ten. It is a summer dawn, forty-five years ago.  I lie half-awake in my small bed at the Hotel Regina, Trieste, listening to the early-morning sounds of an Italian city: Vespas; Fiats; electric trolleycars; buses; shouts of “Ao” and “ciao”; a radio playing (what else?) an aria (Puccini?). Light dribbles...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

That house on Chemin Bonvent (Goodwind Lane) was my home for fifteen years and remains a beacon in my misty land of memories. Like Rebecca, last night I dreamed I went to Manderley—only instead of Manderley it was No. 42, Chemin Bonvent that I found myself sweeping up to, in my dream-Bentley. But, unlike Rebecca, my house-dreams are banal affairs, usually just replays of reality. Nothing much happens, except an upsurge of obscure longing, or the gentle n...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

I retrospectively detect the first squirming of eroticism in Ancient Greece. I read D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths at age ten or so. I couldn’t get enough of my fantasy Hellas, and Eros was one of the gods lurking in those Arcadian glades. The pictures of flimsily-clad Aphrodite lit a surly flame. I had a crush on Athena, too, and half-nude naiads and nymphs flitted in and out of my banal fantasy world, giving me ideas (mostly the wrong ones, but st...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. 

         What did scar me was the treble isolation of being an only child of parents who were distant from me and from each other; being myself, whoever that was, amid my peers, who all seemed to have firm identities; and being a stranger in a strange land. It could have been the recipe for another Hitler, and it certainly explains in part my lifelong interest in bizarre loners, including the Führer, whom I see as a kind of crazy country cousin,...

Church Going

by Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, t...

 Shoplifting at Dracula's: a memoir, cont'd.

In our Ford Squire, Dad at the wheel (Mum never drove when he was available, regardless whether he was drunk or sober—although she was never drunk), we returned to the Continent, Dover to Calais across the choppy Channel under November skies the color of slate and, bidding Paris au revoir from the périphérique, traveled down the poplar-lined Roman highway, Route Nationale 5, through the dirty golds and muddy midwinter spinach-greens of Burg...

I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I'm dying, I'll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn't bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses.

William T. Vollmann

The truth is that we mediocre men cannot even imagine what it is to be a great man like Mozart and Shakespeare and thus to be free from the domination of the contemporary prejudices, beliefs, morals, artistic rules, scruples (call them what you will) with which even the most enlightened of us are—often unconsciously—obsessed.

              W.J. Turner, Mozart: The Man and His Works

Paris was a place of wonder. It was a real city, my first. I loved it, even peopled as it was by foreigners who insisted on speaking a foreign language and expecting me to understand—me, transatlantic princeling that I was! I had no intention of learning their jabber, yet later did, to a near-native pitch of fluency. My parents, however, remained staunchly hopeless at languages. E...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. (Photo is of the RMS Queen Elizabeth.)

Of the transatlantic journey that links me to that bygone era of great ocean voyages that is in turn linked to all of previous seaborne human history, I recall only teasing episodes: the bustle and excitement of boarding the Queen Elizabeth; the dark water slopping ominously, far beneath the steep gangway; the brilliance of the light at sea; the briny ocean-smell; the miniature salt and pepper shakers on the dining ta...

Blair was, of course, better known by his pen name, George Orwell. He was one of the most indispensable twentieth-century writers. Only Koestler understood the dangers of totalitarian ideology as well. But Orwell was a cha...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. (Photo: Flagler St., Miami, 1951. Note the coincidence of McRory's Department Store, at right.)

         I was born into a tropical never-never-land of pink stucco and Jewish retirees and towering palms, on July 20th, 1951, at around two in the afternoon, seven years to the day after Colonel von Stauffenberg failed to extinguish the Führer via bomb, and precisely eighteen years before another colonel, Neil Armstrong, made his contribution to histor...

Quite frankly, I've always thought, in my infinite naivety, that proclaiming oneself "anti-Zionist" or "anti-Israeli" rather than "anti-Semitic" gives one a hell of a license to go ahead and be, well, anti-Semitic. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Arab world, where "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and Mein Kampf are perennial bestsellers, and nowhere in the Arab world more than in Hamas-controlled Gaza. But it seems that the Fatah-controlled Palestine Authority (a hopeless sho...

We don’t remember days. We remember moments.

                                             Cesare Pavese

     Two years ago, when I was trying to sell property in France, the French authorities, in their inscrutable Chinese way (not for nothing is the French ruling elite called Les Mandarins), instructed me to furnish them with the address of my parents’ first conjug...

Here we finish Chapter One of my memoir–which is currently titled Shoplifting at Dracula's, by the way, for reasons that will become apparent if you stick around. (Photo: Rural Co. Tyrone.)

4. My mother’s bunch were Irish too, but they were (or became) Prods, “Scotch-Irish” in the parlance of then, an entirely inaccurate label because they were God-mad Erse through and through, those Catholic McRorys from the county Tyrone. The Catholic McRorys from Tyrone remade themselves into th...

On the heels of the terrible earthquake in Haiti, in which as many as 500,000 people may have died, I think back to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and Voltaire's reaction to it. I almost always find the Sage of Ferney a fresh breeze in the ambient fug, and in this case, as in so many others, he took on the obscurantists with gusto, and from his outrage came a poem, Poème Sur le Désastre de Lisbonne, and ultimately, of course, Candide, in which the character of Dr. Pangloss is based on the the...

And on we go, down all the days of Boylans and others; we're in about 1888 now. The photo shows an original DuPont powder mill on the Brandywine River, Wilmington, Del., ca. 1905.

3. Widowed Mary Boylan was left to bring up Ned Junior and Bob as best she could, which she did by moving from the slums of South Philly twenty-odd miles SSW to more salubrious surroundings in less grand but smaller and cheaper Wilmington, Delaware. There, in the city of the DuPonts, she determinedly pursued succ...

...and on and on. Here's the next bit. I'll go on like this until I've serialized the whole thing, à la Dickens. Maybe some kind editor will spot it and ask to publish it. (All right, all right, you can stop laughing now.) Intermittently, I'll be posting pieces on other subjects than myself, which will be a pleasant change.         

2.  In the 1870s a mysterious crisis that led directly to my being born an American occurred in the Boylan house of hogs in Clones. Whether the casu...

Memories of another car, another era (I have my car-guy hat firmly on today): This boat-like conveyance, the Hudson Commodore of 1949-50, quite upscale for the time, boasted Hudson's then-famous straight-six engine, the finest, creamiest powerplant from the finest American car manufacturer of the day after Lincoln and Studebaker. An off-white Commodore convertible similar to the one in the picture, with red leather interior, three on the tree, and all-tube in-dash radio, belonged to my mot...

Unfortunately, life made Gilbert Sorrentino an expert on the letdowns, rejections, and deceptions inherent in the writing life; fortunately, he turned his disappointments into satire, as a satirist does. Here are some excerpts from "Sea of Rains," a chapter in his very funny parody of the arty and literary worlds, Lunar Follies (Coffee House Press, 2005), in which imaginary but all-too-real rejection letters pour from various publishers onto the desk of the agent of a writer known only as "...

Desperately Seeking Sam      

        I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without  having left a stain upon the silence. –Samuel Beckett

        The first and last time I saw Samuel Beckett, he was walking down a Paris street, the Rue Rémy Dumoncel. At least, I think it was Beckett. The height was right; the near-skeletal thinness was right; the location was right—near the nursing home where he died not long after. I think he wa...

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
Cheers for now. 

As I prepare to travel from sunny Texas to the snowy Northeast, to teach a seminar and give a reading from my works at the esteemed Western Connecticut State University (venue of the nation’s only MFA course in Professional Writing) in historic and picturesque Danbury, former hat-making center and chief town of bucolic Fairfield County, I leave my readers, such as they are, with vital info gleaned from the local Chamber of Commerce website. These dry data will have to do until first-hand ex...

Fröhliches Weihnachten

Navidad Alegre

Buon Natale

Joyeux Noël

С Рождеством Христовым

I'm always surprised by how many educated, middle-class people I know who have traveled less than, say, your average Victorian pastor, who made it a point of making at least one pilgrimage to the Holy Land in his lifetime, to return with magic-lantern slides of the Dome of the Rock and Gethsemane with a few fleabitten camels standing about in the background. One thinks also of the traditional Grand Tour of the 18th and 19th centuries, embarked upon by college graduates and society debutante...

John McGahern, author of the novels Among Women, The Pornographer, and The Dark (the last of which which was banned in the know-nothing, Church-suffocated Ireland of the early '60s), as well as numerous Chekhovian short stories and the crystalline memoir All Will Be Well, died in '06 and was memorialized widely, including here, by me. Truly, the Ireland he grew up in was very much the obscurantist, repressed place Joyce describes in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man; and that McGahern...

      It was in the ordinary decencies–drink, food, conversation–that Samuel Beckett believed, and in little else, apart from Art, his one true religion. In this personal church he was a staunch conservative. His saints were Dante, Racine, Rembrandt, Schubert, Schopenhauer, and that other melancholy Samuel, Dr. Johnson, who obsessed him all his life (interestingly, pre-Godot, he wrote part of a play about Dr. Johnson in which the great man is awaited but never appears). Lesser saint...

John Updike, who died last January, was a man of many interests and broad horizons: novelist, art critic, short-story writer, poet, and, up to a point, car guy—or should I say, automotive esthete. Not for him the oil-stained T-shirt and under-the-hood exertions of a weekend. He couldn’t have cared less about the 0-60 time or highway mpg of a car. Nevertheless, as he says in Due Considerations, his last collect...

Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) 

Über allen Gipfeln 
Ist Ruh, 
In allen Wipfeln 
Spürest du 
Kaum einen Hauch; 
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. 
Warte nur, balde 
Ruhest du auch. 

As a firm believer that there's nothing new under the sun, I've been racking my brains to come up with a historical parallel to the sudden rise of Sarah Palin, and I think I've got one. Ever heard of Pierre Poujade? Few have today. but he was once famous enough to appear on the cover of TIME magazine and be spoken of as a potential prime minister of France.

The parallel, like all such historical analogies, is far from exact, but it may be briefly illuminating. Poujade was born in the sm...

VLADIMIR: Moron!

ESTRAGON: Vermin!

VLADIMIR: Abortion!

ESTRAGON: Morpion!

VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!

ESTRAGON: Curate!

VLADIMIR: Cretin!

ESTRAGON (with finality): CRRITIC!

VLADIMIR: Oh!

He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

                                             Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

On St Patrick's Day, 1943, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Eamon de Valera, father of the Irish free State, one-time radical republican and founder of Fianna Fàil (still Ireland's largest party), broadcast a radio speech to the nation in which he outlined his vision of post-war Ireland as "a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic y...

Plot, one might say, is the chronological sequence of events in a story, and the story itself is how, and in what style, those events are revealed to the reader. Harry Rowohlt, the German critic, author, and translator (and translator of my books), says that plot is the least necessary element of a good book, and cites my work as an example: "Sex, Gott, Alkohol und Irland, wenn das nicht Handlung genug ist," says Harry, re: the Killoyle trilogy ("sex, God, alcohol, and Ireland, if the plot ...

The Nobel prizewinning Danish physicist Niels Bohr (above, with an unnamed colleague) kept a horseshoe nailed to the wall above his desk and, when asked whether he believed it would bring him luck, replied: “Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you luck whether you believe in it or not.”

The OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau (above, avec chien) and François Le Lionnais. The group's initiatory text was a sequence of ten sonnets written by Queneau entitled Cent mille milliards de poèmes: these sonnets all use the same rhymes, and are grammatically constructed so that any line in any sonnet can be replaced by the corresponding line in any of the other nine sonnets. Each sonnet in the original edition was cut into 14 strips...

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam

And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.

Also, well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,

Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.

So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit

Have visited such a man? Many others

Were justly called, and trustworthy.

Who would have trusted me? For they saw

How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,

And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.

Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,

Able to recognize greatness wh...

At the end of the day (no, I mean that literally), feeling entitled to a brief blurring of the harsh contours of the world, I usually have a couple of stiff drinks (vodka or whiskey), followed by wine with dinner. Then a digestif (whiskey or cognac); and so to bed. It's hardly a bacchanalia, but it meets with the disapproval of big chunks of the medical profession, who are forever wagging the nanny finger about having more than one drink, if that, and never mind the obvious benefits of red ...

More about Nabokov, about whom I could go on and on--and will. He is cold and unfeeling, a mere manipulator of human pawns, say the ignorant or bloody-minded (or career Nabokov-haters, a rabid school of troglodytes motivated as much by class hatred and inverted snobbery as anything: Les aristos à l'échafaud). That this is utter nonsense can be proved at a glance, by reading any of his works; few writers I know of have anything like his instinctive, heartfelt reaction to adumbrations of cr...

Here in Texas, exposed as we are to tropical fronts and Northern ones alternately, the weather can change with cinematic abruptness, and does. In fall and winter the temperature may plunge 40+ degrees in a day when a cold front of the kind Texans call a Blue Norther blows through, frequently accompanied by all kinds of meteorological melodrama--tornadoes, hailstorms, and the like--but thankfully disposing of the steamy tropical fug and sweeping clean the skies. Then, for a couple of days, b...

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Nobel '01, is a man whose personality may have its unlovely side, and he isn't alone in that, but whose perspicacity and genius are beyond question, notably (I find) in The Enigma of Arrival and A Bend in the River. I've always thought of him as being, like Updike, a pure writer--that is, a man who is first and foremost a writer, not a man, or an Indian, or a Trinidadian, or an agnostic, or British. Or whatever (as they say). I was pleased to discover that...

 What's a Warholic? One addicted to the works of Andy Warhol? No, it's the name of Alexander Theroux's latest protagonist, Laura of that name. Theroux, Paul's older brother (by 2 years), is an interesting fellow and one of our best writers. The novels of his that I've read, Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat, linger yet in my mind as being prolix, fantastic, bitter, and hilarious. His latest, Laura Warholic, The Sexual Intellectual, has been described (in the Barnes & Noble Review) as "the ...

Pursuant to yesterday's list of the world's funniest books, here's another, more informal list. A good writer's voice is distinctive from the very first line, and the following first lines of novels, some painfully famous, others less so, are ideal instances of this.

 Call me Ishmael.

 —--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick  

 It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

 —--Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice  

 Loli...

Dalkey Archive Press compiled this list of the funniest works of fiction of all time from responses to questions they sent to various booksellers and book people across the U.S.A. I was especially enthusiastic about No. 13 on the list. And to be on a list, any list, with Italo Calvino, Oscar Wilde, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett, is honor enough for me.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Kangaroo, Yuz Aleshkovsky

Reservation Blues, Sherman...

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands...

...it's what's-his-name. Masefield. John Masefield, Poet Laureate of England, 1930-1967. This pub, in Wirral, Merseyside, near Liverpool, was intended to honor the poet, who trained to become a merchant seaman along the Mersey. But the local punters thought they recognized you-know-who and started calling the place "the Adolf." I mean, honestly. Hasn't hurt business, though. Quite the contrary. 

Masefield was a fine old-fashioned journeyman-poet who led a fine old-fashioned Victorian kind...

We're all radicals until we have kids. Then we start listening to the likes of C.S. Lewis.

"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of...

What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I:

I, this incessant snow,

  This northern sky;

Soldiers, this solitude

  Through which we go

      Is I.

                                   Walter de la Mare

This pensive gentleman is the late Brazilian novelist Osman Lins (1924-1978), of whom I've only recently heard but whose work I fully intend to explore: the novel Avalovara, for instance, in which--in a surrealistic manner reminiscent of his cultural cousin, the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, with his "heteronyms"--Lins introduces the "Yolyp," a person who is two people in one, a kind of spiritual hermaphrodite. (Well, we'll see how it goes.) But I enjoyed this passionate comme...

Milan Kundera, he of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Joke (that failed to amuse the Czech Communist censors), has long been in my pantheon of modern greats and remains there, despite the recent allegations made against him that he was a state spy. Well, if he was, one way or another half of Czechoslovakia was, too; not an excuse, but I've always been very wary of passing judgment on people who live under circumstances unimaginable to pampered, Western me. Anyway, what he says abo...

"Writers should have the highest ambition: not just for themselv...

Jorge Luis Borges lived in Geneva as a youth, died there at 86, and was buried in the same cemetery as John Calvin. Here's his take on the city.                                                         "Of all the cities in the world, of all the homelands that a man seeks to earn, Geneva seems to me to be the one most likely to bring happiness. Thanks to her I discovered, since 1914, French, Latin, German, Expressionism, Schopenhauer, the doctrines of Buddha, Tao...

"There is something of the night about A. L. Kennedy," says Rosemary Goring of the Glasgow Herald. And, let me add, something of the Day too. This is a feeble joke: Day is Kennedy's latest novel, a tour de force about a WW2 tail gunner. Other works include Paradise, a descent into alcoholic misery; On Bullfighting, which is just what its title implies; What Becomes, short stories, and one of my long-time favorites, from her or anybody: Night Geometry and The Garscadden Trains, her first col...

And as long as we’re on the subject of my youth in Switzerland (well, as long as I am), Expo 64 is one of my fondest memories. It was a Swiss National Fair that, because Switzerland is a kind of miniature world in itself, was also a kind of miniature World’s Fair, with monorails, then much in vogue, and cable cars, a vital part of Swiss culture, and art displays, and hands-on science exhibits; but, being run by the Swiss, it was as charming and lovely and well-maintained as Switzerland it...

I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while...