Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 30, 2010,
I was mildly critical of Ron Rosenbaum (above) below, re: his spurious Pale Fire controversy. But I'm entirely on his side on the topic of agnosticism vs. atheism. As he says in this week's Slate, "Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer."
Well said, sir. Atheism is as absurdly chil... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 29, 2010,
And 15 years before the horror came roaring out of Berlin that resulted in the crushing of Paris (below), a young Russian emigre living there on the proceeds of tennis lessons and translations wrote, "And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 29, 2010,
Seventy years ago: The dust has settled, the armistice is signed, the nation lies prostrate. Usually you go for a stroll down the Rue de Rivoli around this time of day, to clear your head, browse the shopwindows, sit for awhile in the Tuileries. But today this is the sight that greets you: not a relaxing one. And for four more years this is Paris, second city of the Third Reich. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, July 27, 2010,
Ron Rosenbaum, at his best an intelligent and entertaining culture sleuth (I found his Explaining Hitler fascinating, although it came nowhere near to an explanation), is at it again. Hard on the heels of the controversy over Vladimir Nabokov's posthumous novel The Original of Laura--in the course of which RR first publicly urged Dmitri, VN's son, to burn the manuscript, then recanted and exhorted him Publish! Publish! (he published)--we have what looks to me like a nostalgic attempt on RR's ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, July 25, 2010,
From the Entertainment Weekly obit for Harvey Pekar, by Ken Tucker: "Pekar remained an ardent champion of the lowly comic book, as well as a highly original reader of such neglected authors ranging from the forgotten humorist George Ade to the contemporary novelist Roger Boylan."
Nice of Ken not to repeat "lowly." That's George Ade in the photo. He ain't neglected. He's my brother. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 23, 2010,
Charles de Gaulle with his daughter Anne, who had Down syndrome.
Normally undemonstrative, the General was open and affectionate with the
little girl. When she died, aged 20, he said "Maintenant elle est
comme les autres" ("Now she's like the others"). Nothing becomes a
man of dignity so much as a well-tempered display of emotion. There was something
Roman about De Gaulle. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 22, 2010,
A poignant photo of Paul Verlaine sitting alone in a
cafe, post-Mathilde, post-Rimbaud, hastening his descent into drug addiction and alcoholism with a bottle of (what else?) absinthe. The story of the original
poète
maudit has inspired more self-destructive artistic martyrdoms than any other, b... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, July 21, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, July 20, 2010,
On July 20, 1944, Col. von Stauffenberg et al. failed signally to put AH and Germany out of their misery.
On that date in 1951 I came along. Good for me. Still here. Bit of a miracle, that.
Then, on the same date in 1969, another colonel made news by setting foot on the Moon. As he did so, I was watching him on the TV in the restaurant I was working in, rather than the customer I was serving; upshot: spaghetti alla carbonara all over Mr. Hassam, of Beirut. This was one of the few occasions when... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 16, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 15, 2010,
From the Telegraph:"One American reviewer wrote of [Beryl Bainbridge]: 'The highest compliment I can pay Beryl Bainbridge is an admission that I’ve been reading her books for almost 30 years and still don’t quite know what to make of them. Her novels may be uniformly spare, but they’re hardly tight; each one seems as weirdly elastic as the whole slippery oeuvre.'”I feel that way, too. But I also feel that way about quite a few other fine writers, such as John Banville, Thomas Berger, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, July 14, 2010,
Two hundred twenty-one years ago today, the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille. This, and the subsequent Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, constituted the third event of the French Revolution. (The first had been the revolt of the nobility, refusing to aid King Louis XVI through the payment of taxes; the second, the formation of the National Assembly and the Tennis Court Oath.) It's hard to find another event in all of history that had such far-reaching consequences, good an... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, July 13, 2010,
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) lived on the island of Guernesey, where he wrote Les Misérables. His house, Hauteville, was a remarkable light and airy hilltop domain, with vast views of the Channel and his French homeland on the horizon.Nigel Richardson says:"Hauteville's secret doors, dark carved wood, chinoiserie, mirrors, and constant play of light and dark make it feel more like being inside a fertile imagination than a house."Oh, to be in exile there. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 12, 2010,
Alas, poor Harvey, I knew him. Shortly after Killoyle came out in
'97 I was on the road from Texas to Washington, D.C., to promote the book
at various bookstores in the nation's capital and nearby Virginia, and
had stopped on my first night at the Super 8 Motel in Hope,
Arkansas. After a sumptuous fried-chicken takeout from the local KFC,
just down the street from Bill Clinton's childhood home, I was lying on
my bed watching par-per-view when the phone rang and a raspy voice
mispronoun... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 12, 2010,
News comes of renewed tribal riots in Northern Ireland, occasioned
by the traditional July 12 marches when the Protestant Orangemen go around with big drums jeering at the Catholics because Protestant King William of Orange defeated Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne on this date in 1690. Such news dismays but doesn't surprise. I've never really believed in the Peace Process. It's a good idea, but naive: tribalism is inimical to peace, and Northern Ireland is Europe's tribal B... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 12, 2010,
Oh, all right, well done. I was for the Dutch, but Spain deserved the win. The more so for their elegant play and the sense of unity it'll bring back home, no small consideration in a loose amalgam of Catalans, Basques, Galicians, Andalusians, etc., each region with its own language and parliament. Such an arrangement could be a formula for dissolution, Belgian-style, but the central idea of Spain has a greater hold on the collective imagination of its citizens than the idea of Belgium has on... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 9, 2010,
Clive James on the ongoing horror of "honor" killings in certain Muslim, Hindu, and/or Sikh precincts around the world and the wretched silence from Western feminists and liberals:"When a girl in a British Pakistani community is set on fire by her brothers, or has her face ruined with acid by a rejected candidate for the role of husband, we hear about it in the newspapers, although seldom for long; but in Pakistan such incidents aren’t news at all. They happen three times a day. They are pa... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 8, 2010,
If I had a single composer's works to have with me on the proverbial desert island, I would be torn between Beethoven's, Mozart's, and Gustav Mahler's; but Mahler would get the nod, by a whisker. He's a novelist in music who leaves nothing out, a John Cowper Powys of near-infinite, glorious sound. He was born 150 years ago; of those years he only lived 51. I've loved his work since the revelatory moment at age ten or so when I heard the Ninth Symphony for the first time. Here it is performed ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, July 7, 2010,
Zulfikar Ghose is a writer born in that part of pre-Partition India that is now Pakistan and who now lives just down the road from me, here in Austin, Texas. He is a fine writer, and pretty much sui generis, although elements of Rushdie and Garcia Marquez (and Beckett, and Joyce) can be detected in his novels, among which are such whimsical masterpieces as The Incredible Brazilian, The Triple Mirror of the Self, and Figures of Enchantment."I have no interest in the reader," says Ghose. "I nev... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, July 7, 2010,
Best luck to the Flying Dutchmen in the World Cup final. In Madison Square
Garden, in 1978, I watched their agonizingly close defeat by Argentina.
They lost 3–1 after two extra time Argentinian goals. Dutch champion Rensenbrink
struck the Argentinian goalpost in the last minute of regular time, with
the score 1–1. I watched it with a French-speaking Belgian, but he was entirely Dutch for the occasion. As was I. Lang leve de Nederlandse! Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, July 6, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 5, 2010,
More on the late admirable Bainbridge, from A.N. Wilson. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, July 5, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 2, 2010,
Beryl Bainbridge, a highly original and appealing writer, has died at 77. From the Telegraph:"Philip Hensher, author of Man Booker-shortlisted The Northern Clemency, described her prose as 'beautifully balanced and funny.' But he said her ingrained modesty made her unwilling to accept praise for her work."My Adorations would never have worked (if indeed it does) without her Young Adolf. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, July 2, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, July 1, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 30, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, June 29, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, June 28, 2010,
Four assassins, of whom only one was competent; but you only need one, don't you? One Archduke, one Archduchess. A wrong turn taken by their driver in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, placed them directly in the path of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist and conspirator who, having heard of the failure of his three comrades to inflict so much as a scratch on the visiting Austrian Imperial couple, was coming out of a delicatessen unwrapping a ham sandwich and heading, as were the Imperials, for ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, June 28, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, June 25, 2010,
"We are in danger of losing the battle for freedom of speech," Mr. Rushdie said. It is being recast as a Western imposition, not a universal human right. Respect is being redefined as agreement, and censorship disguised as a virtuous defence of diversity. His own fatwa, he said, was "a rejection of the idea of fiction as a form" and "the beginning of something that was going to spread around the world."The Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses was the first sh... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, June 25, 2010,
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)
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, June 24, 2010,
At Arthur
Rubinstein’s farewell performance at the Usher Hall
in Edinbu... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 23, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, June 22, 2010,
In March 2000, I was invited to read from Killoyle at a literary and cultural conference in Vienna. I accepted with pleasure; Vienna comes right after Paris, Geneva, and Rome in my hit parade of favorite cities. It was a busy few days. Austrian Radio's English-language service scheduled a brief interview with me on the morning after I arrived, a little light-headed from jet lag. I never got to hear the interview, which is probably just as well, because what little I can remember of it revolve... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, June 21, 2010,
Never stay up on the barren
heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness. Ludwig Wittgenstein
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, June 18, 2010,
"The leaders who, for many years, have been at the head of the French armies have formed a government. This government, alleging the defeat of our armies, has made contact with the enemy in order to stop the fighting. It is true, we were, we are, overwhelmed by the mechanical, ground and air forces of the enemy. Infinitely more than their number, it is the tanks, the airplanes, the tactics of the Germans which are causing us to retreat. It was the tanks, the airplanes, the tactics of the Germ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, June 17, 2010,
Marshal Philippe Petain, who had defeated the Germans in 1916 at Verdun, sued the same enemy for peace in 1940, calling it an "armistice" and hoping for benevolence, but what he got, apart from humiliation and a national trauma that endures to this day, were terms of occupation that were among the harshest ever imposed on a vanquished foe. Meanwhile, Brigadier General Charles De Gaulle, who had led one of the few successful counter-attacks during the Battle of France, was attempting against a... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 16, 2010,
"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning e... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 16, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, June 15, 2010,
Seventy years ago, the German Army reigned supreme, rolling up the highways of northern France amid straggling convoys of refugees and the devastated remains of the French Army, en route to Paris, which the Wehrmacht entered at 5:45 AM on June 14th, first one tentative motorcycle plus sidecar through the Porte de Clichy, then, soon afterward, entire tank divisions, rumbling past the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs Elysees to the Place de la Concorde. Much to their amazement, the Germans met n... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, June 14, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, June 11, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, June 10, 2010,
No, that's not Nosferatu, that's Thomas Berger, author of such wildly original modern classics as Little Big Man, Neighbors, and Crazy in Berlin. He's a style-comes-first kind of guy; he has no time for the notion that the plot must drive the narrative, and that a book must conform to a predetermined structure, like a building. It makes the writer's job harder, in a way; plot-driven novels are easier to plan out, whereas "organic" ones, like Berger's (and mine), evolve painfully, like life fo... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 9, 2010,
No finer or more evocative memoir than Nabokov's Speak, Memory has ever been penned. I return to it as a refuge from the lesser-writer's struggle and from the present day.
"On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, my first glance upon awakening was for the chink between the white inner shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not open them at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle. . . . But if the chink was a lo... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 9, 2010,
A clear-sighted commentary on what lies behind the whole miserable incident, by William Shawcross, who observes: "Western critics of Israel often say that they are not anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist. No such distinction occurs to commentators such as Sheikh Hussein [bin Mahmud, a pseudonymous but apparently popular commentator in the global jihadist community] – Jews, Israelis, they are all 'the sons of apes and pigs.'"The more it changes, the more it stays the same. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, June 8, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, June 8, 2010,
I needed another job, and after a few
months I found one as a translator with a small literary agency run by
an
amiable and educated black American named Gerald. I’d read about Gerald
in the New York Times; he was a fluent Dutch
speaker, from time spent in Amsterdam and Surinam, he’d translated a
Dutch
children’s book on gnomes that became a surprise bestseller. With his
share of
the proceeds he’d started the Gotham Literary Agency and was looking for
a
French translator. I appli... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, June 7, 2010,
Bernard De Voto,Twain scholar and cocktail aficionado, on cocktail hour and the exalting properties of the ideal martini (3.7-to-1 ratio of "White Satin" to vermouth, "five hundred pounds of ice," and a lemon twist): "This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn. But it would not be a martini if we should s... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, June 7, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, June 6, 2010,
The day I never forget. Nor do I forget the 29th Infantry Division, in which my father served. From the Division website:
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, June 4, 2010,
"The fall of France was a tragedy that ranks as supreme in history
as Hamlet and Othello and King Lear rank in art." Rebecca West
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, June 4, 2010,
Israel's confrontation with the "peace" flotilla allows the rest of the world to channel its inner anti-Semite, as it always does when the Israelis defend themselves against Hamas and Hezbollah and their Syrian and Iranian (and now, Turkish) paymasters. It was a PR disaster for the IDF, no question, although this photo should lay to rest any questions about the pacific quality of the "peace activists" on board. However, to criticize the execution of the action by IDF commandos--to call it a b... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, June 3, 2010,
I'm taking time out from my WW2 retrospective to take note of a momentous event, perhaps a history-altering one. No, nothing to do with oil spills, terrorist flotillas, or Kim Jong Il. More to do with Victor Frankenstein, actually. The event to which I'm archly referring is the creation of a living organism.As John Derbyshire tells it,"Craig Venter and his colleagues put together a genome from scratch, using off-the-shelf chemicals, and swapped it for the genome of a living organism, a wee on... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, June 2, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, June 1, 2010,
Seventy years ago this week, the German invasion of France came to an unexpected halt in the outskirts of the French channel port of Dunkerque (Dunkirk), allowing the evacuation of 338,000 British and French troops trapped there: the "miracle of Dunkirk." Winston Churchill tried to contain the exuberance by remarking, "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory; wars are not won by evacuations." But the "spirit of Dunkirk," however fanciful and senti... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, May 28, 2010,
Slightly less than a year ago, my daughter and I spent a week in Geneva for her to meet some old friends of mine, practise her French (good on the lunch-ordering level) and get a first-hand look at where Dad grew up. But after the passage of so many years I didn't expect to be able to show her the very house I lived in from the age of 7 to the age of 17; surely it was long gone, I thought, razed to make way for Geneva's ever-burgeoning suburbs. But no, there it was, like a fly in amber, almo... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, May 27, 2010,
Sir Edward Elgar, observes the eminent English music critic Michael Kennedy, was "a
private man, deeply divided against himself . . . his personality at once the
prey of insecurity and depression and the onrush of sudden high spirits."
Bipolar, we'd call it today. Such men do not make easy friends, or create easy art. And easy art is what's wanted. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, May 26, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, May 25, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, May 24, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, May 21, 2010,
Becoming
a New Yorker was as close as I got to tailoring an Ameri... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, May 20, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, May 19, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, May 17, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, May 13, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, May 12, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, May 11, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, May 10, 2010,
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, May 7, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, May 6, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, May 4, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, May 3, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, May 1, 2010,
But I did know him slightly, as I may have mentioned earlier. When I was a student at Edinburgh University in the early and so-long-ago 1970s, Gordon Brown was the Rector, and a very active one; this in itself was unusual, since the position, that of a liaision between the student body and the university administration, had previously been regarded as essentially ceremonial. But Gordon took the bit in his teeth, and got involved, mostly on his own behalf. Once I went to see him in his office.... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, April 30, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, April 29, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, April 28, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, April 27, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, April 26, 2010,
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,... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, April 23, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, April 22, 2010,
Véra and Vladimir Nabokov outside their home, the Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, sometime between Lolita and Ada. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, April 21, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, April 20, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, April 19, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, April 19, 2010,
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, April 17, 2010,
I'm not religious in any conventional sense, but I have a writer's awe of spiritual immanence, and find most of the God I need in great art. I would certainly never call myself an atheist; to do so would be every bit as dogmatic and arrogant as asserting beyond doubt the veracity of Christian doctrine. I found it interesting, then, to learn that one of the most prominent atheist philosophers in the public forum, Antony Flew, decided, after a lifetime of aggressive Hitchensesquedenial of the d... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, April 17, 2010,
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... ? Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, April 15, 2010,
My
great ambition is to write a funny book; but, as you know, it’s the most
difficult thing of all.
Alberto Moravia
Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, April 14, 2010,
"Theodore Dalrymple" is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British medical man of letters remarkable not only for being that, in the tradition of Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, and Anton Chekhov--all writing doctors--but principally for being a clear-eyed and objective observer and eloquent chronicler of our decaying civilization. As a prison doctor in Birmingham for many years, he came face to face with the victims and perpetrators of a utopian social ideal that in many ways has turned ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, April 13, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, April 12, 2010,
"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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, April 12, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, April 11, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, April 9, 2010,
Another insight from the sage Czech in exile. The novelist destroys the
house of h... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, April 9, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, April 8, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, April 7, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, April 5, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, April 4, 2010,
I am too firm in consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural.
Joseph Conrad ...? Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, April 2, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, April 1, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, March 31, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, March 30, 2010,
I came across this fascinating morsel recently:
"[Dickens] gave an interview in 1862 to a young Russian journalist named Fyodor Dostoevsky which Slater [Dickens's biographer] guesses Dickens thought would never see the light of day: "'He told me that all the good simple people in his novels [like Little Nell] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and l... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, March 30, 2010,
Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.
Ireland’s
where I seriously started on the only indoor sport I’ve ever been any good at,
drinking, and the only outdoors one I’ve ever really enjoyed, walking. I walked many miles in Ireland, at first because
it was the best cure for a hangover and/or bachelor’s itch, then because it was
the best way to see the country, and it made me feel good at the end of the
day. Usually I walked on my own, occasionally with one of my roommat... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, March 29, 2010,
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 marginal figures without any influence.
Charles Simic Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, March 28, 2010,
A sobering yet somehow exhilarating observation by Sir Martin Rees,Britain's Astronomer Royal:
"Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, March 27, 2010,
A fine new poem by Derek Walcott:
The Lost Empire
And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden. Its victories were air, its dominions dirt: Burma, Canada, Egypt, Africa, India, the Sudan. The map that had seeped its stain on a schoolboy’s shirt like red ink on a blotter, battles, long sieges. Dhows and feluccas, hill stations, outposts, flags fluttering down in the dusk, their golden aegis went out with the sun, the last gleam on a great crag, with tiger-eyed turbaned Sikhs, pennons of t... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, March 26, 2010,
Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.
In my first months in Northern Ireland I desired companionship, and feeling myself to be an honorable descendant of the hog-herding, Papist Boylans of Monaghan, I opportunistically sought out the Catholic side, because even in the narrowest and most provincial of Catholic minds, I thought, there remained that opening to the wider world and to the Western tradition that Rome represents, whereas an Ulster Protestant mind is barren of all culture, even a... ? Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, March 26, 2010,
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... ? Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, March 24, 2010,
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: ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, March 23, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, March 22, 2010,
As long as I seem to be in a Kipling state of mind this lovely morning, here's a short piece I wrote back in May '08 on the old imperialist's love of automobiles: A Rhapsodist of Motorcars. (Above is one of them, a 1933 Lanchester Ten).
Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, March 22, 2010,
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
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, March 22, 2010,
Colour,
old man, is what, au fond, clinches a creed.
Colour and the light of God behind it.
Rudyard
Kipling, after visiting Chartres
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, March 19, 2010,
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
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, March 18, 2010,
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. Graham Greene (1904-1991) Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, March 17, 2010,
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.... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, March 17, 2010,
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, March 16, 2010,
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)
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, March 15, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, March 15, 2010,
[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? Quintus Horatius Flaccus, "Horace" (BC 65-BC 8) Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, March 12, 2010,
My task
is to chronicle those little daily lacerations upon the spirit. Anthony
Trollope (1815-1882)
Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, March 11, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, March 10, 2010,
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. Milan Kundera Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, March 9, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, March 8, 2010,
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.
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, March 6, 2010,
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 ...? ? Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, March 5, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, March 4, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, March 3, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, March 2, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, March 1, 2010,
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)
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, February 28, 2010,
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... ? Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, February 26, 2010,
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. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God defined the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one. François-Marie
Arouet, "Voltaire" (1694–1778) Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, February 25, 2010,
Susa is a lovely ancient town in the Piedmont, in Italy, at the foot of the Mont-Cenis pass that leads to Savoie in France, only a few miles away. Until they started building railroad tunnels in the 19th century, the Mont-Cenis was the only way from France into Italy; Hannibal, Constantine I, and Napoleon crossed there. So did I, at age nine or so, transported in the family Renault. I savored the intoxication of descending into the verdant plains of Northern Italy, next stop: Susa, and a guar... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, February 24, 2010,
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)
Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, February 23, 2010,
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,... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 22, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, February 20, 2010,
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... ? ? Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, February 19, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, February 18, 2010,
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, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, February 17, 2010,
Belgium is an anomaly, a crazy-quilt of Frenchmen and Dutchmen who call themselves Walloons and Flemings, respectively. I've always liked the country, although I haven't spent much time there since, I believe, 1975, when I drove from Namur to Ostend and took the ferry to Harwich and the train from there to Scotland, where I was then studying.. On the way I stopped in Bruges and Ghent, and remember peerless medieval architecture, chilly autumn streets, quiet canals, excellent "frites" (fries... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, February 16, 2010,
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,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 15, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, February 14, 2010,
"One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, and from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
Albert Einstein
Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, February 13, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, February 12, 2010,
I was browsing the Croatian press, as one does, and came across an article in the (English-language) Croatian Times about a scientist at Zagreb University who has been expressing views sharply at variance with what had until recently been conventional wisdom in the Salons and Huffington Posts of the West: Forget global warming, says "renowned physicist" Vladimir Paar (whose photo on the Croatian Times website is oddly blurry, like a KGB mug shot from the old days); "most of Europe will be un... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, February 11, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, February 10, 2010,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, February 10, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, February 9, 2010,
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, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 8, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, February 6, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, February 5, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, February 4, 2010,
“Islamofascism today builds on the same mythological figure of the satanic, ubiquitous, immoral and all-powerful Jew that once haunted the European anti-Semitic imagination from Richard Wagner to Adolf Hitler,” says Robert Wistrich in his new book A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to Jihad. I haven't read it yet, but, outraged as I am by the willful blindness of the bien-pensant Western left to this appalling phenomenon, I fully intend to, asap. (New Republic review here.) Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, February 4, 2010,
In a somewhat misguided attempt to woo the West, the Iranian government has sent the Tehran Symphony Orchestra on a goodwill tour of European cities, including Geneva, one of the capitals of the Iranian diaspora. Well-intentioned, no doubt. But things have been going less than swimmingly, as any Iranian with any contact with the outside world could have predicted. After the concert at Geneva's venerable Victoria Hall–whose stage has, over the years, welcomed the likes of Liszt, Michelangeli... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, February 2, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 1, 2010,
This is a photograph from space of the Korean peninsula at night. The illuminated South abuts against the inky darkness of Kim Jong Il's nightmare dictatorship. No further comment needed. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 1, 2010,
The gloomy chap in the photo is Frederic Chopin. What with the TB that was soon to kill him and the collapse of his affair with George Sand (aka Aurore Dupin), he had reason enough to look bummed. Anyway, it's his 200th birthday, or near enough (Feb. 22nd). Honor the memory of the greatest composer for the piano by listening to one of his greatest interpreters, Martha Argerich, play the sublime Andante Spianato. Poor Chopin. Happy birthday anyway, maestro. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, January 29, 2010,
"Wow, that thing has 'Irish satirical novelist' and 'literary critic' written all over it," was the heavily ironic comment of one of my colleagues when I pulled into the office parking lot in my molten-orange Ford F-150 Raptor supertruck. (Not really mine, actually; it's one of the vehicles I'm sent by various test fleets to review.) Of course, my colleague's comment went straight to the heart of the apparent contradiction between art and materialism, a supposed dichotomy that has become so a... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, January 29, 2010,
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,... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 28, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, January 27, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, January 27, 2010,
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
Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, January 25, 2010,
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
Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, January 23, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, January 22, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 21, 2010,
Sixty years ago, this obituary appeared in the London
press:
Eric
Arthur Blair died suddenly in London on 21 January 1950 at the
age of forty-six, succumbing to the tuberculosis that
had plagued him for the last three years of his life.
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 21, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, January 20, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, January 19, 2010,
Shoplifting at Dracula's, Chapter Two
First Travels and Travails
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, January 18, 2010,
Nice to know how randomly scattered are those with idiosyncratic literary tastes. This is from my friend Stephen Wesson, who recently spent a weekend in a cabin in the mountains of West Virginia and discovered therein this eclectic bookshelf. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, January 15, 2010,
Whenever I hear Rachmaninov's magnificent Suite for Two Pianos I think of Paris, so here's a nice shot of the Pont des Arts, and here's a link to a YouTube clip of two great ladies of the ivories, Martha Argerich and Lilya Zilberstein, playing the second part, "La Nuit, L'Amour." I can damned near smell the roasting coffee and the diesel fumes on the damp air. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 14, 2010,
No, not Mother Russia, but one of her offshoots: the neighborhood church in the district of Geneva known as "La Petite Russie," or "Little Russia," where Lenin, Bakunin, Dostoevsky, and others resided during the great Tsarist diaspora and after, right up until the Bolshevik uprising of 1917. Joseph Conrad wrote a novel about the Geneva Russians: Under Western Eyes, which I still remember as capturing the atmosphere of Geneva's snowy streets in midwinter and the warmth of the expatriate Russia... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 14, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 14, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, January 13, 2010,
The Mourne Mountains extend along the coast of Northern Ireland, from south of Belfast down to Strangford Lough, on the Irish Sea. C. S. Lewis, who was born in Belfast, visited them often as a boy and was inspired by their otherworldly beauty to invent Narnia–or so 'tis said, by some. I hitchhiked through them in the spring of 1972, on my way from Coleraine, where I was a student at the University of Ulster, to Dublin, where the Abbey Mooney was. (The Abbey Mooney, and Wynn's Hotel across t... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, January 12, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, January 11, 2010,
...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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, January 8, 2010,
I'm working on a memoir. This is how it begins. (The picture shows where it all began: Monaghan, Ireland.)
1. My parents were thoroughly Irish types,
thoroughly American that they also were: she, the lace-curtain pasionaria;
he, the desperate chancer. Delaware-born, they were both of immediate or
intermediate Irish stock: the Rogerses, originally McRorys, on her grandfather’s
side; the Boylans on his father’s. His branch of the Boylans were formerly of
Co. Monaghan in south Ulster, near... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, January 7, 2010,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, January 6, 2010,
Lucky bugger. And he explains why.
"With each
job description I read, I felt a tightening of what I must call my soul. I
found myself growing false to myself, acting to myself, convincing myself of my
rightness for whatever was being described. And this is where I suppose life
ends for most people, who stiffen in the attitudes they adopt to make
themselves suitable for the jobs and lives others have laid out for them."
True. And then there are the rest of us day-jobbing journeyman writers. Ch... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, January 5, 2010,
Browsing the Tribune de Geneve, online edition of the newspaper of record of Geneva, my favorite ex-hometown, I learn posthumous news of the great Jacques Chessex, the Swiss writer whose death I commemorated in a previous post. Chessex's last book, Le dernier crâne de M. de Sade (Mr. de Sade's Last Skull)–which he finished on the morning of the 9th of October last, collapsing later that same day of heart failure while shouting down a heckler at a reading in the Swiss spa of Yverdon-les-B... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, January 4, 2010,
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 "... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, January 2, 2010,
I'm doing a review of Gilbert Sorrentino's final book, The Abyss of Human Illusion, for the New York Times. While researching it, I came across a couple of peppery interviews with Sorrentino, who died in '06 at the Nabokovian age of 77; like VN, he upheld a high literary standard, while despising affectation; and like VN he was a man of strong opinions and unique style. He refused to seek the well-trodden roads of bestsellerdom and artistic compromise. Life, he said,was ridiculous; you only h... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, December 31, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, December 29, 2009,
Here's an observation from the caustic pen of Gustave Flaubert:
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. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, December 27, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, December 25, 2009,
Fröhliches Weihnachten
Navidad Alegre
Buon Natale
Joyeux Noël
С Рождеством Христовым Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, December 23, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, December 22, 2009,
Twenty years ago to the day, the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife and accomplice Elena, fled their palaces in Bucharest, intending to find a safe haven abroad, in Panama or Brazil, but it was too late, their writ ran no more, the army rebelled, the Ceausescus' helicopter was forced down in the countryside, and on Christmas Day 1989 they were executed, after a summary trial that was a disgrace and a kangaroo court, even considering the undoubted guilt of the defendants. But t... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, December 21, 2009,
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st. Baron Macaulay (1800–1859), was a Victorian historian, essayist, poet, and politician who wrote a once-renowned History of England and Lays of Ancient Rome, a once-popular collection of verses about heroes and villains of Roman history. Indeed, Macaulay was a great believer in the "heroes and villains" version of history, to such an extent that no less a personage than that heroic villain, Karl Marx, referred to him as "a systematic falsifier of history." Oh... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, December 18, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, December 17, 2009,
Notre Dame de la Neige. The most beautiful city's even more beautiful in just-fallen snow, before it turns to brown and icy slush. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, December 16, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, December 15, 2009,
When the Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest was asked by his publishers what subtitle they should use for the reissued edition of his seminal work, The Great Terror, whose claims about the evils of Stalin's regime had been corroborated by old KGB files after the Soviet collapse, his reply was, "What about 'I Told You So, You Fucking Fools'"? The fools in question were the left-wing Western intellectuals (Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodore Dreiser, ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, December 14, 2009,
[This piece, copiously illustrated, also appears in Autosavant, 12/14/2009.] 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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, December 11, 2009,
The painting is Morning, by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). 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.
On all hilltops There is peace, In all treetops You will hear Hardly a breath. Birds in the woods are silent. Just wait, soon You too will rest. ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, December 10, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, December 9, 2009,
Rembrandt, like his countryman Van Gogh, died broke, but, unlike Van Gogh, who famously never sold a painting, Rembrandt had enjoyed great commercial success before falling on hard times. Still, both were penniless at the end; Rembrandt died a debtor and was buried in an unmarked grave. How tiresomely ironic, then, that a Rembrandt painting should sell for $33,000,000; as tiresomely ironic as Van Gogh's works going for similar sums when what he got when he was alive was bupkis mit kuduchas, a... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, December 8, 2009,
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
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, December 7, 2009,
To the Congress of the United States:Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that Nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, December 7, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, December 6, 2009,
My computer has been invaded by aliens. Actually, it's a very Earthbound alien, a homemade virus called Privacy Center, a fairly basic one as far as these things go, but capable of wreaking considerable damage. It stands between me and my desktop, so I can't access any of my files: When I try, a fake computer-scan screen pops up, aglitter with twinkling check marks and exclamation points, and tells me my computer's infected with half a million viruses, which only Privacy Center can destroy. T... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, December 4, 2009,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, December 3, 2009,
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.”
Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, December 2, 2009,
Edmund
Wilson was a literary one-man band: literary critic (The Shores of Light,
Axel's Castle), historian (To the Finland Station), memoirist (A
Piece of My Mind), social commentator (The Twenties/ Thirties/ Forties/ Fifties/Sixties)
and novelist (Memoirs of Hecate County). His activities as polymath of
letters were made possible by his privileged upbringing–his father was the
attorney-general of New Jersey–and, later, his connections throughout the New
York literary scene. It's hardl... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, December 1, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 30, 2009,
Known to locals as simply Llanfair, this charming Welsh-speaking village is on the isle of Anglesey. I passed through as a lad in '64, en route to my ancestral Ireland for the first time, via ferry to Dun Laoghaire from the Irish Sea port of Holyhead, from where boats have been sailing to Ireland for 4,000 years. You might suppose this magnificent moniker originated in the dawn of Welsh history, or at least at some point before the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffyd in 1282, when, according to the ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, November 28, 2009,
This just in from Sofia, nexus of trans-galactic civilizations: The distinguished Bulgarian Space Research Institute tells us to stop trying to get in touch with extraterrestrial civilizations, because they're already among us (this is from the Daily Telegraph, perhaps needless to say). Lachezar Filipov, Deputy Director of the Institute, says, "Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time," but adds reassuringly, "they are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to h... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 27, 2009,
I just read John Updike's 2002 novel Seek My Face, a meditation on art and life centered on a day-long interview with Hope Chafetz, widow of the Abstract Expressionist painter Zack McCoy and a painter herself, that elides effortlessly into a memoir of a woman's life and loves and a recreation of the 1950s New York art scene. The characters are based on Lee Krasner and her husband, the paint-spattered artist Jackson Pollock. Pollock's works have never conveyed anything to me except violence, e... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 25, 2009,
From The Independent: A Society of Authors survey five years ago found that half of all authors made less than the minimum wage, and that three-quarters earned less than £20,000 a year. "Most authors struggle," says Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the body. "The gap between the few top authors and the rest of them is widening all the time," he says. "The vast majority of authors earn very little and most authors keep up their job until they can afford to write full time." "If you are g... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, November 24, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 23, 2009,
One of my students at Western Connecticut State U. was planning an essay and presentation for me on the film "Aces High," a 1976 cinematic version of "Journey's End," the great R. C. Sheriff play about World War I. He suggested bringing his neighbor into a three-way conference call to discuss the niceties of adapting a play into a film. Why his neighbor, I inquired. Because he starred in the film, he said, referring to the eminent Canadian actor Christopher Plummer, whom my student encounters... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, November 21, 2009,
Two of my lifelong passions come together in the person of Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir: his father’s work, and cars. Dmitri is an authority on both, having assisted his father in the translation of the latter's works from Russian and English into French and Italian (in all of which languages he is, apparently, entirely fluent) and having raced cars for a living while, in counterpoint, touring the world as an opera singer--in which guise, singing basso, he debuted (awkward hybrid of a ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 20, 2009,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, November 19, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 18, 2009,
One of the more beneficial side effects of the stir created by Dmitri Nabokov's decision to publish his father Vladimir's last, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura (never mind VN's express injunction against ever doing so) has been the posthumous second wind accorded to the twentieth century's greatest writer as once again we revisit, in the company of literary-minded journalists, the Berlin years, the Paris years, and the Cornell years--especially the latter, between the tragic obscu... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, November 17, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 16, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, November 15, 2009,
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 ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 13, 2009,
Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), self-styled "Darwin's Bulldog," on belief vs. its opposite. (He was the chap who coined the very useful word "agnostic.")
"I
have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy,
and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the
atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of
myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is
justified in calling, atheist and in... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 13, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, November 12, 2009,
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.
Funniest
Works of Fiction
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy,
Douglas Adams
Kangaroo, Yuz
Aleshkovsky
Reservation Blues, Sherman... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, November 12, 2009,
Music is the least understood of the arts, and the
most abused. No one seriously speaks of Shakespeare and Peanuts (or Tintin) in
the same breath, but "music"--especially here in Austin, "live
music capital of the world"--is open to all, with no barriers of taste or
education. Bob Dylan's Beethoven's equal, and yo Ludwig, roll over anyway,
there's a new game in town. (But who seems more dated now, Beethoven or Chuck
Berry?) You have to say "Classical Music" if you want to be
understood as r... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 11, 2009,
And, because it's Veterans' (ex-Armistice) Day, a famous ode that verges on kitsch but still manages to be moving:
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 11, 2009,
Of Patrick Kavanagh, a poet and novelist from the same County Monaghan in historic South Ulster from which my own darlin' O'Boylans originally hailed, Seamus Heaney (another Ulsterman) had this to say: "[Kavanagh] was forever seesawing between anger and equipoise, the anger brought on by the sight of artists of less talent and, in his view, less integrity, flourishing while he suffered poverty and unfair neglect, the equipoise achieved in the writing of poems and prose works where, as he say... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, November 10, 2009,
A Swiss couple I know have just returned from Turkmenistan, ex-Turkmen S.S.R. in Soviet days. Their description makes it sound like a cross between the Marx Brothers and 1984. Ashgabad, the capital, is a whited sepulcher of marble and gold. Most of all the old Soviet buildings have been replastered in white marble, and all the new buildings are made of it. The city is spread out, all in marble--hotels, apartments, government buildings, etc., all lit up at night by thousands of st... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 9, 2009,
Oh, all right. I can't resist it. I love this poem. Suggested soundtrack while reading: "Four Sea Interludes," from Britten's Peter Grimes.
Sea-Fever I
must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, November 8, 2009,
...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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, November 7, 2009,
Back in September, 2008, when the Large Hadron Collider, the super-duper atom smasher outside Geneva (near the airport, as you can see in the photo; about three miles, in fact, from where I once lived in total ignorance of Hadron Colliders and their ilk), was about to go online and start hurling particles of stuff around in an attempt to replicate post-Big Bang conditions, or something, and thereby reveal the existence of the Higgs Boson, a really tiny particle that theoretically should exist... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 6, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, November 6, 2009,
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
... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, November 5, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, November 5, 2009,
Francis Kilvert (1840-1879) was a learned Victorian country curate who ministered to his flocks in the Anglo-Welsh border country, along the tranquil and lovely Wye valley (now best known for Hay-on-Wye, "the book town," Mecca or Vatican of the world's literary wheeler-dealers). Kilvert, who died young, poor man, of peritonitis, made voluminous diary entries on the nonevents of his day-to-day existence that have since, through the backward glance of Time, become defining events of a Victorian... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 4, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 4, 2009,
The great Swiss writer Jacques Chessex is dead at 75. He won the Goncourt Prize in 1973 for his novel "L'ogre" ("The Ogre"), a vivid analysis of a dead father's continued psychological dominance of the hero's life. Tortuous family relationships, especially those between parents and children, framed most of Chessex's work, including the novels "Les Yeux Jaunes" ("Yellow Eyes") and "L'Ardent Royaume" ("The Kingdom of Passion"), and affected his own life: his father committed suicide when Jacque... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, November 4, 2009,
One of my all-time favorite eating and drinking establishments anywhere was the Café de Cluny, ideally located at the best intersection in the world, that of the Boulevard St. Germain and the Boulevard St. Michel, across from the eponymous museum (and former abbey), in the heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris. The Cluny was cozy and easy-going and much less pretentious and expensive than the Flore and Deux Magots, just up St. Germain. Founded in 1869, and patronized over the years by such as... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, November 3, 2009,
Julian Barnes is the author of Flaubert's Parrot and Arthur & George, both fictional explorations of the personalities and legacies of two prominent, if completely different, authors: Gustave Flaubert and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (His analysis of the latter is especially insightful.) In this manifesto, he invokes the spirit of Flaubert again as a rebuke to writers who would settle for less than their best. He's quite right, too.
"Writers should have the highest ambition: not just
for themselv... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, November 3, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, November 2, 2009,
I've been reading More Matter, a collection of John Updike's essays and reviews, and enjoying, as I always do, the reach of the late master's mind. This collection contains perceptive pieces on such disparate topics as Eastern Europe, Lana Turner, Irish writers (although in the latter essay, oddly, he gets John McGahern's name wrong, calling him "Thomas" instead: good editing, Knopf), Normans Mailer and Manea, food, drink, travel, and, best of all, art; specifically, that found in the Frick ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, October 31, 2009,
"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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, October 29, 2009,
Gabriel Josipovici is an English writer of fascinating, oblique fiction (The Inventory, Mobius the Stripper) and memoir (A Life). I find him interesting not only because of his outstanding work and varied background (France, Egypt, England), but more precisely because of his experiences with English-language publishers as opposed to German ones. I, too, have seen my work better produced, better publicized, and better marketed in German translation than in its mother tongue. Here he describes... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Sunday, October 25, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, October 24, 2009,
Behind me in the picture is the house in Geneva I grew up in from the age of, approximately, six, to that of not-so-sweet sixteen. The pic was taken by my daughter last June, when we were over there on a kind of recon trip and jaunt down several memory lanes, none more teeming with memories than this one, Chemin Bonvent (Goodwind Lane). I was surprised to find the place still standing, and even more surprised to find it looking almost exactly the same as when I'd last seen it, 36 years ago. E... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Saturday, October 24, 2009,
As a follow-up to the crop circle story, and to my reminiscences of the charming Dorset village of Cerne Abbas and its famous giant, here's a snapshot of the old fella, who's known locally as "The Rude Man," for obvious reasons. Although many believe him to be of neolithic origin, there's no mention of him in medieval chronicles, so he may be much younger than that--450 or so, dating to a revival of interest in pagan rituals, oddly coincident with the Reformation, as if the peasantry, confuse... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, October 23, 2009,
What, more crop circles? Aliens, too? God, how I've missed 'em. Well, apparently they're back, according to the Daily Telegraph, which is rapidly becoming the one-stop online shop for UFO phenomena (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5406187/Crop-circle-found-Wiltshire.html.) It seems that a local off-duty policeman came upon a remarkably intricate crop circle and its perpetrators, three gentlemen from outer space. Thrillingly, the aliens P.C.Plod ran into were tall blon... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, October 14, 2009,
During my first year as a student in Edinburgh I used to slip out of my dormitory room every Thursday night at 9 p.m. and make my way to the administration building, Pollock Hall, a fine neo-Gothic Victorian manse in whose basement there was a television that the great mass of soccer and rugby TV-watchers didn't seem aware of. I would tune the set to BBC2 and with bated breath (there was always the danger of a telltale clattering of footsteps down the stairs, a rugby or soccer match on anothe... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, October 8, 2009,
Let us welcome Herta Müller to the pantheon of the great and not-so-great. Which is she? Time, not literary critics, will tell. Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, September 30, 2009,
Fascinating. An etching purporting to be of Hitler and Lenin playing chess in an attic in Vienna in 1909 is being put up for auction in England. The artist, Emma Goldschramm, claimed to have been Hitler's art teacher and to have hosted a political salon at which on this occasion the two chess opponents were present. Now, I did a lot of Hitlerian research for my novel The Adorations, which has several scenes set in Vienna around 1909 in which Hitler's a character, and I found no evidence that ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Tuesday, September 29, 2009,
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... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, September 25, 2009,
Tintin is the most
worldly and down-to-earth of juvenile adventure tales. Created by the Belgian artist
Georges Rémi, who was known as Hergé from the French version of his initials
reversed, the Tintin comic books encapsulated in 62 pages–each page an
installment in the sequential 62-week-long serials run by the weekly magazine Tintin (“for young people from 7 to 77,”
as the slogan went)–robust adventures in which the intrepid young “reporter”
who reports to no newspaper and n... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, September 24, 2009,
"Half an hour to drink a beer, no wonder he can't get a job!" Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Wednesday, September 23, 2009,
Some writers can hardly write at all, but they can plot like nobody's business. I recently finished rereading Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, which I'd assigned to one of my creative-writing students as an example of blockbuster historical fiction, and which I decided I should actually reread, too, if I intended to comment intelligently on it. Reading it was very enjoyable in an undemanding kind of way, like reading a 1000-page magazine, and most instructive in the craft of how to wri... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, September 21, 2009,
Inspired in part by a couple of excellent Belgian beers (Duvel–also the name of our doughty little Schipperkee), I was thinking about the Gueuze, my favorite beer bar in Paris. So fond am I of this place, in fact, that it figures prominently in my novel The Adorations as a rendezvous place for Stefanie, my Austrian heroine, and her SS contact, during the (obviously) German occupation. The fact that the bar was founded in 1976 is neither here nor there; indeed, it makes it easier for me to c... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Friday, September 18, 2009,
I've always admired Jean Sibelius. Gorgeous and melodic as his early music is (Karelia;Tapiola; Finlandia; Luonnotar; etc.), there's an austere beauty in his later works, notably the Fourth Symphony, that reminds me of Samuel Beckett's prose. In fact, the famous (amicable) disagreement Sibelius had with Gustav Mahler–in which Mahler challenged Sibelius' contention that a symphony should be precise and severe in its intentions by saying "No, no, a symphony must be like the world. It must ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Roger Boylan on Thursday, September 17, 2009,
Snug. Noun (Brit.). A small, cosy public room in a pub or small hotel. Oxford English Dictionary.
This is the first day in the life of the Snug, as I'm calling my blog, with its deliberate overtones of a pub. I spent many of my happiest moments in pubs in Ireland, Scotland, and England, and in the old days the snug was where you took the family, or your girlfriend, and huddled or cuddled next to the coal fire glowing in the grate, on an ideal blustery night, say in mid-October, and lowered the... Continue reading ...
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