September 8, 2011
You read it here first. I'm about to waste the dwindling amount of time left to me by embarking on another no-doubt-doomed literary undertaking. It will be a novel set in three or more fictional cities, linked by character and/or circumstance--I haven't figured that part out yet. But these cities already exist in the demented world of my fiction. Killoyle, of course, is one. New Ur of the Chaldees, that charming college town in Ohiowa, U.S.A., is another, and both will be in the new book. Sandrapore, India, birthplace of the great Anil Swain, probably will, as well. Then there are other places: Killouaille, Killoyle's sister city in Brittany, France; Citta Assoluta, resort town on the Italian Riviera; St. Anselms, an old cathedral town on the Fullish River in East Anglia....The proximate cause of this inspiration was rereading some of Jan Morris's excellent work, and contemplating her imaginary city, Hav of the Myrmidons. If my magical mystery tour is half as much fun as hers, it won't be such a waste of time after all. Now, to work...
Posted by Roger Boylan.
August 29, 2011
"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has
become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you
think, at your age, it is right?"
"In my youth," Father William replied
to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm
perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again." "You are old," said the youth, "As I mentioned before, And have grown most
uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
Pray,
what is the reason of that?"
"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook
his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this
ointment—one shilling the box—
Allow me to sell you a couple?"
"You are old," said the youth, "And your jaws are too weak For anything
tougher than suet; Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the
beak— Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In my youth," said his
father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the
muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my
life."
"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose That your eye was
as steady as ever; Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose— What
made you so awfully clever?"
"I have answered three questions, and that
is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can
listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down
stairs!"
Posted by Roger Boylan.
August 26, 2011
From The Financial Times, by Martin Amis re: Philip Larkin."Larkin
died 25 years ago, and his reputation (after the wild fluctuation in the
mid-1990s, to which we will return) looks increasingly secure. And we also feel,
do we not, that originality is at least a symptom of creative worth.
Larkin certainly felt so. In a letter of 1974 he quotes a remark by Clive James
– “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry” – and adds, “I’ve
been feeling that for years.” Larkin’s originality is palpable. Many poets make
us smile; how many poets make us laugh – or, in that curious phrase, “laugh out
loud” (as if there’s any other way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially
conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else
takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And
let it be emphasised that Larkin is never “depressing”. Achieved art is quite
incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of
King Lear would end in a Jonestown."
Posted by Roger Boylan.
August 5, 2011
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I caught this morning
Morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding |
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| High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing |
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| In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, |
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| As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding |
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| Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding |
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| Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! |
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| Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here |
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| Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion |
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| Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! |
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| No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion |
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| Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, |
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| Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. |
Posted by Roger Boylan.
July 31, 2011
August 1st is the Swiss National Holiday. I lived in Switzerland once,long ago, and have missed it ever since. Why won't they let me back in? Why should they? If they let in all the world's riff-raff it wouldn't be half the haven it is. Long live the stubborn Helvetii.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
July 25, 2011
Unrecovered from jet lag, I awoke early to dark wet Harry Lime streets outside, and a chilly breeze off the Hungarian steppe. The Balkans begin on the Landstrasse, said Count von Metternich, referring to an eastbound street in Vienna. It feels like they're here.
Then a breakfast of meats and cheeses washed down with Viennese espresso. And the first segment of the conference at the Faculty of Philosphical and Cultural Studies, formerly part of the Lying-In Hospital in Habsburg days, and the lecture hall we were in the ex-maternity ward. Just the kind of unimportant non-symbolism pounced on by the lit-crit types who populate these conferences. The Flanners, as they've been dubbed, are a curious bunch, but no more so than any other academic crowd. Mostly like central casting for British TV sitcoms: long stringy hair, floppy hats, tweeds. Dr. Margarete Rebik, head of English studies, gave the introductory talk.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
July 24, 2011
After 30 hours of air travel from sweltering drought-stricken Austin, where it was (and is) around 100 deg. F., I arrived, grimy and fatigued, in the cool and wet capital of Austria, where the highs won't hit 60 F all week. On the way I passed through Washington and Frankfurt. I'm constantly amazed at the humiliating misery air travel has become. Moreover, I found myself taken aside in Frankfurt by Bundespolizei and interrogated, briefly but throughly, on my rasion d'etre. I can't help it" being given orders by Germans in uniform makes me uneasy. But it didn't last long, and all my flights were on time.Now it's raining on the quiet streets outside my hotel in the center of Vienna, near the University, the oldest in the German-speaking world. I found the place after a frugal journey into town from the airport via commuter train and U-Bahn (subway) and a good three miles' worth of shank's mare, lugging two suitcases down the boulevards, and incredulous at the icy knife-edge of the wind that howled down the Ringstrasse. When I finally swept majestically into the lobby of the Hotel Boltzmann--named, incidentally, after a distinguished Viennese scientist of yore who, the hotel's publicity helpfully informs us, hanged himself while on holiday with his wife--I encountered Herr Harry Rowohlt, translator of my books into German, eminent scholar, actor, and valued friend for many years; the man, in fact, whom Kurt Vonnegut (whose works Harry also translated), described as being the only German known to him, apart from himself, who had a sense of humor. The memory of our joint readings across the length and breadth of Germany and Austria at the beginning of this century has become legend in our retellings of them. Harry is in town to deliver a keynote speech at the same Flann O'Brien conference that brings me here, thanks to him. He is eminently qualified to speak, as the translator of Flann's works into German and the pre-eminent translator in German letters. (Also appointed lifelong ambassador of Irish whiskey. Alas, owing to a medical condition he no longer drinks.) He wangled my invitation here, claiming on no small authority to know my works as well as I, and that I was a true and unimpeachable acolyte of the great Flann. We had lunch, strolled about the drizzly streets, and admired the mostly elegant University buildings, the notable exception (of course) being the English Department, venue of our forthcoming entertainments, a true monstrosity that resembles a structure incompetently thrown together from Lego blocks Ironically, it sits adjacent to a lovely building of classical restraint in the Viennese neoclassical style. Haydn, as it were, taking up residence next to Sid Vicious. Back at the hotel, Harry and I had the good luck to stumble upon a rehearsal of "The Brother," a clever adaptation of Flann O'Brien themes by Gerry Smyth, a renowned Irish cultural historian and musician, and David Llewellyn, his colleague in Liverpool, who publishes and acts for the BBC. The pair were brilliant. Gerry Smyth's rendition of the now-famous "The Workman's Friend," O'Brien's paean to a pint of plain ("A pint of plain/Is your only man") was yearning, poignant, and musical. It reminded me of tenor solos in small pubs in the wind-whipped West of Ireland, with only a pipe as accompaniment, and an audience of three or four. It was especially fortunate that I came upon this rehearsal when I did, because my 24-hour jet lag caught up with me soon afterward and I slept long into the night. But it was only the first night, and plenty of ambient curiosities remain. More anon.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
July 22, 2011
I recently had a birthday. I'm now older than the presidents of Russia, France, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, and the prime ministers of Spain, Japan, the UK, Ireland, Israel, and Canada. Oh, and the Chancellor of Germany.
Thank goodness for the gerontocrats of China, India, and Italy.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
July 14, 2011
It's 222 years since that ragtag mob invaded the Bastille and seized its entire population of four forgers, two lunatics, and one deviant aristocrat (there had been two, but the Marquis de Sade had been transferred elsewhere ten days previously). The unfortunate Governor, the Comte De Launay, was beaten to death and his head was mounted on a pike, in traditional peasant-insurrectionist style. Things calmed down for awhile, then got worse, and before you could say "Robespierre," there he was, admiring the oiled movement of the guillotine that, in '93, took the King's head, and the Queen's, then his. And there was Napoleon.
God, what a fascinating country. Joyeux Quatorze.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
July 13, 2011
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky--try saying that after you've had a couple. Actually, the man himself (1887-1950), a Ukrainian-Polish contributor to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and author of ingenious plays and short stories, was well-known for regular consumption of more than a couple, and you couldn't blame him. He was a great writer utterly neglected in his day, known, he said, only "for being unknown." Hardly any of his work was published in his lifetime, thanks to bad timing re: the tides of change and repression in the Soviet Communist Party. When the stories were posthumously published, they were later compared to the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar. "One of his last novellas, Dymchaty bokal ('The smoky beaker,' 1939), tells the
story of a goblet miraculously never running out of wine, sometimes interpreted
as a wry allusion to the author's fondness for alcohol." Wry, indeed. His outstanding talents were stymied at every turn; this being the age of Stalin, Krzhizhanovsky of course had no choice but to stay. No emigration, unless to Siberia. He died in Moscow at 63, three years before the dictator. Not until 1989 did his work begin appearing, upon which people greeted a long-forgotten genius. I dunno. Sometimes life's ironies are just too much. At least we can now read Krzhizhanovsky, which will be a greater pleasure for most of us than trying to pronounce his name.
Posted by Roger Boylan.
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