Sunday miscellany

Very nice Times review of Nico, Sam and Thomas's concert!

(On another note, I could not endorse Ben Brantley's review of The Pride of Parnell Street, which I saw earlier this week - the performers were doing their best, they were really very good, and the language is gorgeous, but there seemed to be absolutely no reason the piece could not as well have been a short story as a play!)

Times trifecta: Jonathan Lethem on J.G. Ballard.

Finally, Christian House profiles William Boyd at the Independent - Boyd is in any case one of my favorite writers (annoyingly his new book will not be published in the U.S. till January - I might be due an Amazon UK order...), but I leave you with these excellent lines:

London, he once wrote, poisoned him with insomnia and allergies. He declared it "a tax my body has to pay if I want to live in London – the most interesting city on the planet".

Impasto

William Boyd on the Leopold Museum and the paintings of Egon Schiele. On Schiele's “Self-portrait with Head Inclined” (1912):

Most unusually, Schiele has a moustache in this portrait—the only image of him moustachioed that I can recall. Luckily for posterity, Schiele was fond of being photographed and in all the many photographs we have of him he appears clean-shaven. I don’t mean to be facetious, but Austro-Hungarian Vienna was, among everything else, the city of facial hair. Was it a mark of rebellion not to grow a beard or a moustache in those days and thus distinguish yourself from the hirsute complacent burghers and whiskered bemedalled soldiers? I think of another of Schiele’s Vienna contemporaries, another harbinger of the modern 20th century and a ground-breaker in his field, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—lean, ascetic and permanently clean-shaven, like Schiele. Does the demonic stare in this portrait, the added black stripe of the moustache, gesture towards the schizophrenic nature of Viennese society in those days before the Great War? This may be the wisdom of hindsight but another contemporary of Schiele (and of Wittgenstein and Freud) in pre-war Vienna was Adolf Hitler, then an embittered and near-destitute down-and-out, roaming the streets, living in squalid hostels, nurturing his paranoid fantasies. Twenty years later he would be chancellor of Germany.

(I am thinking I must have seen the Schiele exhibition at the Royal Academy in December 1990 - it certainly made an impression on me...)

Majorca, Zagreb, Larnaca, Tel Aviv

William Boyd's "The Things I Stole", a short story in a vein I particularly like (the plausibly rendered first-person narrator, so that it seems almost as though it's a personal essay rather than a story):

I stole food at my boarding school. We were allowed a modest food parcel once a week (like POWs) from a local grocer: a few bananas, a box of dates, mini-packs of cornflakes - no buns or cakes, no chocolates, nothing that could be purchased from the school tuck shop where fizzy drinks, colas, biscuits and every tooth-rotting sweet the confectionery industry could serve up were on offer.

In my house there was a very rich Greek boy whose food parcel might have come from Fortnum & Mason, such was its size and magnificence. I and my coevals pillaged this boy's food with no compunction (he was plump and cried easily). It was thanks to Stavros's food parcel that I developed my enduring taste for Patum Peperium, Gentleman's Relish, a dark, pesto-like spread made from anchovies. It is my Proustian madeleine - it summons up all my early pilfering. I can taste its earthy, farinaceous salinity now.