#robert boyers

[power-chords]

Robert Boyers interviews Saul Bellow, 1995.

[aranazo]

Laing and Anti-Psychiatry an anthology of writing about R. D. Laing with a Derek Birdsall cover.

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Is there evidence, anywhere, that the attention directed at privilege in recent years has resulted in a reduction in inequality or a more generous public discourse?

The Privilege Predicament, Robert Boyers, https://www.scribd.com/article/450022002

IN MY FRESHMAN YEAR at Queens College, I had a strange awakening—strange in that the attendant, overmastering emotion was a combination of h

[bobonbooks]

Review: The Tyranny of Virtue

Review: The Tyranny of Virtue

The Tyranny of Virtue,  Robert Boyers. New York: Scribners, 2019.

Summary: A distinguished liberal scholar critiques the new academic orthodoxy, one that defines virtue through the excoriating of privilege, identity, safety, microaggression, ableism, and appropriation, creating an academic tyranny in which people fear to speak their minds under threat of denunciation.

Robert Boyers

Perhaps the…

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[salmagundimagazine]

Literature and Culture: An interview with Saul Bellow*

Photograph credit: Emma Dodge Hanson

Q.: Mr. Bellow, I'd like to begin by asking you whether you think the writer and/or the artist has a special task to perform at this point in time, whether you yourself feel that you have a special task to perform?

Bellow: Well, I think most writers are like most surgeons: after they've completed a course on how to open up someone's belly, they just go on doing it. They feel that they have a license to do it, and whether they do it well or badly doesn't matter so much. I also find that writers, after they have made some initial discovery about how to write a book, continue to write a book in that way, and just settle back into bourgeois comfort. 

From "Literature and Culture: An Interview with Saul Bellow," originally found in Salmagundi No. 30 (Spring 1975)

*This is an edited transcript of a public interview conducted at Skidmore College on November 8, 1973. Interviewing Saul Bellow were Robert Boyers, Robert Orrill, Ralph Ciancio, and Edwin Mosely, all members of the Skidmore faculty.

[salmagundimagazine]

Mario Vargas Llosa on Faulkner and Hemingway

William Faulkner's office at Rowan Oak 

      Hemingway was also important. He was very, very popular all over Latin America when I was young. I read both his novels and short stories with great enthusiasm; but I haven't been tempted to reread Hemingway, with the exception of The Old Man and the Sea, which I reread only recently, and on the whole I think he has declined a bit in my estimation. My impression is that the moral and artistic values of Hemingway now seem a bit obsolete or anachronistic. He no longer seems what he did when we first read The Sun Also Rises."

  -Excerpted from "Exhilaration & Completeness: An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa", conducted by Robert Boyers and Gene-Bell Villada. Originally published in Salmagundi Nos. 155-156 (Summer-Fall 2007)

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Carolyn Forché awarded American Academy of Poets Fellowship

Carolyn Forché with Mark Strand and Salmagundi founder and editor-in-chief Robert Boyers in Saratoga Springs

  FOS and frequent contributor Carolyn Forché has been awarded this year's Academy of American Poets Fellowship. She published two recent poems in our 45th anniversary issue, including "Exile" (which she reads for Civitella here), but we'd like to celebrate her much-deserved recognition by offering a poem by her late friend Daniel Simko, a poet for whom she herself sought wider recognition. Daniel's "Mythology / From the Fragments" appeared in our pages as part of a tribute to the Slovak-born writer organized by Carolyn after his untimely death in 2004 with her characteristic generosity and love for the poem, however celebrated or unknown.

Mythology / From the Fragments

By Daniel Simko

Because a body moves from one empty house to another as though it were a shirt, because in the mind the gardens are precisely detailed, mapped, an entire peninsula often eerily lit, the province abandoned

because often even memory is neglected, erased, wiped clean, burned out of existence, the door slammed shut, because the wall fills with drawing, or becomes empty of drawing, because it becomes the wall

because it is no longer, because it is loved insanely, because it is looked for in the eyes, in the hands, the gesture, a body no longer, no longer the world, because it is inconsistent, a torch in the snow, an extinct mythology

because in caricature longing remains the same, but without anaesthetic, because it becomes a gash, because it is a voice in a crowded theater, an opera told to sit down, because it is asked, and is seated

because it is sung or kissed in absence, quieted and covered, whispered to, because it is the one plate left empty, the one plate never filled, because it is hunger, because in the empty notebook it is a score for voice 

[salmagundimagazine]

Smiles of a Summer Night Revisited

We've been revisiting mid-period Bergman lately and decided for the  Swedish midsummer holiday to see the perennially fresh Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) in which the midnight sun reveals and animates the reversals and machinations of the nocturnal entanglements of a fetching and unsettling cast of characters.  

Below is an excerpt from Robert Boyers' 1978 essay on "Bergman and Women" with its focus on the character Desirée Armfeldt whom Bergman "adores not because she has especially good ideas or because she is an especially kind or noble person, but because she has some clear notion of what she wants, how to get it, and how far one may legitimately go in pursuit of one's desires." 

Eva Dahlbeck as Desirée Armfeldt in Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night 

"A feminist concerned with Bergman's view of women and with the effects of his films on viewers of either sex may well wish to begin with an examination of animal need as it's developed in his earliest films. The enquiry may more fruitfully begin with the mature works of the mid- fifties, when Bergman had found at least some of his standard subjects and was working with a confidence previously unknown to him. Among the films to be considered are Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and Wild Strawberries (1957), surely two enduring favorites. Both contain a variety of male and female types, and both may be said to elaborate a sustained critique of egoism, a malady in which the personality is arrested at the level of excessive pre-occupation with an exclusive aspect of its own development. In both films the malady is centrally focused in a male character: Fredrick Egerman (Gunnar Bjornstrand) in Smiles, Isak Borg (Viktor Sjostrom) in Wild Strawberries, though there are other figures who betray similar problems, including Egerman's 'rival' the Count and Borg's mother and son. Each film lovingly develops an alternative to the egoism and the attendant dislocations of function which afflict the egoists. Though one would never guess as much from the writings of Bergman's feminist critics, the corrective to the vision is in each film supplied by the presence of a remarkable, highly intelligent, and highly visible woman character: Desiree in Smiles, Marianne in Wild Strawberries. Had Ms. Mellen seen either film when she wrote that Bergman's women "invariably hate themselves"? No doubt she had, but was determined to score points without full substantiation. Not surprisingly, male critics of Bergman with other axes to grind conveniently ignore Desiree or Marianne as well. Vernon Young's Cinema Borealis, for example, discusses Wild Strawberries as though Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) were an insignificant walk-on, worth no more than a passing mention, when in fact she is on screen almost as much as Isak Borg and has a disproportionately large share of the film's best speeches, and draws Bergman's camera to her for one reaction shot after another.

Neither Desiree nor Marianne is soiled by animal needs. If anything, Desiree has an immoderate though never unbecoming sexual appetite which she does nothing to conceal, and Marianne's determination to have a child, to be a mother, is proudly maintained though it compromises her marriage and raises painful questions about her future in general. In fact, no one who sees these films with a discerning eye will imagine that for either woman animal need and its satisfaction is an end in itself, any more than Bergman's need in a film like Cries And Whispers is a definitive put-down of women. Always in Bergman the vision of the film as a whole signals the continuing difficulty of large-scale and enduring integration, the difficulty we have in maintaining proportion, in expressing at once what we need, what we think we need, and think we ought to need. Though Desiree is without the paralyzing self-consciousness of Ester in The Silence, she knows that some things are more important than others, that confident decisions are likely to be rescinded at any moment for good or bad reasons, and that if there are needs, there is also a reasonably appealing world and intractable others with whom to deal, decently if at all possible. Bergman adores Desiree not because she has especially good ideas or because she is an especially kind or noble person, but because she has some clear notion of what she wants, how to get it, and how far one may legitimately go in pursuit of one's desires; also because she is a beautiful woman whose carriage and demeanor bespeak a clarity of intention and relative harmony of impulse. She is, so to say, at one with herself, and though that self is capable of mischief and worse, it knows limits; more, the satisfaction of its animal needs is plausibly related to the expression of ordinary affections and the assumption of worldly responsibilities, including the care of children."

—Robert Boyers, “Bergman and Women” (Salmagundi #40)