![]() ![]() He regarded Mackay Brown as a poor subject for a PhD because he was not well-known and ‘seem to be still alive’. Falconer was an ex-naval officer and author of the ‘improbable’ ‘masterwork’, Shakespeare and the Sea, in which he argued that Shakespeare’s familiarity with naval terms clearly demonstrated that he had spent his ‘lost years’ as a ‘naval man’. In Scotland, Parini settled into his studies, supervised by Professor Alec Falconer, who seemed to be ‘vaguely senescent’ and forgetful, and who was dismayed by Parini’s decision to write his thesis on the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown. The alternatives, as he saw them at the time, were to ‘Stay at home, where my mother would chop off my balls, or go to Vietnam, where they would be blown off.’ ![]() As he explains, this was the choice he made when, after graduating from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, he had moved (briefly he hoped) back to live with his parents in the Pennsylvanian town of Scranton. Parini is an American who, in the 1970s, was accepted as a PhD candidate at the Scottish University of Saint Andrews. ![]() It doesn’t matter if you have never read any of the work of the famous Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, neither had Jay Parini when he was co-opted to look after the elderly, blind author and persuaded to drive him around the Scottish Highlands. Jay Parini’s memoir provides an insight into the famous South American author as the two of them tour the Scottish Highlands. ![]()
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