T C Boyle

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Boyle, Mark (1934– ). British sculptor, painter, and Performance artist, born in Glasgow. He served in the army, 1950–3, and studied law at Glasgow University, 1955–6, then worked at a variety of jobs (clerk, labourer, waiter), before turning to art—untrained—when he met the painter Joan Hills (1936– ) in 1958. Thereafter they lived and worked together, based in London, and in the 1980s they were joined in their artistic endeavours by their children Georgia (1962– ) and Sebastian (1964– ), collaborating as the Boyle Family. In the early 1960s Boyle and Hills were involved in performances or Happenings, one of which was ‘Theatre’ (1964); in this they ‘led a group of people down London's Pottery Lane to a dilapidated rear entrance marked “Theatre”. Once inside, Boyle and Hills invited their company to be seated on kitchen chairs ranged before a set of blue plush curtains, which opened upon a performance composed of nothing more, nor less, than the ongoing, everyday activity of the street outside’ ( Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century, 1991). In 1967–8 they worked on light-shows for rock musicians, including Jimi Hendrix, and since 1969 they have devoted much of their energies to a long-running project called ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth'. This has involved making minutely detailed replicas in fibreglass of small areas (usually about 2 × 2 metres) of the earth's surface at sites chosen at random by having blindfolded friends or members of the public throw darts at a map of the world: ‘The aim is to produce as objective a work as possible.’ Exhibitions of these works, which are hung on the wall like pictures, have been held at the Hayward Gallery, London (1986), and elsewhere.

T. C. Boyle (Thomas John Coraghessan Boyle), 1948-, American writer, b. Peekskill, N.Y., grad. State Univ. of New York (B.A. 1968), Univ. of Iowa (M.F.A. 1974, Ph.D. 1977). He published under the name T. Coraghessan Boyle until the mid-1990s. Influenced by such literary heroes as Evelyn Waugh , Gabriel García Márquez , and Flannery O'Connor , he has become known for his wildly imaginative, simile-rich, manically jumpy yet highly polished polysyllabic prose as well as for his satiric bent and hipster-tinged black humor. Boyle's settings range from the historical to the contemporary, his subject matter often edging into the quirky, strange, or bizarre. He first came to critical attention with his short stories in the mid-1970s; they and those that followed have been gathered in such collections as The Descent of Man (1979), If the River Was Whiskey (1990), T. C. Boyle Stories (1998), After the Plague (2001), and Tooth and Claw (2005). He is also a prolific novelist whose books include Water Music (1981), World's End (1987), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993; film, 1994), The Tortilla Curtain (1995), Riven Rock (1998), Drop City (2003), The Inner Circle (2004), and Talk Talk (2006). Boyle has taught at the Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles, since 1978.

Boyle, Jeremiah Tilford (1818–71) Union army officer, born in Mercer County, Kentucky. In the Civil War, Boyle was assigned by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to Louisville to command “peacekeeping” forces in western Kentucky. In this bitterly divided border state, Boyle trampled civil liberties (and exasperated President Abraham Lincoln) with countless arrests on suspicion of disloyalty, censorship, interference in local elections, and frequent executions of suspected guerrillas. Further, he continually overestimated the numbers of Confederate raiders, dispatched garbled and inaccurate intelligence of enemy movements, and pursued slowly if at all.