Late in life, he opened an English bookstore in Avignon; before that, in London, he wrote anti-consumerism and anti-automobile books. But he made his biggest mark in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s: he briefly ran the Off-Off-Broadway birthplace Caffe Cino, and he devised a kit that lets customers assemble their own harpsichords, enabling the modern revival and spread of the instrument.
Author: Matthew Westphal
National Book Awards 2018 To Sigrid Nunez’s ‘The Friend’, Jeffrey C. Stewart’s ‘The New Negro’
Alongside the fiction prize to Nunez’s novel about a bereaved writer and his Great Dane and the nonfiction prize to Stewart’s biography of philosopher Alain Locke, honors went to Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency (poetry), Yoko Tawada and Margaret Mitsutani for The Emissary (translated literature), and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (young people’s literature). Isabel Allende became the first Spanish-language author to receive the lifetime achievement award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
St. Louis Ballet Dancer Found Dead In Rural Missouri Lake
“Raffaella Maria Stroik, 23, was reported missing Tuesday after a state park ranger found her unattended vehicle at Mark Twain State Park, about 100 miles northwest of St. Louis.” Her body was discovered floating in Mark Twain Lake Wednesday morning. She had joined St. Louis Ballet only last year.
How Do We Know These Bronzes Are By Michelangelo? Eight-Pack Abs, Short Big Toes, Messy Pubic Hair
It’s those features, common in his male nudes and rare in those of his colleagues, that led researchers at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to be certain that the two “Rothschild Bronzes” were sculpted by Michelangelo — making them the only surviving works in that metal by the Florentine artist.
Oligarch Seller Of ‘Salvator Mundi’ Formally Charged In Major Monaco Corruption Scandal
Dmitry Rybolovlev faces charges of “trading in passive influence and violation of the secrecy of the investigation” as part of what Le Monde has described as “a vast influence-peddling scandal at the heart of Monaco institutions.” The billionaire — who in 2004 bought Donald Trump’s Palm Beach mansion sight unseen at an inflated price — is suing art dealer Yves Bouvier, and he is accused of getting Monaco’s former justice minister to influence the case.
OED’s 2018 Word Of The Year: ‘Toxic’
“The word was chosen less for statistical reasons, [the U.S. head of Oxford Dictionaries] said, than for the sheer variety of contexts in which it has proliferated, from conversations about environmental poisons to laments about today’s poisonous political discourse to the #MeToo movement, with its calling out of ‘toxic masculinity.'” The runners-up were “gaslighting” and “incel.” (Last week, rival dictionary Collins declared its word of the year to be “single-use.”)
Neighbors Are Suing The Tate Modern Because Its Visitors Keep Gawking Through Their Windows. So An Artist Installed Binoculars
Demonstrating that conceptual art and masterful trolling can be one and the same, Max Siedentopf says that his installation — which he has titled Please respect our neighbours’ privacy — will “just help visitors to enjoy Tate Modern’s most popular sight a little bit more and up close.”
Kuwait Bans ‘Brothers Karamazov’
Maybe it’s not too surprising that a conservative Arab monarchy has already banned the likes of 1984 (too subversive) to One Hundred Years of Solitude (too racy) to Disney’s Little Mermaid (Ariel’s top is too skimpy). But the crop of 948 new titles blocked from presentation at this year’s Kuwait International Literary Festival includes Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. (Too gloomy?)
Former Opera Company Chief Pleads Not Guilty To Sex-With-A-Minor Charges
Timothy Sexton, the former artistic director and CEO of the State Opera of South Australia in Adelaide, was indicted on four charges for incidents alleged to have occurred between 1988 and ’91. He had worked in various capacities with SOSA for 20 years when he took the company’s helm in 2011; he resigned last year for unspecified personal reasons.
Re-Creating The Medieval Acoustics Of The Mosque-Cathedral Of Córdoba
Here’s how archaeo-acousticians went about modeling, and then reproducing, the sound in the prayer hall/nave at four different points in the building’s history: when it was new in the 780s (you could hear a prayer clearly throughout the room), after subsequent enlargements (more echoes and “acoustical shadows”), and a renovation and expansion in the 1000s (a prayer “echoes as though it was recited deep inside a cave”).