Category: people

Architect Antoine Predock wins the 2006 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. In announcing the award yesterday, the AIA saluted the New Mexico architect for an approach “born out of his geographic surroundings, the American West, an open desert full of history and expansive space.”

It’s hard to get any more Broadway than Neil Simon – the celebrated playwright remains the only living writer to have a Broadway theater named after him, and this season, no fewer than three Simon revivals are playing New York’s biggest stages. So it’s easy to forget that it took Simon decades to achieve critical acclaim, and even longer to win the Pulitzer he so coveted. At 78, two years removed from a kidney transplant, Simon is still working, planning a sequel to The Sunshine Boys and turning his autobiography into a stage play.

The debate over C.S. Lewis and his children’s books is nothing new, of course, and some of the combatants in the seemingly endless debate go well beyond mere literary argument. Is the Narnia series “a timeless fantasy about talking beavers, friendly fauns and a mystical lion named Aslan? Or insidious militaristic propaganda cunningly used to inoculate innocents with rigid Christian dogma penned by a pervy pipe-puffing Oxford prig who actually didn’t very much like little children and might have slept with a woman old enough to be his mother? When he wasn’t drinking. In pubs. With J.R.R. Tolkien.” And in an age in which children’s fantasy is a major literary sub-genre, scholars are just warming up their Lewis screeds.

There is no question that the Narnia books contain strong Christian imagery, but even religious scholars have never agreed on what point of view Lewis intended to endorse. “In one camp are evangelicals, whose churches regularly use Lewis’s book Mere Christianity to introduce newcomers to orthodox understandings of Jesus Christ… Others, however, insist that Lewis cared chiefly about bringing the worldwide Christian family together. Since he helped advance a vibrant ecumenical movement in his day, he must not be reduced to a sectarian champion posthumously.”

“Devotees and scholars of the writer Walt Whitman are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the original edition of his seminal work, Leaves of Grass, the concise volume of 12 poems that pushed the boundaries of social decency and of poetry itself. By rejecting the rigid structures of British metre, Whitman offered readers free-spirited bursts of consciousness that forever changed American poetry… Experts suspect only a few hundred copies of the original edition exist and are using the anniversary to try to count them.”

In a speech peppered with the potent silences that are often called “Pinteresque”, he accused the U.S. and its ally Britain of trading in death and employing “language to keep thought at bay.”

It’s official: Beethoven died of lead poisoning, according to scientists studying hair and tissue samples from the famous composer, and the deadly metal probably also caused his deafness. Still unknown is just exactly how old Ludwig came into contact with so much lead, but one theory involves his heavy drinking, for which lead goblets would have been a likely accessory.

“The major blues album is a vanishing artifact. Along with Robert Cray and Corey Harris, Buddy Guy himself is one of the few living humans with more than one.”

He’s still performing 80 concerts a year. “While Tatum, Louis Armstrong and others were inventing jazz, Brubeck was hoping to learn it. Now, some 70 years later, he’s the most successful popularizer in postwar jazz history.”

Playwright Harold Pinter, who had canceled going to his Nobel ceremony this week, has been taken to a London hsopital. “Pinter, who was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in December 2002, was born in Hackney, east London.”