Category: people

Jonathan Karp is “a baby-faced 40-year-old” who became editor-in-chief at Random House in May. He has a glittery list of authors, and Variety has also called him “one of the more visible book publishers in town.” “Still. For years and years and years, like scads of lesser-known schleps who wait tables or answer telephones, Mr. Karp dreamed of writing a musical comedy, a dream he has nourished through playwriting workshops, amateur readings and weekends and vacations devoted to lyrics and plot lines.” So he did…

Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who became an internationally celebrated activist while fighting South Africa’s apartheid government, is facing accusations of censorship and hypocrisy after pulling the plug on a seven-year collaboration with the man who was to be her biographer.

“Henri Cartier-Bresson invented the grammar for photographing life in the 20th century,” says Robert McFarlane. “From his earliest photographs, Cartier-Bresson captured life in flight, sometimes literally. In perhaps his most famous picture, ‘Behind the Gare St Lazare, Paris 1932’ a man leaps to the right, taking off from a wooden ladder lying in a shallow puddle near curved metallic debris. Cartier-Bresson’s reflexes are so precise his Leica’s shutter records the leap at the exact moment before the man’s right heel descends to the mirror-like surface of the water. It is a moment pregnant with possibilities and as if to add visual value, Cartier-Bresson’s camera records a poster in the background showing a dancer leaping in the opposing direction.”

Ken Sprague, who has died of cancer aged 77, once said that his aim was “to build a picture road to socialism, to the Golden City or, as Blake called it, Jerusalem”. A painter, sculptor, muralist, banner-maker and sometime television presenter, he was, for half a century, a regular, if dissenting, cartoonist for the Daily Worker, its successor, the Morning Star, and for papers like Tribune and Peace News.

Paul Ganson is retiring as a bassoonist in the Detroit Symphony. But his instrument is not how his colleagues will remember him best. Ganson is a legend in the Detroit music community, not just for his playing, but for a crusade that he undertook 34 years ago to save the city’s Orchestra Hall. “In September 1970, Orchestra Hall was about to be demolished and replaced by a fast-food operation, a sorry end to a proud history. The concert hall, an acoustical wonder even in its failing condition, was built in 1919…” but the DSO hadn’t performed there in years. It would take a miracle to save the dying building, and a miracle is exactly what Ganson delivered.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the 20th century’s most important photographers, has died in the south of France, at age 96. He was a pioneer of photojournalism as well as co-founder of the influential Magnum picture agency.

Conductor Lorin Maazel has withdrawn from conducting Carmen at the Seville Festival in Spain because of emergency eye surgery. “Due to this surgery, doctors responsible strictly recommended that Maestro Maazel should not undertake any physical activities for the next four to six weeks, including conducting.”

Someone once likened philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser to “a cross between Spinoza and Groucho Marx.” The longtime Columbia University professor (since 1954) died last weekend at the age of 82. He was “known for his wit, erudition, and blunt conversational style.”

A Berkeley acupuncturist is gaining a name for himself as a maker of some of the best modern violins available today. Peter Van Arsdale’s secret is the wood he uses – found timbers salvaged from the icy waters of Lake Superior. “Cut from logs that sank maybe two centuries ago as they were being floated to frontier settlements, the wood — rot-free because there’s almost no oxygen in the cold waters where it was preserved — has a richness and density rare in younger timber.” He also sees a connection between his two professions: “Acupuncture works with vibrational energy, and violins are nothing but vibrational energy.”

“Peek into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fictional universe and it is easy to see why so many still take offense. Singer’s characters, nearly all Jews, curse and covet and commit adultery. They impersonate demons or invoke them. They are superstitious, provincial, desirous. Nearly everything forbidden by Jewish law and custom is done by one character or another… Now, with the publication of three encyclopedic volumes of Singer’s short stories by the Library of America, and with lectures and readings honoring the centennial of his birth this year, another opportunity is being offered to take the measure of those transgressions.”