Category: people

It’s been 7 years since hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas, but legions of fans and hip-hop scholars still refuse to believe that he ever actually died. After all, since the shooting, “seven posthumous albums have been released – more than when he was alive… His funeral, if there was one, didn’t make the news. We never saw a casket. There was no public memorial.” All the doubt has only solidified Shakur’s place as one of American music’s most influential figures. “If LL Cool J is hip-hop’s balladeer and Public Enemy its enduring conscience, Shakur maintains his status as a supreme urban griot whose gritty, observant rhymes illuminate the plight of disenfranchised black males.”

Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee does not like giving lectures. In fact, for the most part, he declines all such invitations. But when he was asked to present the prestigious Robert B. Silvers lecture in New York, he relented, and agreed to participate in order to honor Silver, the founder of the New York Review of Books. Still, a conventional lecture would simply have been too much to expect from Coetzee, and the South African author did not disappoint, eschewing observations on craft and style in favor of the creation of a new work of fiction to read to his audience.

James Joyce’s troubled but brilliant daughter, Lucia, has always been seen as something of a peripheral figure in her father’s life, and Joyce scholars have traditionally assigned more literary importance to Joyce’s wife. But a new biography of Lucia suggests that she, not her mother, was Joyce’s primary muse. The book is important not only because of its controversial thesis, but because it exists at all. In recent years, Joyce’s grandson, who oversees the author’s literary estate, has become increasingly aggressive in protecting his grandfather’s legacy, to the point of forbidding scholars from quoting from Joyce’s letters.

Last week, as if out of nowhere, Donald Gordon gave 20 million to be shared equally between the Royal Opera House and the Wales Millennium Centre. But why? “In the UK, Gordon is not known as a philanthropist. He has given money to Sadler’s Wells, Shakespeare’s Globe and the British Museum, but, he says, these donations were a matter of ‘a few thousand’ and he can’t remember what they were for. So why this unexpected and extraordinary gesture? ‘For the past few years, my major diversion has been the performing arts. Now I am hoping to make the transition from what they call tycoon to opera appreciator’.”

“A team of 14 researchers exhumed the bones of the 14th century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch on Monday, in the attempt to uncover new aspects about his physical appearance and health.” The researchers plan to spend several months examining the nearly-intact skeleton, and hope to eventually use computer technology to create an approximation of what the poet’s face might have looked like. Creepy? Sure. But Petrarch is used to it: this is the fourth time his remains have been dug up by scientists.

When longtime Denver Post music writer G. Brown resigned his position last week after being accused of plagiarism in a review, he chalked the copied portions of the review up to sloppiness and the pressures of the daily deadline. But now, it appears that an even larger chunk of the review that cost Brown his job may have been pilfered from a New York Daily News story, and the whole incident has caused the Post to rewrite its internal ethics policy, to the dismay of some staffers.

The ’60s may be long gone, but don’t tell that to the Ken Kesey-inspired Merry Pranksters, who continue to traverse Northern California in a psychedelic bus, spreading beat wisdom and leftist radicalism wheresoever they find it lacking. Sure, the Pranksters may be a bit more, um, self-promotional than they once were, but Kesey, who died two years ago, still exerts a clear and powerful influence over the writers and poets who hung on his every word in life.

“Some people just can’t take yes for an answer. Robert McMichael was one of them. The photographer/salesman-turned-art collector founded one of Ontario’s most popular cultural attractions, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg… But Mr. McMichael never could accept the consequences of his own generosity or the success of the gallery he created. Rather than celebrate the independence of the institution, he fought its evolution at every step.” McMichael died Tuesday, aged 82.

“[Canada’s] affection for the McMichael Canadian Collection, I suspect, will survive long after the founder’s follies have been forgotten. The latter were, unfortunately, many and famous. For much of the last 25 years of his life, you could never be quite sure what he would do next.”

Gordon Onslow Ford, the last of the 1930s Paris Surrealists, has died in California, where he had live the past 50 years. He was born in 1912, and joined the group that included Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy in 1938 and worked with them until 1944.”