Category: people

“It’s not every day that you meet the winner of Britain’s biggest literary prize and end up conducting the kind of forensic interview you might with a yob on an antisocial behaviour order. But in the past week, astonishing things have been said about the enigmatic, 42-year-old Mexican-Australian who penned his debut novel, Vernon God Little, under the pseudonym, DBC Pierre.” In fact, the author’s shady past goes far beyond even the rumors which have dogged him recently, and Peter Finlay (Pierre’s real name) isn’t apologizing for any of it.

“Manuel Vazquez Montalban, one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, has died aged 64. Mr Montalban died of a heart attack as he changed flights at Bangkok international airport on Friday, Spanish diplomats said… The Catalan author and left-wing political commentator was famed for writing 50 books – translated into 24 languages – as well as creating the fictional detective character, Pepe Carvalho.”

“She died 40 years ago, succumbing intentionally to a kitchen oven’s gas fumes at age 30. He survived 35 years longer before dying of cancer. They were still married but no longer together when she left the world of the living. So why are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes the golden couple of fall 2003?”

“The board of the Menil Collection in Houston named its new director yesterday: Josef Helfenstein, director of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mr. Helfenstein succeeds Ned Rifkin, who resigned almost a year ago to head the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington.” The Menil Collection has functioned amid considerable internal turmoil over the last several years, but with the appointment of Helfenstein, it is hoped that an organization which has sometimes had trouble defining itself will finally have a chance to establish a firm direction.

A little scrap of wallpaper that might have helped kill Napoleon has been sold at auction. “Tests eight years ago, on a lock said to have been cut from Napoleon’s hair after his death revealed eight times normal levels of arsenic. One culprit could have been the red-and-gold wallpaper of his bedroom, at Longwood House on St Helena, where he was exiled for six years until his death in 1821.”

Gyorgy “Ligeti has a unique place in the history of 20th-century music: an avant-gardist who is familiar to a wide public (even if he has Stanley Kubrick’s use of his music in 2001 to thank for that popularity), and an uncompromising modernist whose music revels in its connections with other cultures, other art forms, and the music of earlier centuries.”

The UK’s arts minister ran afoul of some of the nation’s most prominent arts groups this week, when published rumors spread that she was planning to divert government funds away from large national groups such as the British Museum and the National Gallery, in favor of funding smaller, regional organizations. Estelle Morris is sharply denying that she has any such plans, and insists that she merely wants to increase the accessibility of great art. Still, wary arts execs will be watching Morris’s next moves closely.

Two new biographies of Sammy Davis Jr. “spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish – indeed his lifelong effort – to be white.”

When Don Bacigalupi arrived as director of the San Diego Museum of Art in 1999, the museum was considered a difficult job. “What a difference four years and new leadership makes. The museum has risen to national respectability by generating high-quality exhibitions touching on all areas of the collection, revitalizing the collection itself through judicious acquisitions, and establishing a collegial relationship with other museums in Balboa Park, across town, across the United States and beyond.” Now Bacigalupi departs to head up the Toledo Art Museum.

Maya Angelou is so easy in her dispensation of wisdom, she’s like a “Dial-an-Oracle” “Asked about the popularization of her poetry, she has a quick answer to any suggestion of criticism. ‘A friend of mine responded negatively when I told him that I was going to write greeting cards for Hallmark. He said, ‘Oh, I hope not. You are the people’s poet in this country and you don’t want to trivialize that.’ But I thought about that. ‘What am I doing? What am I talking about?’ I asked myself. If I can say something on a card that can reach somebody’s heart and mind, let me try. And I found that that is almost the most difficult writing that I have done. It might take me three pages of prose to write an epigram that is two or three sentences’.”