Category: people

“In scenes resonant of the mass mourning in Britain following the death of Princess Diana, police said a million fans had lined the route of the funeral procession, which was accompanied by Hallyday’s band playing live, as it made its way from the Arc de Triomphe along the Champs-Élysées to Place de la Concorde and on to the church of La Madeleine.”

“It’s a formidable challenge, and one winners have to undergo twice (usually, as with Ishiguro, delivering a lecture and a “banquet speech” three days later). But most attempts include at least three of the following elements: profuse thanks to the Swedish Academy; equally lavish expressions of humility and unworthiness (but don’t overdo this passive-aggressively, like Luigi Pirandello); confessing a personal debt to Scandinavian literature (WB Yeats’s entire speech, for example, consisted of tributes to Swedenborg and Ibsen); a potent childhood memory and a recent anecdote showing how grounded in mundane reality you are.”

“Mr. Gass wrote just three novels, none of them bestsellers, but he was often described as one of America’s finest literary stylists – ‘a magician of the word, the writer of a prose so rich that it makes Vladi¬mir Nabokov’s seem impoverished,’ Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda wrote in 2013.”

“‘As understandably troubling as the accusations noted in recent press accounts are, they are unfounded,’ he said in a written statement. ‘As anyone who truly knows me will attest, I have not lived my life as an oppressor or an aggressor.'” In response, all four men who spoke to the Times stood by their stories. Said one of Levine, “He is lying. … I will take a lie-detector test. Will he?”

“‘Today I filed defamation proceedings in the federal court of Australia against the Daily Telegraph,’ he said at a brief press conference in Melbourne. ‘This is to address the hyperbole, lies and the spurious claims about me in entertainment community. They have splashed spurious claims with bombastic titles on their front pages.'”

“This is an essay about what happens when knowledge is warped by a cult of interpretive genius. It is about having had my understanding of music fundamentally structured by James Levine’s craft when I was the same age as the children he allegedly liked to abuse, and in the process having decided not to know what I knew. It is about what it means to me that my love of music and my understanding of how it should sound were shaped by someone who abused children, and that the institutions in which and by which that love was fostered likely protected the abuser and enabled the abuse.”

A just-published study finds significant declines in several key areas of cognitive functioning among teenage boys who are doing time. Given that most prisoners eventually return to society, and ex-cons with poor reasoning ability and/or impulse control are unlikely to go straight, this could have widespread negative effects.

“Émile Zola is best known as the 19th century French author of celebrated works including Thérèse Raquin, Nana and Germinal. Now, the leader of the Naturalist literary movement is being recognised as a talented and experimental photographer with the auction of a rarely seen personal collection of pictures.”

Fans of Russian lit will know Vladimir Mayakovsky as the great poet of the early Soviet era, but in 1925 – 100 years after the journey that led to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America – he traveled to the United States (with stops first in Cuba and Mexico) and published his dispatches in Russian newspapers. (Mayakovsky did see the U.S. through Soviet eyes, but he loved New York City.)

“Although he was little known outside the French-speaking world, Mr. Hallyday sold more than 100 million records, acted in more than 30 films and appeared on the cover of Paris Match dozens of times. His career endured so long that when he released an album in 2008 called Ça Ne Finira Jamais (‘It Will Never End’), the title sounded like a simple statement of fact.”