Category: people

“A museum on the site of the boyhood home of the [Nobel-winning] poet and playwright Derek Walcott has closed amid a funding shortfall that has been linked to disputes over controversial tourist developments on St Lucia.”

The disgraced theatre mogul had run the hugely successful Livent company. “At its height, Livent produced shows including The Phantom of the Opera and Ragtime across North America, the United Kingdom and Australia. The company sought bankruptcy protection in 1998 and was sold off three years later.”

Alexander Slotnick: “I conducted the following interview with James Salter in the Fall of 2014. It was published in the University of Virginia’s literary journal Meridian several months later, and Jim died shortly thereafter, on June 19th, 2015, at the age of 90. As far as Literary Hub‘s editors and I know, this was Jim’s last interview. It’s republished here in full with thanks to Meridian and Jim’s family.”

The play reveals this odd, disconcerting paradox: we mythologize artists, but do so with precisely the attributes of authenticity we ironically think make them more real. It’s as if we want genuineness but don’t quite know how to grasp it. Master brings up the question of where artists actually exist in their careers — we think we see them, when they are not really there at all.

“The 60-year-old star, who has played presidents, writers, and gang leaders in a career that has spanned four decades, has one final film awaiting release, an untitled drama set in the world of high fashion” to be released this Christmas. He gave no reason, and his spokeswoman said, “This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”

“More attractive students earn higher grades when they are seen than when they are not seen,” report economists Rey Hernandez-Julian and Christina Peters of the Metropolitan State University of Denver. This result, they add, was “driven mainly by courses taught by male instructors.”

It’s the same case – the alleged theft of $540 million from 1MDB, the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund – that has the Justice Dept. trying to acquire the rights to such films as Dumb and Dumber To and The Wolf of Wall Street (which starred DiCaprio).

He made a wide range of other films, from early exploitation flicks like Turn On to Love to the Jack Lemmon vehicle Save the Tiger to the George C. Scott-Marlon Brando thriller The Formula to the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy Neighbors. He was nominated for a second Oscar for, of all things, a short documentary, Traveling Hopefully, about the founder of the ACLU.

Like all of the stories from those who died in the fire, Khadijah Saye’s is terrible – and the timing is also deeply awful: “Her work was being exhibited as part of a showcase of emerging artists at the Venice Biennale, and now an important gallery was offering to show her art. The director had wanted to meet at her studio, not knowing she worked out of the 20th-floor flat she shared with her mother.”

Despite the contentious political rhetoric of our now, Smith is looking forward to taking up the post in September. “Poetry gives us a vocabulary for the feelings that don’t easily fit into language. And it’s not a static vocabulary because we as beings are constantly changing and contradicting ourselves and growing and coming up against problems that feel completely new or happinesses that feel completely new.”