Category: people

“[She was] a novelist and memoirist who recounted her bittersweet Jewish roots in New York as a rabbi’s daughter in Hell’s Kitchen and her turbulent marriage to the literary critic Alfred Kazin.”

“After learning the singing exercise solfeggio from an older brother, he took voice lessons at a school sponsored by the Works Progress Administration and at 14 was singing on a local radio station with the Pawtucket Boys’ Club Harmonica Band.” And as a sophomore at Juilliard in 1948, he met the partner he finally got to marry in 2012.

He published a book of poetry at 19 and got his degrees from the University of Iowa, but then addictions derailed him for years. “Mr. Johnson initially believed that sobriety would damage his creativity, but later realized that his addictions were not fueling much writing.” When he got sober, he wrote many things, including Jesus’ Son, a beloved book of linked short stories.

“The thing that I am branded with and the thing that I am denounced for, I now claim as my own. I am illegitimate, I am ambiguous. In some way I actually claim the right to ambiguity, and the right to clarity. It does me no good to say, ‘Well, I reject this and I reject that.’ I feel free to use everything, or not, as I choose.”

“The extraordinary thing about Beethoven’s hearing loss journey is that he found a way forward at every stage. Once he accepted his deafness at Heiligenstadt, it was no longer a source of shame, and he was open about it from then onwards. Even for the last 10 years of his life, when he could hear nothing, he kept composing. Many people will know the story of his conducting what seems to be an orchestra in his head at the premiere of his 9th Symphony. Eyes still shut, he had to be stopped and shown the smiling musicians, the appreciative audience applauding.”

For 45 years he worked at the People’s Army Theater, the main company for the Soviet and then the Russian armed forces. “Aside from his theater work, Mr. Burdonsky kept a low profile, using his mother’s surname. He said he had never visited Stalin’s grave, by the Kremlin wall.”

“Robert Booker led the state Arts Commission through an often challenging period marked by recession-era budget reductions and major shifts in the state’s public policy environment. Nevertheless, under Booker’s leadership, the Arts Commission distinguished itself as one of the state’s most resilient, responsive, fiscally responsible agencies, and one of the nation’s boldest and most innovative state arts agencies.”

Claude Lanzmann told the DPRK authorities that he was shooting a film about tae kwon do – and he kept it up with his ever-present government minders, who believed him. In reality, he was revisiting the scene of an affair some 60 years earlier.

As James Ivory, now 89 and still traveling and writing, tells Sarah Larson, “[Ismail] was my life’s partner. From the beginning right on down to his final day. I lived openly with him for forty-five years, in New York and wherever else we were. That says what it says.”

It in 1957, her first year at U. Texas-Austin – and the first year black students were admitted as undergrads – that Conrad was cast as Dido, opposite a white student, in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. She was harassed not only by white students but also by state legislators, who threatened to withhold funding from the university if she were not replaced.