Category: people

“In my day, anyone who is vaguely educated – in other words, they know where Pakistan was … or that they had a vague idea which century Henry VIII [lived in] – would give you the opportunity for all sorts of humor. … The general feeling is that anything that doesn’t affect you personally is not worth knowing about. … It’s kind of like, ‘Geography? Well, I don’t need to know about that.'”

“Chopin’s heart inspires a deep fascination in Poland normally reserved for the relics of saints. For Poles, Chopin’s nostalgic compositions capture the national spirit — and the heart’s fate is seen as intertwined with Poland’s greatest agonies and triumphs over nearly two centuries of foreign occupation, warfare and liberation.”

“Marshall McLuhan hadn’t yet given us the formula, but if Dylan Thomas was the medium, poetry was the message. Already a radio favorite in Britain, he blazed his reputation across 1950s America with a sequence of Led Zeppelin–esque reading tours, multicity road shows in which the dying throb of Romanticism met the incoming crackle of mass communication.”

That’s as in Dungeons and Dragons, not … anything else. Yes, there are still D&D Dungeonmasters, and they’re by no means all geeky white boys anymore. (This one’s an Asian-American woman.)

“During his 26 years at The Times, Champlin served as the paper’s principal film critic from 1967 through 1980. He then shifted to book reviewing and, with his “Critic at Large” column, offered a more general overview of the arts. He retired in 1991 but continued to contribute to The Times’ daily and Sunday Calendar sections and wrote two books despite becoming legally blind from age-related macular degeneration in 1999.”

“Professors approaching 70 who are still enamored with hanging out with students and colleagues, or even fretting about money, have an ethical obligation to step back and think seriously about quitting. If they do remain on the job, they should at least openly acknowledge they’re doing it mostly for themselves. Of course, there are exceptions.”

A real New York story, with a supporting cast including Edmund White, Robert Indiana, Candy Darling, and half the residents of the Chelsea Hotel.

Archaeologists have found plenty of evidence of women warriors in the areas where Amazons were said to live. They didn’t cut off breasts or live without men, but they did fight, hunt, smoke pot and get tattoos.

“I don’t go out, I hardly ever leave here,” Hockney says. “I go out to the dentist, the doctor, the bookstore and the marijuana store, because you have to go to each of those yourself. And that’s it.”

“Many of the hit shows Glen Larson produced found little favor with critics, including ‘B.J. and the Bear’ (1979), about a trucker and his pet monkey. And despite his success, sometimes with multiple series running simultaneously, he never won an Emmy.”