Category: people

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has ordered his government to look into buying the archive and Swiss estate of the émigré composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, continuing an effort to reclaim and repatriate Russian cultural legacy.”

Best known for his operas Transformations (set to Anne Sexton’s retellings of fairy tales) and The Dangerous Liaisons, Susa’s oeuvre “also included more than 200 theatrical scores and a wealth of choral music … [It] was marked by a combination of tonal harmonies, judicious dissonances and a gift for the well-turned vocal phrase.”

“Pretending to present daringly counterintuitive views to his readers, he actually strengthens the hold on them of a view of things that they have long taken for granted. This is, perhaps, the essence of the genre that Gladwell has pioneered: while reinforcing beliefs that everyone avows, he evokes in the reader a satisfying sensation of intellectual non-conformity.”

“When Lachlan got out of the hospital, doctors said he shouldn’t play contact sports anymore. That was a heartbreaker for Connors, but in the wake of that disappointment Connors found that he suddenly could play music almost effortlessly.”

The New York Times has only printed an obituary for one fictional character – Poirot. What’s the deal with the international devotion to Agatha Christie’s plump, mustachioed little Belgian?

“‘This is a very good problem to have,’ he said of his sudden fame. ‘I wish my mother were alive to see it.'”

“When she began to write, as a member of the Watts Writers Workshop that sprang up after the 1965 riots, L.A. literature was largely a literature of exile, produced primarily by those from elsewhere, who lingered briefly along the city’s glittering surfaces and did not invest the place with any depth.”

“He wrote three novels himself, which drew on his own upbringing as a Jew in the South … But in a life of prolific production – he wrote or edited more than 30 books – his greatest contribution was as a cultural historian and critic who became … ‘perhaps the person most responsible for the emergence of Southern literature as a field of scholarly inquiry’.”

John Cleese: “The main danger we have is that the audience knows the scripts better than we do.”

“So all that’s on TV, it just goes directly into your brain and you stop judging it’s right or not. You just swallow and swallow. This is what an Icelandic poet told me. And I became so scared to television that I always got headaches when I watched it. Then, later on, when I got my Danish book on television, I stopped being afraid because I read the truth, the scientifical truth and it was much better.”