Category: people

“What has happened to Jeffrey Deitch is a tale worthy of a prime-time soap. There are white hats and black hats, high-minded cultural ideals pitted against putative populist evil, pop and ivory-tower cultures caught in fierce contention. The only thing lacking is a walk-on by Larry Hagman.”

“Even though he believes that American magazines are overedited and overstaffed — ‘No one else in the world takes so many people to make magazines’ — [former Maxim publisher and poet Felix] Dennis says that there is nonetheless a lot of life left in printed products here.”

The music world, discriminatory? Yes, says mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin, who has been blind since birth. But she’s determined, and successful.

In September, Christopher Koelsch took on the role of president and CEO for the L.A. Opera. Can he rescue it from debt and keep the 25-year-old company going?

“John Cheever, now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia, was at least rarely gloomy. Fact is he was more fun per minute than is legal…”

“[It] was an effective if merciless boot-camp instructor. It (or ‘He’ as I imagined it) trained me to amass a vocabulary flexible and muscular enough to avoid words beginning with stammer-consonants, and do so on the hoof, before the other person caught on. … What feels like a curse when you’re younger can prove to be a long-term ally.”

“Prosecutors in June charged Say with inciting hatred and public enmity, and with insulting “religious values”. He faces a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison, although any sentence is likely to be suspended.”

In 1536, as Henry VIII’s chancellor, Cromwell tried to get through Parliament a Poor Law providing money to those unable to work. Says Mantel, “We have reached a period where we are going back to the Middle Ages; where poverty is once again being viewed as a moral failing or a weakness, and relief by the state is a privilege and not a right.” (She also thinks Cromwell could sort out the banking system.)

“It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions … but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

“[He] became one of the most respected painters of his time, but slowly. For much of his 50-year career he exhibited primarily in Belgium and the Netherlands, achieving international recognition” only in the 1990s.