Category: people

“[He] was among the last of a Runyonesque breed that was long a vital if largely unheralded segment of the music business. … In representing the commercial interests of song, lyricist and composer, publishers of Mr. Richmond’s vintage were equal parts tout and talent scout, matchmaker and midwife, broker and bill collector.”

Morrison’s new book, Home, treats what she thinks of as the real era: “‘I think we have erased the truth about the ’50s, which was the Korean War — which was never called a war, we called it a police action,’ she added. ‘It was violent. There was a lot of slaughter of black people during the ’50s.'”

Despite the show trial he underwent in 1964, “inwardly Brodsky resented and rejected his identification as a dissident, and fought it for the rest of his life – not because he disliked or disapproved of dissidents, but because he felt he had other aims than they did. His goal was to make his mark in literature, and everything else was secondary.”

“The diaries, which run to 141 volumes and more than 43,000 pages, begin when Victoria was 13 and end 10 days before her death in 1901, at age 81.”

“The first Harry Potter film. I was the perfect guy for that movie. They all knew it. J.K. Rowling wanted me to do it; David Heyman, the producer, wanted me to do it. But one guy from Warner’s overruled everyone and Chris Columbus got the gig. I was furious at the time but in hindsight, the level of studio interference on a project that size would have driven me insane.”

Amy Shearn’s family found, among her grandmother’s papers, a stack of elegant and quirky letters from the famous writer and war correspondent, who had been an old family friend in St. Louis. (The whole bit about having been Mrs. Ernest Hemingway barely figured.)

“Yes, Woolf wrote a play. There is a good reason why you’ve probably never heard of it: it’s pretty terrible. First written in 1923, and then revised for a performance at Vanessa Bell’s art studio in 1935, Freshwater is a gentle satire of the bohemian world of her great-aunt” and centering on the the young actress Ellen Terry’s departture from her marriage to a middle-aged painter to “lead a life of corruption […] in Bloomsbury.”

“[His] best-known creation has fostered blissful sloth, caused decades of domestic discord and forever altered the way consumers watch television.”

“[His] vision is not quite Christian in the traditional sense; it is Gnostical: it is the mystical intellection, at its highest moment a fusion with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with logos and who can communicate with human beings in the form of a ray of light or, in Dick’s case, hallucinatory visions.” (All this from a dose of sodium pentothal …)

New School philosophy professor Simon Critchley argues that Dick’s worldview not only “gives us what has arguably become the dominant mode of understanding of fiction in our time” (i.e., “the idea that reality is a pernicious illusion”), it also elucidates the doctrine of original sin, the movies of Lars von Trier, the paranoid style in American politics, and the roots of the modern culture wars.