“You accept or reject the influences around you, you are formed by your social enclosure and you are always growing. To be a writer is to enter into public life. I look upon our process as writers as discovery of life.”
Category: people
John Golding, 82, Artist And Art Historian
While he had a successful career as one of Britain’s top abstract painters, Golding was best known for organizing major Picasso exhibitions and writing what isa considered the definitive book on Cubism.
Contralto Lili Chookasian, 90
“Where many contraltos are endowed with the lightish, dusky equivalent of a viola, her voice – immense, deep, velvety and burnished – put a cello at her command. She was also praised for her sensitive musicianship, powerful dramatic characterizations and impeccable diction.”
Marta Eggerth, Operetta Star, Still Sharp And Still Singing At 100
“People ask me, How is it to be 100? I say, I don’t know. I have no standard of comparison. You must ask me when I am 200 what it was like to be 100, and then I will be able to tell you.”
Soprano Ailyn Pérez Wins 2012 Richard Tucker Award
The $30,000 prize “is conferred annually on an American opera singer at the threshold of a major international career.” Pérez’s husband, tenor Stephen Costello, received the award in 2009.
For Carole King, Songwriting Just Came Naturally
On “You’ve Got a Friend”: “That song, pure and simple, came through me. I sat at the piano; the song came through me. People say, ‘Did you write it for James Taylor?’ No, no I didn’t.”
Experimental Author Christine Brooke-Rose, 89
“The author of more than a dozen novels, as well as short stories, essays and criticism, Ms. Brooke-Rose was one of relatively few Britons to maintain a long association with experimental fiction. Her stylistic techniques – playful, polyglot, punning, postmodern and slyly self-referential – are more typically associated with writers of the French Nouveau Roman school.”
Stalin Museum Decides To Acknowledge His Atrocities
“A museum that has honored Josef Stalin in Georgia since 1937 is being remodeled to exhibit the atrocities that were committed during the Soviet dictator’s rule. Georgian Culture Minister Nika Rurua said Monday that his nation, which became independent in 1991, can no longer host a museum ‘glorifying the Soviet dictator’.”
Elizabeth Catlett, 96, Sculptor And Harlem Renaissance Figure
“Though much of her early career was ignored by the mainstream art world, Catlett’s work is now collected by museums all over the world. Still, the artist said it was too much when NPR told her last year that she had been described as the matriarch of modernist sculpture.”
Gunter Grass Barred From Israel
Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai says Grass is not welcome because he has tried “to inflame hatred against the State and people of Israel.”