Category: people

“Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose,” said Franzen, according to Attenberg. “It’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’… It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.”

For Christian Europeans, the Greek philosopher’s name became a byword for luxuriant sensuality; for Jews, his name denoted a godless heretic. While Epicurus was indeed godless and heathen (he believed in no deities), he was by no means a hedonist: his thought, in fact, was close to that of the Stoics.

“Widely respected as one of the fathers of contemporary Italian popular music, … [he] belonged to a genre of Italian songwriters known as ‘cantautori,’ whose lyrics gave voice to the aspirations and frustrations of a postwar generation seeking societal change.”

Taro Yamamoto was perhaps the first celebrity in Japan to call for an end to nuclear power, and the actor paid for his stance: “Just a month later an offer for him to appear in a TV drama series was withdrawn because of his actions. Yamamoto then quit the entertainment agency to which he belonged and became a freelance actor.”

Leibovitz: “I actually hiked once, and it’s possible that it was the worst experience I ever had outdoors. And I was in Alaska–a very beautiful place. To me, it’s meaningless. I don’t see the point of it. It’s a hard–physically–thing. I found it hard. And when you get there, there’s nothing there, just more of what you passed.”

Lethem: “You see the most amazing acts of curation and resurrection on the internet. It is a spectacular Borgesian library, and at the same time it represents a flattening of a tangible or a hierarchical life. I had to decide what record to own. Now I just own them all.”

By the late 1940s, the man who had been Hollywood’s top character actor – Olivier called him a genius – was losing his way, parodying himself in mediocre films. Then he returned to the stage as Brecht’s Galileo, led a company of young movie actors in staged readings of classics, and ultimately directed Henry Fonda in The Caine Mutiny on Broadway and Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter on celluloid.

“The will of the late Nobel-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska calls for the establishment of a new literary prize and a foundation that will guard her literary achievements.”

“When Jeanette Winterson was a child – a redheaded scrap of a thing, as fierce and self-willed as Jane Eyre but readier with her fists – she … was adopted, raised by evangelical Pentecostals in a working-class town in northern England in the 1960s and ’70s. … To the dismay of her mother, Winterson turned out to be brilliant, literary, defiant and gay.”

“Not only was he largely responsible for establishing the trumpet as a popular solo instrument, but he also dominated the scene in the 1960s and 70s with a punishing schedule of concerts (an average of 180 a year) and more than 300 recordings, many made on his trademark piccolo trumpet.”