Category: people

“A couple of theories have arisen to explain Kael’s critical ascendancy during this period. One holds that movies in those years were just exceptionally good. Another theory suggests that Kael changed the rules of criticism, setting up a new way of evaluating popular art, without concern for prestige or self-conscious sophistication.”

Michael D. Higgins, a veteran legislator, peace activist and poet who served as Ireland’s first-ever Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, has been elected the nation’s ninth president. While arts minister, he established a string of new arts venues across the country, founded the national Irish-language television network, and relaunched the Irish Film Board.

Ann Southam, a Toronto-based composer who died in 2010, “has willed $14 million to the Canadian Women’s Foundation … This gift marks the largest ever donation to a Canadian women’s organization.”

When novelist Jeannette Winterson published Oranges Are not the Only Fruit, interviewers wondered if it was autobiographical. Truth, she writes, is stranger – and harder – than fiction.

The author of Handmaid’s Tale and The Year of the Flood talks about her most prized possession, her dream superpower – and finishes with a Canadian sex joke.

“Narrative, Barry believes, is so hard-wired into human beings that creativity can come as naturally to adults as it does to children. They need only to access the deep part of the brain that controls that storytelling instinct. Barry calls that state of mind ‘the image world’ and feels it’s as central to a person’s well-being as the immune system.”

“After beginning his career as a specialist in Renaissance music, Mr. Hamm became frustrated with the condescension of his fellow musicologists toward the popular music of their own time. He began to write and lecture on the subject … [and] helped establish the field of American popular music history with two books that have become standard texts.”

“Conspiracists ignore a crushing weight of documentary and in-text evidence that the Stratford master authored the plays.”

“I should be happy that Anonymous turned out to be such a laughably incoherent botch of a film. One that should make the purveyors of the pernicious Shakespeare ‘authorship’ conspiracy theory hide their heads in shame. But, alas, they won’t. They have no shame. … What’s next, a birther epic about a black president who wasn’t really born in Hawaii?”

“Rhapsodizing about Robert Altman’s Nashville … Kael wrote that ‘Altman, from a Catholic background, has what Joyce had: a love of the supreme juices of everyday life.’ Those ‘supreme juices’ were what Kael went to the movies for as well. Praising Barbra Streisand’s vitality in Funny Girl, she noted approvingly, ‘She simply drips’.”