Category: people

“You mistook him for no one else: the late, popular style was a faded fan, but it was still recognizably Bloom’s old peacockery. The leaping links, hieratic cross-referencing, and amusingly camp self-involvement—the sense you got that everything made sense inside Bloom’s head, that everyone connected with everyone else within the huge Oedipal family he had made of literature—had been there from the beginning, somewhat masked by the scholarly density and relative propriety of his early work.” – The New Yorker

“Long known for a premier collection of Pop art that he built with his wife, Gael Neeson, Edlis made a star turn in a recent HBO documentary about the art market, providing one of the film’s most poignant moments.” – ARTnews

Harold Bloom “read like a man picking up crumbs with a moistened index finger. He often considered loneliness in literature. You felt he was attracted to loneliness as a theme for the same reasons that Ishmael, in “Moby-Dick,” liked to join funeral processions. It made him feel more open, invigorated and alive.” – The New York Times

“This week, 226 years since her execution on Oct. 16, 1793, a new exhibition in Paris aims to show how the queen’s image has been transformed in recent years. From reviled royal to pop icon, her face now appears on gift shop souvenirs at her former home at Versailles, on bars of chocolate, hairbrushes, mugs, shopping bags, fridge magnets and snow globes.” – Los Angeles Times

“Tucker’s primary love was music, a devotion that she first cultivated in the Lutheran church of her childhood. But over the course of her [three decades] at The Chronicle, which began in 1964, she developed a wide-ranging versatility that allowed her to write about theater, literature and especially dance.” – San Francisco Chronicle

In literature, some of the most celebrated writers were once considered too strange, too limited or just too boring. Several publishers turned down Toni Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” and she was chastised for years by white critics for focusing too much on black characters. – Washington Post (AP)

In contrast to the United States, so far no theater in Europe, where the #MeToo movement has had little impact, has canceled any of the singer’s planned performances on calendars running through the fall of 2020. In continuing the performances, European venues have cited an absence of allegations in their venues, the lack of a judicial case against him and the singer’s well-known affability and undeniable popularity. – Yahoo! (AP)

“From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called ‘the School of Resentment,’ by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.” – The New York Times

“[He] was distinguished in at least three fields. As a photographer in the 1950s and ’60s he made memorable images of contemporary American writers and painters, and of the young Bob Dylan soon after the singer’s arrival in New York. As a film-making musicologist he documented traditional arts in the American South and in Peru. And as a musician, particularly as a founder member of the New Lost City Ramblers, he had an incalculable influence on the American folk revival and all that followed.” – The Guardian