Category: people

“Before Ginsberg could utter the opening lines of his mantra, and assume the proper meditative posture, my father and I began to chortle uncontrollably. … My father suggested I go and apologize, which I did, at which point Ginsberg grimaced, urinated on himself, … and fell to his knees.” (Years later, Ginsberg got karmic revenge of a sort.)

His most recent book, The Masque of Africa, “unmasks Naipaul – whose reputation for callousness toward humans is legendary – as a besotted, almost tender, lover of animals.”

“The actress, who had roles in more than 30 movies, achieved cult status as Altaira in the cult classic” Forbidden Planet. She’s also remembered as the title character – a sexy, athletic, clever detective – of the TV series Honey West.

Through 2010, the centennial of the author’s death, “Russians wrestled over Tolstoy much as they did when he was alive. Intellectuals accused the Russian Orthodox Church of blacklisting a national hero. The church accused Tolstoy of helping speed the rise of the Bolsheviks. The melodrama of his last days, when he fled his family estate to take up the life of an ascetic, was revived in all its pulpy detail.”

“The late Harold Pinter – among the iconic playwrights of our era, a man who could illuminate the notions of self-destruction, general malice, self-defense, control, resistance, and all manner of human lapses in sparse, dark, and pummeling English – who knew this same, often absurdist Harold Pinter was a romantic?”

“It was 50 years ago that the then 18-year-old Maurizio Pollini won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. It is has become part of the Pollini myth that after his victory he became something of a recluse, prone to nerves and cancellations, who didn’t properly re-emerge until the late 1960s, by which time his youthful verve and engagement had been transformed into a dauntingly icy professionalism.”

When asked about the professional reaction he received after he came out of the closet, Everett responded, “Nothing very much [in terms of Hollywood reaction]. I just never got a job there, and I never got a job here, after [coming out].

“Words have an emotional resonance in you, huge emotional echoes, when you’re speaking in your own language. You don’t think about what you’re saying; the words come out of a need to express yourself. When you’re speaking in a foreign language, there’s like an office in your brain, where people are throwing the words at you. ‘Give me that word – I need a verb! I need an adjective!'”

“She died in a hospice in the Baltimore suburb of Towson after suffering congestive heart failure in November, a long-time friend told reporters. In the hit musical she was portrayed as Liesl, singing the duet Sixteen Going on Seventeen with Rolf.”