Category: people

Speaking at the launch of his new novel, Cain (which retells the story of Adam and Eve’s ne’er-do-well son), the Nobel laureate called the Good Book “a manual of bad morals” with “a cruel, jealous and unbearable God.” (Fortunately, he observed, “Catholics do not read the Bible.”)

“Philip Roth came home again Saturday, which is not so unusual because he’s been a frequent visitor in recent years.” The twist to this visit? Roth was “the surprise guest on a bus tour of Newark” — “Philip Roth’s Newark,” as it was called.

“Ms. Spero, who always viewed art as inseparable from life, developed a distinctive kind of political work. Polemical but symbolic, it combined drawing and painting as well as craft-based techniques like collage and printmaking seldom associated with traditional Western notions of high art and mastery.”

“A warm breeze, at play.” So actor Harvey Keitel once described his director in The Piano. An interviewer finds that “[t]he breeze derives from her quirky humour and the mercurial play of expression on her face; her greying hair and her black clothes suggest severity, but the woman herself is a riot of frank, flushed emotion.”

“‘How do you make a dance?’ Well, I get asked that so often that I just make up completely different answers each time. There are so many made-up answers, and they’re all lies.”

The conductor “recently underwent surgery to repair a herniated disc in his back. He was tentatively scheduled to return in time to lead the [Boston Symphony] in a complete cycle of Beethoven concerts between Oct. 22 and Nov. 7. The orchestra announced Thursday that – on doctor’s orders – Levine will sit out the first two programs in the cycle.”

He was “the last surviving Howdy Doody puppeteer, … and was even Puffnstuff before Puffnstuff was Puffnstuff, animating that dragon costume for Sid and Marty Krofft’s live stage shows before Puffnstuff went to television.” More recently, Blackwood was co-founder of Pinocchio’s Marionette Theater in Orlando.

“For 20 years or longer, author-illustrator Maurice Sendak has claimed that child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim mercilessly attacked his 1963 book Where the Wild Things Are when it was first published, causing him and the book great damage. … But like Max’s travels in Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak’s version is almost completely imaginary.”

“I think Gore is a complete lunatic, and it doesn’t bother me what he says about me. He’s an awful, nasty man. Now he can’t write. He’s wheelchair-bound, and he’s in pain. He lost his lover of many years. … You know, he’s just an old grouch.”

“[H]e was a pilot at the tag end of the Pacific war, a member of a crew, and someone who survived great peril in flimsy aircraft. It made a gambler out of him – or someone who declined to be as responsible as others.”