Category: people

“One of South Korea’s most famous actresses was found dead in her home on Thursday in what the police called a suicide. They linked her death to malicious online rumors, a growing social problem in South Korea, which has one of the world’s most active online communities and one of its highest suicide rates.”

“It’s me, that guy, but it’s a question of editing out parts of myself… I wouldn’t write about doing something decent. I think the real me is in my diary and that’s under lock and key… I don’t think what I write is fiction, I really don’t. But there’s a reason I’m not a reporter – I couldn’t trust myself with facts.”

SAG President: “James Earl Jones’ distinguished career on stage, in film, on television, in commercials and as a vocal presence without peer commands our admiration and respect. His long and quiet devotion to advancing literacy, the arts and humanities on a national and local scale deserves our appreciation.”

By lifetime achievement awards. (“But I’m still working!”) By mention of his Hollywood career. (“Do you know I haven’t set foot in a movie studio in, wait a second, 30 … in 43 years? There is a statute of limitations. People shouldn’t bring it up.”) By Lang Lang. (“It’s a circus act, you know? Why doesn’t he just come out and juggle?”) By travel. (“You get shunted around. Too awful.”) By technology. (“I don’t even have a cell phone. I don’t know how they work.”) And so on…

Violinist Hilary Hahn has been reinventing her career over the last couple of years, and to her surprise (she claims to be a tech neophyte,) she has emerged as the poster girl for online engagement with classical music, as well as a leading proponent of looking outside the classical genre for inspiration.

Intrepid literary gold miner Hart Seely finds that the vice-presidential nominee is following in the surrealist tradition of such modern Republican poets as Donald Rumsfeld.

“There are plenty of people out there–not only English teachers but also amateur language buffs like me–who believe that diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator… just about any sentence can be diagrammed, even when it is gibberish.”

“In the spirit of Andy Warhol and Paris Hilton, [Bernard-Henri] Lévy has always grasped – more profoundly, or at least more profitably, than any mere philosopher could – an important truth: the media must constantly be fed… The French disdain for BHL is reflective of an inherent distaste for blatant self-promotion.”

By nearly any measure, Kennedy Center chief Michael Kaiser has to be considered one of the great success stories of the American performing arts world, known for retiring deficits without slashing artistic budgets beyond recognition. But is his success translatable for other struggling arts groups? Kaiser is betting that it is, with a new 183-page “manual” for arts managers.

“Hayden Carruth, whose spare, precise, impassioned verse took myriad forms and stamped him as one of the most wide-ranging and intellectually ambitious poets of his generation, died Monday at his home… Although known primarily as a critic, reviewer and editor, Mr. Carruth produced some 30 books of poetry that addressed, in charged, taut language, subjects like madness, loneliness, death and the fragility of the natural world.”