Category: people

“I did not leave North Korea because I was hungry for food, but because I was hungry for music. People do not leave because they know that they deserve food, but because they know that they deserve freedom.”

“Wilfrid Mellers, an English musicologist, composer, critic and teacher who published more than 20 books on subjects ranging from 17th-century English and French composers to the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, died on May 16 in Scrayingham, North Yorkshire. He was 94.”

Andre Breton’s surrealist manifesto sold for a lot of money this week. “It is not simply that Breton spent most of his adult life utterly skint – though that’s always worth remembering. The true offense lies in the way in which sneaky old capitalism, once again, has so ingeniously taken a movement aimed at its violent destruction and turned it into luxury goods.”

“The breadth of Trilling’s renown can hardly be understood today. He was a professor of literature at a major university who was at the same time a ‘figure’ (a term he honored) in the culture at large. And what was he really? An essayist; and it is tempting to say, given the expository clamor of the moment–its short views and skimpy topicality–merely an essayist.”

“Eschenbach, who leaves with the orchestra today for a three-week tour of Asia, ended his tenure here as a fascinating medium for contradiction. Anyone looking for similarities between the podium personality and the pianist would have found the entire concert rather frustrating: He is as two separate artists.”

Philippe de Montebello’s “new job is to be announced Tuesday night at a dinner celebrating the institute’s 75th anniversary. In addition to teaching at N.Y.U., he will advise the university on its plan for a new overseas campus at Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.”

“American writer Susan Sontag was terrified of death. She beat cancer in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, but third time around she wasn’t so lucky. In a tender account of her final illness, her son David Rieff recalls how he colluded with his mother’s fantasy that she wasn’t dying – and what this ultimately cost him after she had gone.”

Novelist Joseph O’Neill loves the game of cricket, writes about it, obsesses over it. But he lives in New York, and most of his novels are aimed first at an American audience. So how would a cricket-themed novel find an audience?

It’s been less than a year since Patricia Mitchell took over as president of St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, but she’s already made a considerable impact. “She has impressed many Ordway stakeholders — from staff and board members who point to her go-getter attitude, to the hall’s resident arts organizations, who appreciate her lack of guile.”

“Work in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Nate Lippens, a freelance critic, is being examined after one of his art reviews was discovered to have striking similarities to criticism published two years earlier in Art in America magazine.”