Category: people

Writer Norman Mailer “has been hospitalized for the second time in as many months for severe respiratory problems, and his children are now holding daily vigils at his bedside in the critical-care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.”

“Edgar Allan Poe’s death is one of the biggest literary mysteries, period. People don’t grow tired of it. It’s sort of like the J.F.K. assassination.” Now a researcher thinks he knows the answer…

“Leonard Riggio is the rich person who made Dia:Beacon possible. A demanding, emotional, self-made man — a Brooklyn cabbie’s son who built Barnes & Noble into the dominant bookseller in America — Riggio was the chairman of the Dia board during the years Dia:Beacon was being built. He believed in it with every fiber of his being. When Dia needed a piece of art to round out its permanent collection, he bought it. When cost overruns occurred, he covered them. But last year, Riggio abruptly, and angrily, resigned as Dia’s chairman.”

“A collection of manuscripts and musical scores stolen from pianist Arthur Rubinstein’s Paris apartment by the Nazis has been donated to the Juilliard School by the pianist’s family.”

” ‘It’s not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive,’ Bourgeois has recently stated. You know what she is getting at – at 95, she is still working – but when you see her work laid out like this, there is no mystery.”

Graffiti taggers are a problem in cities the world over, scrawling their nom de vandal on whatever surface they can find. But in Toronto, a new tagger is getting some shocked attention from the city’s musicians. The name popping up on bridges and roadside barriers: Gustav Mahler.

“Lessing, who turns 88 this month, never finished high school and largely educated herself through voracious reading. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, nonfiction and two volumes of autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.”

The new bio of the Peanuts creator offers insight into Schulz’s character through his work. “The cartoons themselves — however telling as illustrations of things the biographer has discovered about Schulz — are rich works in their own right. They fall somewhere between art and literature; but those categories really don’t matter very much, because they create their own little world. The biography derives its meaning from the cartoons and not vice versa.”

Carnegie Hall has tapped an architecture firm run by the son-in-law of its chairman, Sanford Weill, to design its $150m expansion. “Carnegie officials said they were impressed by a previous project by his firm: the design of the well-regarded new home of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where the chairwoman is Mr. Bibliowicz’s mother-in-law, Joan H. Weill.” Ethical questions abound, and Carnegie Hall is being forced to defend its decision publicly.

Musicians with thriving professional careers are not often to be found busking on street corners. But David Juritz, “solo violinist and leader of the London Mozart Players (Britain’s longest established chamber orchestra), he has taken a leave of absence from his day job and is travelling around the world, busking to raise money for the charity Musequality, [which] is raising money for music projects in disadvantaged areas of the world, starting with South Africa and Uganda.”