Category: people

“As a literary showdown, Mario Vargas Llosa vs. Gabriel García Márquez ranks with some of the most famous feuds, including Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov vs. Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer vs. Gore Vidal.” Now, 31 years later, the mystery of the fight has been solved.

“Pop singer Elton John should be banned from performing at a jazz festival in Tobago because his homosexuality could influence young people, some Christian leaders on the Caribbean island said on Monday.”

“President Vladimir Putin is hosting a reception for him on Tuesday. President Putin visited Rostropovich while he was convalescing and last month awarded him Russia’s ‘Order of the Fatherland, First Class’.”

Jack Valenti, Longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America has suffered a stroke. “Valenti, 85, had the stroke last week and remains at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore, according to a statement issued by longtime friend Barry Meyer, chairman and chief executive of Warner Bros.”

“His eyesight is fading, but at 88, Joern Utzon’s mind remains sharp, and he still makes sketches to improve his masterwork, the Sydney Opera House. The building’s custodians and Utzon’s family have denied recent charges that a degenerative eye condition has left the Danish architect unable to contribute fully to renovations underway on the landmark building and that his name is being used to push through substandard work.”

“For those who look on the arts as a kind of celestial sports competition, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is up there with Bertolt Brecht for the title of German Poet of the 20th Century. The standard view of the contending couple is that Brecht’s poetic art was dedicated to social revolution, whereas Rilke’s poetic art was dedicated to art.”

“Cultivator of well-placed authors, widows and heirs, Glenn Horowitz combines the curiosity of an intellectual with the instincts of a businessman. He is known for sharp elbows, unyielding persistence and the high — some say inflated — prices he extracts for his clients. Through his two galleries on the Upper East Side and in East Hampton, which he runs with the art dealer John McWhinnie, Horowitz organizes book and art exhibitions — and parties that glamorize books as luxury products and help drum up business.”

The only home Ernest Hemingway ever owned outright was in Havana. “The government of Cuba refuses to let ‘Papa’s’ presence on the island die. After appropriating the property in 1961, it continues to promote Hemingway as a cultural icon, casting him as a mythical figure on a level just below Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.”

“Haygood launched Delos in 1973, because she felt American music and American artists were poorly represented on disc. James DePreist, who has recorded for the label, has called her ‘the plow that broke the status quo plains of American recordings’.”

Lisa Bufano’s legs and fingers were amputated when she was 21. “Bufano’s movement pieces — she turns them into video podcasts and posts them on her Web site — use music, props, prosthetics and illusion to explore the idea of deformity.”