Category: people

The Nobel-winning Egyptian writer was 94. His “city was teeming Cairo, and his characters were its most ordinary people: civil servants and bureaucrats, grocers, shopkeepers, poor retirees, petty thieves and prostitutes, peasants and women brutalized by tradition, a people caught in the upheavals of a nation struggling through the 20th century. Around their tangled lives, Mr. Mahfouz chronicled the development of modern Egypt over five decades in 33 novels, 13 anthologies of short stories, several plays and 30 screenplays.”

“Acclaimed Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab writer honoured with the Nobel Prize in literature, died in a Cairo hospital Wednesday morning. He was 94. Regarded as one of the Middle East’s finest writers, Mahfouz rose to international fame in the 1950s with his renowned Cairo Trilogy — the novels Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street.”

“As a composer he was a kind of hard-core conceptualist driven by theoretical curiosity. As a result his music could be awfully dry at times, but in about half of it or more the conceptualism transformed in kind of an amazing alchemy to an extreme sensuousness, lovely, slow sound-metamorphoses that you just couldn’t believe.”

When Katrina hit New Orleans, Times-Picayune art critic Doug MacCash jumped into reporting. “Who knew the 49-year-old art critic could tackle the hardest of hard news stories in history? Who would have guessed he’d even be there — and as a volunteer? A couple days later, nearing the breaking point and struggling to focus, MacCash would find himself interviewing Mayor Ray Nagin on a helicopter ride over the city.”

“Léopold Simoneau, the Canadian lyric tenor who dominated international Mozart performance in the 1950’s, died on Thursday night in Victoria, British Columbia. He was 90 and lived in Victoria.”

Chuck Close “is gearing up for a full-fledged battle with Olmstead Properties over a five-story condo building the company wants to build on a 6-by-12-foot portion of an L-shaped lot on Bond Street, next door to Close’s co-op. The complex – which would have 50 feet of frontage on Lafayette Street – would plunge Close’s studio into darkness, he says.”

“As reclusive as he is legendary, Mr. Peterson is an artist whose amazing technical command and uncanny musical instincts have for decades instilled in other musicians the kind of awe and fear he expresses about his idol, the late Art Tatum (he once compared that piano master to a lion: an animal that scares you to death, but one you can’t resist getting close enough to hear roar). Over a decade ago, however, Mr. Peterson suffered a stroke that debilitated his left hand and left him in a weakened condition. He has been battling his way back ever since. It’s an arduous challenge.”

“His blood pressure continues to fluctuate, and does so unpredictably. ‘So it is not easy for me to fly for a long time and to be on the podium for a long time. It can happen without announcement that my blood pressure is too low. This instability gives me the necessity to finish my career after 57 years of concert and opera conducting’.”

He was consdered the dean of Canadian music. “He introduced contemporary techniques through his own avant-garde pieces and a lengthy teaching career that touched the lives of the country’s greatest musicians. ‘In many ways, if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have the wealth of Canadian composers that we have now’.”

Five hours of film of writer Eudora Welty has been found in the archives at the National Endowment for the Arts. “This is the only known 60 millimeter film of Eudora Welty reading and discussing her work. This is the earliest known footage of one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.”