People

Harold Bloom “read like a man picking up crumbs with a moistened index finger. He often considered loneliness in literature. You felt he was attracted to loneliness as a theme for the same reasons that Ishmael, in “Moby-Dick,” liked to join funeral processions. It made him feel more open, invigorated and alive.” – The New York Times

“This week, 226 years since her execution on Oct. 16, 1793, a new exhibition in Paris aims to show how the queen’s image has been transformed in recent years. From reviled royal to pop icon, her face now appears on gift shop souvenirs at her former home at Versailles, on bars of chocolate, hairbrushes, mugs, shopping bags, fridge magnets and snow globes.” – Los Angeles Times

“Tucker’s primary love was music, a devotion that she first cultivated in the Lutheran church of her childhood. But over the course of her [three decades] at The Chronicle, which began in 1964, she developed a wide-ranging versatility that allowed her to write about theater, literature and especially dance.” – San Francisco Chronicle

In literature, some of the most celebrated writers were once considered too strange, too limited or just too boring. Several publishers turned down Toni Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” and she was chastised for years by white critics for focusing too much on black characters. – Washington Post (AP)

In contrast to the United States, so far no theater in Europe, where the #MeToo movement has had little impact, has canceled any of the singer’s planned performances on calendars running through the fall of 2020. In continuing the performances, European venues have cited an absence of allegations in their venues, the lack of a judicial case against him and the singer’s well-known affability and undeniable popularity. – Yahoo! (AP)

“From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called ‘the School of Resentment,’ by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.” – The New York Times

“[He] was distinguished in at least three fields. As a photographer in the 1950s and ’60s he made memorable images of contemporary American writers and painters, and of the young Bob Dylan soon after the singer’s arrival in New York. As a film-making musicologist he documented traditional arts in the American South and in Peru. And as a musician, particularly as a founder member of the New Lost City Ramblers, he had an incalculable influence on the American folk revival and all that followed.” – The Guardian

Forster started strong but faded and had a hard time finding work for decades. But “the drought ended with a chance encounter with Tarantino at a West Hollywood coffee shop where Forster regularly had breakfast. Tarantino told him he was writing an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which would become Jackie Brown, and asked Forster to read the book.” – Los Angeles Times

Hockney, as a brash young artist in the 1960s, made some bold moves. “In the previously unknown letter, scrawled by Hockney while he was studying at the Royal College of Art in London, the 23-year-old brazenly adopts the tone of an established artist and invites Helen Kapp, the curator of the Wakefield gallery, to see his work as if she were an old friend.” – The Observer (UK)

Giorno wanted more for poetry than simply the page, good as that is. He “turned to the world of art and the mechanisms of mass media to shake poetry loose from the page and embed it more deeply in the fabric of everyday life.” – The New York Times

Celdran was arrested and convicted in the Philippines for a dramatic performance protest, and he fled to Spain to escape his sentence. Celdran, who led walking tours all over Manila that he turned into plays, “had a charm that appealed as much to people in Manila’s glitzy hotels as to people in the slums, where his friends included cigarette vendors and drivers of the horse-drawn carts that plied the tourist neighborhoods.” – The New York Times

Why did The Washington Post reviewer (and the now-infamous headline writer) have such a hard time dealing with singer Debbie Harry’s memoir? Perhaps because “she always comes off as tough and matter-of-fact and New York–y,” and the Post reviewer wanted a lot more. – The Atlantic

Amrou Al-Kadhi: “When I started doing drag, it felt like the ultimate rejection of everything I was taught in the Middle East. … I felt like I was lying. I was trying to live out things that I didn’t actually believe about myself. Everyone was looking to me as this voice of liberation. And I just wasn’t that … Whenever the drag came off, I would have a nervous breakdown.” – The Guardian

“With a rich accumulation of poems, metafictions and other unclassifiable prose works, … he superimposed a psychic overlay on the city’s mundane streets and terraces, its feuds and factions, the aggravations and atrocities of the bloody 30-year Troubles.” – The Guardian

Eve Babitz: “I took the smock off, letting it fall beside me, but Julian kicked it far across the slippery floor, out of the way in a corner. I sat down quickly at the chess set and wondered if we could just pose or did we actually have to play, but Marcel — whose obsession with chess made him give up not only art but girls — was waiting for me to make the first move.” – Literary Hub

“An actor and humorist, [he] was a core figure in two of the quirkiest television shows of the 1970s, The Great American Dream Machine and the children’s program Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School.” – The New York Times

“At the time I wrote this, I had lost my job after 37 years with an engineering firm. They called me in on a Wednesday afternoon and said, ‘We got to let you get, a reduction in force.’ So here I was at 56, wondering what am I going to do with my life,” he said. He took a year off to write. – Chicago Tribune

“With just three solo shows and a handful of star turns in group exhibitions, Wong established himself as a quicksilver talent, with an almost preternatural sense for creating gripping, idiosyncratic scenes, which he sometimes populated with a solitary figure (or merely a trace of one).” – ARTnews

“In his over five decades in entertainment, Taylor would make over 2,000 guest star appearances on shows like The Monkees, The Merv Griffin Show, The Tonight Show, Late Night with David Letterman, Hollywood Squares and The Gong Show. He also hosted the beauty pageant spoof The $1.98 Beauty Show.” – Yahoo! (AP)

Alex Ross: “The grand-diva façade concealed a restless, exploratory spirit. In later years, Norman became increasingly adventurous in her choice of repertory.” The New Yorker

Garbo wrote to her best friend, “It is hard and sad to be alone, but sometimes it’s even more difficult to be with someone … When we are here on Earth it would be so much more kind if for this short time we would be forever strong and young.” – The Observer (UK)

Portman’s acting life, of course, has been marked not just by Marvel movies but by that other huge franchise, Star Wars. She likes meatier roles as well, but she says, “I love getting to be part of something that is such a major part of entertainment for young people. It sets your mind-set to recognize injustice. I recently saw a sign at the climate march where this kid was like: ‘I grew up on Marvel movies. Of course I’m going to fight against wrong.'” – The New York Times

Feinstein was 88. She’d published more than a dozen poetry collections and 15 novels, translated Russian poets and wrote biographies of Ted Hughes and Bessie Smith. “Feinstein often explored the relationship between being Jewish and being English — the ‘not quite at-homeness of the English Jews in England,’ as Paul Morris put it in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Ever present with her was the knowledge that had her ancestors settled in Germany rather than England, her life might have been very different.” – The New York Times

Carroll was the first Black woman to star in a non-servant role in a TV series in the U.S. “NBC executives were wary about putting Julia on the network during the racial unrest of the 1960s, but it was an immediate hit.” Carroll also won a Tony for No Strings and an Oscar nomination for Claudine. The director and producer Ava DuVernay wrote, “Diahann Carroll walked this earth for 84 years and broke ground with every footstep. An icon. One of the all-time greats. She blazed trails through dense forests and elegantly left diamonds along the path for the rest of us to follow.” – PBS Newshour (AP)

Giordani sang hundreds of performances at the Met and, at a relatively young age, stepped back from the spotlight and began to mentor younger singers. He was the son of a prison guard who owned a gas station. He said, “That’s mostly where I made my debut, making coffee. … “People still remember me when I was 12 or 13, singing or bringing coffee.” Yahoo News (AP)

The French architect also designed the Olympic Pool and the vélodrome for the Olympics, a building that has become the Montréal Biodôme. The stadium was controversial at the time, and has stayed controversial – and costly – ever since. But the mayor who asked him to design these 1976 Olympics buildings had a different view. “‘Taillibert is the kind of architect who built the cathedrals of ancient times,’ said [Jean] Drapeau, calling Taillibert’s designs ‘poems in concrete.'” – CBC

The two named plaintiffs seek to represent a class of more than 100 former female students at Studio 4. Their complaint alleges that Studio 4 set out to “create a steady stream of young women to objectify and exploit.” The complaint also contends that the school was “designed to circumvent California’s ‘pay for play’ regulations,” which prohibit making actors pay for auditions. – NPR