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Lessons On How To Have An “Exquisitely Managed Career” By Philip Roth

"Its lessons include: never marry; have no children; lawyer up early; keep tight control of your cover designs; listen to the critics while scorning them publicly; when it comes to publishers, follow the money; never give a minute to a hostile interviewer; avoid unflattering photographers; figure out what you’re good at and keep doing it, book after book, with just enough variation to keep them guessing; sell out your friends, sell out your family, sell out your lovers, and sell out yourself; keep going until every younger writer can be called your imitator; don’t stop until all your enemies are dead." - BookForum

Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti

One contradiction stands above the rest. The man who cofounded City Lights bookstore and press and wrote the million-selling poetry collection Coney Island of the Mind, a seminal text in the Beat canon alongside classics like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, did not consider himself a Beat. - Rolling Stone

Roger Englander, Pioneering Producer Of Classical Music On TV, Dead At 94

At NBC in Philadelphia, he produced the first-ever telecast of a complete opera, Menotti's The Telephone, and he followed up by putting together Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera ever written for television. Englander went on to produce what might be the most influential classical music programming ever aired on American TV, Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. - The Washington Post

Alan Bowness, 93, Former Director Of Tate Galleries And Co-Founder Of Turner Prize

"The internationally renowned scholar was the first trained art historian to become director of London's Tate Gallery, a position he held from 1980 to 1988. During his tenure, he spearheaded the creation of a 'Tate of the North,' the project which became Tate Liverpool. … In 1984 he helped establish the Turner Prize, one of Britain's most influential art awards." - ARTnews

What’s Anthony Hopkins’s Secret? ‘No Acting Required’

"If you follow a superb screenplay, the language is a road map, and so you don't have to act.. … When you learn that language you pack that into the suitcase of your brain, and those words inform your body. They move you around the set. … It's there for you, all written down. But we tend to make mincemeat of it by wondering what it all means." - The New Yorker

Carmen Esposito’s Memoir Called ‘Save Yourself’ Came Out Just As Pandemic Lockdowns Hit

The standup comedian, who produced a special called Rape Jokes in response to her own experience of assault and Donald Trump's Access Hollywood tape (among other things), says that it was extra ironic to be promoting her memoir that first month. "It’s about growing up Catholic and figuring out that I was queer. There are no helpful tips for what to do when we run out of toilet paper." - Washington Post

Raymond Cauchetier, Whose Photos Captured The People Of French New Wave Cinema, 101

Cauchetier, whose death was caused by COVID-19, was a self-taught photographer who "documented the revolutionary early films of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and other New Wave directors a half-century ago with now-classic portraits, only to go uncredited for decades." - The New York Times

The Committed Artistic Life Of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson

The artist wrote, "The magnitude of research and study of Afro-Amerikans is what I have dedicated my life. My works are the missing pages of American history." She worked in as many mediums as she could; she believed "that life for her people in America was an act of near-superhuman perseverance, and she was determined to capture that history." - The New York Times

Ruth Carter Gets Her Star, The First Costume Designer To Do So Since Edith Head

The designer of Black Panther, Selma, Dolemite Is my Name, Malcolm X is the first Black costume designer (and second costume designer ever) to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Eddie Murphy: "I’ve never had a wardrobe designer whose clothes actually influence how you play your character — how you walk, how you stand. She really is instrumental in bringing your characters to life. There’s no one like her." - Los Angeles Times

Yuval Waldman, Violinist And Conductor Focused On Music Composed During Times Of Oppression, 74

Waldman's parents survived WWII and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and "his career in some ways reflected his multinational upbringing and his sense of music as a lifeline in a turbulent world." - The New York Times

Rajie Cook, Who Designed The Pictograms We See Everywhere, Dead At 90

"In 1974 Cook & Shanosky Associates, a design firm started by Mr. Cook and Don Shanosky a few years earlier, won a contract to develop a set of symbols that could be universally understood, and that would efficiently convey the kinds of information people in a public place might need. … The signage the two came up with, 34 pictographs (with others added later), is still in use today." Later in life, he became an "art activist" making sculptural assemblages. - The New York Times

A Life Listening To Jazz: W. Royal Stokes

No one could have predicted Stokes’s zigzag jazz life, including him. Born in D.C. in 1930, he was a teen obsessed with boogie-woogie records; then a student turned professor of Greek and Latin languages and literature and ancient history; then a turned-on-tuned-in-dropped-out hippie roadtripper; then a volunteer radio DJ; then a voracious music scribe who published his first jazz review at age 42; thena freelance jazz critic for The Washington Post and, later, an editor at JazzTimes magazine. - Washington Post

Daughter Of Israel’s Most Famous Author Accuses Him Of ‘Sadistic Abuse’

In the opening lines of her new memoir, the second daughter of Amos Oz, Galia, wrote, "In my childhood, my father beat me, swore and humiliated me. … Not a passing loss of control and not a slap in the face here or there, but a routine of sadistic abuse. My crime was me myself, so the punishment had no end." Galia's siblings and mother say they remember Amos, who died in late 2018, very differently. - The Guardian

Gérard Depardieu Formally Charged With Rape And Sexual Assault

"An actor in her 20s … accuses Depardieu of having raped and assaulted her at his Parisian home on two separate occasions in August 2018. … An initial investigation into the rape accusations against the 72-year old was dropped in 2019 for lack of evidence. It was reopened last summer, leading to criminal charges being filed in December." - Yahoo! (AFP)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Backbone Of San Francisco’s Literary Scene, Dead At 101

A poet in his own right as well as proprietor of the bookstore and publishing house City Lights, Ferlinghetti became famous in 1957 when he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of obscenity charges after publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." Ultimately, he became "a fixture at the center of the whirling counterculture, … the bearded guru of San Francisco's art scene, as closely identified with the city as summer fog and the Golden Gate." - The Washington Post

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