Search Results

“... philosopher. All the children are very musical, like their mother, and all of them are, as John Cage said of Schoenberg, self-made aristocrats. Waugh sometimes gives the impression that had it not been for all the suicides, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the two world wars and the rise of Fascism in Germany, the Wittgensteins would ...”

“... who worked with him briefly, and in whom he had no interest (and of whom he had no memory), was John Cage. Goldfinger claimed to be a lifelong Marxist, but he never joined the Communist Party. In 1931, he met Ursula Blackwell, a woman of enormous resilience and wit who was then studying painting with Amédée Ozenfant. They married in 1933 and moved ...”

“... Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings that made his name when they were shown four years later: flags, targets and numbers crafted in encaustic ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... to be true. Consider the following. I went on a date with a classical composer who invited me to a John Cage concert at Juilliard. After the concert we looked for the bust of Béla Bartók on 57th Street. We couldn’t find it, but he told me how Bartók had died there of leukaemia. I wanted to like this man, who was excellent on paper, but I didn’t. I ...”

“... people, even if this meant ceaseless tensions and a permanent identity crisis. In 2001, when John Howard’s Liberal government was returned to power with an increased majority, it found the post-9/11 climate wholly sympathetic to its belief that further doses of nationalist purgative were required, in order to allay the strains of a still novel ...”

“... 2001 film version of Louis de Bernières’s novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a miscast Nicolas Cage plays the soldier hero. The opening scene depicts the (second) Italian invasion of Greece in 1941. Mussolini’s first invasion, in 1940, had been a political and military disaster, the first sign that Italian fascism’s ambitious war aims were unlikely to ...”

“... could order the fragments in her own way; but even this seems rather too programmatic, a bit too John Cage. It is certainly better to dip into the book than to read it through – one of the many endearing things about Pessoa is that he makes conscientiousness seem silly – and the fragments should be read as a series of bulletins, without assuming one ...”

“... Pound’s Cantos, the spatial innovations of Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Cage. But spatiality functions in other less obvious, if no less important ways. The formating of a printed text (book or otherwise), the conventions of book production which dictate what sorts of framing materials will be included (for instance, the ...”

“... in the Nevada gambling city. The screenplay was adapted by Figgis from a novel of the same name by John O’Brien (who himself committed suicide shortly after Figgis had acquired the rights to film his book). Figgis signals his awareness of Hollywood’s current sweep-it-under-the-carpet attitude to alcohol in the deftly judged opening scene. Looking ...”

“... seemed to me quite like what you’re up to.GP: Did you ever come across another Peckham artist, John Latham?TP: Of course, of course, I know him well. Knew him well.GP: Did you talk to him much about books?TP: Like most artists I meet, we talked about money, women, publishers, things that are wrong in the world, the Royal Academy.GP: But he never belonged ...”

“... by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair: the Old Man, the Deep Male – Iron John. Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, ‘dominated’ the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year, and has made, as we shall see, a heavy ...”

“... John Cheever’s two celebrated novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, are now reissued in one volume. In this form, we can see that the two are really one and the end was always implied in the beginning. We are often told that the American novel is not very deeply rooted in the social world, that in a society so fluid and so quickly changing fiction hardly has time to take stock of the way things actually work and tends to blow up into some kind of surreal fantasy ...”

“... in 1937, or thereabouts, has now set into a kind of quaintness: My nine-tiered tigress in the cage of sex I feed with meat that you tear from my side Crowning your nine months with the paradox: The love that kisses with a homicide In robes of red generation resurrects. That, from Eros in Dogma (1944), is a fair sample of its manner, which seems to be ...”

“... Britain’s prisons. It is instructive to compare some of these pages with Gerry Adams’s Cage Eleven, his account of Long Kesh. With the exception of one or two chapters – a hard-nosed, political attack on force-feeding, some pop history about 1690 – his brief cameos are little more than a pathetically unsuccessful attempt to add something to the ...”