Arts and Letters Links
on June 28th, 2011Truman Capote is that amusing sort of person best enjoyed from a distance.
Comes now William Todd Schultz, self-styled “psycho-biographer,” to explain the mystery of Truman Capote’s lamentable Answered Prayers, which almost finished him off as a viable author. In a predictable nutshell, Capote wrote it because he had a lousy childhood that he never got over, but let us not get ahead of ourselves; there are other weenies to roast before this tale is done.
Battle over the legacy of the father of Art Nouveau. Wow this is old, and I need to clean out my Bookmarks.
Suddenly, however, the work of Alphonse Mucha, the acclaimed Czech painter, has become the focus of a blistering row in his homeland where the Prague city government, a provincial town council and his grandson are all at loggerheads over a huge collection regarded as the artist’s masterpiece.
The US Marine Corps Combat Art Program.
The program is not the only one of its kind in the United States military, but many regard it as the one most deeply committed to its artistic mission. Like those in the other services, it began after the attack on Pearl Harbor and scaled back after Vietnam. Somewhat unusually, however, it has kept at least one artist in the reserves ready to deploy. And while most of the services have reactivated their art programs since the start of the Bush administration’s “global war on terror,” the Marine Corps’s has been the only one to cover most of the major conflicts.
According to Hooper, Lewis’s gardener, Fred Paxford, who was instructed to burn the author’s manuscripts, knew that Hooper had “the highest regard for anything in the master’s hand”. The gardener was instructed to burn a number of notebooks, but managed to convince Major Lewis to delay until Hooper could see them.
A screenwriter accuses Emma Thompson of plagiarism:
I have come to Emma Thompson’s house in West Hampstead to discuss what I believe to be – she continues to smile at me so openly – the misappropriation of my work by her and her husband Greg Wise. They deny it, of course.
I highly recommend “The C.S. Lewis Hoax” by Kathryn Lindskoog. There never was any bonfire, C.S. Lewis barely knew Walter Hooper; he is a fraud and a forger. His “discovery” of C.S. Lewis’ allegedly “lost” novel, THE DARK TOWER, was actually a plagiarism of Madeline L’Engel’s A WRINKLE IN TIME. I will not buy or read any Lewis editions that bear Hooper’s name.
http://www.amazon.com/C-S-Lewis-Hoax-Kathryn-Lindskoog/dp/0880702583
Wow, that’s amazing! Thanks for the link! I can’t get over how many people pull this stuff!
That book sounds interesting, Jim.
Regarding Truman Capote, I haven’t read any of his works but from what I’ve read about him seems to be encompassed very well in that article. He seemed to be a rather contemptible person. I read how he tried to take credit for “To Kill A Mockingbird”. He and Harper Lee were childhood friends and he seemed to intimate at times that he contributed a lot to the book – given some to speculate for awhile that he was the actual writer.
It’s unfortunate how he met his end but it was his own doing and it seemed foolish that he’d think those he wrote about would enjoy having their dirty laundry aired. Though if he were alive today, with the shameless blogosphere, he’d be right at home!