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Paul Auster, Prolific And Experimental Man Of Letters And Filmmaker, Dies At 77
NEW YORK —Paul Auster, a prolific, award-winning writer and director known for creative tales and meta-narratives such as “The New York Trilogy” and “4 3 2 1,” died at the age of 77.
The Carol Mann Agency, Auster’s literary representatives, announced his death on Wednesday but did not immediately disclose any other information. Auster was diagnosed with cancer in 2022.
Auster wrote over 30 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages, beginning in the 1970s. He was a longtime fixture in the Brooklyn literary scene but has yet to achieve major commercial success in the United States. However, he was widely admired overseas for his cosmopolitan worldview and erudite and reflective style, and the French government named him a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1991. He was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Paul Auster, Prolific And Experimental Man Of Letters And Filmmaker, Dies At 77
Auster, dubbed the “dean of American post-modernists” and “the most meta of American meta-fictional writers,” combined history, politics, genre experiments, existential quests, and self-conscious references to writers and writing. “The New York Trilogy,” which featured “City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room,” was a postmodern detective story in which names and identities blurred, and one protagonist was a private investigator named Paul Auster. The brief “Travels in the Scriptorium” tells a story within a story as a political prisoner is forced to read a sequence of narratives by other victims, which will eventually include his own.
The author’s longest and most ambitious work of fiction, “4 3 2 1,” was published in 2017 and was a Booker Prize nominee. The 800-page novel is a story of quadraphonic realism in the post-World War II era, following Archibald Isaac Ferguson’s simultaneous adventures from summer camp and high school baseball to student life in New York and Paris during the major uprisings of the late 1960s.
“Identical but different, meaning four boys with the same name parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances,” the author writes. “Each one on his own separate path, and yet all of them still the same person, three imaginary versions of himself, and then himself thrown in as Number Four for good measure; the author of the book.”
His other works included the nonfiction compilations “Groundwork” and “Talking to Strangers”; a family memoir, “The Invention of Solitude”; a biography of novelist Stephen Crane; the novels “Leviathan” and “Talking to Strangers”; and the poetry collection “White Space.” In his most recent novel, “Baumgardner,” the titular character is a widowed professor troubled by mortality and wondering “where his mind will be taking him next.”
Auster was such an old-fashioned novelist that he used a typewriter and disliked email and other Internet communication. However, he had an extraordinarily active film career compared to his writing peers.
In the mid-1990s, Auster worked with filmmaker Wayne Wang on the celebrated art-house film “Smoke,” which was an adaptation of Auster’s funny narrative about a Brooklyn tobacco shop and a customer named Paul. The film stars Harvey Keitel, Stockard Channing, and William Hurt, among others, and earned Auster an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.
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Paul Auster, Prolific And Experimental Man Of Letters And Filmmaker, Dies At 77
Wang and Auster immediately followed up on “Smoke” with “Blue in the Face,” an improvised story set in a Brooklyn cigar shop that starred Keitel and featured appearances by everyone from Lou Reed to Lily Tomlin.
Auster eventually created the films himself. Keitel appeared in Auster’s 1998 love story “Lulu on the Bridge,” which he directed and co-wrote with Vanessa Redgrave. Nine years later, Auster wrote and directed the drama “The Inner Life of Martin Frost,” which starred David Thewlis as an author and Irène Jacob as a lady who has an unusual connection to the story he is writing.
“The four times I’ve worked on movies, I’ve never had a problem talking to actors,” Auster told filmmaker Wim Wenders in a 2017 interview published in Interview magazine. “I was always in excellent harmony with them. After those events, I recognized a connection between creating fiction and acting. The writer does it with words on a page, whereas the actor does so with his body. The effort remains the same.
Auster married fellow author Siri Hustvedt in 1982, and they had a daughter, Sophie, who appears in “The Inner Life of Martin Frost.” He also had a son, Daniel, from his first marriage to the author-translator Lydia Davis. Daniel Auster would suffer from drug addiction and die of an overdose in 2022, shortly after being charged with second-degree manslaughter in the death of his young daughter, Ruby.
Paul Auster never publicly discussed his son’s death, but he had written extensively on parenthood. In “The Invention of Solitude,” published in 1982, he reflected on the “thousands of hours” he’d spent with Daniel in the first three years of his life and wondered if they were worthwhile. “It will be lost forever,” Auster wrote. “All these things will vanish for the boy’s memory forever.”
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Paul Auster, Prolific And Experimental Man Of Letters And Filmmaker, Dies At 77
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Paul Benjamin Auster grew up in a middle-class Jewish family caught between his father’s thriftiness and miserliness and his mother’s desire to spend to the point of irresponsibility. He would soon feel like an outcast in his family, turned off by their materialism and inspired by James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Edgar Allan Poe’s stories rather than the stability of a typical employment.
His ideals would be thoroughly tested. After graduating from Columbia University, Auster toiled for years before finding a publisher and making money from his works. He wrote poetry, translated French literature, worked on an oil tanker, tried to sell a baseball board game, and even considered making money by raising worms in his cellar.
“All along, my only ambition had been to write,” Auster wrote in her brief memoir “Hand to Mouth,” released in 1995. “I knew it as early as 16 or 17 years old, and I never misled myself into believing I could make a life from it. Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a police officer. You don’t select it; you’re picked, and once you realize that you’re not cut out for anything else, you must be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your life.”
SOURCE – (AP)
NEW YORK — Justin Timberlake is set to submit a new plea on Friday in his drunken driving case in New York’s Hamptons, according to prosecutors. The details of the plea were not published, but a person familiar with the situation said Timberlake agreed to plead guilty to a less serious offense than the original accusation of driving while intoxicated.
The individual talked with The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Edward Burke, Timberlake’s attorney, declined to comment.
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Justin Timberlake Reaches Plea Deal To Resolve Drunken Driving Case
Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney’s office said Wednesday that the pop singer will appear in person in Sag Harbour Village Court on Friday to enter a plea.
Timberlake was detained on June 18 in the village of Sag Harbour, on Long Island’s eastern coast, when police claimed he ran a stop sign in the village center, drifted out of his lane, and exited his BMW smelling of alcohol. The 43-year-old Tennessee native has pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor drunk driving allegation.
Last month, a judge suspended Timberlake’s license to drive in New York.
Burke, Timberlake’s lawyer, has argued that he was not inebriated and that the prosecution should be dismissed.
Timberlake was stopped after leaving a Sag Harbour hotel at 12:30 a.m., according to authorities.
“His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, a strong odour of an alcoholic beverage was emanating from his breath, he was unable to divide attention, he had slowed speech, he was unsteady afoot and he performed poorly on all standardised field sobriety tests,” police told the court.
Justin informed the officer he had one martini and was on his way home with some buddies, according to police. He was arrested and spent the night at the police station.
The boy band singer-turned-solo star and actor’s agency and other representatives did not immediately reply to requests for comment on Wednesday.
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Justin Timberlake Reaches Plea Deal To Resolve Drunken Driving Case
Justin, a ten-time Grammy winner, began performing as a young Disney Mouseketeer, rose to prominence as a member of the boy band NSYNC, and launched his solo recording career in the early 2000s.
Sag Harbour is a former whaling community featured in Herman Melville’s famous novel “Moby-Dick” which is located in the Hamptons, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of New York City.
SOURCE | AP
NEW YORK — Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul, has been indicted on fresh sex offense charges ahead of his trials in New York, Manhattan prosecutors announced at a hearing Thursday.
The indictment will remain sealed until Weinstein’s arraignment on September 18.
Harvey, 72, was unable to attend Thursday’s hearing because he was recovering from emergency heart surgery on Monday in a Manhattan hospital.
Harvey Weinstein Indicted On Additional Sex Crimes Charges Ahead Of New York Retrial
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office revealed at a recent court hearing that prosecutors have begun presenting evidence to a grand jury of up to three new complaints against Weinstein dating back to the mid-2000s.
Harvey’s 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges was overturned by an appeals court earlier this year, prompting prosecutors to seek retrial. It is unclear if the new charges will be included in the retrial, as prosecutors seek, or if the court will treat them separately.
The latest charges come after British prosecutors declared last week that they would no longer pursue indecent assault charges against Weinstein, who was the most visible villain of the #MeToo movement in 2017 when women began to speak up about his behavior.
Harvey Weinstein Indicted On Additional Sex Crimes Charges Ahead Of New York Retrial
The 72-year-old Miramax co-founder has long claimed that all sexual activity was consensual.
He is scheduled to appear in Manhattan court for a hearing on the case on September 12. His retrial is tentatively scheduled for November.
SOURCE | AP
James Earl Jones, an imposing figure on stage and screen, passed away on Monday at the age of 93. He became famous around the world as Darth Vader, a cosmic evil, after overcoming a childhood stammer and developing a stentorian voice.
According to Jones’s representative Barry McPherson, James Earl Jones passed away at home with his family by his side.
Despite his commanding stage presence, Jones’s voice carried him far in his career; he would have been famous even if no one ever saw his face. Depending on the scene, the deep bass might either inspire reverence (as it did for the wise father Mufasa in “The Lion King” and other Shakespearean parts) or terror (as it did for the rasping Vader in the “Star Wars” movies).
In response to a question from a Reuters interviewer about whether he disliked being so strongly associated with Darth Vader, Jones burst out laughing. The job only called for his voice for a few lines, while another actor wore the mask and performed the onscreen action.
“I love being part of that whole myth, of that whole cult,” he remarked, also expressing his pleasure to satisfy fans who wanted him to repeat his “I am your father” line to Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker.
James Earl Jones Oscar
On Monday, alongside a sad heart emoji, Hamill commented on X, “#RIP dad,” under a news article about Jones’s passing.
Jones claimed he earned barely $9,000 for the original film’s Darth Vader role and treated it as nothing more than a special effects gig. In fact, he never even asked to be named in the credits of the first “Star Wars” films.
On Broadway, he won Tonys for “The Great White Hope” in 1969 and “Fences” in 1987, and in 1991, he won Emmys for “Gabriel’s Fire” and “Heat Wave” on television. His collection of accolades is extensive. Grammys for best spoken word album and “Great American Documents” were both bestowed upon him in 1977.
Although he never took home an actual Oscar, he did receive an honorary nomination for his performance in 2011’s “The Great White Hope” and was considered for best actor in the film adaptation.
One of his earliest film roles James Earl Jones was as Lieutenant Luther Zogg in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
Among his subsequent critically lauded film performances were those of South African Reverend Stephen Kumalo in 1995’s “Cry, the Beloved Country” and novelist Terence Mann in 1989’s “Field of Dreams.” He has been in numerous films, including “Field of Dreams,” “The Sandlot,” “Matewan,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Coming to America,” and so on.
In addition to his appearances in scores of ads, Jones provided the authoritative voice-over for CNN’s newscast introductions for a number of years.
Irish, African, and Cherokee ancestry
A member of a mixed-race family sprung from Irish, African, and Cherokee ancestry, James Earl Jones came into this world on January 17, 1931, in the little Mississippi town of Arkabutla.
Not long after that, Robert Earl Jones Sr., who had been a prizefighter and was now an actor, abandoned the family. It wasn’t until James relocated to New York in the 1950s that he was able to reconcile with his father, as his maternal grandparents had forbidden him to see him while he was growing up. In due time, they shared the stage in other productions.
When Jones’s grandparents uprooted the family from Mississippi and settled on a farm in Michigan when he was around five years old, he began to stutter and eventually stopped speaking altogether.
His high school English teacher used a trick to get him to speak up after he remained mute for ten years. Jones claimed to have written a poem, which the teacher then had him repeat to the class as evidence that he was the real author.
Jones got over his stammer and developed an interest in acting, but he later admitted that he still had to be careful with his words.
Moving to New York after completing his drama degree at Michigan, he began to receive more and more praise for his stage performances.
He played the role of Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in “The Great White Hope,” his breakout Broadway performance. Reviewers gushed over Jones’s portrayal of the racist boxer in the critically acclaimed play.
His starring performances as Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello in Shakespeare’s plays kept audiences captivated for decades. Paul Robeson, a singer, actor, and activist, was one of his memorable 1977 Broadway roles, and he played Alex Haley, an author, in the TV miniseries “Roots: The Next Generation.”
According to a 1987 review of “Fences” in the Washington Post, he could “move in seconds from boyish ingenuousness to near-biblical rage and somehow suggesting all the gradations in between.”
One of Jones’s co-stars in “Othello,” Julienne Marie Hendricks, was his first wife. Flynn Earl Jones was born to Earl and his second wife, the late actress Cecilia Hart. Cecilia passed away in 2016.
Jones won major roles in politically charged films and plays, paving the way for other Black actors to follow in his footsteps.
Jones rose to prominence during the height of the civil rights movement in the ’60s and ’70s, but he avoided taking a stand on racial issues.
Jones told the Toronto Star in 2013 that he thought many people thought he was weak for not being a stronger advocate for the cause while he was famous. According to the actor, though, he would rather have his work speak for itself.
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