I pay tribute to the late outstanding architectural critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ada Louise Huxtable. She upheld architectural beauty in a world of so many tasteless and uncultured monstrosities. We need more people like her in this world, especially in the booming cities of Asia which shouldn't blindly mirror the numerous garish and soul-less urban horrors or excesses of the West. We in Asia should celebrate the architectural uniqueness of our Eastern civilizations through balanced and ecological urban planning, by upholding elegance, beauty, culture and even spirituality in our architectures.



(Image below sourced from berkshirefinearts.com)







(Image below sourced from metropolismag.com)

 








Below is an obituary article from her former newspaper, The New York Times:

Ada Louise Huxtable, Champion of Livable Architecture, Dies at 91

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Ada Louise Huxtable, with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, in 1970, when she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

By DAVID W> DUNLAP, The New York Times 

Published: January 7, 2013

Ada Louise Huxtable, who pioneered modern architectural criticism in the pages of The New York Times, celebrating buildings that respected human dignity and civic history — and memorably scalding those that did not — died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 91.

 

Her lawyer, Robert N. Shapiro, confirmed her death. She lived in Manhattan and Marblehead, Mass.

Beginning in 1963, as the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper, she opened the priestly precincts of design and planning to everyday readers. For that, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, in 1970. More recently, she was the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal.

“Mrs. Huxtable invented a new profession,” a valedictory Times editorial said in 1981, just as she was leaving the newspaper, “and, quite simply, changed the way most of us see and think about man-made environments.”

At a time when architects were still in thrall to blank-slate urban renewal, Ms. Huxtable championed preservation — not because old buildings were quaint, or even necessarily historical landmarks, but because they contributed vitally to the cityscape. She was appalled at how profit dictated planning and led developers to squeeze the most floor area onto the least amount of land with the fewest public amenities.

She had no use for banality, monotony, artifice or ostentation, for private greed or governmental ineptitude. She could be eloquent or impertinent, even sarcastic. Gracefully poised in person, she did not shy in print from comparing the worst of contemporary American architecture to the totalitarian excesses of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

“You must love a country very much to be as little satisfied with it as she,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a United States senator from New York, wrote in his preface to a 1970 collection of Ms. Huxtable’s writings, “Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?”

It was the first of several books whose titles alone conveyed her impatient, irreverent tone. These included “Kicked a Building Lately?” (1976) and “Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger” (1986).

Though knowledgeable about architectural styles, Ms. Huxtable often seemed more interested in social substance. She invited readers to consider a building not as an assembly of pilasters and entablatures but as a public statement whose form and placement had real consequences for its neighbors as well as its occupants.

“I wish people would stop asking me what my favorite buildings are,” Ms. Huxtable wrote in The Times in 1971, adding, “I do not think it really matters very much what my personal favorites are, except as they illuminate principles of design and execution useful and essential to the collective spirit that we call society.

“For irreplaceable examples of that spirit I will do real battle.”

Actually, there was no mistaking what Ms. Huxtable liked — Lever House, the Ford Foundation Building and the CBS Building in Manhattan; the landmark Bronx Grit Chamber; Boston’s City Hall; the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Pennzoil Place in Houston — and, even more delectably, what she did not.

“The new museum resembles a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops,” she wrote in 1964 about the Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle. Her description came to be synonymous with the structure itself, “the lollipop building,” and was probably more familiar to New Yorkers than the name of the architect: Edward Durell Stone.

The long-abandoned gallery has since been substantially altered as the Museum of Arts and Design. It might be argued that Ms. Huxtable’s lollipop epithet helped doom preservationists’ later efforts to save the original facade. But Mr. Stone’s romantic brand of monumental modernism was never to her liking.

“Albert Speer would have approved,” she said in 1971 about his Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, linking Mr. Stone indirectly to the Nazis’ chief architect. “The building is a national tragedy. It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.”

This was a far cry from the fawning coverage of new buildings that Ms. Huxtable deplored in the newspapers of the 1950s. And it was welcomed.

Ada Louise Landman was born on March 14, 1921, to Leah Rosenthal Landman and Dr. Michael Louis Landman. She grew up in Manhattan in a Beaux-Arts apartment house, the St. Urban, at Central Park West and 89th Street, and wandered enthralled through Grand Central Terminal, the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum.

She attracted notice in The Times at an early age with her stage-set designs for Hunter College productions of “The Yellow Jacket” in 1940 and “H.M.S. Pinafore” in 1941. After graduating from Hunter in 1941, she attended New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. But her most treasured academic home was probably the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University.

Out of school, she was hired by Bloomingdale’s to sell a furniture line with works by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames. “Many young architects and designers made the obligatory tour of the rooms,” she recalled. “One of them noticed and married me.”

That was L. Garth Huxtable, an industrial designer. He took many of the photographs that illustrated his wife’s books. The couple also collaborated in designing tableware for the Four Seasons restaurant, which opened in 1959 in the Seagram Building. Mr. Huxtable died in 1989. Ms. Huxtable left no immediate survivors.

Ms. Huxtable was assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1950. She was a Fulbright fellow, studying Italian architecture and design in 1950-52, and a Guggenheim fellow in 1958. She had also begun writing for architectural journals.

In 1958 she addressed a broader audience in The New York Times Magazine with an article criticizing how newspapers covered urban development. “Superblocks are built, the physiognomy and services of the city are changed, without discussion,” Ms. Huxtable wrote. “Architecture is the stepchild of the popular press.”

Five years later she was invited to become a critic by Clifton Daniel, then assistant managing editor of The Times. Though architectural commentary was not new — a line could be traced, largely in magazines, to the 19th century through Aline B. Saarinen, Lewis Mumford, Montgomery Schuyler and others — Ms. Huxtable was being asked to write full time for a general-interest newspaper.

“At first she turned him down, saying daily journalism would disrupt her private life,” Nan Robertson wrote in her 1992 book “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and The New York Times.” “Daniel looked elsewhere, assiduously, but in his own words, ‘I couldn’t find anyone better than she was.’ ”

Ms. Robertson said Ms. Huxtable followed in the tradition of the foreign affairs columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick: “so good they could not be ignored by the men who ran the establishment, and so personally assertive that they would not be ignored.”

For her part Ms. Huxtable said The Times made a “brave gamble” in the “belief that the quality of the built world mattered, at a time when environment was still only a dictionary word.”

Feared by some architects, loathed by some developers and not universally admired by scholars, Ms. Huxtable was nonetheless “a darling of the public,” Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman wrote in “New York 1960,” published in 1995.

Her exacting standards were well enough known to be a punch line for a New Yorker cartoon by Alan Dunn in 1968. It shows a construction site so raw that only a single steel column has been erected. A hard-hat worker holding a newspaper tells the architect, “Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn’t like it!”

In 1969 the Pulitzer Prizes were expanded to include an award for distinguished criticism or commentary.

The first, in 1970, was split by the judges between Ms. Huxtable for criticism and Marquis W. Childs of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch for commentary. She was the second woman, after Mrs. McCormick, 33 years earlier, to win a Pulitzer for The Times. In 1973 she was the second woman ever named to the Times editorial board. (Mrs. McCormick had been the first.) She was succeeded as the daily architecture critic by Paul Goldberger but continued to write about architecture in a Sunday column. She left The Times when she was appointed a MacArthur Fellow in 1981. In her wake, architectural criticism became a staple at big newspapers and grist for subsequent Pulitzer Prizes.

“Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue,” Mr. Goldberger said in 1996.

Ms. Huxtable was the author of 11 books. “Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City” (1961), included a characteristic critique of the Pan Am Building, which was then being built directly behind Grand Central. (It is now the MetLife Building.)

Rather than aesthetics, Ms. Huxtable focused on how the tower would alter the scale of Park Avenue, adding “an extraordinary burden to existing pedestrian and transportation facilities.” She continued, “Its antisocial character directly contradicts the teachings of Walter Gropius, who has collaborated in its design.”

When The Times named her a critic, Ms. Huxtable was working on a six-volume series on New York City architecture. Only the first volume, “Classic New York: Georgian Gentility to Greek Elegance,” was published, in 1964.

In it, she extolled not just lovely Greek Revival temples but also mongrelized houses from the early 1800s.

“They rank as ‘street architecture’ rather than as ‘landmarks,’ ” she said. “Their value is contrast, character, visual and emotional change of pace, a sudden sense of intimacy, scale, all evocative qualities of another century.”

Her interest in preservation did not make her an enemy of modernity. In “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style” (1984), Ms. Huxtable said the glass curtain-wall skyscraper, epitomized by the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, offered “a superb vernacular, probably the handsomest and most useful set of architectural conventions since the Georgian row house.”

What infuriated her were “authentic reproductions” of historical architecture and “surrogate environments” like Colonial Williamsburg and master-planned communities like the Disney Company’s Celebration, Fla. “Private preserves of theme park and supermall increasingly substitute for nature and the public realm, while nostalgia for what never was replaces the genuine urban survival,” she wrote in “The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion” (1997).

Ms. Huxtable’s last book, in 2008, was “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change.” And her last column, published in The Journal on Dec. 3, 2012, concerned the impending reconstruction of the New York Public Library eliminating the central stacks. Typically enough, it was titled, “Undertaking Its Destruction.”

Ultimately, however, what animated and sustained her were not the mistakes but the triumphs. As she said of New York City in The Times in 1968:

“When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.”

Faulkner estate sues over quotes in Woody Allen film & Washington Post ad!

 

My Comments:

 

Whether these lawsuits by the heirs of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner and two-time Pulitzer awardee poet/novelist William Faulkner (1897-1961) are legally valid or not is, I believe, besides the point. For a writer like me, what is more interesting is that these news reports will hopefully encourage more people to be curious about the great literary writer William Faulkner and his works.

 

William Faulkner was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, a giant of the U.S. south.

 

Let us read these literary masterpieces:

 

The Sound and the Fury

 

As I Lay Dying

 

Absalom, Absalom!

 

 

 

Here is one of Faulkner's interesting quotes: 
"It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work."

 

– William Faulkner

 

 

 

Here is a news report about the hullabaloo...

 

Oct 30, 2012 3:51 AM Updated: Oct 30, 2012 7:52 AM

 

By JEFF AMY

Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - William Faulkner wrote that the past is never dead. His heirs say their copyright to that phrase is very much alive.

The author's literary estate is suing Sony Pictures Classics for using a paraphrase of the line in Woody Allen's 2011 film, "Midnight in Paris." It's also suing Northrop Grumman Corp. and The Washington Post Co. for using another Faulkner quote in a newspaper ad by the defense contractor.

The first lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Oxford, Miss., says Sony infringed on the copyright when actor Owen Wilson slightly misquoted the line from Faulkner's "Requiem for a Nun." He said, "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past."

The second lawsuit, filed Friday in Jackson, Miss., makes similar claims about the ad, which used a passage from a 1956 essay Faulkner wrote in Harper's Magazine. The quote, which says in part "We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it," was the conclusion to an essay criticizing the South's response to school integration.

Sony says the quote is "fair use," a legal term meaning the user doesn't have to license or pay for it.

"This is a frivolous lawsuit and we are confident we will prevail in defending it," a Sony Pictures spokeswoman said in a written statement.

Northrop Grumman declined comment. The Washington Post did not return a phone call Monday.

David Olson, a Boston College law professor who specializes in patent law and copyright, said he agrees that the estate is over-reaching legally.

Lee Caplin, who represents the estate, disagrees. He said these are the first lawsuits it has ever filed. Caplin said that the estate recently licensed a quote to the sitcom "Modern Family." He contrasted that to Allen's use of the quote in the movie.

"He just wanted to kind of take it and he felt entitled," Caplin said of Allen.

Caplin said the suit is not a "money grab." He said Sony was dismissive of his attempts to license the quote after the movie came out.

Under the fair use principle, people can take and reuse part of a copyrighted book, song or movie without permission. Generally, excepts can be used if they're short and if they're part of a new artistic work, scholarly work or a parody. Noncommercial uses are generally more permissible, Olson said.

"If it's for a commercial use, they do have to pay for it," Caplin said.

Olson, though, said that's a flawed understanding of copyright law.

"Commercial use isn't presumptively unfair," he said. He said no one watches "Midnight in Paris" as a substitute for buying "Requiem for a Nun."

"The Faulkner estate's interest is not being harmed in any way," Olson said. "If anything it draws a little more interest."

Caplin argued that even though the movie snippet is short, it's a key summing-up of the whole film, and that Allen took it because Faulkner said it better.

"This is Mr. Faulkner's most famous quote," Caplin said.

In the Northrop case, Caplin said he's not sure the heirs would have wanted Faulkner's name to be associated with an arms manufacturer.

Olson said the Northrop case may be stronger, but he fears that authors are using copyright to limit the political context in which works are quoted or used.

Olson said some estates are zealous about enforcing copyright, to increase revenue or limit discussions that

heirs find disagreeable. The suits could just be warning shots by the estate to other users.

"Part of what they could be doing is just trying to get the word out," Olson said.

CONGRATULATIONS to writer Craig Davidson, to literary arts & the written word!               

2012 London Film Festival "Best Picture" award goes to French-Belgian movie Rust and Bone  based on the short story collection of the same title as the movie and authored by Craig Davidson


(Photographs of the writer)



Craig Davidson is a Canadian writer of short stories and novels.

His first book, The Preserve, was a horror novel written under a pseudonym.

Craig's first short story collection, Rust and Bone, was published in September 2005, by Penguin Books Canada.

(Below is an image of Canadian edition of the book, plus another picture of the author on the right)




Here, a poster of the award-winning French-Belgian movie...





(an old photograph of the writer)

Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard's soaring French-language movie about love, loss and killer whales, won the best picture award at the London Film Festival on October 20, 2012.

This cinematic thriller/melodrama tells the story of a boxer (played by actor Matthias Schoenaerts) and a whale trainer (played by Oscar Award-winning actress Marion Cotillard), how the guy fells in love even as the woman suffers a tragic accident at work.

Rust and Bone (French language: De rouille et d'os) is a French-Belgian film based on Craig Davidson's  short story collection with the same name. The tale is of an unemployed 25-year-old boxer in love with a killer whale trainer.

My Recommendation
I highly recommend that we all read the book first before watching the movie adaptation.

Impressive new art center for Asia! On Oct. 6, 2012 afternoon, I made my first visit to Singapore's Gillman Barracks art area and spent over 3 hours there.






This art lover is so very impressed with the visionary, entrepreneurual and cultured government of Singapore for this new project to convert the former British colonial era Gillman Barracks into a complex for international and Singaporean art galleries and other artistic establishments.

Economic progress indeed isn't enough without cultural and spiritual renaissance!

This city-state of Singapore is serious about its bid to outshine Hong Kong an d others to become the arts hub of Asia.

Not all the art galleries and facilities have opened, but from what I have already seen during my October 6 afternoon visit, this Gillman Barracks will be a great success!

By the way, not many Singaporeans know yet the exact location of this place whether young or old, because it is a new redevelopment. But I was lucky to ride a taxi with a middle-aged driver who knew exactly the address I gave him, when I asked why he knew the place, he replied that he used to be a soldier and those were their military barracks! :)



Gillman Barracks
Address: 9 Lock Road, Singapore 108937
Opening Hours: 11:00-20:00 (Sunday until 18:00)
Closed on Monday
http://www.gillmanbarracks.com








Here are some of the galleries and works I saw in the Gillman Barracks complex (I went to all!):


This is a work by a Japanese artist inside a hall, all by itself....

Space Cottonseed

Address: 47 Malan Road, #01-24, Singapore 109444

This South Korean gallery has an on-going exhibit titled "Prelude" and will last up to today October 21, 2012. One of the artists I admire there based on his beautiful works is that of Lee Sea Hyun. Below is one of his works:

LEE SEA HYUN
Betweenn Red-84, 2009

Sundaram Tagore Gallery Singapore

Address: 5 Lock Road, #01-05, Singapore 108933

New York's Sundaram Tagore Gallery has numerous impressive works in Singapore, like some works below from "The Big Picture" photography exhibit now on-going up to Nov. 10, 2012. The photographs range from images of Hollywood and other celebrities to landscapes of various places worldwide, etc. Astounding variety, range and quality of works!

Photograph by SEBASTIÃO SALGADO
Sahara, Algeria (Man Praying), 2009




Photography by ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
David Bryne, Los Angeles, 1956





Hiroshi Senju at Sundaram Tagore Gallery Singapore
Photo below of his work by Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop




ROBERT LIDORI
Salle de Crimée Sud, (99) ANR.02.036, Salles de I'Afrigue, Aile du Nord - 1er étage, Château de Versailles, France, 1985

Mizuma Gallery

Address: 22 Lock Road, #01-34, Singapore 108939

This Tokyo-based gallery's Singapore branch in Gillman Barracks was showing a Korean artist Hyung Koo Kang's works when I visited, and I lingered on for quite a while to admire the paintings. I even bought an autographed book! Titled "Crossing Gazes", the solo exhibition of the newest pieces in Korean painter Hyung Koo Kang’s series of huge bigger-than-life portraits was quite impressive. Among my favorites were the paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and others.

HYUNG KOO KANG
Audrey Hepburn, 2012

HYUNG KOO KANG
Gandhi, 2012

Partners & Mucciaccia

Address: 6 Lock Road, #02-10, Singapore 108934

From Picasso to the New Roman School The never-ending cult of beauty in contemporary art

This exhibit of European works awed me not only with the beauty of the paintings, but also due to such world-famous names as Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. The show is up to Nov. 30 2012

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
Italian Square, 1947/1972

The Drawing Room

Address: 5 Lock Road, #01-06, Singapore 108933

Exhibition

Short Memory

Now - 24 Oct

This event surveys most of the artists exhibiting with The Drawing Room, and gathers major works that represent dynamic inquiries into artistic formats and practices that happen within the mingling of cosmopolitan and arcane cultures in Manila. The artists' critical and experientially-grounded methods portray a specific Philippines in constant flux.

KAWAYAN DE GUIA

Self and the Other (2012)

Silverlens

Address: 47 Malan Road, #01-25, Singapore 109444

Silverlens' first art exhibit, which I was able to see on my visit, was that of Philippine artist Luis Lorenzana.
Photo below of his work by Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop




Other Gillman Barracks images below...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to Asia and to China

writer Mo Yan wins 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature

Asia is rising not only economically, but hopefully also culturally. 

Chinese author Mo Yan has just won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature! 

The Nobel Prize is worth around US$1.2 million, but this achievement is priceless for the writer and for all of us Asians.. 

(Below is illustration of author Mo Yan by Adolfo Arranz from the October 13, 2012 article of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post on his forthcoming four new works http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1059912/new-books-way-nobel-laureate-mo-yan) 

(Below is DVD of director Zhang Yimou's first and award-winning 1987 movie Red Sorghum, based on a novel by Mo Yan and also  starring the actress Gong Li. The movie won the prestigious Golden Bear Award for best film at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival )

The Swedish Academy’s official announcement read, “Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

(Below images of writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner)

As an aspiring literary writer who used to write poetry as a student, who penned two unpublished novellas and other works, and as an ethnic Chinese born and raised in the Philippines of which I am its citizen, as an Asian and as a lover of books and literature, I congratulate  the 57-year-old writer Mo Yan for winning the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.

  

CHINA DAILY / REUTERS

Chinese writer Mo Yan smiles during an interview at his house in Beijing

Below is video of writers celebrating the win of the Chinese author.... 

Chinese author Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Chinese author Mo Yan has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature.

By British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) October 11, 2012

A prolific author, Mo has published dozens of short stories, with his first work published in 1981.

The Swedish Academy praised his work which "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

The 57-year-old is the first Chinese resident to win the prize. Chinese-born Gao Xingjian was honoured in 2000, but is a French citizen.

Mo is the 109th recipient of the prestigious prize, won last year by Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer.

Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - only given to living writers - is worth 8 million kronor (£741,000).

"He has such a unique way of writing. If you read half a page of Mo Yan you immediately recognise it as him," said Peter Englund, head of the Academy.

He said Mo had been told of the award, adding: "He was at home with his dad. He said he was overjoyed and terrified."

Born Guan Moye, the author writes under the pen name Mo Yan, which means "don't speak" in Chinese.

He began writing while a soldier in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and received international fame in 1987 for Red Sorghum: A Novel of China.

Made into a film which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988, the novella was a tale of the brutal violence in the eastern China countryside, where he grew up, during the 1920s and 1930s.

Mo Yan "merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary", said Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, announcing the award

Favouring to write about China's past rather than contemporary issues, the settings for Mo's works range from the 1911 revolution, Japan's wartime invasion and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

"He has a very impressive oeuvre," Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese at the University of London, said.

"He has a large readership and he addresses the human condition in a way in which the Nobel Committee likes to see."

Mo's other acclaimed works include Republic of Wine, Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out and Big Breasts and Wide Hips.

The latter book caused controversy when it was published in 1995 for its sexual content and depicting a class struggle contrary to the Chinese Communist Party line.

The author was forced by the PLA to withdraw it from publication although it was pirated many times.

After it was translated into English a decade later, the book won him a nomination for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Chinese people react to the news that writer Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature

Despite his social criticism Mo is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors, however critics have accused him of being too close to the Communist Party.

"A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature," the author said in a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009.

"Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions."

His latest novel, Frog, about China's "one child" population control policy, won the Mao Dun Literature Prize - one of his country's most prestigious literature prizes - last year.

Mo and the other Nobel laureates for medicine, physics, chemistry and peace, will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on 10 December - the anniversary of the death of prize creator Alfred Nobel in 1896.

Excited with Franz Kafka Papers, finally to be released to the world soon!

 

This is Good News to all literature lovers of the world! I am celebrating this good news by starting this blog.

I couldn't forget my 2008 visit to the beautiful historic Prague City in the Czech Republic, and the highlight of the trip was my retracing the life of the great Jewish writer Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924)---from where he lived, worked, where he and the German Jewish scientist Albert Einstein had met/dined at a restaurant, to the synagogue and to the Jewish cemetery where he was finally buried.



"And yet Kafka was Prague and Prague was Kafka. Never had it been Prague so perfectly, so typically, as during Kafka's lifetime, and never would it be so again. And we, his friends, 'the happy few'...we knew that the smallest elements of this Prague were distilled everywhere in Kafka's work."
- Johannes Urzidil in The World of Franz Kafka 

I believe outstanding writers like Franz Kafka are indeed immortal! He was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century.

(Below images of Franz Kafka and his handwritten letter)

 

 

 now, sharing the good news...

Israeli Court Rules Library to Get Kafka Papers, Lawyer Says

By Gwen Ackerman - Oct 15, 2012 12:01 AM GMT+0800 Bloomberg

A cache of as yet unseen Franz Kafka manuscripts will be made available online to scholars after an Israeli court ruled they weren’t given as a gift to the secretary of the author’s executor and friend Max Brod.

According to the Tel Aviv Family Court decision, the papers, which were stashed away in safes and attics for years, will become the property of the National Libraty of Israel, which promised in a statement to scan and put them on its website.

Papers that once belonged to Franz Kafka have been the subject of a court case as archivists collect other material by the late author. This photo shows a collection of photographs of the writer and his friends.


Source: The National Library of Israel via Bloomberg.

An undated handout photo, provided to the media on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 shows Franz Kafka. Source: Schocken Books via Bloomberg News

“We are talking about a historical decision that brought justice to Max Brod and his friend Kafka,” Meir Heller, lawyer for the library, said by telephone. Harel Ashwall, the lawyer for the secretary’s two daughters, disagreed and said he planned to appeal the ruling.

Kathi Diamant, director of the Kafka Project at San Diego State University, has said in the past that papers that may be part of the collection may help scholars locate some Kafka notebooks that the Gestapo confiscated from the author’s companion, Dora Diamant.

The dispute over the papers began with Brod, a German- language author best known for his Kafka biography and historical novels. Though Kafka’s last wish was for his papers to be burned, Brod kept them, ensuring the publication of “The Trial” and “The Castle.”

Literary Estate

When Brod died in 1968, he left his estate to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who then left it to her daughters. The court ruled today that the will intended for Brod’s literary estate, including the Kafka manuscripts, to be given to a public institution and kept intact.

“We think that the decision does not reflect the intentions and desire of Max Brod, in fact the opposite is true,” Ashwall said in an e-mailed response to the ruling. “We also think the ruling is flawed in legal terms.”

For decades, Hoffe declined to make the papers available to the public, frustrating archivists and scholars alike. Kafka specialists had hoped her daughters would open the files, providing new insights into the author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924.

When the sisters, now in their 70s, attempted to ratify their mother’s will in January 2008, the state of Israel  intervened. The case landed in the family court, where the National Library became a party to the proceedings.

Internet Plan

The library plans to catalog and preserve the papers, then, “in the not so distant future scan and open them up to all on the Internet, in this way fulfilling Brod’s will,” Oren Weinberg, director of the library, said in an e-mailed statement.

During her lifetime, Hoffe sold a handwritten manuscript of Kafka’s “The Trial” for $1.98 million at a 1988 Sotheby’s auction in  London.

Heller said he hoped that all Kafka papers that were bought from Hoffe in the past will now be returned to their proper place at the library in Jerusalem so they can be presented together to scholars.

Muse highlights include New York Weekend, Lewis Lapham on history and Richard Vines on food. s, Hoffe declined to make the papers available to the public, frustrating archivists and scholars alike. Kafka specialists had hoped her daughters would open the files, providing new insights into the author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924.

When the sisters, now in their 70s, attempted to ratify their mother’s will in January 2008, the state of  Israel intervened. The case landed in the family court, where the National Library became a party to the proceedings.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff or.

***

The following are images I had researched in the Internet, on places and memorials in Prague City associated with the great writer Franz Kafka)


(Photo below is that of the unique Franz Kakfa Monument in Prague)




(Photo of the Franz Kafka grave in the Jewish Cemetery of Prague City)




(Photo below of the Jewish synagogue of Prague)




(Photo below of Prague's Spanish Synagogue)





(Photo of the entrance to the Franz Kafka Museum in Prague)