Zaha Hadid.

Хадид, Заха (31 октября 1950, Багдад, Ирак — 31 марта 2016, Майами, США)

На 66-м году скончалась британский дизайнер арабского происхождения Заха Хадид, первая и пока единственная женщина, которая получила престижную премию в области архитектуры — Притцкеровскую.
Как сообщает The Guardian, причиной смерти стал сердечный приступ.
Хадид умерла в одной из больниц Майами, где проходила курс лечения от бронхита.

Одна Пасха для православных и католиков?

Одна Пасха для православных и католиков? Рим и Константинополь согласны!
По решению, принятому до раскола и анафемы, наложенной в 1054 году, все христиане мира вычисляют дату Пасхи одинаково.
Она отмечается в первое воскресенье после первого полнолуния, наступившего не ранее дня весеннего равноденствия.
Но равноденствие не астрономическое, а установленное расчетным путем и приходящееся на 21 марта.
Между старым юлианским календарем, по которому до сих пор вычисляют праздники Русская, Иерусалимская, Грузинская и Сербская церкви, и более точным григорианским, которым пользуются католики, постоянно нарастает расхождение - потому день равноденствия, а значит, и Пасха, у конфессий не совпадает.
Вдобавок из-за несовпадений солнечного и лунного циклов праздник каждый раз выпадает на другое число.

Григорианская пасхалия (западная традиция)отмечает Пасху 27 марта а Александрийская пасхалия (восточная традиция) отметит Пасху аж 1 мая.

A House Full Of Daughters.

Juliet Nicolson, on ancestry.
Sissinghurst Castle: Vita Sackville-West’s granddaughter, Juliet Nicolson, on ancestry | Daily Mail Online
'WHAT HE WANTS IS AN ADORING SLAVE'
An exclusive extract from Juliet’s book A House Full Of Daughters.
During my mother’s lifetime I knew and cared little about her past. While my father’s family had long been concerned – well, to be more accurate, obsessed – with the business of recording and recounting everything that happened to them, no one wrote anything much down about the Tennyson d’Eyncourts. There were no diaries and curiously few photographs of Philippa’s family and, with an attitude that now seems unforgivably arrogant, we almost entirely overlooked her side of things. When her stories of wartime deprivation made their way to the surface, we did not listen. Instead, we yawned. I knew almost nothing about where she had lived as a child or gone to school. When I was much older, I used to wonder a lot about her childhood. My ignorance saddened me. I found myself longing to discover that there had been some real happiness in those early years before her marriage.
She arrived in the world in 1928 – a bad time to be a daughter. She was brought up after the carnage of the First World War, which destroyed such a high percentage of male youth and made boys matter so much more than girls. As a child, my mother was shunted away from home to avoid the bombs of the Second World War and later her presence was obscured by the postwar gloom that preoccupied adults in the late 1940s. As a young woman, the desire to escape from the dullness of home life made her ready to compromise. Later, she was tethered by marriage and motherhood and was too late to take advantage of the youthful emancipation of the 1960s.
On 8 April 1953 Nigel wrote to his mother. He had been engaged to Philippa for a month. ‘I can see her shaking off the dull conventions of her family and becoming a Sissinghurst person. She is an unopened flower. A strong bud. It will be fascinating to see her develop.’ At the age of 36, Nigel was still looking for his parents’ approval. And they gave it, but with reservations, joining in the family conspiracy that she would have to be taught how to be a satisfactory Nicolson wife. ‘Can she open a bazaar well?’ Harold had asked Nigel. ‘She’ll have to learn,’ Nigel replied. And in a shocking letter to Vita shortly before the wedding, Harold wrote: ‘I do not think she is an interesting or intellectual girl, but Nigel would not want that – what he wants is an adoring slave.

A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson.
Snobbery, scandal and sex in the shrubbery: seven generations of the Sackville-Wests.

- Juliet Nicolson: reflects on the ghosts of family weddings past | Daily Mail Online

Julia Peyton-Jones.

Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery with Hans Ulrich Obrist.
This formidable blonde wants to live until she's at least 100 and her favourite place is Brazil.
If it all went wrong, she would happily start again at a Sainsbury's checkout.


Serpentine - one of the top 10 most visited art galleries in the UK, attracting 1.2 million people, making it the world’s 66th most visited arts institution.
Not a bad show for what was a tea-room built by the Royal Parks in 1934, which became a gallery in 1970.
Making art pay its way is also why the 63-year-old painter turned curator is on the short-list for the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year award.

Peyton-Jones has two galleries to run – the Serpentine and the Serpentine Sackler, the old ammunition store that was renovated two years ago by the Pritzker-winning architect Zaha Hadid – who also designed the first pavilion.
Her biggest bite to date was to take over the old gunpowder store and raise the £14.5m needed to create the Serpentine Sackler and Hadid’s new restaurant.
Using American-style fundraising tactics, she brought in the Sacklers, the Wolfson Foundation, Carphone Warehouse’s co-founder David Ross and many others to back the enterprise; not a penny of public money was used until it opened.

Only 15 per cent of total expenditure comes from the Arts Council.
This, says Ms Peyton-Jones, is now one of the lowest ratios of public subsidies per visitor for any arts organisation in the UK: £6 is raised privately for every £1 of public funding; an astonishing feat at a time when public arts subsidies are falling.
And entry for the public is free.

Princess Diana was the one to set the seal on the Serpentine’s party: she was photographed arriving at the party on 29 June, 1994, wearing the “revenge dress” and shaking hands with Peyton-Jones as Prince Charles was telling all to Jonathan Dimbleby on TV.

Curriculum Vitae: A career in paint.
Name: Julia Peyton-Jones OBE.
Born: 18 February 18 1952.
Education: 1975-78: Studied painting at the Royal College of Art, London.
Career: A painter in London – two of her works hang in the Bank of England – and lecturer in fine art at Edinburgh College of Art. Between 1978 and 1988 she was the curator in the exhibitions department at the Hayward Gallery.
In 1991 she became a director of the Serpentine Gallery, responsible for both commissioning and showcasing the groundbreaking exhibitions, education and public programmes.
Outside interests: Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art; Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects; Professor of the University of the Arts London.
Favourite painting: Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
Favourite restaurant: Daquise, a Polish restaurant in South Kensington, where she takes visiting artists and patrons. People can play cards and they let you bring your dog.
Favourite pastime: Walking with her Jack Russell, Charlie.

- An interview with Julia Peyton-Jones | ArtsProfessional

- The woman who attracted art, celebrity and lots of cash | The Times

Nancy Reagan.

Bob Colacello on Nancy Reagan | Vanity Fair

Nancy Davis Reagan (born Anne Frances Robbins; July 6, 1921 – March 6, 2016).

An Open Mind. By Karl Ove Knausgaard.

- The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery - The New York Times
- An Open Mind - Video - NYTimes.com
A witness (Karl Ove Knausgaard) in an operating room where the patients are conscious.
Karl Ove Knausgaard is the author of the six-volume autobiographical novel ‘My Struggle.’

- “Do No Harm,” was written by the British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh.
His job is to slice into the brain, the most complex structure we know of in the universe, where everything that makes us human is contained, and the contrast between the extremely sophisticated and the extremely primitive — all of that work with knives, drills and saws — fascinated me deeply.


Marsh waved me over.
“See this? This little spot here. That’s the center for facial movement. We have to leave that in peace.”
- Were all the expressions the human face could make supposed to originate in this little spot? All the joy, all the grief, all the light and all the darkness?

- BBC Two - Artsnight, Series 2, When Henry Met Karl
Leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh interviews Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. (BBC Two - Artsnight, Series 2, When Henry Met Karl)

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’

Published: 21 Mar 2014
Update: 5 March 2016
A Debate Over Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’ - NYTimes.com:

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968.
His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything (Archipelago) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize.
For My Struggle, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009 (for Book One), the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifteen languages.
Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is a hard sell: a 3,600-page work published in six volumes, without a plot to speak of.
The six books were published in Norway between 2009 and 2011.
Knausgaard and the narrator of My Struggle share the same name, relatives, friends and ideas, but the work can’t really be called non-fiction. “I remember rooms and landscapes,” Knausgaard has said. “What I do not remember [is] what the people in these rooms were telling me.”

- A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett, Vintage RRP£8.99, 416 pages ( the narrator’s relationship with his overbearing, intimidating father.)
- A Man in Love: My Struggle Book 2, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett, Vintage RRP£8.99, 544 pages (...describes meeting Linda, his second wife: “The sun rose in my life,” he writes.)
- Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett, Harvill Secker RRP£12.99, 496 pages, (Boyhood Island is set almost entirely in Karl Ove’s childhood;
- Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle: Book 4, by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated by Don Bartlett, Harvill Secker, RRP£17.99, 560 pages ( is a fairly straightforward Bildungsroman: "novel of formation, education, culture" from youth to adulthood-coming of age.)
- Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle Book 5, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Harvill Secker, RRP£17.99, 672 pages (The fifth book of the cycle, returns briefly to this haunted house from A Death in the Family - return to the father’s death, encodes death into microstructure of Karl Ove’s 14-year residence in the provincial town of Bergen, where he pursues various studies and jobs, takes summer breaks, drinks heavily, falls in and out of love and, most crucially, turns himself into a writer.
Some Rain Must Fall has exchanged novelistic plotting for the relative formlessness of life, where the causes of our effects are often hidden.)

Published in the US by Archipelago as My Struggle.

- Meet the Man Who Translates Karl Ove Knausgaard
Anecdotally, people are also always asking which book is the “best,” or if they have to start from the beginning.

Personally, I think Book Two is the best. I have suggested to people that they should start at the beginning, but I also know Book One has put some readers off. I think some readers check out very quickly because of the theme of death and the focus on self. By contrast, Book Three, for example, would probably not put people off in the same way. There is a change of style after the first two books, with Three, Four, and Five being more accessible. So now I would recommend readers dip in wherever. As to the critics, it feels right to me to review each book as it comes out. One a year is slow for those addicted to the series, I know— apologies for that. Considering everything, I guess a series retrospective at the end would make a lot of sense.