Word: novak
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Conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak predict that Finley, whose work has been supported in the past by three NEA grants ($22,000 in total awards), will be the next target of outrage -- and opportunity -- for enemies of the endowment's funding. Finley, the columnists warned, could become "the Mapplethorpe case of 1990" if her latest request for support is approved. Last week that suggestion of scandal was enough to shake the National Council on the Arts, the beleaguered body that oversees grants recommended by NEA panels. The council voted to postpone until August its decision on all grant...
...Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in January, the Star Tribune used words like heartfelt and moving to describe We Keep Our Victims Ready, a verse piece about the consequences of male violence for women, gays and the homeless. The same piece was also singled out by Evans and Novak, who took exception to the fact that at one point Finley spreads chocolate across her naked body in what she describes as "a symbol of women being treated like dirt...
After doing exhaustive library research on a subject, Novak typically talks to dozens of family members and friends to build up lists of questions for his interviews. No muckraker, he uses challenging or contradictory material only to try to jog his subject's memory or trigger fresh stories. "I push as far as I can go," he says. "I'm not trying to change a person's version of himself." Novak works from transcriptions of his interviews, occasionally going back to the tapes to capture the subject's voice -- one of his strengths, he believes. A couple of months into...
Toronto-born, Novak graduated from local York University intending to be a writer ("No kid goes to bed at night dreaming he'll be a ghostwriter"). After earning an M.A. in contemporary Jewish studies at Brandeis, he spent ten years editing scholarly magazines and writing a string of financially unsuccessful books (among them: High Culture, about marijuana use, The Great American Man Shortage and a compendium of Jewish humor). Just as he resigned himself to "finding a real job," an editor friend at Bantam suggested Lee Iacocca. "Great! My kind of guy," said Novak, who had never heard of Iacocca...
...future celebrity subjects. He muses about Mikhail Gorbachev ("but somehow I think he's busy right now"), and, as a music lover who has recently resumed piano lessons, he thinks about Paul McCartney or Barbra Streisand. "Or Elvis, if he can find him," wisecracks Ben, 10, one of the Novaks' two sons. As for a return to the solo byline of William Novak, he says it's not soon likely. "I get far more ego gratification and attention from these books than I ever did from my own." But aren't the celebrity books his own too? No. This John...