CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

The Guardian shares with us (and the rest of the world) exclusively the first chapter of Harpers Lee's Go Set a Watchman. You can read it and see the beautiful illustrations and animations in the website or listen to Reese Witherspoon read it for you. Go have a read or a listen in The Guardian. E.T.P. 23'45''. 

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: Latin American authors for your summer reading list

 

Illustration via Quartz

"For many years Latin American writers complained of living under the shadow of their predecessors: the heavyweights of magical realism like Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa or Carlos Fuentes. And Latin American authors are too often absent from suggested reading lists, despite the demographic shift taking place in America. 

“They have in common a formal audacity, they are very confident in their style and in what they are doing,” Valerie Miles, founder of the Spanish edition of Granta Magazine, told Quartz about this generation of authors. “The ideas about politics are not so obvious in their writing as they were in the writers of the boom: politics becomes something more intimate that comes out from the daily life with the partner, children… not from the state.”

Quartz have have put together a list of Latin American authors, highlighting books that may not be necessarily the most recent, but those that are translated, edited or easier to find in English. "No matter what the must-reads table at your bookstore says: there is life beyond Roberto Bolaño and Junot Díaz." Have a look at the list in Quartz. E.T.P. 5'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: To Cocktail

“As ‘cocktail,’ so I gather, has become a verb, it ought to be conjugated at least once,” wrote the author of The Great Gatsby in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf, the wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Who better to first lay out its full conjugation than the man who, as the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center puts it, “gave the Jazz Age its name”? Given that his fame “was for many years based less on his work than his personality—the society playboy, the speakeasy alcoholic whose career had ended in ‘crack-up,’ the brilliant young writer whose early literary success seemed to make his life something of a romantic idyll,” he found himself well placed to offer the language a new “taste of Roaring Twenties excess.” Read full article in Open Culture before going ahead and start practically conjugating this very summery verb. E.T.P. 3'

 

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: Death of Writing

Illustration via The Guardian.

Tom McCarthy argues in The Guardian that if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google. "If, five years ago, you’d asked me to name the most important French mid-20th century writer, I’d have mentally dipped a hand into a hat in which names of contenders such as Camus, Genet, Duras and Robbe-Grillet had been tossed, and pulled one out at random. Not any more. Right now I’d answer without hesitation: Claude Lévi-Strauss. An odd choice, perhaps: an ethnographer by calling, Lévi-Strauss wrote neither plays nor novels. Yet, for my money, his work displays a richer, deeper literary sensibility than that of his “proper” literary contemporaries. Not only is his prose better than theirs (his lyrical descriptions of the “leprous crusts” of buildings or the “supernatural cataclysms” of sunsets and sunrises), it is also infused with meditations on the very act of writing – the blindspots that it opens up, the traps or pitfalls that it sets. Infused, too, with a sense of structure, pattern, system (the narrative of Tristes Tropiques, for example, zaps from culture to culture, continent to continent, as it remaps the entire globe along lines of association: between the layout, concentric or concyclic, of a village’s huts, the transgenerational rhythms of exogamy and endogamy of the tribe to whom these huts belong, and the symmetry or asymmetry of a caste system on the far side of the world). And infused, beyond even this, with a tantalising sense that, if only he could correlate it all, plot the whole system out, some universal “master-meaning” would emerge, bathing both him and his readers in an all-consuming, epiphanic grace." Read full article by Tom McCarthy in The Guardian. E.T.P. 8'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: Best First Sentences

Photo via Gawker.

"In a 2013 interview with Joe Fassler, horror fiction maestro Stephen King reflected on the magnitude of a novel's introductory sentence. "An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story," he said. "It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this." The first sentence sets the stage—however long or short the text—and hints at the "narrative vehicle" by which the writer will propel the book forward." Read full article in Gawker Review of Books (yes, Gawker Review of Books, go figure!). E.T.P. 4'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: 10 Best Quotable Novels

Photo via The Guardian.

"Certain works of fiction have so many memorable lines that they’ve entered everyday language." The Guardian's Alex Clark's favourites goes from James Joyce's Ulysses to Irving Welsh's Trainspotting. Read full article in The Guardian. E.T.P. 4'

THE PROCRASTINATOR'S 2014 READING LIST

Dear Procrastinators, this year instead of sharing the reading lists of  The New York Times or The Guardian, we decided to make our own, so we reached out to our friends and contributors (two days ago!) and asked them to share those books they enjoyed procrastinating the most with during 2014. These are the answers we got,  truly great recommendations from fellow procrastinators sharing the joy of reading. Enjoy and add yours to the comments!

1. The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition, Richard Rodes

2. The Martian, Andy Weir

3. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, Jon Krakauer

"All of them are highly recommendable. The first one is dense, more than 800 pages, but it's -give or take- the best book I've read in my entire life. It's about the discovery of the atom, about the physics of the beginning of the 20th century, the world wars, the atomic bomb, etc. Very interesting narrative from a critical point of view. The second book is fiction, it tells the story of an astronaut that ends up in Mars, alone. Very geek, but fun (and I read that the movie is on its way and it'll be directed by Ridley Scott). Finally, the 3rd one, I read it on the middle of my Himalayan fever. It's the real story of an Everest expedition in 1996 that ended up tragically. The author is Jon Krakauer who survived  that expedition and reached the top (he's the same authot of Into the Wild). You can read the book in two days, is one of those you cannot put away (and btw, I also read they'll be doing this film next year!)"

Luis, Geophysical Engineer.
Bogotá.

1. My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki

2. The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

"These are two books that are far from being masterpieces but I devored them in few days and they made me stop doing stuff that I should have done... I think that's the Procrastinator's spirit, right?"

Victoria, Illustrator & Animator

Madrid.

1. Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation, Authority & Acceptance, Jeff Vandermeer.

"2014's procrastination: Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer (that honestly is one book divided in three episodes.) Imagine a book that condense the adventure and mystery essence of Verne with Lovecraft's strangeness and suspense, the best WTFery of Lost, and X-Files conspiracies involved with the decadent and dystopic spectrum of Terry Gilliam circa 12 Monkeys. Now imagine that everything that does not imply knowing what happened in the 12th expedition and what the hell happened in the X Area are just secondary stories and voilá... perfect procrastination."

Germán, Illustrator & Animator.

Caracas.

1. The Art of Asking, Amanda Palmer.

"One interesting fact is that through her twitter account she connected people that couldn’t purchase the book with people that offer to purchase book and deliver them worldwide for free! Her community of fans is one of the most powerful and enacted I’ve ever seen. And this book reveals a bit about this phenomenon. I think that depending on the eyes you read it with, you can reach different “insights". For me,  the book gives a very personal and artistic explanation on the “economy of sharing” phenomenon." 

Lily, Interaction Designer.

New York.

1. Lens on Life: Documenting Your World Through Photography, Stephanie Calabrese Roberts. 

2. Steal like an Artist, Austin Kleon.

3. Show Your Work, Austin Kleon.

"The first book I discovered it at the library of the Pompidou Center, just after leaving the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition. I loved that there was an interview with Elliot Erwitt, one of my favorite photographers. I discovered "Steal like and artist" and "Show your work" both from Austin Kleon, thanks to some friends in England. We were talking about how to promote and sell our work. Also, I just started Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nïn, 1939-1947. No idea how that book fell into my hands."

Karem, Cinema & TV Producer.

Caracas.

1. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami.

"The only book I can think of is this Murakami one, after which I quit smoking, started running and decided to become my own boss... but that was in 2013." (After that introduction, I think that book deserved to be here, right?) 

Marie, Social Entrepreneur / Playful Pony.

London.

1. Uncreative Writing: Managing the Language in the Digital Era, Kenneth Goldsmith.

2. Maps of the imagination: the writer as cartographer, Peter Turchi.

"This year I read a lot of books, but mainly thesis-related ones, these two I found them on a Saturday morning in one of Broadway Market's book shops and decided to buy them as they seemed to have some loose relation with the themes I was exploring (actually I was just looking to procrastinate). Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing turned out to be exceptionally related, and his point of view on writing/copying/re-contextualizing/originality, and all things language related in the digital era in fact ended up giving a whole new twist to my dissertation project. Goldsmith is known for being the guy that tried to print the Internet, and most recently it was mentioned a lot because he will be offering a class at the University of Pennsylvania called "Wasting Time on the Internet". On the other hand Turchi's work -and beautiful maps- helped me a lot when facing the challenge of creating a story, a  universe, specially in a language that is not my own. It's not super extraordinary, but the time I spent procrastinating with this book inspired me enough to start a new project that hopefully you will discover soon! Finally, if you must know, I am fighting with Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus. Maybe this time next year I'll be done with it... maybe not."

Ana, Procrastinator.

The Cloud.

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo via Dazed Magazine.

Dazed Magazine has a summer project called States of Independence  where they have invited their "favourite 30 American curators, magazines, creatives and institutions to takeover Dazed for a day." One of them is Kenneth Goldsmith, author of one of the books that helped shape my thesis, my thoughts around writing in the digital era, and justifies somehow the appropriation and re-contextualization used in the Procrastinator as a way of generating new content: "Uncreative Writing." According to Dazed, he is on a mission to tell us why we should care about poetry while featuring the diet poems of Mira González, as well as some Microsoft Word poems and found poems.  In Dazed words: "artists are flocking to poetry these days precisely because it's an orphaned and evacuated space, ready to be repurposed with poetry that looks nothing like the kind of poetry you see (but don't read) drizzled across the pages of The New Yorker. Instead of sonnets, we see apps, image macros, hacked photoshopped images, found language, hardcore programming, and YouTube videos posing as poetry. Suddenly, poetry looks interesting again." Read full article and all the poems in Dazed Magazine. E.T.P. 12'

Photo: Chronicle of a summer. Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, France 1961

The BFI polled 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers in the search for authoritative answers to the question: What are the greatest documentaries of all time? Nick James believes that one of the most remarkable things about the Top 50 documentaries list is that it feels so fresh. "One in five of the films chosen were made since the millennium, and to have a silent film from 1929 at the top of the list is an absolute joy. That allusive essay films feature so strongly throughout demonstrates that nonfiction cinema is not a narrow discipline but a wide open country full of explorers." Some of the documentaries are classics like Chronicle of a summer, The Thin Blue Line, Sans Soleil and, of course, Nanook of the North. On my side, I still have a lot of documentaries to see, which is of course, great news. Read the list with comments from the curators and prepare for a well documented summer here. E.T.P. Days (months?).

Images: stills from Emoji Among Us via Laughingsquid.

"Emoji Among Us” is a nature documentary parody by stock footage company Dissolve that explores the role of emoji in the world. The parody was inspired by the work of Sir David Attenborough, and features stock footage from Dissolve’s library. E.T.P. 2' http://laughingsquid.com/emoji-among-us-a-nature-documentary-parody-exploring-the-role-of-emoji-in-the-world/

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Image via The Guardian.

Hayao Miyazaki: his final bow. The much-loved animator's Studio Ghibli has become part of the aesthetic fabric of Japan. But The Wind Rises will be Miyazaki's swansong as director. What happens next? Paul McInnes writes in The Guardian: "Studio Ghibli is the animation studio founded by Miyazaki and his partner Isao Takahata in Tokyo in 1985. Over the 29 years that followed they have released 19 full-length feature films, eight of them directed by Miyazaki. Of these, 2001's Spirited Away is the biggest film of all-time in Japan and was the first to gross $200m worldwide. When Japanese consumers are polled as to their favourite brands, they often put Ghibli top, ahead of Toyota and Sony. But Ghibli's importance in its home country goes beyond financial success; in a way it has helped to define a sense of national character, creating new fables for the country such as the environmental parable Princess Mononoke. Ghibli has come to stand for both an aesthetic and moral code, continuing the practice of hand-drawn animation as everything else turns digital and creating stories for children that offer a more complex morality – and have a more vivid imagination – than its peers." E.T.P. 18'

Image via The Independent.

Semi Chellas interviews Matthew Weiner in The Paris Review: "Born in 1965, Matthew Weiner is barely old enough to remember the period with which his television series Mad Men has now become almost synonymous. His office is exactly what one might hope for the creator of Don Draper: a stylish mixture of midcentury modern furniture, with a cabinet full of top-shelf liquor. But it turns out that the furniture came with the building, which was designed in 1955, and the liquor, mostly gifts, is wasted on Weiner, who hardly drinks at all." Read The Art of Screenwriting No. 4 in The Paris Review. E.T.P. 33'

Photo via The Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society.

Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society takes off. Allison Flood comments about this peculiar society in The Guardian's Blook Blog: "I'm not a member of a book club – perhaps it is rooted in the days of my education, but I just feel that I'd hate having to read something by a certain time. However, I am loving this week's slew of articles about New York's Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society, a book group which loves "good books and sunny days and enjoying both as nearly in the altogether as the law allows". Read full article in The Guardian. E.T.P. 4'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Image via Le Petit Prince.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: "Of all the books written in French over the past century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Le Petit Prince” is surely the best loved in the most tongues. This is very strange, because the book’s meanings—its purpose and intent and moral—still seem far from transparent, even seventy-five-plus years after its first appearance. Indeed, the startling thing, looking again at the first reviews of the book, is that, far from being welcomed as a necessary and beautiful parable, it bewildered and puzzled its readers." Read full article in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 7'

Photo via 7Capas Tumblr.

Jeff Beer in FastCoCreate writes about society's change of perception of skate culture: "Thanks to Dogtown & Z-Boys, we all know that modern street skateboarding and its culture was born in California. But a new interactive project from the National Film Board of Canada reveals that a little known Canadian film was a pioneer in both skateboarding film and the development of Direct Cinema, a movement of the late '50s and early '60s that helped change the face of filmmaking." Read full article in Fast Company. E.T.P. 7'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Zadie Smith, photo by Chris Boland via The Paris Review Facebook Page.

“Rome says: enjoy me. London: survive me. New York: gimme all you got.” Zadie Smith’s story Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets from The Paris Spring issue is now available in its entirety online, go ahead and have a lovely read. E.T.P. 28'

Image via The New Yorker.

Adrienne Raphel share in The New Yorker the story of the very famous Moleskine: "Maria Sebregondi, the founder of Moleskine, was born and raised in Italy. Her mother worked as an editor and a graphic designer. “I remember, when I was a child, having graphics around all the time,” she said. Sebregondi’s background is primarily in literature and publishing, but, she said, a “kind of visual sensibility was strong in my family.” Moleskine-style notebooks had been produced since the eighteen-fifties, by small French bookbinding companies, and distributed in Paris bookstores; they were used by Picasso, Hemingway, Van Gogh, and the like . . . But, in 1986, the last traditional moleskine manufacturer, a small stationer in Tours, France, closed down. Moleskines went extinct, driven out by cheaper, mass-produced notebooks." Read full story in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 9' 

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo: Gabriel García Marquez de la serie Frente al espejo. Caracas, 1982.

This past Thursday our beloved Gabo died in México leaving a lot of memories and yellow butterflies nostalgically fluttering around. My first García Márquez book was Relato de un naúfrago, as an assignment for school (one of the good ones). Cien Años de Soledad would follow. After that it was up to me keep discovering el Gabo and that thing people called magic realism, that as he many times pointed out, and as I suspected back then, is just normal/extraordinary life in that little piece of land right next to the Caribbean. My favorite book is El amor en los tiempos del cólera. It's so definitive. I also loved of course, El general en su laberinto, Del amor y otros demonios and Memorias de mis putas tristes. If you haven't read el Gabo yet, this is your time. It must be amazing having so much to discover from him, from Colombia, from life, chaos, magic and love.

The photos above and below were taken by the Venezuelan photographer Vasco Szinetar, and are part of a great series called Frente al espejo (In front of the mirror). Have a look at Vasco's work in his blog. The articles below are a good compilation of the articles appeared in the newspapers after Gabo's death, and a couple of old interviews worth reading or re-reading. Hope you enjoy them, and if you want to share one memory or article, do it in the comments, it will be deeply appreciated!

Photo: Gabriel García Marquez de la serie Frente al espejo. Cartagena, 2010.

 

Hector Tovar in Los Angeles Times: Gabriel Garcia Marquez was more than magical realism: An appreciation: "Like Hemingway, “Gabo” was a newspaperman. He’d worked as a columnist in Colombia and his first book was born as a series of columns about a shipwrecked sailor. That thin little volume with an impossibly long title was the first book I read in Spanish, as a 19-year-old Angeleno undergraduate studying the language of my immigrant parents: “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time.” Read full article in LA Times. E.T.P. 7'

Gabriel García Márquez. Only the bible sold more copies than his book. "Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens . . .One Hundred Years of Solitude" was "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure," biographer Gerald Martin said." Read full article in The Times of India. E.T.P. 6'  

Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize winning author, dies at 87. ' "I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work," reads a mural quoting the author outside of town.

García Márquez was tickled that he had earned so much praise for his fertile imagination.

"The truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination," he told The Paris Review (read interview below) in 1981.' Read full article in CNN. E.T.P. 8' 
Peter H. Stone in the The Paris Review (1981). Gabriel García Márquez. The art of fiction No. 69. "I’ve always been convinced that my true profession is that of a journalist. What I didn’t like about journalism before were the working conditions. Besides, I had to condition my thoughts and ideas to the interests of the newspaper. Now, after having worked as a novelist, and having achieved financial independence as a novelist, I can really choose the themes that interest me and correspond to my ideas. In any case, I always very much enjoy the chance of doing a great piece of journalism." Read full interview in The Paris Review. E.T.P. 25'

Jon Lee Anderson's profile in The New Yorker (1999): The Power of García Marquez. Can the Nobel Prize-winning novelist rescue Colombia? "He says he usually wakes up at five o'clock, reads a book until seven, dresses, reads the newspapers, answers his E-mail, and by 10 --"no matter what"-- he is at his desk writing." Read full article in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 28'

Photo: García Márquez poses for a portrait in Paris in 1990, via CNN.

En Español:

Winston Manrique Sabogal en El País: Muere García Márquez, genio de la literatura universal. "Bajo un aguacero extraviado, el 6 de marzo de 1927, nació Gabriel José García Márquez. Hoy, jueves 17 de abril de 2014, a la edad de 87 años, ha muerto en México DF el periodista colombiano y uno de los más grandes escritores de la literatura universal. Autor de obras clásicas como Cien años de soledad, El amor en los tiempos del cólera, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, El otoño del patriarca y Crónica de una muerte anunciada,fue el creador de un territorio eterno y maravilloso llamado Macondo." Leer artículo completo en El País. E.T.P. 12'

Eduardo García Aguilar en el blog de AFP: Última tarde con García Márquez. "La última vez que vi a Gabriel García Márquez fue en diciembre de 2003 en la Ciudad de México. . . Para cada colombiano, estar con García Márquez era ver en persona al padre de la patria, un Víctor Hugo personal que nos iluminó en la adolescencia; pero ese padre de la patria fue para todos quienes conversamos con él la persona más sencilla, jovial y antisolemne que se pudiera encontrar, el muchacho pobre nacido en la Costa Caribe colombiana, cerca del mar, de los carnavales de Barranquilla y de las plantaciones de la Compañía Bananera donde hubo una masacre; el emigrante pobre confundido con argelinos en el París de fines de los años 50 o el viajero que llegó a México con esposa e hijo y unos cuantos dólares viajando en buses Greyhound, después de renunciar a su trabajo en la agencia cubana Prensa Latina en Nueva York." Leer artículo completo en AFP Blog. E.T. P. 7'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo via Les InRocks.

Eleven years after The Ignorance (2003), Milan Kundera is back with the novel La Fête d'insingnifiance. Always ironic, but maybe with less grief, is how El País describes it. Le Monde says that is as light as a quail's feather, or maybe an angel one. Originally written in French, the novel will be available in Spanish in September. Read full article (in French) in Les InRocks (E.T.P. 4') and in Spanish in El País (E.T.P. 7'). Couldn't find an article in English, but I found a great interview conducted soon after Kundera’s most recent book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, had become an immediate best-seller, by Christian Salmon in The Paris Review. E.T.P. 15'

Photo via Co.Create.

Mad Men premieres tonight and its creator, Matthew Weiner speaks with Co Create about advertising, the loneliness of social media, the eternal nature of storytelling and the theme of crafting your own narrative. The end is nigh. Read full article in Co.Create. E.T.P. 7'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo Emmanuelle Devos via The Paris Review.

“If you saw American Hustle with your parents, as I did last Christmas, you will have noticed something that set it apart from pretty much every Hollywood movie of the last few years. I refer to the sex appeal of Amy Adams. Her hotness was a blast from the past, and not just because of the disco décolleté. For some reason, Hollywood doesn’t really do sexy these days, at least not in female roles—and certainly not compared to the French.” Intrigued? Have a look at this week’s staff picks readings in The Paris Review. E.T.P. 5'

 

Photo via NPR.

"Have you ever had a sentence stop you in your tracks? Editors at The American Scholar magazine have put out their list of the "" in fiction and nonfiction. Associate editor Margaret Foster says the inspiration came from water cooler talk around the office." Read full article in NPR. E.T.P. 3'

Still of the short via Slate.

The new Muppets movie centers around a showdown between Kermit and his evil doppelganger, and so of course there was one place the comedy was destined to go: the Mirror Routine. Muppets Most Wanted is only the latest in more than a century of movies to include the gag, in which two characters stand on opposite sides of an empty mirror frame and one pretends to be the other’s reflection. Almost every great comedian, from Charlie Chaplin to the Marx Brothers to Adam Sandler to Bugs Bunny, has at some point in their career performed their own variation of the bit. Watch a nice super cut of the evolution of the Mirror Routine in Slate Magazine. E.T.P. 2' 30''

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Illustration via Brain Pickings (fragment).

Brain Pickings' Maria Popova researched all sorts of documents, biographies and interviews of some of our favorite writers to find out their sleep/work patterns, and then correlated that data with the number of books published and major awards received. The results are inconclusive, of course, there is not ONE way to write. There are some Murakami-style early bird writers, but there is also Bukowski who woke up at noon and was equally a genius. The infographic and the illustrations are really nice though. Have a look here. E.T.P. 5' (Via Short List).

Photo via The Guardian.

And speaking of writers, I just recently read in Paris Review an interview that Susannah Hunnewell made to Michel Houellebecq. Wow, he really is a controversial man and anything I can say about the interview or him will be definitely an understatement or an insufficiently articulated personal opinion. So if like me, you read The Elemmentary Particles and didn't know much about Houellebecq, and you're interested in getting to know better (or worst) one really interesting character, please go ahead and read this interview in Paris Review. E.T.P. 18'

Image via Dazed Digital.

Finally, Dazed Magazine couldn't have said it better, so I will just quote here: "Is there a way to be a bad feminist? How do you survive in the male art world? What does it mean to be a female writer? In conjunction with our Girls Rule issue, some of our favourite writers, activists and artists will be musing on these questions for Girl Guides, a series of how-tos and thinkpieces on the state of modern womanhood. Here, Dazed writer Steph Kretowicz unpicks the neverending toxic cycle of advertising, body issues and inequality." Full article in Dazed Digital. E.T.P. 10'     

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Grey Power by Yoni Lefévre.

This week some photos from Yoni Lefévre's project Grey Power were around the Internet. Lefévre believes that good design begins with empathy and communicating emotions and with his work he aims at creating conceptual solutions for cultural and social issues. I think he is absolutely right. With Grey Power he used drawings made by children of their grandparents to add colour to their lives and create an image boost for that generation. "We are living in a rapidly ageing society. A majority regards this as a negative development. Older people are perceived as standing on the sideline, having lost their independence. But I see the great value this generation can offer." It's all in all a good concept, and a very lovely execution. Have a look at the project here. E.T.P. 10'

Image via The New Yorker.

Should literature be useful? "Two recent studies have concluded that serious literary fiction makes people more empathetic, and humanists everywhere are clinking glasses in celebration. But I wonder whether this is a victory for humanism’s impalpable enrichments and enchantments, or for the quantifying power of social science." Read Lee Siegel's article in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 6'

Still from James Franco & Seth Rogen's parody video via The Huffington Post.

We know that is almost absolutely impossible you haven't seen this by now, but since it's a remarkable example of procrastination we had to post it. Just in case you've been under a stone this week, if you just want to watch it again, and just because it would be awesome if this video had more views than the original one, here's James Franco and Seth Rogen's parody video of Kanye's "Bound 2" "song". E.T.P. 4'14''.

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

"In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night — six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight — so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction."

This is a quote of Stephen King that Maria Popova shared in Brain Pickings when talking about King's book: On Writing. In the summer of 1999, King was nearly killed while taking his daily walk. A driver struck King as he strode along the gravel shoulder of Route 5 in Maine. While recovering from his injuries, King wrote On Writing.

Read the whole story, including some insightful excerpts and a 25' recording of the whole story in NPR. E.T.P. 32'.

Image: Screenshot of Shortlist website.

Massive spoiler alert! Shortlist pusblished some of the most famous last words in literature. Here's what they say about it: "If you knew you were about to meet your maker you’d try and make your last words before you shifted off this mortal coil pretty darn special, eh? Literary characters are no different – some succeed in reaching some higher state of gravitas; others, well, their last recorded utterances reflect the banality of much of the human condition. Have a look in Shortlist website. E.T.P.: 4'.

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

 Photo via The Guardian.

“Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.” Alice Munro has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature. The writer known as "the Canadian Chekhov" is the 110th winner of the prize and the 13th woman to receive it. Read the news in The Guardian and a interview about "Dear Life" her newest collection of short stories that came out in November 2012, in The New Yorker. E. T. P.: 5'26''.

Image: Lidia Popova, illustrations for Toys by A Olsufieva, 1928. Photograph: Redstone Press via The Guardian.

This very interesting article in The Guardian starts like this: "At the trial of the three Pussy Riot performers in August 2012, one of the accused, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, made a closing statement in their defence. She spoke of Pussy Riot's admiration for those writers and artists who had suffered under Stalin's purges, and in particular for a group of avant garde poets and writers known as Oberiu. Two of the most prominent Oberiu members were Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, both of whom were arrested, and died, during the Great Terror." Russia, along with some other countries,  seem to be bringing back into their policies that "sense of threat in the background", that is why we found this article so pertinent. Read it in The Guardian. E. T. P.: 4'35''. 

Lars Von Trier latest movie Nymphomaniac, that will be released in UK movie theaters the next 25th of December have a really orgasmic collection of character posters. Of course. Have a look here. E.T.P.: 23''.

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Image via Maptia.

"The relationship between words and their meaning is a fascinating one", specially when we come across a concept that truly cannot be properly explained between cultures, like the popular Brazilian 'saudade' or Milan Kundera's 'lítost'. Inspired by 'Through The Language Glass', a book by Guy Deutscher that argues that our mother tongues shape our experiences of the world, Maptia did a beautiful job illustrating 11 of those untranslatable words. Have a look here.

Photo: Jorge Luis Borges photographed by Vasco Szinetar via Vasco Szinetar's Blog.


The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24th, 1899 (¡feliz cumpleaños!), so there was some articles and blog posts  celebrating his wonderful stories and imagination. Explore, a Brain Pickings project edited by Maria Popova in partnership with Noodle, features a fragment of an imagined old Chinese Enciclopaedia named Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge created by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1942 short story The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. According to that animals are classified as  follows:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,

2. embalmed ones,

3. those that are trained,

4. suckling pigs,

5. mermaids,

6. fabulous ones,

7. stray dogs,

8. those included in the present classification,

9. those that tremble as if they were mad,

10. innumerable ones,

11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

12. others,

13. those that have just broken a flower vase,

14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Check Explore, a very nice project; check Venezuelan photographer Vasco Szinetar's work, he is famous for his mirror portraits; and if you haven't yet, read Borges, it's good for the mind and the soul.