CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo: Evening Standard/Getty via The New Yorker

Adam Gopnik reflects in the New Yorker how it seems impossible to revision the literary history of America, or even the very magazine he writes for "without being reminded of how inextricable the drinking life and the writing life—or, to put it more bluntly, alcoholism and art—once were. From St. Clair McKelway to Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, and from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sinclair Lewis and beyond, it was not long ago that if you wrote you drank, and if you weren’t drinking it was because you were drying out." Drinking used to be regarded as a complement to the act of authorship writes Gopnik. Read Writers and Rum in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 8'

Photo: Still from the 2nd Episode of HBO Girls, via The New Yorker.

Speaking of writers, also in The New Yorker, Sasha Weiss analyses the evolution of Lena Duhnam's character, Hannah, in the first two episodes of the new season of HBO Girls. Weiss highlights how the show dramatizes the formation of a writer's consciousness, in this case, Hannah's. An interesting reading, if you are a fan of Girls of course, pointless otherwise. Read full article in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 6' (Spoilers alert).

Image via The Telegraph.

 And to close this section: Oscar nominations! This past Thrusday the movies, documentaries and shorts nominated for the 86th Academy Awards were announced: "12 Years a Slave," "American Hustle," "Captain Phillips," "Dallas Buyers Club," "Gravity," "Her," "Nebraska," "Philomena" and "The Wolf of Wall Street" received top honors as the nominees for Best Picture.

Lovely Cate Blanchett will be competing with Amy Adams, Judy Dench, Meryl Streep (of course) and Sandra Bullock in the Lead Actress category, while Christian Bale, Bruce Dern, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leonardo DiCaprio will compete against a surprising performance of Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club, if you haven't seen this one, go ahead and book your ticket. Another surprise, Jennifer Lawrence receives her 3rd Oscar nomination. Really? I mean... really? Hope the Academy does (unsual) justice and recognises the superior performance of Lupita Nyong'o. Anyway, read full list of nominees in the LA Times. E.T.P. 5'.

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Illustration: Maximillian Bode via The New Yorker

What if the poetic has left the poem in the same way that Elvis has left the building? Long after the limo pulled away, the audience was still in the arena screaming for more, but poetry escaped out the backdoor and onto the Internet, where it is taking on new forms that look nothing like poetry." That is the beginning of Kenneth Goldsmith's article in The New Yorker titled: The Writer as a Meme Machine, about the interesting reflections on art, poetry, memes and "conceptualism in the wild" made by Canadian Media Scholar Darren Wershler. Read full article here. E.T.P. 5'

Photo via The New Yorker.

If like me you were waiting to see 'Blue is the Warmest Color' the movie that won the Palm d'Or this year in Cannes, this article will leave you very much surprised. "The 2013 Cannes jury, presided over by Steven Spielberg, awarded the top prize not only to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, but to the lead actresses, too. “Three artists,” Spielberg said that May day. . . the red carpet was witness to a symphony of happy symmetry as the established Léa Seydoux, twenty-eight, and the newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos, nineteen, flanked their director and kissed him. Then, later in summer, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos said that the shooting had been unbearable and they would never again work with Kechiche". Emily Greenhouse share the details of this story in her article Did a Director Push Too Far? in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 4'30''

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'.