Anna Gunn on all the Skyler White haters
Actor Anna Gunn has written an interesting piece for the New York TImes about the hatred her Breaking Bad character Skyler White - married to chemistry teacher turned drug baron Walter – has attracted. She ‘has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women.’ And somewhere along the way, that hatred for Skyler has morphed into a (sometimes homicidal) hatred of Anna herself.
The Novelist: A video game
A new indie video game lets you play at being a novelist. Your challenge? To balance your creative life and family life, without losing it all. Sounds a bit too much like the least-fun part of real life to be worth voluntarily playing … but maybe it’s good practice? Trailer below.
David Simon remembers Elmore Leonard
We’re all a bit excited here at the Wheeler Centre that David Simon, creator of The Wire, is coming to Melbourne for our Pop Up Festival of Dangerous Ideas. In a blog post published by the Guardian, he remembers another great crime creative - Elmore Leonard, who died last week, and who ‘made the lines between genre and literary fiction ridiculous and arbitrary for all time’.
Water, as you’ve never seen it before
Moses Hacmon shows us water in a whole new light in his photographic series, Faces of Water. The striking images are created using a special type of film with a layer of liquid iron that records the movement of the water itself. You can view the series on Wired.
Adam Gopnik defends the teaching of literature
Why teach English literature in universities? Why study it? Is it really that useful for a future career? And what do English majors contribute to society? In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik considers these often-put questions and concludes:
To have turned the habits of reading and obsessing over books from a practice mostly for those rich enough to have the time to do it into one that welcomes, for a time anyway, anyone who can is momentous. English departments democratize the practice of reading. When they do, they make the books of the past available to all.