Arts & Culture

Patrick deWitt is the author of The Sisters Brothers.

"Doesn't the act of noticing matter as much as what's noticed?" So asks the narrator of Harry Mathews' masterpiece of minutia, The Journalist.

On the mend from a nervous breakdown (though it's mentioned only in passing — "the steering wheel came off in my hands," he says), he's been encouraged by his doctor to keep a journal. A seemingly benign idea, and he throws himself into the task with gusto — far too much gusto, it turns out, as the journal soon eclipses his entire life.

Back when refrigeration wasn't up to modern standards, Fat Tuesday was a time to clear your house of indulgent foods. This led to lots of rich recipes, from Shrove pancakes to King Cake. In Sweden, the specialty is semlor. A group of people in Portland, Ore., are keeping that dish — and a few other Swedish traditions — alive.

Picture soft, sweet rolls, sort of like brioche, piled with creamy almond filling. Now picture them being made by a room full of young, mostly blond children speaking Swedish.

This piece was not my idea. It was Linda Holmes'. If you're reading this blog, you probably share my regard for her take on popular culture. So my ears pricked up when she suggested I look into doing a radio piece on Kyle Killen.

Killen created a new NBC show, Awake, premiering Thursday, March 1, at 10.p.m. (NBC has the pilot online early as well, for those who don't want to wait.) It's a densely plotted drama about a middle-aged police detective who's been in a car accident with his family. When he wakes up, he's caught between two devastating realities. In one, his wife has died and his son has survived. In the other, it's only his son who lost his life.

A troubled starlet dies in a helicopter crash off the Irish coast after sending a series of mysterious text messages. Three years later, a hungry young reporter desperate for work takes an assignment to write a quickie celebrity biography of her — but finds complexity and danger.

That seemingly accidental death is the catalyst for the events in Bloodland, a new thriller by Irish author Alan Glynn.

Glynn tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Mary Louise Kelly that his book takes the reader from Dublin to New York to the Congo in pursuit of a tangled story of murder, corruption and illegal mining of rare ores.

Country Music Award winner Gretchen Peters had an eventful 2010: The BP oil spill washed up on her doorstep, a good friend committed suicide, and her son announced that he's transgender. The last of those in particular, she says, got her thinking about personal conflict.

"[My son] had withheld a very basic and large truth about himself for a long, long time," Peters says. "And I thought, what's the difference here — except a difference of degree — between him and anyone else? I think all of us withhold truths about ourselves that we think would make other people like us less, or accept us less."

The new iPhone app called "Zombies, RUN!" is not your standard running game.

It's designed to encourage folks, such as say, video gamers, who aren't usually associated with exercise to take up running.

British writer Naomi Alderman, who is a gamer herself as well as an Orange-award winning novelist, came up with the idea for "Zombies, RUN!" while in a class for amateur runners she tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Mary-Louise Kelly.

"The start of the course they said to us, "Why do you want to learn how to run?" and one woman said, "I want to be able to out run the zombie hoarde," Alderman explains. "Then I thought, 'Ahh, this would be a good idea for a game.'"

For his third symphony, the 26-year-old American composer Mohammed Fairouz decided to incorporate text in three languages. Poems and Prayers, which had its debut Thursday in New York, features passages in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic.

The symphony was commissioned by Northeastern University, where Fairouz teaches. The idea was to write something exploring the conflicts in the Middle East, so for inspiration, Fairouz delved into the region's poetry — both ancient and modern.

It's been said that there are only seven basic plots in fiction. Pulp novelist William Wallace Cook would beg to differ.

According to Cook, there are a whopping 1,462 plots, all of which he laid out in his 1928 book, Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots.

Plotto has just been reissued for the edification of novelists everywhere. Author Paul Collins, who wrote the introduction to the new edition, tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Mary Louise Kelly that the book came out of Cook's need to sustain a punishing writing pace: In one year, 1910, he churned out more than a book a week.

He took on competition that was much bigger and much faster, but in the end the judges decided Malachy, a Pekingese with a long mop of fur framing his funny little pushed-in face, was the top dog in the land and gave him top honors at the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York.

The New York Times describes his win thus:

"While his six competitors sped around the ring at Madison Square Garden, Malachy moved so deliberately that he only had to make a half circuit on the green carpet. It did not matter. Beneath his long coat and lion's mane — and behind that distinctive pushed-in face — was the club's ultimate champion.

On the eve of the 54th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, the conversation was all about Whitney Houston. The 48-year-old pop diva was discovered dead in her room at the Beverly Hilton Saturday afternoon. The cause of her death was under investigation.

Houston died alone in the same hotel that was the venue for a party she had often entered in triumph: the annual pre-Grammy Awards bash given by her mentor, recording impresario Clive Davis.

It was at Davis' A-list party that a teenaged Houston was introduced to the recording industry. It was at another Davis party, says Billboard editorial director Bill Werde, that an important milestone occurred.

It's not all about sports bars and Bowl parties; Hippo Editor Amy Diaz has a few suggestions for those who want a little art this weekend, including a new exhibit at The Currier, a trio of one act plays, and some opera. 

Richard Starkey always had dreams of being a musician — long before he took up the drums, joined The Beatles and became Ringo Starr. But his career didn't end when the band broke up.

"I was asked many times to write my autobiography, but basically, people only want the eight years I was in The Beatles. They're not really interested in my before life or after life," Starr says. "There would be 10 volumes before I got to The Beatles."

Starr's 17th solo album, Ringo 2012, is out this week. Here, he discusses it with NPR's David Greene.

Since Adam wrote here yesterday of science as a meaningful pursuit, or better, of how a science-inspired way of quenching our unquenchable thirst for knowledge about ourselves and the world will add meaning to one's life, I'd like to take off on a tangent also springing from Umair Haque's recent blog post in the Harvard Business Review.

You can catch up on the Oscar-nominees this weekend, but there's also a chance to catch a rocumentary on Portsmouth's music scene in the 90's and ask the screenwriter of Ground Hog Day why he wanted Bill Murray to live forever.  Hippo Editor Amy Diaz has the popcorn.