Together, alone | The Spectator

Joe Exotic is an ordinary American

Netflix’s Tiger King has been touted as ‘the only show that’s crazier than the world outside right now’. Besides being weird beyond measure — a seven-part freak show combining meth-heads, involuntary amputees, firearms, sex cults, gay polygamy, cocaine, rednecks, attempted murder and, yes, more tigers than you could shake a flaming torch at — it offers fascinating parallels with the most important debate of our time: the eternal conflict between liberty and authority. As you may have noticed, this coronavirus pandemic has brought out the best and the worst in people and produced two highly polarized visions of the world.

David Prycejones

Dedicated to literature

The convention is that if you happen to meet authors and have just bought or acquired a book of theirs, you ask them to sign it. Particularly stuffy authors might refuse, but in most cases they feel flattered and duly inscribe your name and theirs on the title page or the flyleaf of the book in question. If the mood is right, they may add ‘with best wishes’ or something of the sort. At a superficial level, of course, such signatures are only the equivalent of an autograph album. There’s more to it than that, however. Added value perhaps, but association certainly. The human race lives by the stories we tell ourselves about our identity and our purposes, and that signature helps to make the author’s story part of the reader’s story.

Bill Kauffman

What can we learn about coronavirus from classic cinema?

Batavia, New York With the first blizzard of every winter I take John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-Bound off the bookshelf, and though I never quite make it through to the end, when the snow is ‘melted in the genial glow’, I feel as if I have hunkered down for the week with the ‘Barefoot Boy’ poet’s besieged shut-ins. So when the Kung Flu — excuse me; I forgot for a moment that mild humor is now as verboten as sweaty raves and square dances — kicked its way into our lives, but before the local library shut down, I, like everyone else — well, like a tiny sliver of the populace — reached for Camus’s...Camus’s...oh, the hell with it: The Plague by Albert Camus.

Philip Hensher

Going both ways

Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for instance, may be at once one of the million speakers of Berom, one of the 64 million speakers of Hausa and one of the 1.13 billion speakers of English. The same pattern is repeated across the globe.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Salvant grace

Jazz has traditionally been a male preserve — all 15 of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra are men — but jazz singing is the exception. Later this year, Netflix will release Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, based on the superb play by August Wilson and starring Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis. If the movie adheres to the spirit of the play and its subject (Rainey, the ‘Mother of the Blues’, sang frankly sexual songs in a moaning style), it is sure to ignite a fresh interest in her tempestuous life and career. The imperious Rainey wasn’t simply a gifted singer, but also an astute talent-spotter.

Will Lloyd

The similarity between Charles Dickens and Armando Iannucci

A true adaptation of David Copperfield is neither possible nor even desirable. It would last as long as it takes to read the novel, say, two weeks. The principal cast would number in the dozens, and the extras — the clerks, lawyers, policemen, landlords, cooks, chimney sweeps, pickpockets, sailors, ministers, soldiers, beggars, porters, carters, fishermen, coachmen, pimps, gypsies and whores — in the hundreds of thousands. Replicating the cellars, garrets, galleries, museums, bridges, pubs, factories, shipyards, docks, scaffolds and debtors’ prisons of Victorian London would require construction on a Himalayan scale.

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