Is caste the American class system?
Only in fiction did Faulkner dare to reveal what he knew about the code of caste
Books and Arts
Monday
Men of letters
The Crichel Boys: Scenes from England’s Last Literary Salon by Simon Fenwick reviewed
Sunday
The legend of forgotten musical genius Mieczyslaw Weinberg
Dismissed as a dime-store Shostakovich, then praised as a major modern composer
Vacation time
The enduring popularity of the Vacation series reflects not just the American appetite for travel, but also that old American virtue of gung-ho optimism
Wednesday
So many stories are boring
Adam McKay’s podcast offers an antidote
The last American video store
Video killed the video store
Nature is healing
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn reviewed
Along came Bill Evans
No matter his personal woes, Evans almost always vouchsafed his listeners something not merely to dig but to cherish
Monday
The soul of Flannery O’Connor
Was Flannery O’Connor a racist, or was she not?
Meet the Medici at the Met
Bad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness
Sunday
Take a trip with Hawkwind
Hawkwind played notes from underground, but they had a global influence
Friday
A film festival fiasco in Narrowsburg, New York
Castellano and Castaldo descended upon Narrowsburg with a gust of wind, declaring that they would open an acting school, start a film festival and make it ‘the Sundance of the East’
Korean film has mastered the supernatural horror genre
For those of us who have followed Korean film for many years, the triumph of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden or the living-dead series Kingdom on Netflix came as no surprise
Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans
For Cousteau, scientific investigation, combined with the potential for good image-making, presented an unavoidable hazard to sea life
Is Sohrab Ahmari a Satanic ogre?
The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari reviewed
Berlin has always been a Faustian metropolis
A new history of east and west, best and worst
Wednesday
School of hard Knox
As Amanda Knox walks listeners through the day of her arrest, it’s apparent she is still upset
Tuesday
I’m turning Japanese
In the Eighties, Japan had prosperity, optimism, loads of bizarre porn and the solace of technological gadgetry
Read all over
Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s ‘Girl Stunt Reporters’ by Kim Todd reviewed
Monday
Dark knight of cool
Poor Chet Baker. He really was born to be blue
