I recently discovered the podcast “Better Known” which is “about people’s passions which they think should be better known.” Over the best seven years, they have interviewed over 300 guests and asked them to name six things they love that should be better known. Here’s my crack at this challenge.
Walker Percy. A once popular novelist, he is mostly forgotten today, but I think he is among the best at diagnosing the spiritual dilemmas of our world. The mysteries for him are why one feels better during a hurricane than on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon or why looking at another person is so different than looking at anything else. People usually point to his first novel, The Moviegoer, as his best (it beat out Catch 22, Franny and Zooey, and Revolutionary Road for the National Book Award), but I prefer his others like Love in the Ruins or The Thanatos Syndrome, which take on a larger canvas including the polarization of society (which he presciently saw as severe back in the seventies and eighties). I still sometimes think of one of his thought experiments, a variation on Nozick’s experience machine, where euthanasia involves either continuously pressing a button that stimulates the brain’s pleasure center until one expires or simply flipping a switch with the same result. I would plunk for his non-fiction Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book as a favorite, though I’m still waiting to meet someone who shares my enthusiasm for it. (Its few fans on the internet tend to be hard-core Catholics, a faith to which Percy converted.) It is a half-serious half-parody survival manual for our world that lays out the pros and cons of various ways of living in it. Unfortunately, it may soon lose its legibility given that it asks for familiarity with bits of popular culture (like the Phil Donahue Show) that are fast becoming ancient history. In the meantime, maybe it will still be of use to some people. And if Tyler Cowen is right that the important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers, then Percy may show them the way.
Brno. The Czech Republic’s second city has a few things to recommend it. Mendel discovered the laws of genetics here and his garden can still be visited. The architectural style of functionalism found a home in Brno, most famously Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat but also many nice pieces by Brno’s own Bohuslav Fuchs and an ahead of its time exhibition grounds. The composer Leoš Janáček spent much of his life here and you can visit his haunts along with the forest where the Cunning Little Vixen was set. The country’s two most famous writers, Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal, were born in Brno, though they tend to be associated with other places. The city is more loyal to the artists who remained like the comedian-actor Bolek Polivka or the poet Jan Skacel. Urbanistically, it is a miniature Vienna with smaller versions of its Ringstrasse and Opera House, though its skyline is dominated by a former Habsburg prison rather than a castle. It is home to one of the world’s few museums devoted to the Roma and its outskirts feature the battlefield of Austerlitz (setting for War and Peace), two churches by Baroque master Jan Santini Aichl, and a fun set of caves. Its size is perfect for giving you the central European experience of cafes and culture without the hassles of the over-touristed capital cities (even Bratislava has become an unlikely tourist trap). The main things that are missing are more of a Jewish presence (though Brno’s small Jewish cemetery features the grave of the actor Hugo Haas) and a large river (though the town is working on making its two smaller ones more accessible). Indeed, Brno takes its “second city” status as a challenge and cultivates its own personality and even way of speaking.
Preston Sturges. Comedy tends to date quickly, but I feel like Sturges’s black-and-white films from the thirties and forties somehow survive. They could be classed along with other screwball comedies from the era that featured fast-paced repartee, but I always felt that they contained something deeper. (Ebert quotes Howard Hawks saying that the problem with his Bringing Up Baby was that there was no baseline of sanity.) The best might be The Lady Eve about the romance of an ophiologist (expert on snakes)/heir to an ale fortune and a con woman. It contains not one but two of the best closing lines in film history. And this clip is one of my favorite scenes.
Or read Ebert’s review. Equally esteemed is Sullivan’s Travels about a successful director of comedies (his last hit was Ants in Your Plants of 1939) who wants to make a film with real meaning (the Coen Brothers later borrowed his intended title Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?) and sets out as a hobo to find the real America with unpredictable results. Just about all of his films, however, are worth watching just to see if you can keep up with all the clever lines and maybe to restore some of your faith in humanity.
Rickie Lee Jones. My favorite music is generally R&B, soul, and Motown, but I wasn’t sure what was overlooked from that genre. Maybe Jill Scott? I feel like the older stuff is mostly pretty well-known. That’s why I chose Rickie Lee Jones. She was a star for a brief moment in the seventies. Maybe you know her hit “Chuck E.’s in Love”. But I really enjoyed her off-beat later albums like Flying Cowboys. I didn’t know the backstory until recently when I found a Ted Gioia piece about her:
He puts it this way, “She seemed poised not only to have hit songs - which, after all, aren’t a rarity in the entertainment world - but to do something even more remarkable, namely redefine the parameters of pop singing.” He says that she has a different concept of time than other singers. I wouldn’t have known that or been able to put it that way, but it seems right to me. Again Gioia, “She could make it seem as if her voice was floating over the ground beat with the freshness and changeability of the shifting colors of a sunset.” This ultimately wasn’t the path to stardom, but she followed her own muse. Here is a clip of one of my favorites, but you can also listen to Gioia’s playlist.
Biographical Dictionaries. I’m not sure if it is fair to put the following books together. Each is a series of mini-biographies - of authors, intellectuals, sports stars, filmmakers, and philosophers. The best is probably John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists, which consists of 287 essays about English-language novelists. Every one is full of insights, both the writers you’ve read everything by (like Salinger) and those you will probably never read (John Bunyan, anyone?). Some of my favorites are portraits of once bestselling but now forgotten writers like Mrs. Humphrey Ward or Robert Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian). Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia takes a broader approach, providing introductions to his personal touchstones ranging from Ernst Junger to Dick Cavett, though the best are the forgotten Jewish intellectuals like Egon Friedell or Peter Altenberg who defined German-language style and held court at Viennese cafes because the universities wouldn’t have them. Joe Posnanski’s Baseball 100 may not be quite as universal, baseball is mostly an American sport, but it is often poignant and gets at the curious roots of fame and success, the relations of fathers and sons, and how to evaluate black players excluded from the major leagues. Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball is not quite so deep, his goal is to evaluate success on the court rather than beyond it, but it was good enough to inspire Tyler Cowen’s GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time, another addition to the genre and the first to be integrated with AI. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t say that David Thompson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film is overlooked, but its pointed and personal descriptions of actors and directors are essential (even if it is overloaded with information that is now accessible on imdb). Perhaps his Have You Seen…? could be added here with its mini takes on 1000 great films beginning with “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”. I would round out the group with a couple of volumes by Mark Lilla on political philosophers that are based on his essays in the NYRB and cover some of the more controversial thinkers of the past century; the titles - The Reckless Mind and The Shipwrecked Mind - give you a strong hint about where he is headed, even as the portrayals take its subjects seriously as thinkers.
52 Kards. Everyone should learn to do something with their hands. Juggling is a good first place to start and you should be able to keep three balls in the air after a day or two. Sleight of hand magic is another place to start and easier than you think. I’d use a site like 52 Kards to build up a few tricks that require some dexterity (rather than ones that depend on a set-up). You might start with the Tenkai vanish which you should be able to manage in a few minutes. If you spend a little more time developing a front and back palm and a snap change, you’ve already got a nice basis for impressing kids. After you get a little confidence with these, there are lots of directions to go - an easy and effective one to pick up is the card to mouth - and you can always keep your hands busy practicing them. My pet theory is that exposing yourself to lots of illusions is a good way to train your mind, but I have yet to find any evidence of this. If you prefer your challenges in pencil and paper form, I’d recommend problems from the linguistics olympiads which don’t require any knowledge of the languages in question (here is the international version and here is the North American version.