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The Weekend Butler: The Italian “Gone with the Wind,” stuff I just learned, and a classic TV hit that would be a hit today
By
Published: Mar 24, 2021
Category:
Weekend
DID SHE READ YOUR MIND?
Corinne Putili, on Sherry Turkle, in The New Yorker
This year has offered a stark and painful lesson about social deprivation. After a year away from people who don’t live in my house, I’m finding it harder to respond to the increasingly rare texts from loved ones asking how I am, and I notice that the texts I send asking that question often go unanswered. Too much has built up to compress into a text. There used to be so many entry points to conversation, little stories that let us ease into or dance around deeper subjects: the comings and goings, commutes and dumb things people said at work, trips and dates and things we did to amuse ourselves that could be offered as lighter alternatives to what we weren’t ready to share. What I want, more than anything, is simply to be in the presence of the people I love and miss the most—to see how they hold themselves now and what their faces look like when they tell me, with words or tears or silence, what this last year has been like for them. I want them to do the same for me. I want more than can be communicated through a device.
SOMETHING ELSE I JUST LEARNED
Store batteries in the refrigerator. The cold extends battery life.
BET YOU DIDN’T SEE THIS COMING
The newly hired editor of Teen Vogue had to quit before she started the job because of racially charged posts on social media a decade ago. Guess who used worse language on social media? One of the editors who signed the letter demanding her ouster.
ANDREW CUOMO
A few things I didn’t know. From Linda Stasi, I come to praise Cuomo, not to bury him.
WEEKEND READING
Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s only novel was rejected by Italy’s most distinguished publishers, so he died in 1957 without learning that “The Leopard” would become the best selling novel in Italian history — the Sicilian “Gone With the Wind” — and that it would be named by The Observer as one of “the 10 best historical novels” and that Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film adaptation would win the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Also: It’s one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read. To read more and buy the book or stream the movie, click here.
IF I RAN A NETWORK OR A STREAMING SERVICE…
… I would revive this show. Maybe I’d even use the same scripts.
IF I RAN A NETWORK OR A STREAMING SERVICE (PART 2)
The book made the writer’s name. The TV show was a hit in England 70 years ago. If anyone dared to make it now, it would be about the Proud Boys, set later this year. But the original is much more to the point. Console yourself with the short novel: The Four Just Men.
THE WEEKEND MOVIE
If your blood pressure spikes, you’ll wish you could call the Just Men. On Netflix.
