Moby-Dick may be the first work of western fiction to feature a same-sex marriage: Ishmael, the loner narrator (famous for the most ambiguous opening line in literature) gets hitched – in bed – to the omni-tattooed Pacific islander, Queequeg: “He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.” Other scenes are deeply homoerotic: sailors massage each others’ hands in a tub of sperm oil and there is an entire chapter devoted to foreskins (albeit of the whalish variety). Indeed, the whole book is a love letter (sadly unreciprocated) from a besotted Melville to his hero, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he wrote: “You have sunk your northern roots down into my southern soul.” Faced with such unbridled flagrancy, the US establishment has never been keen to accept the idea that Melville may just possibly have been gay. And it must have rankled to have the brilliance of his book pointed out to them by a bunch of British queer writers. When a modest Everyman edition appeared in London 20 years after Melville’s death in 1891, DH Lawrence declared it a work of futurism before futurism had been invented; EM Forster and WH Auden extolled its queer nature. Virginia Woolf read it three times, comparing it to Wuthering Heights in its strangeness, and noted in her 1926 diary that no biographer would believe her work was inspired by the vision of “a fin rising on a wide blank sea”.

Race (like gender, sexuality and other markers of identity) shapes travel – and backpacking especially – in such palpable ways. As a black woman, I find there arespaces where my race and gender make me invisible, which means that I can immerse myself more fully into the lives of those around me. I can take a series of public buses from Cape Town to Nairobi over a month and have no one notice that I am thousands of kilometres from home. And there are spaces where the colour of my skin makes me hyper-visible, like taking the train from Vienna to Berne and being the only people in our carriage to get their identity documents checked.

Yet at the same time, Melville’s book subverted those ideas. It tacitly addresses slavery and struggle; it is not a coincidence that one of its most extraordinary chapters, “The Whiteness of the Whale” overturns a notional purity. “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” Melville writes, and cites images of the “higher horror in this whiteness of . . . woe”. Among many contemporary artists inspired by the book is the internationally celebrated Ellen Gallagher – New England-born, of Cape Verdean and Irish parents – who subtly interrogates the implicit themes of race in Moby-Dick through her Watery Ecstatic series. Add to this Melville’s astonishingly overt homoeroticism (not least the “marriage” of Ishmael and the tattooed South Sea islander Queequeg, one of the first persons of colour to appear in western fiction), and you have a book almost postmodern in its elegant ellipses.

Mas continuo sendo coveiro porque aqui já aprendi muito sobre o ser humano. Quando você está na parte de cima da pirâmide social, todas as coisas que você olha são iguais. É como quando você está no avião e todos os pontinhos lá embaixo parecem a mesma coisa. Mas de onde eu estou, aqui embaixo, consigo enxergar o detalhe. Como coveiro, vejo a dor e a morte em tamanho natural. E foi durante a pandemia que eu vi as coisas mais sombrias da minha carreira, em mais de trinta anos que faço isso.

Western values. The free world. The liberal order. Over the three weeks since Putin declared war on ordinary Ukrainians, these phrases have been slung about more regularly, more loudly and more unthinkingly than at any time in almost two decades. Perhaps like me you thought such puffed-chest language and inane categorisation had been buried under the rubble of Iraq. Not any more. Now they slip out of the mouths of political leaders and slide into the columns of major newspapers and barely an eyebrow is raised. The Ukrainians are fighting for “our” freedom, it is declared, in that mode of grand solipsism that defines this era. History is back, chirrup intellectuals who otherwise happily stamp on attempts by black and brown people to factcheck the claims made for American and British history.

“The fossil fuel industry’s so-called solution to this crisis is nothing more than a recipe to enable fossil-fueled fascists like Vladimir Putin for years to come,” said Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action. “As long as our economy is dependent on fossil fuels, we will be at the mercy of petro-dictators who wield their influence on global energy prices like a weapon.

O dono da casa ensina ao adolescente, quase sem querer, todo um método de leitura atenta e detalhista – Borges ensinava, escreve Manguel, “não apenas compartilhando comigo sua paixão por esses grandes escritores, mas também me mostrando como trabalhavam, desmontando os parágrafos com a intensidade amorosa de um relojoeiro”. Assim como a de todos os leitores, a biblioteca de Borges, completa Manguel, “era sua autobiografia”. “Para Borges, o âmago da realidade estava nos livros: em ler livros, escrever livros, conversar sobre livros”, escreve Manguel, e continua: “De maneira visceral, ele sabia que dava continuidade a um diálogo iniciado havia milhares de anos, o qual ele acreditava que nunca terminaria. Livros restauravam o passado”.

It’s an astonishing work rate that has surely taken its toll. Arthritis means that Dylan can no longer hold a guitar; onstage he plays, and is propped up by, an electric piano. His voice – rarely a thing of beauty and most often an abrasively compelling affair described by David Bowie as “like sand and glue” – is in tatters, obliging him to abandon singing altogether for gravelly, dramatic declamation on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Yet like Matisse, forced to give up oils and canvas for cut-outs around the same age, Dylan remains obstinately true to his art, “refusing to let his career become embalmed” as Paul Morley puts it in his new book, out next month. Once you stop creating, you’re in the past.

Lindsay Ellis’ video “Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire About Nazis” argues convincingly that a seemingly lightweight approach can be more subversive than treating Nazis as demonic villains with a coherent ideology that need to be fought on its own ground. She makes a case that the apparent bad taste of depicting neo-Nazis as laughable buffoons in The Producers has proven resistant to co-option by fascists, while the way Edward Norton’s neo-Nazi character is framed by director Tony Kaye and the articulate nature of his racist arguments in American History X upend its intended message, leading it to find a cult following among contemporary fascists. Raiders is shallow by design, with no reflection on how Indiana might share elements of the ideology he’s fighting, but it cedes no ground to the aesthetic of “fascinating fascism.” Named by Susan Sontag in a 1974 essay, the concept suggests, in films like The Night Porter and The Damned, that Nazism was a playground of kinky sex.

When I was working at the museum, I remember noticing something. They have this Buchla 100 modular system and I had two oscillators set in tune; I was just listening to them drift in and out of one another. For a while I didn’t understand what was happening; I didn’t realize that the oscillators were actually going out of tune, but it was a very interesting experience. Then, the next day, I went to play an acoustic organ and I was just sitting there holding an octave – basically two oscillators tuned in unison – and listening to it do the same thing, fluctuating. It was really an important discovery for me that the two were linked and that was what I was interested in, these instabilities that only certain instruments have.

Here’s the odd thing—26 years on, he hasn’t stopped. He’s been playing about 100 shows annually ever since, growling through a set of songs old and new with a small band. It’s an endeavor that for a good chunk of each year keeps him on a private bus and, in the U.S. at least, in relatively crummy hotel and motel rooms. (He’s said to prefer places that have windows that open and allow him to sleep with his pet mastiffs. Beyond that, they are places fans wouldn’t expect to find him.) The shows at first may have been a tonic, but over time they revealed themselves to be a panacea. It must have struck Dylan: How could he look foolish if he just kept doing the same thing? If he were an artist, he would continue to create and show his art publicly. If he were a celebrity, he would appear in public. And if he were a seer, a prophet, or even a god, well, he would let folks pay and see for themselves how mortal such figures actually were. And far from saturating the market, he has created a new industry for himself as a touring artist. On a good night he makes some of his best-known songs unrecognizable, and on a bad one you come out wondering what it was, exactly, you’ve just seen. So far this year, the 73-year-old has played in Japan (17 shows), Hawaii (two), Ireland, Turkey, and nearly 20 other cities in the hinterlands of Europe; he’s headed now to more than a dozen shows in eight different cities in Australia and New Zealand—and this is before what should be a fall run through the States. Robert Shelton, the New York Times writer who first noticed Dylan, labored on a biography for more than 20 years; seeing the star’s unstable arc on its publication in 1986, he titled it, grandly, No Direction Home. Dylan hadn’t even begun not to go home.

Moreover, billionaires’ extravagant wealth is by and large not spent, as Zuckerberg suggests, on cutting edge research and philanthropic efforts. After they’ve bought up enough yachts and private jets they mainly invest in making themselves richer through casino-style financial speculation and in luxury real estate in starkly unequal cities like San Francisco, Miami and New York, where mostly vacant homes act as safety deposit boxes to shield wealth from taxation. Their money might also end up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, where it can sit undisturbed by the long arm of the state. Very little of that ever trickles down to the 99%, where inequality has skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.

“I remember that when I worked on the Buchla at NYU for Chry-Ptus there were those sounds that I got by feedback, which I tried to find again with the synthesizer,” she recalled in an interview with Emmanuel Holterbach. “Beatings, pulsations, sustained sounds that evolved by beats, a kind of transposition of the re-injection procedure. It’s just that with the Buchla you could control things much more rigorously and it was I myself who made them move. At the same time I also kept the system of two tapes, which could play with a different synchronization. I kept that principle of mobility. It is improvising by itself all the time. In some way it is improvising itself.”

If classical music wants to reach a wider audience it must first understand that new audience. That new audience is more likely to be found at the fringes of classical music - among Ludovico Einaudi and André Rieu fans for instance - than among devotees of death metal and dubstep. (A sobering observation by a reader about André Rieu should be compulsory reading for all critics - follow this link to read it.) Critics, and, indeed, the whole classical fraternity, could learn much from studying the Compassionate Listening Project*. Members of this non-profit project have trained themselves in deep listening, which is something the visionary Pauline Oliveros advocated. This involves listening with care, attention, and deep compassion to every side of a difficult situation, with the goal of transforming separation and conflict into an opportunity for connection.