Bite Me, Tony

It only took 4 years but I finally got around to watching Bong Joon-ho's bleakly funny, award-winning classic,  Parasite . Not too shabby considering the length of time it took for me to discover his 2006 giant monster movie, The Host , which is--unsurprisingly--often funny and a little bleak. The two movies also share the same lead actor, Song Kang-ho, who plays a down-at-heels dad in both films. In Parasite , his entire family is unemployed with little hope of remedying their situation anytime soon. The Kims live in squalor, earning spare change by assembling pizza boxes for a local pizza delivery company. Their semi-underground apartment is cramped, smelly and apparently infested with "stink bugs". The bathroom toilet is situated on a shelf next to a window, and only a couple of feet from the ceiling; actually using the toilet would seem to require some nimble bit of contortionism. Things aren't look rosy for the Kim Family. And then one day the son runs into an o

James Purdy was a gay American author whose name I've occasionally seen mentioned in various magazine articles about gay American authors without ever familiarizing myself with any of his work. For some reason I always thought he was the author of  Deliverance ,  which was actually penned by James Dickey, who was decidedly  not  gay.  Purdy, in addition to being a novelist, also wrote short stories and plays, although none of his work gained widespread acceptance during his lifetime. A member of Gertrude Abercrombie 's underground salon  during the 1930's, Purdy was highly influenced by the " New Negro Renaissance ", then flourishing with the talents of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughn and Dizzie Gillespie. While Purdy's work was championed by a number of literary notables (as well as the wealthy and influential Abercrombie, self-styled  Queen of the Bohemian Artists ), many critics found his tales of societal misfits to be outside the bounds of good