Photo By Ezra Gut
Sometimes I go down to Sodom
to talk to Lot’s Wife
where she looks out at the Dead Sea
Drowning in War
Hold fast to the garden,
the little blue shine of a bird.
Its long, curved beak probes for nectar
in the flowering bush next to my kitchen.
Make this bird as necessary as knowing
what the government does in my name.
The Lost Generation
C’est un peu, dans chacun de ces hommes, Mozart assassiné.
I enter the hotel where Ricky has been staying since a few days after October 18 when she was forced to leave her house in Metula. In that home next to the northern border of Israel she had been dealing with her Parkinsons’ with walks in the garden in the morning and the afternoon, grab bars in strategic places, meals provided by a local organization, and visits and deliveries from shops she has known for 50-odd years. Now she is in a small room far from the elevator and can’t make it to the dining room because there are some stairs she cannot manage.
When Is Anti-Zionism Bigotry?
October 7 approaches. Many Israelis will be lighting memorial candles on the anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel. The occasion will also be marked by anti-Zionist demonstrations all across the West. It’s been a year of rockets and drones, rhizomic tunnels, assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank, slaughter in Gaza and now Lebanon. A zeeser jahr—happy Jewish new year? I think not.
Dirty Hands, Doomy Doctors & Young Mr. Faye
Three things are required which are very rarely found together. Genius and charm (do not imagine that the people can be made to swallow anything insipid, anything weak). A very sure tact. And finally (what a contradiction?) there must be a divine innocence, the childlike sublimity which one occasionally glimpses in certain young beings but only for a brief moment, like a flash of heaven.
I flashed on Michelet’s insight when the new president of Sénégal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, denounced a “dog-eat-dog world” in his address at the UN last week…
https://youtu.be/ba5-H1SbD9w?si=sNpgQYY1wsgDEEu6
Hitler’s Loathsome Paladins
Some readers might immediately recognize the name and distinction of Richard Evans, now Sir Richard Evans, the author of the study Hitler’s People.[1] Evans, the retired Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, was the scholarly companion-in-arms to Deborah Lipstadt when she was accused of libel by the crypto-Nazi provocateur David Irving. Even under the painful constraints of British libel law, requiring the alleged libeler (Lipstadt) to prove that she was right in having debased the libeled party, Lipstadt would win the case, thanks to Evans on her side. Irving had sought to enrich himself at Lipstadt’s and Penguin Books’ expense for falsely terming him a “Holocaust-denier” and “an ardent follower of Adolf Hitler.” Evans proved her correct.
In Hitler’s People, Evans makes a new departure from his previous achievement as a political and social historian of Nazi Germany. Here, he considers the character of the perpetrator. Who are these individuals who–along with Hitler, whom they worshipped—conspired to commit these monumental crimes against humanity, and quite particularly against the Jews? Is there a “new acquist/of true experience” to be had in examining the brief lives of the best-known criminals of the Nazi Reich?[2]—an experience, which Evans hopes, will equip us to better deal with the likes of a Trump and an Orbán (whom we’ve recently met on these pages as members of Autocracy, Inc., the worldwide collective of autocrats)? The jury is out.
Barry Lynn’s Anti-Monopoly Jeremiad
In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois, in “Black Reconstruction,” assailed the American system of racism. Key both to his indictment of America and his dream for it, Du Bois provided perhaps the most perfect distillation of the American ideal of liberty:
“America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men.”
Du Bois ended with a quiet exclamation: “What an idea.”
What a piece by Barry Lynn in the September Harpers where he quotes from Black Reconstruction (and underscores Du Bois’s wonder-ender). Lynn’s “The Anti-trust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech”—is a sharp yet rangy polemic.
Adams Chronicle
Every fall semester, as I did again last week, I have the privilege of showing my students episode 2 in HBO’s marvelous dramatization of the life of John Adams. Episode 2 covers the debate in the Continental Congress over declaring independence from Great Britain.
Hunter Harris Goes High
Hunter Harris’s talkback to our masters of entertainment has proven she has what it takes to become a vital voice of America. When she aims at official powers-that-be, the country benefits from her wit. Not that our ruling classes float above Harris’s usual beat. Her reporting in this swatch from her latest column places Mayor Adams inside the celebrity terrarium…
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is going through it to a degree that would make SZA¹ pick up her pen or make Martin Scorsese start storyboarding the saga of a new criminal conspiracy. On Friday afternoon Adams pleaded not guilty to five federal corruption charges, per The City.² He is the first New York City mayor to face criminal charges while in office. The news of his indictment went through Twitter like the night Trump got Covid, or the day Azealia Banks said Grimes smells “like a roll of nickels.”
RIP The Voice and the Vibe (James Earl Jones & Frankie Beverly)
Two African Americans who represented the dreams of their community made their transition this week, and I’m taking a moment to celebrate how they embody the apex, diversity, and massive creativity of blackness.
Joy And Pain x 2
Donna Allen’s cover came through to me before Maze’s original. I dug how she seems to hold something back even as she doubles-down–wailing, crying, moaning for her life. Allen’s version gets all of “Joy and Pain’s” deep bluesy amor fati. She’s performing for adults. This isn’t kid’s stuff…
Fast Pitch
“Reaction Time”, 2024, oil on linen, 20 x 16 inches.
A ballsy one from “Quickies”—Larry Madrigal’s new solo exhibition at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles.
Harmon Killebrew
The other night I learned what sui generis meant.
And then: schadenfreude.
I even felt schadenfreude when the Republicans couldn’t elect a speaker.
I looked into Marjorie Taylor Greene’s eyes: cold, vacant, hateful, ignorant.
Then I traded her for an outfielder who could also pitch.
……a throwback.
Lonely Ghazal
The house smelled of cats, mildew, loneliness.
Through empty rooms, the wind blew loneliness.
Emergent
Thanks to the Harris-Walz campaign, The Democracy is a deep far from where we were six weeks ago. There are countertruths implicit in this transition—lasting lessons about continuity and change that might even turn around exit leftists. (The breed who avowed earlier this summer: “We’re leaving the USA when Trump wins.”)
The Wind from the Midwest
We made it home. I’m sitting on the deck in 90-degree heat worrying that the 103 degrees we drove through in Nebraska might be on its way here. Uh-oh.
At any rate, a few random thoughts while driving across the West.
The Art of Social Criticism (Excerpt from Barbara Hardy’s “The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray”)
C.L.R. James once avowed that his moral imagination derived from Vanity Fair. When it came to James’ formation, Thackeray, not Marx, was the Man. I can take a hint so I read Vanity Fair to my son when he was an elementary schoolboy. What a fuckin’ book! (And not just for the adult in the room, though I won’t speak for the youth.)
I was thrilled to find out (recently) the late critic and scholar Barbara Hardy was alive to the artful social criticism in Thackeray’s corpus. Fifty years on, Hardy’s The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray (1972) remains a vital book, thanks to Hardy’s “exuberant” readings.
Barbara Hardy: Life and Times of a Subtle Socialist Critic and Literary Scholar
Barbara Gladys Hardy
24 June 1924 – 12 February 2016
When Barbara Hardy died, I lost one of the most profound friendships of my life. This memoir, therefore, will not have the distance of an official memorial. It celebrates a uniquely unusual woman. To meet Barbara was to encounter a woman of buoyant strength, with a capacity for warmth and joy and enthusiasm. It was to encounter a woman with a bold, crystal mind, whose power, precision and largeness of vision possessed extraordinary expansive energy. Her intellectual brilliance was everywhere apparent. She had a special charisma.
Rushdie’s Knife with Occam’s Razor
Salman Rushdie has written an eloquent memoir, a meditation on his near murder by an assassin’s knife, called, simply, Knife. On seeing this book, I immediately recalled another book title, a German counterthrust to Adorno’s 1951-dictum, “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric). The title of this resistant text, which appeared in 1955, is Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer: Lyriker zu ihren Gedichten (My Poem is My Knife: Lyric Poets on Their Poems).[1] Here is evidence that men and women will write poems, will continue to take dictation from their personalità poetica; but in this instance they do so at an extraordinary distance from their recent history, from the Nazi catastrophe and its aftershocks. An engaged German poetry needed another generation of writers.
What does that mean, “my poem is my knife”?
The Uses of the Rothermans
Originally published in “New Mexico Quarterly” in 1953.
I was eleven when my uncle closed with the Rothermans. This was 1933, in a village on the south shore of Long Island that is now pure metropolis and that was then becoming a suburb. My uncle’s family and my sister and I (our parents were killed in an auto accident in the mid-twenties) had moved shortly before from a great, white-pillared, Georgian house that faced the new golf course. The vicissitudes of a stock called Vanadium were the cause of the move: the house, the Lincolns, Robb (the former dumptruck driver who chauffeured them), Anna and Maria, illiterate German housemaids in their teens, help that had been pressed a year before from “The Daisy Huggub Agency” in Hempstead, and some other ill-chosen earnests of marginal gain — all were let go at once. The Georgian house, a product of my uncle’s massive pride, was sold to the Jewish owner of a chain of retail jewelry stores.
Larry David, I Want My Life Back
An open letter
I know fame.
I’ve experienced fame.
And I now know the price of fame.
All without being famous.
Larry David, I want my life back.
I notice the illusion starts with the sideways glance, followed by a series of yes/no/can’t/could/not sure/but hey that leads to the soft opening: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Larry David?” Ever? My new friend, you are the third person today.