Reviews and News:
Matei Calinescu’s The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter, published shortly after Khrushchev’s thaw ended, captures the “crucial features” of life under Soviet totalitarianism—“the strange unreality of the world” and its “sad humor.” The central character is Zacharias Lichter, “an aging Romanian Jew who seems to come from one of Martin Buber’s Hassidic stories and lives the life of an eccentric beggar in a Bucharest untouched by history or politics. Lichter spends his time in the city’s parks and taverns, preaching to friends and acquaintances, among whom the most important are the always silent, half-asleep drunkard Leopold Nacht, considered by Lichter to be the deepest philosopher around, and the practical, helpful Dr. S., whose competence and skills in matters of psychology make Lichter call him a true demon. Zacharias Lichter’s mission in life has been defined by an earth-shaking mystic experience during which, fallen on the ground in a public garden and surrounded by giggling passers-by, Lichter realizes that God’s flame struck him. ‘Its flash had blinded me,’ he testifies, ‘striking me like a stone, deafening me with its roar, parching my mouth with heat, and leaving behind a terrible thrust.’ Strange visions, humans with heads of eagles, frogs, and rats, some showing forked tongues of snakes, surround him. When at last things return to normal, God’s flame continues to burn from afar, in silence.”
The poet Philip Levine loved jazz and recorded several readings of his poems set to music before he died. Those recordings have now been released. The album is called The Poetry of Jazz.
How the EU privacy law, which goes into effect on May 25, will change the web: “The rule, called General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, focuses on ensuring that users know, understand, and consent to the data collected about them. Under GDPR, pages of fine print won’t suffice. Neither will forcing users to click yes in order to sign up.”
Leonard Bernstein’s daughter remembers their “raucous” household: “It was always full of friends and relatives, extra chairs getting dragged up to the dining room table. My sister was born later but my brother and I came up together and we shared a room. We would be in our beds at night and we could hear the grownups downstairs, carrying on on the piano and laughing. Board games, charades—we thought grownups had fun all the time. We couldn’t wait to be grownups.”
Parul Sehgal reviews Amit Majmudar’s verse translation of the 2000-year-old Bhagavad Gita.
When Christian rock was cool: “Larry Norman was perhaps the most complex figure in 20th-century American music. He was a mess of contradictions, a singer with a message who grew more contradictory the more he tried to keep his message pure. He struggled quite visibly, grappling both with his own personal failings and with a movement that he helped start but which leapt beyond his control, mutating into something he hated and which had world-changing implications. Who was Larry Norman? He’s one of the fathers of spiritual rock music, ‘the Forrest Gump of evangelical Christianity’—which puts him on the front lines of America’s culture wars, though on whose side it’s hard to say—and the subject of Gregory Alan Thornbury’s fantastic new biography, Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music?”
Essay of the Day:
Today, northeastern elites visit coal country “to hug themselves in self-delight for their social, educational, and moral superiority.” This wasn’t always the case, as F. H. Buckley points out in First Things. Why not?
“How different things were in the older literature of poverty. In 1936 Fortune magazine commissioned James Agee to report on the lives of three Southern sharecropper families. The piece was never published, but later became Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the most famous account of Depression-era poverty. Unlike the Washington Post reporters, Agee was sufficiently abashed to recognize the obscene voyeurism behind his reportage. A generation later, Michael Harrington revealed in The Other America that, for the poor, little had changed. He brought his readers face to face with the hidden poverty of the ghettos, sweatshops, and small farms of America. His book is credited as the inspiration for Medicaid and Medicare.
“The earlier writers described the poor with compassion, as fellow Americans. At times, the programs they proposed—such as the War on Poverty—were ill-conceived, but there was no sense of moral superiority in this literature, even over those who might have brought their poverty on themselves. The desperately poor were broken in body and spirit; while they didn’t belong to anyone or anything, they still were our brothers in humanity and citizenship. If they lived their lives at a level beneath that necessary for human decency, we were called upon to do something about it. In Harrington’s case, that had meant living with them in one of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker hospices.”
Photos: Mexican housing developments
Poem: Ernest Hilbert, “Alpine”
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