Stephen Boyer and Filip Marinovich (Photo: Marinovich)

If you really want to understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to talk to the poets.

One night last week, late, after ducking out of a birthday party, we wandered down Broadway like we sometimes do now, looking to extend the evening a bit, see what was doing in the park.

Zuccotti was quiet, but charged with energy as it had been for a month and counting. Many of the sleeping bags were already lumpy and zipped tight. Some were moving gently. The library was closed, covered with blue tarps. But two of the librarians, who were also the poets, were still kicking it. They met three weeks ago and are now best friends, they agreed.

These were Stephen Boyer, 27, a former model and paid dominatrix, and Filip Marinovich, 36, a sometime associate professor of poetry.

Not that any of that really matters anymore. “Hierarchies are bullshit,” Mr. Boyer said. In the last three weeks, he had met celebrities, philosophers, politicians—then curled up under a table to await the next unknowable day. “I’m in the most uncomfortable situation I’ve ever been in in my life, and I have more access to the world than ever.”

Sometimes things are their opposites. Mr. Boyer learned this doing his other job, tag-teaming with his girlfriend, dominating people for money. This is physical work, no getting around that, but it’s also psychological. Mostly it’s about power and how to flip it. Good training, actually, for a member of a revolutionary movement.

Mr. Boyer and his girlfriend moved back to the states from London just a few weeks ago, and they were staying in a hotel overlooking ground zero, preparing for a trip to DC, a business trip. Lots of clients down there—all the doms know it’s the best place in the country to beat people and humiliate them and maybe fuck them with a strap-on for money.

When he reunited with his New York friends, they were going on and on about Occupy Wall Street. “I was like, ‘Let’s get a fucking drink. I haven’t seen you in forever.’ Like, whatever. I’ve been to a zillion protests. I really expected nothing.”

The next day, though, he wandered over to Zuccotti Park. After walking around for five minutes, he recalled, “I just started crying. I was like, This is not like anything I’ve ever seen. It’s what we’ve always wanted to be happening but never figured out how to do.”

Mr. Marinovich agreed. “I gave up on this a long time ago, and yet here it is,” he said.

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Of course we asked them about what everyone outside this movement—especially members of the media—seems want to talk about, and nobody on the inside is particularly concerned with: What do you all want? What are the demands? How do you know when you’ve won and can go home?

The poets were polite. They tried to answer. They were tired, as everyone is down there. Running on pure adrenaline. But these were the wrong questions, the ones you ask when you don’t yet get it. These were the questions of the world outside the park—the world of prose. Occupy Wall Street is actually, it turns out, occurring in the realm of poetry and spirit. It’s a sort of waking dream. Which is why it’s so strangely powerful and cannot be sneered away or shoveled over with cynicism (not that we didn’t try) or kettled into history, and may even survive the winter in New York.

“Demands will grow,” Mr. Boyer assured us calmly, with a patience we immediately envied, as we had not felt patient like that in a very long time. He was tall and young, and wore mostly black and didn't seem very much like a sadist at all. “Demands will eventually come. But this is a space for learning. I’ve learned more here in the last two weeks than I have in all those years of college.”

That’s not a dig on the University of San Francisco, where Mr. Boyer majored in creative writing and sociology. The degree didn’t get him far, though, so he has done what he had to do for money, some good, some not so good. He walked the runway last year in London for Ziad Ghanem, for instance, the designer widely viewed as the creative heir to Alexander McQueen. Mr. Ghanem placed volumes of Mr. Boyer’s poetry on every seat in the front row, and Mr. Boyer’s picture turned up in British Vogue. That was the good job.

But it seems like a different life now. He no longer knows the person in those pictures.

In his 1985 cult anarchist treatise T.A.Z., Hakim Bey, aka the poet Peter Lamborn Wilson, described what he dubbed the temporary autonomous zone: “a guerrila operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination).” Which is as good a description of Occupy Wall Street as any.

The library. (Flickr/hukdunshur)

Such zones have flourished, however briefly, around the world, often in secret, Mr. Bey wrote, but in in contemporary America he thought such a space would most likely emerge after three conditions were met. First, people needed to understand not only how the State (Wall Street, the One Percent, whatever) had enslaved them but also “the ways in which we are ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us.” When the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek showed up in the park a few weeks back, he compared this process of awakening to the John Carpenter movie They Live, in which the protagonist, Nada, finds a pair of special sunglasses which reveal that  the advertising billboards all around him carry hidden messages: submit, stay asleep, conform, consume. The dollar bill? This is your god. (And spoiler alert: the rich are all aliens.)

The second condition was that the internet would need to evolve into a useful tool of dissent and organization.

And third, Mr. Bey wrote, “The State must progress on its present course in which hysterical rigidity comes more and more to mask a vacuity, an abyss of power.”

Check, check, check.

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It was windy. The blue tarps were whipping around. Mr. Boyer was asked another of those questions a reporter might ask, an outside-the-zone question. We were just visiting, after all.

“Ever have any famous clients?”

“I’ve had powerful clients. I’ve also had a lot of middle-class clients and a lot who just lost their jobs and don’t know what to do and are freaking out and they want fetish relief from all the pain. I’m like, ‘Sorry, I didn’t want to take your money, but that’s what it’s about.’”

“Political people?”

“So many times.”

“People you recognized?”

“Sure. I’m not going to give you names. But like, I’ve had clients before who are very close to Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, for instance. And I’m just like, ‘Really? Really? You hang out with them every day?’”

Mr. Boyer suggested his girlfriend come to Zuccotti. She said no. Her room was overlooking the reconstruction of  the World Trade Center site, and at one point, Mr. Boyer stood on the balcony, peering down at what felt to him like a graveyard. Then he turned back to watch her on the luxurious bed in the sleekly minimalist room. “She looked so isolated. And I was like, ‘You sure you don’t want to come to Occupy Wall Street?’” No thanks, she said.

“I think that division of psychic-ness is the main reason why we had to go our own ways.”

It seems clear that the lack of demands is not the problem with this thing but its engine. We ask the usual questions because that is how we understand—or, not understand at all, really, but control and contain, and then dismiss or exploit, according to our individual agenda or cast of mind. Those of us standing outside the park—who could, at any moment, simply step across the threshold—want to flick it aside it or put it to use, because that’s what we have learned to do. Box it up, slap on a label, file it away.

Like Mr. Bey said, “As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind an empty husk.”

Which might be why everyone keeps asking.

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Mr. Marinovich is married and has a place on the Lower East Side. He doesn’t sleep in the park but hangs out all the time. He has taught poetry at Columbia and the St. Marks Poetry Project. He had a wild beard, and soft eyes and was wearing a hooded wind-breaker.

He compared Zuccotti Park to Sherwood Forest. “It’s the true Akademia,” he said, referring to the original school founded by Plato in an Athenian grove of olive trees. He, too, struggled to remember the person he was before Occupy Wall Street. “There’s this huge clash and rift between everything that came before and now. It’s so full of danger and possibility and opportunity and ecstasy and everyone’s falling in love and everyone looks so beautiful and you just want to walk through and have sex with everyone.”

Not that either poet had had any actual sex in the sacred grove. Another literal question we had to ask. Truth be told, we too were falling in love with this movement, but we remained affixed to the other zone, ever alert to the clickable headline.

Anyway, the point was not about sex, both poets agreed, laughing. “There’s a tremendous psychic eros going on here, this connection that we feel together,” Mr. Marinovich explained. “It creates this courage to stand up to whatever happens.”

“The TAZ is an art of life in continual rising up, wild but gentle,” Mr. Bey wrote, inspired, to a large degree, by the great Sufi poets. It's “a seducer not a rapist, a smuggler rather than a bloody pirate, a dancer not an eschatologist.”

Mr. Marinovich added that most interactions in the world outside are money-centered. Not in the park. They had no money, and yet they were well fed. Nobody mentioned Jesus, or the communities of early Christians, but you have to think those disciples had a brightness in their eyes that these poets would recognize. They, too, had crossed a threshold between then and now. The followers of Jesus had abandoned their families, had given up concerning themselves with money or anything practical, feeling certain the messiah was coming (to ask whether he did or not is to miss the point). They had loaves and fishes that fed a multitude. The occupiers have pizza—sometimes 300 pies a day—that somehow just arrives. They trust that they will be O.K., that fellowship will sustain them, and so far they are O.K.

Mr. Marinovich marveled at the “immediate, urgent intimacy” he felt in the park, among the occupiers. “It’s completely natural and unforced,” he said, “and it has so much to do with the absence of money as a center, because when that’s not in the center, what is in the center we don’t know, and into that opening everything can flow.”

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Mr. Marinovich views Zuccotti Park as sacred space. Mr. Boyer’s description of ground zero as a “graveyard” seemed apt, he said. There was a reason, maybe subconscious, that they were occupying this place. Close to Wall Street, yes, but closer to where the towers fell.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he said. “The dead have been used for ten years as fuel for this war. I don’t think that’s anything they would have wanted. To hijack the spirits of the dead and use them to create this permanent state of war is one of the vilest things you could possibly do.” (One thought of Mr. Boyer’s clients, who might have been in that Pentagon basement when the decisions were made, plans drawn up. Or maybe that’s just what johns inside the Beltway always tell their young boy poet–dominatrixes.)

“I feel like this is the real tenth anniversary of 9-11,” Mr. Marinovich continued. “It’s weird what was leading up to this. The whole commemoration, but before that Hurricane Irene, which was like this cleansing thing. All that happened. And being here on the periphery of ground zero, so loaded with spirits....”

A year ago, he’d been walking around the area, and he’d felt that the spirits were walking with him. Telling him things. Which he wrote down in a poem that is now in the Occupy Wall St. Poetry Anthology, which Mr. Boyer and Mr. Marinovich created together, out of contributions from people in the park and others who sent in work online and keep sending more, so much they can hardly read it all. Contributors include Anne Waldman, Adrienne Rich, Michael McLure, Elliott Katz, but anyone can contribute by sending their work to stephenjboyer@gmail.com, with "occupy poetry" in the subject line.

Two copies of the anthology, which are in binders so they can grow each day, are kept in the Occupy library and are not online. But you can borrow them—there is no checking out or checking in—or hear them at the weekly poetry assembly, every Friday at 9:30 p.m. Or you can just ask, like we did. Mr. Marinovich went first, reading the piece he’d written a year ago, when the spirits of the dead had whispered to him. “This is called ‘Wolfman Librarian and the Trembling Pair of Actor Hands,’” he said, and noted that it was long. The beginning went something like this: “Tell me this grove will protect me / From World Trade Towers Lightning forking the brain / Mine! Mine! / Why are there trains under the grass / And my butt is wet / Why do you constantly interrupt yourself? / My rhythm is the rhythm of interruption.”

Mr. Boyer went next, with a poem he’d put down in a rush on one of his first giddy nights in Zuccotti Park. Again, an except: “We need a sex space in the park, a space surrounded by tarps, held by the people, so we can get naked and fill each other with ourselves,” he read. And a few lines later: “I want to moan as the bankers and men on Wall Street watch with their binoculars, and in this way we shall win. They’ll come, demanding our naked bodies, and we’ll share ourselves. Sasha Gray, where are you? Get down here and gang bang for democracy. And show them just how beautiful our bodies, and the way we glow when we make one another radiate.”

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Mr. Boyer used to suffer from anxiety. He used to do drugs, sometimes hard ones, and drink every day. In his three weeks in the park, spending hour after hour meeting people, talking about ideas, reciting poetry, he’s felt free of that. “There’s this hunger inside for the kind of community that I am now having access to,” he explained. “Since that wasn’t available to me, I’d partake of drugs to kind of numb that desire, because there was such a void in me. A lot of people are in the same mindspace.” He added, however, that some were actually using more, maybe because they’re so disoriented and exhausted. Who knows? It was hard to pin down exactly what was going on for the people who’d entered into this experiment.

Mr. Marinovich jumped in. “This is nonlinear time, saturated now-time,” he explained, “‘time shot through with the presence of the the now,’ as Benjamin called it.” We had to look that up. Now-time was a long time ago for us. The reference was to Theses on the Philosophy of History, which Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish literary critic, wrote in January 1940, as the Nazis prepared to invade France. Eight months later, after fleeing to Spain, Benjamin learned that Franco had decided to return the refugees to Paris. He swallowed a handful of morphine pills.

Anyway, that was history. This was now-time. Jetztzeit. The revolutionary moment, the messianic age, which might extend forever, or not that long, but was somehow ever-present.

It seemed inevitable somehow that in the eyes of the outside world, at least, that the Occupy Wall Street movement would eventually flame out. People would begin to bicker. Splinter groups would form. January would be colder than anyone imagined. It all seemed very fragile. But by a different measure, the occupiers had already won. Their lives felt meaningful, were meaningful, in a way they hadn’t been before, which is a treasure that does not trade on the stock exchange and that most of us, whatever our percentile, rarely get our greedy hands on.

“Look around,” Mr. Boyer said. “We just slept through three days of pouring rain and everyone is still smiling.”

It was an abstract conception of music to say the least, ethereal and puckish. Allied with her audacious visual imagination, it yielded a series of influential dramatic tableaux, the first of which, Juice: A Theatre Cantata in Three Installments , involved 75 chanting costumed angels ascending the Guggenheim museum's spiral ramp. In 1969, that got people's attention.

Today, if anything, we've become overfamiliar with the static masterpieces that Robert Wilson and Philip Glass regularly ship off to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But the quirkiness and malleability of Ms. Monk's own voice usually saves her from the trancy, snoozy pseudo-profundity that dogs the lesser realms of the Wilson/Glass oeuvre .

Which is not to say that I follow Ms. Monk's every chirrup with delight. If to her more casual fans her choices can sometimes seem arbitrary or precious or of more technical-how does her voice do that?-than musical interest, that's clearly a price she's willing to pay.

So, as Ms. Monk celebrates her 60th birthday and prepares for her upcoming B.A.M. Next Wave Festival concerts (Dec. 3-7), it's nice to report that her new album, Mercy (ECM), may well be her finest. The piece began life as a multimedia stage work with installation artist Ann Hamilton, a meeting of two Macarthur-certified geniuses, and that's the form it will take at B.A.M. But there's enough genius in Ms. Monk and her troupe of six additional vocalists and three instrumentalists (two of whom double as singers) to bring Mercy to life as a pure listening experience.

Gone is the vocal trapeze act, replaced by an organic ocean of sound with its ever-present undertow of sorrow. Occasionally the mood crystallizes into a single, comprehensible word: "Help." More often, it simply flows through the mass of voices singing in a liturgical vein of purely Monkish invention, something like Western plainsong shot through with the subtones of Tibetan chanting.

Back in 1971, Ms. Monk created an "opera epic" about Joan of Arc called Vessel , and since then her ardor for the severe and sacrificial has only been deepened by her immersion in Buddhism. In the case of Mercy , the music was composed before 9/11 but it sounds all too at home in its chastened aftermath.

It's been said that Meredith Monk's exploration of what she calls "extended vocal techniques" paved the way for avantish pop artists like Laurie Anderson and Björk. I'll add another reckless daughter to the list, Jewlia Eisenberg, the prime mover behind the mostly a cappella group Charming Hostess. Ms. Eisenberg and company were supposed to perform at the Center for Jewish History in Chelsea a few weeks ago but didn't (a logistical snafu, don't ask), though they are planning to play Tonic, on the Lower East Side, sometime in January. From Ms. Monk, Ms. Eisenberg inherits a disregard for song conventions and an ear for the priestessy, other worldly sound of the trained soprano voice. But whereas Ms. Monk, the good Buddhist, is all about moving beyond words and ideas to get at some core essence, Ms. Eisenberg can't get enough of talking and thinking; she's practically drunk with feminism, Jewish consciousness, left-wing intellectual history. Just as Ms. Monk's Mercy succeeds in sounding meditative without being boring, Ms. Eisenberg's most recent album, Trilectic (Tzadik), manages the neat trick of setting the Jewish Marxist critic Walter Benjamin's 1920's Moscow Diary to music without succumbing to grad-school weediness.

After commencing the album with "Mi Dimandas," a centuries-old Turkish Jewish version of "What a Girl Wants" ("I have few demands. I want a house with a window I can leave out of. I want a bath attendant with sandals"), Ms. Eisenberg dives into Benjamin's Moscow period, specifically his romance with his Latvian Jewish mistress, Asja Lacis. Lacis may have been forgotten even by the Russian-history grad students who hang out at the Strand, but to Ms. Eisenberg she's an "an agit-prop diva who radicalized Benjamin." She is also the vehicle for a star-turn departure from the multilingual ensemble choralizing that makes up much of the album. Ms. Eisenberg's Lacis is the slangy, throaty voice of female appetite, her needs couched in a homebrew of doo-wop and hip-hop with lots of vocalized breakbeats and heavy breathing thrown in for rhythmic punctuation. ("I like to get at all kinds of female sounds, like eating and sex," she told me over the phone.) In the song "Eskimo Suit," she imagines a languorous Lacis smitten with Benjamin: "When I'm with you, I am nine feet long and I'm made of fur, I'm covered with pearls. And I'm sweating." Appropriately enough for this album of intriguing bits and pieces, Benjamin was the great philosophical champion of montage, even if history remembers him best as the noble loser who committed suicide shortly before he would have been granted permission to escape Nazified Europe for America. In "Dream of Me," Ms. Eisenberg has Lacis wish that the nebbishy Benjamin were a lover more on order of the swashbuckling Red journalist John Reed: "I dreamt you fucked me like John Reed, and I'm a good Red-I pushed back and begged for more / I dreamed the vanguard of the left she came so hard she had to scream / So now close your eyes and dig the dream that I dream."

Ms. Eisenberg lives in Oakland, in the cheap seats of the Bay Area, and she says there's more like her where she comes from. The name of her signature band, Charming Hostess, is a dig at conventional feminine stereotypes but also, she says, a serious description of how she sees her cultural role, making introductions within the art-rock/new-music scene that has sprung up in Oakland, the fruit of its proximity to the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Eisenberg's alma mater, and reasonable rent. (Another notable member of the musical party is Carla Kihlstedt, a Charming Hostess voice and the violinist in the Tin Hat Trio whose latest effort, The Rodeo Eroded , is an estimable meld of conservatory bluegrass, Balkan minor modes and Piazzollan "new tango.") As for her Brooklyn roots, she honored them, sort of, by changing her name from Julia to Jewlia.

When it comes to divas, agit-prop or otherwise, sometimes geography just raises more questions than it answers. Take the case of Devendra Banhart, a 21-year-old folk singer (I guess you'd call him) who was raised in Texas and moved with his family to Caracas, Venezuela, where, as he writes in his one-page biography, "everything's fucked, but I love my grandmother, whom [ sic ] fed whiskey to me from her pinky, paid me to touch my earlobes, and let me pull her elbow flab." He wound up in a squat in New York, he says, where he came to the attention of former Swan Michael Gira's indie-rock label, Young God Records. Mr. Gira listened to his demo tape and rushed it into production, cosmetically unretouched, as Mr. Banhart's late October debut album, Oh Me Oh My …

Walter Benjamin famously opined, "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." In Mr. Banhart's case, his crude overdubbing on a barely functional four-track is indistinguishable from his "art naïf" persona. His songs are surrealistic one- or two-minute vignettes rendered by a single guitar and a choir of not entirely in-sync warbly tenors (the overdubbing) which at unpredictable moments will shift into a highly unsettling falsetto wail. On the new album a variety of subjects are covered, among them romance ("I know nature is beside me when he's inside you, I feel it too"), on several occasions teeth ("Lost in the dark, lend me your teeth") and, for some reason, Michigan ("Oh, Michigan State, how I wanna live in you").

Mr. Banhart's young career does raise the question of intentionality and self-consciousness and other subjects worthy of the next Charming Hostess album. Personally, I have no idea whether his sound comes from the open spaces and oil fumes of Texas and Venezuela or a close study of the indigenous grotesque in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music , and I don't much care. The kid's got a sound, as Bob Evans might say. In any event, with a midnight gig Nov. 27 at Williamsburg's BQE Lounge, a return engagement at Tonic in December and a profile in the works at The Wire , the prestigious British music magazine, Mr. Banhart's cult status seems pretty well assured. And deserved. The world should make a place for the truly unusual, Jewlia Eisenberg and Meredith Monk included.

Live Notes

Jason Moran, whose pianism incorporates hip-hop, classical modernism and Thelonious Monk without breaking stride, is having a big couple of weeks. With his trio, he plays the Village Vanguard through Dec. 1. Then, building on the critical success (as if there were any other kind in instrumental jazz) of his recent solo album, Modernistic (Blue Note), Mr. Moran performs a solo recital Dec. 6 at Symphony Space's Leonard Nimoy Thalia theater.

Traditionally, the principal province of this trivializing process, which effectively trashes the moral gravity of history by turning fact into meretricious fiction, was to be found in movies, television, comic strips and other forms of pop culture. Nowadays, however, certain art museums have shown themselves to be as eager as the pop media to compete for honors in this carnival of disinformation and bad faith, and so we have on view at the moment not only a second showing of Gerhard Richter's loathsome pictures of the Baader-Meinhof gang of German terrorists at the Museum of Modern Art, where they were first exhibited a scant two years ago, but the even more repugnant exhibition called Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art , which Norman L. Kleeblatt has organized at the Jewish Museum.

Exactly why a respected institution devoted to the study and exhibition of Jewish art and culture should wish to inflict this numbskull mockery of the Holocaust on the New York public is not a question easily answered. Who could have imagined that the question would ever have to be raised in this quarter? Given the cynicism that now reigns in certain parts of the museum profession, opportunism-the hope of reaping the rewards of controversy-cannot be ruled out. Nor can the sheer stupidity of museum curators and the trustees who support their folly. What I suspect is the case with the Mirroring Evil show, however, is an ardent desire to mount an exhibition that is seen to be "transgressive," to cite the contemporary art world's favorite cant term of high praise.

What the Jewish Museum itself has given us in the way of explanation or defense of Mirroring Evil only compounds the offense by offering statements that are either morally callous, ludicrously misleading or transparently untrue. Mr. Kleeblatt's opening statement in the exhibition catalog, for example-that the artists in this exhibition have "created works in which viewers would encounter the perpetrators of the Holocaust face to face"-is certainly not true. And it isn't made any more credible when this blather about coming "face to face" with evil is repeated a few pages on in James E. Young's essay, "Looking into the Mirrors of Evil," with its claim that the show's artists "add an art that brings us face to face with the killers." This, too, is a wholly false statement.

Hollywood stills of movie stars dressed up as Nazi officers and a room lined with photo portraits of Hitler alternating with photos of Marcel Duchamp-to mention two of the items we are invited to admire in this show-do absolutely nothing to bring us "face to face with the killers." Repulsive photo collages like Economical Love (Pussy Control) and (Hitler

Hairdo) are merely contemptible, while the model of a death camp made of Lego blocks is simply a very sick idea. But then the very conception of Mirroring Evil is a sick idea. I can see why some half-wit/anti-Semite might find this sort of thing amusing. After all, minus the subject that is abused in this exhibition-the Holocaust-the art in Mirroring Evil , if we still want to call it art, is no better or worse than much of the stuff currently on view in the Whitney Biennial. It's all part of the avalanche of sub-intellectual trash that nowadays passes for art in the museums under the banner of Conceptual Art, which by its very nature is wholly devoid of aesthetic interest.

But the subject of this particular exercise in Conceptual Art is the Holocaust, and that is what some of us do not find amusing. It is not to be forgiven. It is for this reason that I refuse to name the so-called artists whose work I have cited here. I'll leave it to others to provide them with their 15 minutes of fame. In my view, anyway, the principal perpetrator of this debacle is its curator, Mr. Kleeblatt, with his absurd claim that Mirroring Evil brings us "face to face" with the Nazi killers. Does he really not understand what the term "face to face" means, literally or otherwise, or is he only pretending not to understand? I am not myself persuaded that he doesn't understand the moral folly of this ghastly show. All this crap about a "face to face" confrontation with evil looks to me to be nothing but an unsuccessful attempt at damage control. Mr. Kleeblatt was clearly determined to reap the rewards of controversy, but was also hoping to avoid responsibility for its fallout. My own sympathies are wholly with the people who have been protesting this show.

As I sat through some of the video stuff in Mirroring Evil , listening to a museum trustee extolling its alleged virtues, and then again when I read through the atrocious catalog, what came immediately to mind was a passage in Gershom Scholem's beautiful and tragic memoir of Walter Benjamin ( Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship ,1981).Scholem,whowas then living in Palestine, describes a visit to Berlin in 1932 in the following passage:

"I went to Berlin on my European trip of 1932 and attended a performance of The Threepenny Opera , which had then been playing to full houses for two years. I was astonished when I saw that a middle-class audience that had lost all sense of its own situation was here cheering a play in which it was gibed and spat at with a vengeance. Three months before Hitler's assumption of power, for anyone who watched such a spectacle with detachment this was a true prelude of what was to come. I hardly could be under any illusions about the fact that a major part of this audience was Jewish."

Well, New York in 2002 is certainly not Berlin in 1932, and the miserable lack of talent in Mirroring Evil doesn't bear comparison with the brilliant talent that went into the creation of The Threepenny Opera, but the moral parallels of Jews engaged in mocking their own tragedy are nonetheless striking and heartbreaking.

Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art remains on view at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, through June 30.

Larry McMurtry is "the fastest pen in the West" (or so says USA Today )-but can he write fast enough to make sense of the title of his memoir, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen ? It's easy to imagine Walter Benjamin at a smoke-filled SoHo cafe, but not, for heaven's sake, at the D.Q.! And yet Mr. McMurtry is not being cute. He's dead earnest in this book, which is as down to earth as Texas dust, or the musty smell of an old bookstore.

Walter Benjamin never reached the Statue of Liberty-our freedom queen-let alone the Dairy Queen in Archer City, Tex., where Mr. McMurtry lives. When Benjamin, fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, set out for the United States in 1940, he got only as far as the Spanish border, where he took his own life rather than risk capture.

Many of his friends who actually got here hated it and scooted back to Europe after the war, but Benjamin could foresee many delights in America, such as Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, experiments in steel and glass construction like the great skyscrapers of New York and Chicago with their sheer surfaces, and the vast emptiness and barbarity of it all, gloriously free from all the marble, statues, plush carpeting of civilized Europe. His friend Gershom Scholem had tried to browbeat him into going to Palestine, to the old promised land; but for Benjamin, the Moses of popular culture, the promised land was the land of mechanical reproducibility, the U.S. of A.

Benjamin has been hot among bohemians and academics, but hardly among the inhabitants of mainstream culture; and yet he is the critic who, in The Arcades Project , in essence said to his fellow intellectuals: Your job is to figure out what gives the people pleasure; let that guide your work . Few novelists have given more pleasure to more people in recent years than Larry McMurtry. He tells the epic story of the cowboys whose cattle drives were halted by the Chicago stock yards. My Uncle Charlie was a cowboy who worked for the stock yards; he was the last man off his horse when the whole operation closed down in the 70's. When we got together as family we did not talk books, we played poker; except once when Charlie told me to read Mr. McMurtry's Lonesome Dove .

Mr. McMurtry read Benjamin's Illuminations in 1980 when he was stuck in writer's quicksand. Benjamin lifted his spirits. It was, to be specific, an essay called "The Storyteller" that got the despondent novelist up and running again. Benjamin has a reputation as a melancholic soul, but more often than not he lifts the spirits of those who read him-it's his subtle bias in favor of the future and happiness that does it again and again.

"The Storyteller" was first published in 1936, the year Mr. McMurtry was born; and it first appeared in English in the 1960's, just when Dairy Queens were popping up in the hamlets of West Texas. Both Benjamin and Mr. McMurtry are book fanatics, both readers more than theorists. Benjamin's father was an antiquarian book dealer; so is Mr. McMurtry. That is where, in Mr. McMurtry's mind, the similarities end: For him, Benjamin represents an ideal, the European man of letters-an ideal that inspires him and goads him on. Benjamin means "Europe" for Mr. McMurtry, what he craves for himself but realizes is very, very distant from the Texas that has been and is his home.

For Mr. McMurtry, Benjamin means art with a capital A. In "The Storyteller," Benjamin laments the decline of the art of storytelling and the rise of a culture of indigestible information (and this was half a century before the Internet, though news radio had already begun). This helps Mr. McMurtry recover his sense of his own vocation, because it recalls to him what Texas was like when he grew up-few books if any and a scattering of lonely, taciturn people.

At the emotional center of this book is Mr. McMurtry's father's death and his own near death. His father had kept the family home (a home on the range), though the days when cowboys could herd cattle up to Montana were long gone; he had been very disappointed when his son turned to books rather than cows and horses. McMurtry père was motivated by the ideal of family pastoralism (the same ideal that trapped me on a farm in Illinois until I escaped east). Family pastoralism was the ideal; in reality, his father was a nomad who prized his solitude, time on a horse above all else. (Mine prized above all else his time alone on a tractor.)

Larry McMurtry's own encounter with death-only glancing, thanks to quadruple-bypass surgery-left him unable to read for months, and that set him to exploring what connects him to his father and the lonesome cowboys. In the course of this meditation, it becomes clear how right Mr. McMurtry was to take Benjamin as his spiritual guide. For Benjamin, the central human imperative is for those who live in the present to convey as best they can, for the benefit of future generations, a sense of life as it was lived in the past.

Until Benjamin's lesson really hit him, Mr. McMurtry had seen only an unbridgeable distance between Texas and Europe and, worse, between himself and his father. But now Mr. McMurtry understands that his obsession with books is as immense and unquenchable as his father's obsession with cattle. These are obsessions that isolate men (Susan Faludi, listen up!). Novels isolate us, too, as Benjamin argued, which makes them different from stories. Stories pull a crowd together; novels we consume in private.

Mr. McMurtry writes about a world of nomads and isolatos. There is something destructive and self-impoverishing in the activities some Americans choose, and it is his job to record these lives just as they are led-in the relative certainty that the arts practiced by craftsmen such as cowboys and novelists will one day disappear. The fact that such arts can emerge means that they must one day disappear. By the end of the book, Mr. McMurtry has answered the question he put to himself in the beginning: How can art arise in a place as barren of art as the American West? It is to his father and his identity with his father that he must look for the answer, in their common pursuit of ideals that they can never realize: "the sense of that crack in reality between what is and what might be, my father passed on to me.… It may be the crack where books and songs are born."

I am as obsessed with books as Larry McMurtry is; my father was as unhappy when I turned to books as his father was. And part of my day job-I'm the editor of the Harvard University Press edition of Walter Benjamin's writings, some 3,000 pages in total-is to get Walter Benjamin into as many Dairy Queens and Burger Kings as possible. This is what I know: Only someone who comes from such cultural poverty as Mr. McMurtry could be so hungry for culture.

From the heart of European artistic luxuriance, Benjamin imagined our artistic poverty and wrote for us. For that, and for the good books of Mr. McMurtry, I give thanks.