Partisan Review articles from January 2002

Partisan Review archives from January 2002

A week in Paris. (Six Reflections on Terrorism).(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... During my week in Paris at the beginning of October, I found that the comments about the terrorism of September 11, 2001--in newspapers, on television, and by friends--were not very different from those at home. Some Parisians thought that the...

Untimely information: tales of victims in the French media. (Six Reflections on Terrorism).(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... Strangely, until now many French commentators have refused to see the events of September 11, 2001, in relation to previous ones--as, for example, an extension of the intifada, or as (successful) implementation of Durban's (aborted) program. In...

Anti-Americanism: murderous and rhetorical. (Six Reflections on Terrorism).(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... I was in Budapest on September 11th and learned about the attack in a new shopping center where TV sets were tuned to CNN. Of course I was unprepared for the news and thought that this was some kind of docudrama using the title "Attack on...

Terror and clandestine anti-Semitism: thoughts on German and American reactions to September 11, 2001. (Six Reflections on Terrorism).(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... I recall how [Hitler] would have films shown in the Reich Chancellory about London burning, about the sea of fire over Warsaw, about exploding convoys, and [I remember] the kind of ravenous joy that would then seize him every ...

What is old and what is new in the terrorism of Islamic fundamentalism? (Six Reflections on Terrorism).
January 1, 2002... Mass murder inspired by Islamic fundamentalism and fanaticism differs from the secular totalitarian ideologies and regimes of Europe's twentieth century: fascism and Nazism, on the one hand, and Communism, especially in the Stalin era, on the...

The new Islamic fascism. (Six Reflections on Terrorism).(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... In his prison journals Albert Speer recalled an astonishing scene towards the end of World War II when Adolf Hitler, in a kind of delirium, pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire." The Nazi leader...

Melville's skull and the idea of Jerusalem.
January 1, 2002... Jerusalem is not a metaphor or a symbol or an allegory or a consolation. Words like these smack of mysticism, or romanticism, or a utopianism of the surrogate and cheaply inauthentic kind. Jerusalem, like any city, is a quotidian thing, a...

Marx, money, and mysticism after Mao.(Karl Marx, Mao Zedong)
January 1, 2002... There is a zero-risk method that we Americans can use to end human rights abuses in China. We can point out the fact that the cruelty of Marxism comes from the writings of Marx. We can do it here, among ourselves. Everything that is said in...

Art as excess: the "voices" of Charlie Parker and Philip Roth.
January 1, 2002... No one has explained the essential difference between style and voice better than has E. I. Lonoff, the magisterial author in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979). His fiction is a "celebrated blend of sympathy and pitilessness," and so is the...

"Gold-ground art" and the Cold War: solving the Great Kress Mystery.(Samuel H. Kress, collector of Catholic art)
January 1, 2002... Just why the major American merchant, Samuel H. Kress (1863-1955), a Lutheran, steeped himself in the most Catholic art work of Italy, buying and warehousing it in wholesale quantities between 1927 and 1941, has long remained a mystery. The...

Alone with Charlotte Salomon.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... In 1994 the American historian Mary Lowenthal Felstiner published a biography of Charlotte Salomon, an artist who fled from Berlin to the South of France in 1939 and was deported four years later. At the age of twenty-six she was killed in...

Cortados on the Quai.(Short Story)
January 1, 2002... The early summer wind climbed up from the Rio Plata and ruffled its way through Carla's loosely tied hair. Dr. Jorge Ruiz, the director of the Rosario Sanitarium and Alvaro's son, would be arriving any moment now. "It's essential." Those had...

Circus. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Circus Look, your longing swung from the trapeze. The clown is you as well and the tame tiger who begs for mercy calls someone to mind. Even the tin-pot music has its charm; it seems you're starting to make peace...

Castle. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Castle The guards cried out incomprehensibly in a mountain tribe's guttural dialect. Venetian windows opened and closed. Long limousines arrived and left. Someone seemed to be dying in the palace. A black banner...

Speak Softly. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Speak Softly... Speak softly: you're older than the one you were so long; you're older than yourself--and yet you still don't know what absence, poetry, and gold are. Rusty water swept the street; a brief storm ...

Street of Endless Prayer. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Street of Endless Prayer Under the orange arch of autumn the weather of another life Days count themselves in rust in moss in scales in stand-up hours beaten across a brown carpet Street of tram tracks and...

Gramarye. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Gramarye Underdrawn, I translate herb with root: aromatic, darkened, drawn together in a doubled cartouche. Undermined, I crawl the earth beneath the house, watch heat fill cracks in the hardwood floor, ...

These. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... These These are the Days of Awe, not marked on my calendar. The covenant with gravity lifts and loosens the leaves, a last warm breeze. I lie down in the grass. Fragments of verse circle me like...

Dostoevsky in Europe: the political as the spiritual.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... On December 22, 1849, only hours after facing Nikolai I's firing squad and receiving a last-minute reprieve commuting his death sentence to nine years of hard labor and military service in Siberia, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail: "Now,...

Isaac Rosenfeld's Dybbuk and rethinking literary biography.
January 1, 2002... There were evenings in Barrow Street, while I played the violin part in Bach's B-minor to Isaac's flute, when his musical sense of style would make me gasp. It was as exquisite as his handwriting. Isaac always meant to perform well. The flute...

At the galleries.
January 1, 2002... Irrelevant as it sometimes seemed in the face of September 11th's horrors, exhibitions continued to open as the fall art season progressed. Some, like the Metropolitan Museum's ravishing extravaganzas of Mughal jewelry and Islamic glass,...

The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt. (Books: expanding our sympathies).
January 1, 2002... THE TERRIBLE POWER OF A MINOR GUILT. By Abraham B. Kenosha. Syracuse University Press. $26.95. IN HIS INTRODUCTION to this slim volume of literary essays, Abraham B. Kenosha laments the fact that in recent years discussions of literary...

Experiments Against Reality: the Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age. (Books: the politics of leftist reality).
January 1, 2002... EXPERIMENTS AGAINST REALITY: THE FATE OF CULTURE IN THE POSTMODERN AGE. By Roger Kimball. Ivan R. Dee. $28.50. HUMANITIES PROFESSORS HATE ROGER KIMBALL, and why shouldn't they? Ever since the publication of Tenured Radicals ten years ago,...

Promises, Promises. (Books: the historical unconscious).
January 1, 2002... PROMISES, PROMISES. By Adam Phillips. Basic Books. $27.50. "BEFORE THE PROBLEM OF THE CREATIVE ARTIST," Freud wrote in 1928, "analysis must, alas, lay down its arms." What was it about the creative artist that prompted this moment of...

Race Matters. (Books: anti-matters).
January 1, 2002... RACE MATTERS. By Cornell West. Vintage Books. $12.00 ONE OF THE SILLIEST BOOKS of the 1990s is back in print, adorned with a new preface. Cornell West's Race Matters does for resentiment what the Harry Potter books have done for...

This Great Unknowing: Last Poems. (Books: make no bones).
January 1, 2002... THIS GREAT UNKNOWING: LAST POEMS. By Denise Levertov. New Directions. $9.95. SOON AFTER THE EXPATRIATE POET Denise Levertov, who died in 1997, arrived in America, she came under the influence of William Carlos Williams, and this caused her...

The Niche Narrows: New and Selected Poems. (Books: make no bones).
January 1, 2002... THE NICHE NARROWS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. By Samuel Menashe. With a Preface by Dana Gioia. Talisman House. $16.95 SOON AFTER THE EXPATRIATE POET Denise Levertov, who died in 1997, arrived in America, she came under the influence of William...

Emigre New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944. (Books: around the torch of liberty).
January 1, 2002... EMIGRE NEW YORK: FRENCH INTELLECTUALS IN WARTIME MANHATTAN, 1940-1944. By Jeffrey Mehlman. The John Hopkins University Press. $40.00. A REVIEWER MUST RESIST THE TEMPTATION to blame the author for not having written the book he or she hoped...

A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950. (Urbane Beginnings).
January 1, 2002... A LIFE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: INNOCENT BEGINNINGS, 1917--1950. By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Houghton Mifflin. $28.95. A HARVARD PROFESSOR AND INTIMATE OF PRESIDENTS, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. seems the consummate East Coast intellectual....