Partisan Review articles from January 2003

Partisan Review archives from January 2003

On collective identity.
January 1, 2003... WHEN WE CONSIDER THE QUESTION of the identity of human collective bodies (keeping in mind the obvious caveat that all definitions of non-mathematical objects will inevitably be shaky and imprecise), we observe that it is analogous to the...

Anne Frank: the redemptive myth.
January 1, 2003... FOR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, Anne Frank's history has come to symbolize one of Europe's deadliest conflagrations--a time when one nation set fire to its democratic government, ravaged countries all over the continent, destroyed Jewish life in...

No kith, no kin.(Short Story)
January 1, 2003... AUGUST 1949. I'm twelve. I don't feel like going home. Empty, devastated, I roam the streets making wider and wider circles around my house. At first I go around our block. Trying not to raise my head, I go along Lanzheron Street, turn on Gavan...

Desert.(Short Story)
January 1, 2003... I WILD RED BERRY REBOUNDED from the ropes and, though only half the size of his opponent, seized him by the leg and by the neck. With the strength of Hercules he lifted the wrestler over his head. "Uh-oh," said Arthur, our butler....

Now that they are dead.(Short Story)
January 1, 2003... MY FIRST SUMMER AWAY AT CAMP a fly got lodged inside my ear, raising a furious, hysterical, all-but-unbearable whine. The doctor first poured in tepid water and then, with an eyebrow tweezer, pulled the thing out, sodden, black, and finally...

Lost. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Lost I am still here between the sun That rises and the one that sets. To remain Or go on. Which means to talk, To remember wind, words for what happened, How I could no longer figure you From trees. And a...

Bayberry. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Bayberry Find them in September, the white dust on them like the finest snow fallen before its time. Find them near the sea, and to water return them. From the boiling pot skim the light green wax. ...

The Harvesters. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... The Harvesters In Bruegel's Harvesters two birds break out of the wheat. Disturbed into the hot, clear air, a portion of time, they turn in the direction of roads laid out like wishbones beyond the neighboring farms,...

A Craftsman of Wine Bowls. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... A Craftsman of Wine Bowls On this wine bowl made of pure silver that was made for Irakleides' home where good taste prevails supreme-- look, here are elegant flowers and streams and thyme, and in the center I have...

Eliane. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Eliane She insisted on a picnic in the garden of her family house Beyond the Bois de Vincennes-- Circa 1910 with gables and pseudo-Norman lath-and-plaster, A balcony sagging over the door like a rifled purse. The...

On Looking into Stoneware Chambers. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... On Looking into Stoneware Chambers Squat and stout as a Mayan, vertical, not slant and topped by a small dome: you greet us open-mouthed and tongue-tied. Stone dumb, but clay. Four walls and a roof, a set...

The Slaughterhouse Wall. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... The Slaughterhouse Wall after Jerome Liebling As if that whisper he sometimes thought he heard over the constant howl of slaughter finally tempted him away, his station stands deserted, almost silent, without...

Adam Eats the Beach. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Adam wears a beard of drool and sand, and raises his arms to the setting sun. The wind's fingers take his face in hand. Now his fists are plunging fast toward land; he clutches the gritty floor, and with one hand,...

A Day Like This One. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... A Day Like This One Says one generation to the next our consideration of darkness habitual by then, and distant like the horizon's black line sprouting yellow rays from the sun's open fist in your drawing. If...

Wish. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Wish But what if, in the clammy soil, her limbs grew warmer, shifted, stirred, kicked off the covering of earth, the drowsing corms, the sly worms, what if her arms reached out to grab the stone, the grooves of her...

White Writing. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... White Writing No vows written to wed you, I write them white, my lips on yours, light in the soft hours of our married years. No prayers written to bless you, I write them white, your soul a flame, ...

The Vision. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... The Vision They didn't know just why they had been chosen-- by whom or what would always be unclear. That night, the last remains of hope were frozen into the consolations of their fear. The spirit falters when the...

Danton Keeps His Head. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Danton Keeps His Head Traffic beetles across the Quai Voltaire as an old man's oiled mask is exposed to the cool dusk. A large wing passes over T.V. screens, obscuring the late newscasts so only voices play. The...

Two for Tu Mu. (Poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Two for Tu Mu I Old poet, lover of caves, inveterate seeker, or looking into the sun setting seeing a cracked mirror where your rod crosses the swelling disc, you bring to mind slow Lincoln staring...

Inside Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
January 1, 2003... If my fellow citizens knew me before I became president, they did so because of these stations. --Vaclav Havel In JANUARY 1983, I became Special Assistant to the new President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty--James R....

An interview with Eda Kriseova.(Interview)
January 1, 2003... Edith Kurzweil: I'm glad to have finally caught up with you. I would like you to tell me what you think has changed since the last time I was here in Prague, about ten years ago. I see many superficial changes in this fantastic city. But I have...

"Two wings of the same breathing creature": fictionalizing history.
January 1, 2003... "CALLIOPE AND CLIO are not identical twins," Wallace Stegner pointed out, "but they are sisters." For that reason the actual can be transposed into the fictional by a novelist whose imagination has been stimulated by real events and persons, or...

Teaching Lincoln.
January 1, 2003... "NOW HE BELONGS TO THE AGES," whispered Edward Stanton at the moment of Abraham Lincoln's death. No doubt, in his grief, Stanton had reached for a consoling thought: in imitation of his immortal soul, this man's spirit would live on and...

At the galleries.
January 1, 2003... YEARS AGO, WHEN I FIRST BEGAN WRITING for Partisan Review, William Phillips's only directive was "Write about a lot of shows." I thought this was simply a bid for variety, but I soon realized that there was more to it. Writing "about a lot of...

Versions of an unmastered past.(4 books on World War II)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... THE FRAGILITY OF GOODNESS: WHY BULGARIA'S JEWS SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST. By Tzvetan Todorov. Translated by Arthur Denner. Princeton University Press. $26.95. THE ALGERIA HOTEL: FRANCE, MEMORY, AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR. By Adam Nossiter....

The case of Victor Serge.(2 books on Victor Serge)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... VICTOR SERGE: THE COURSE IS SET ON HOPE. By Susan Weissman. Verso. $35.00. VICTOR SERGE, MEMOIRES D'UN REVOLUTIONNAIRE ET AUTRES ECRITS POLITIQUES. Edited by Robert Laffont. Bouquins. 30.30 [euro] VICTOR SERGE, WHO DIED IN MEXICO CITY...

Intimacies and mysteries.(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... CONFESSIONS OF A SECULAR JEW: A MEMOIR. By Eugene Goodheart. Overlook Press. $27.95. HOW DOES ONE RECOUNT A LIFE that is not heroic enough to have put the author on a postage stamp or atop an equestrian statue? How can a memoirist do...

Special wretchedness.(Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... LIFE AT THE BOTTOM: THE WORLDVIEW THAT MAKES THE UNDERCLASS. By Theodore Dalrymple. Ivan R. Dee. $27.50. THE AUTHOR OF THIS REMARKABLE VOLUME is an M.D. (psychiatrist) at a prison and hospital in the slums of Birmingham, as well as a world...

Whose Rock?(The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... THE ROCK: A TALE OF SEVENTH-CENTURY JERUSALEM. By Kanan Makiya. Pantheon. $26.00. KANAN MAKIYA, AN IRAQI EXILE living in America, came pseudonymously to the notice of the American reading public with a powerful indictment of Saddam...

Pooh-Poohing the postmodernists.(Postmodern Pooh)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... POSTMODERN POOH. By Frederick Crews. North Point Press. $22.00. IN WHAT WAS SURELY A HAPPY COINCIDENCE, Frederick Crews's delicious parody of freshman casebooks, The Pooh Perplex (1963), arrived during the same year I began my graduate...

Corpse in the kitchen, poem in the hole.(Essays of Four Decades; The Lighthouse Keeper: Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... ESSAYS OF FOUR DECADES. By Allen Tate. Introduction by Louise Cowan. Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books. $29.95. THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER: ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF ELEANOR ROSS TAYLOR. Edited by Jean Valentine. Hobart and William Smith...