Partisan Review articles from June 2002

Partisan Review archives from June 2002

Comment.
June 22, 2002... A SUNDAY AFTERNOON ACROSS THE PARK. Given the extensive controversy surrounding the exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, I went to see it, before ambling down the avenue to view Oskar Kokoschka: Early...

What to read (and not to read) about terrorism.
June 22, 2002... WHAT TO READ ABOUT TERRORISM? The books on terrorism published before September 2001 did not become bestsellers. The two academic journals covering terrorism had a few hundred subscribers each worldwide; I doubt whether any major library in...

Tolerating intolerance: the challenge of fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe.
June 22, 2002... I GREW UP IN NEW YORK, the world's most multicultural city, and for some time lived only a few blocks from the imposing Islamic Center on Third Avenue between 96th and 97th Streets. But it wasn't until I moved to western Europe in 1998--living...

Austrian legacies: Jews and the question of national identity.
June 22, 2002... SEVEN YEARS AGO, the former Chancellor of Austria, Franz Vranitzky, stood on the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, having just received an honorary doctorate, and acknowledged the "collective responsibility" of...

Wounded time: the holocaust, Jedwabne, and disaster writing.
June 22, 2002... AN IMPORTANT ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND the decisive impact of the Holocaust on both fiction and critical discourse is Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster. Though Blanchot does not equate the disaster referred to in the title exclusively...

The daughter of Kadmos.(Short Story)
June 22, 2002... I CONSTANTINE ARRIVED IN INOS in the early summer. It had not been his choice, but rather an unlucky draw. The island of Levkothea lay on the surface of the sea like a tiny, bright, overripe fruit that had fallen so far from the tree it...

LIV. (Poems).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... LIV I do not want to be in the comparisons Where inner death alone exists But the fundamentals Similarities Differences Continuum Division The bifurcated storm Mobile Immobile The huge wing will rise up out of the...

Earth. (Poems).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Earth There might be a shining On the scythe, and the sound Return from caverns, straying Gradually, and the wind might Redden your eyes with other salt... You might hear the sunken keel Shifting way out...

King David's Psalms. (Poems).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... King David's Psalms He sang them in the ornate suite, As Bathsheba brushed her hair. Or Strolled through the royal woods, To hear them in the open air. Once--it's told--he went incognito, And performed at a...

New Year's Day. (Poems).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... New Year's Day Line of the horizon, blank book of distance-- yours is the hiss of memory, the small school of puffins studying the tide's notebooks, its loose leaf papers spilling at our feet. What grows mighty from...

EU. (Poems).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... EU In bloodstained plazas still bearing romantic names, they sit. Smooth and mustachioed, groomed and tight, like flamenco dancers, they snuffle about their former empires and lost serfs, who now...

Halloween. (Poems).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Halloween We cut out gaping holes in gourds and peep into cavities where the soft eyes of our parents used to be. Owls and cats know what's what. Under a large open moon they watch for signs as we walk...

Go Ask Rachel Whiteread. (Poems).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Go Ask Rachel Whiteread We're crowded by the invisible. No wonder history's so hard to move. No one's alone at the dinner table. We have been joined by the predictable function of the drama of our moods. We are...

Do You Like It? (Poems).(Poem)
June 22, 2002... Do You Like It? We now take the next step into the forest of the imagination that William Shakespeare walked into when he wrote plays such as As You Like It, so dark green were those woods and filled ...

Lenin's century: Bolshevism, Marxism, and the Russian Tradition.
June 22, 2002... MARXISM WAS, as Leszek Kolakowski once said, the greatest philosophical fantasy ever conceived by the human mind. All its radical hubris notwithstanding, Marxism would have remained a mere sociological doctrine had Lenin not turned it into a...

What do you do with yourself after a terror attack?
June 22, 2002... ON THE STREET OF HOPE IN SOUTH TEL AVIV, long lines of Russian women in high heels and full makeup walk toward a house. The lines look endless. It's two days after a suicide bomber at the Dolphinarium dance club killed twenty-one teenagers and...

At the galleries.(various scultptors, various galleries)
June 22, 2002... THE PAST SEASON WAS a good one for anyone interested in recent sculpture--especially if you could justify a trip to England to see Anthony Caro's work installed in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park's new exhibition building. Still, there were...

Going to the movies: the light fantastic.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2002... IT'S A PLEASURE TO REPORT that the little surge of beautifully crafted, offbeat films that made 1999 such a good moviegoing year has been sustained since last summer, even as Hollywood blockbusters continue to draw a record audience. There is...

Hemingway: a static figure amidst the red decade shifts.(Ernest Hemingway and politics)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2002... FOR BIOGRAPHERS Ernest Hemingway's life has always been a litany of legends: the shrapnel-shattered knee, Hadley's loss of the suitcase containing stories, Ernest crouched at the feet of Stein. When covering the 1930s, biographers offer the...

Letter from Europe: right populism conquers the political mainstream. (Observations).
June 22, 2002... THE POLITICAL ALARM CLOCKS across central Europe are ringing loudly--but few have the stamina to get up and stop the annoying irritation. The last two years brought more tangible changes for some of Europe's saturated, idly bored...

Baby food bullets and nose drop bombs.
June 22, 2002... JUST MONTHS AGO AN EXPLOSIVES-PACKED Palestinian suicide bomber visited Cafe Cafit, an upscale German Colony hangout in Jerusalem, where I-m presently savoring a cheese Danish and cafe afuk. With wires poking everywhere, the bomber took his...

A slice of Russia.
June 22, 2002... I WAS INVITED TO GIVE A TALK at Moscow State University for International Relations (MGIMO) during the days of the presidential summit. President Bush allegedly had prepared himself for this trip by reading the works of the patriotic Fyodor...

L'Affaire Dreyfus: L'Iniquitie.
June 22, 2002... By Georges Clemenceau. Memoire du Livre. 159 francs. EVERY SO OFTEN FRANCE PRODUCES one of those larger-than-life characters who differs so strikingly from the average that statues (and caricatures) come easy. In literature, Balzac, Hugo,...

The Poets' Dante.(Dante Alighieri)
June 22, 2002... Edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $30.00. THE SONG OF ROLAND. Translated, with an introduction, by W. S. Merwin. The Modern Library. $8.95. PURGATORIO. By Dante Alighieri. Translated, with an...

The languages of the classroom.(THE SKIN THAT WE SPEAK: THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN THE CLASSROOM)
June 22, 2002... THE SKIN THAT WE SPEAK: THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN THE CLASSROOM. Edited by Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy. The New Press. $24.95. MOST PEOPLE REMEMBER the Ebonics affair as one of the more ludicrous episodes of PC...

What's this guy grinning about?(SMILING THROUGH THE CULTURAL CATASTROPHE: TOWARD THE REVIVAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION)
June 22, 2002... SMILING THROUGH THE CULTURAL CATASTROPHE: TOWARD THE REVIVAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION. By Jeffrey Hart. Yale University Press. $26.95. JEFFREY HART, SENIOR EDITOR of National Review and Emeritus Professor at Dartmouth University, has long been a...

The life of a polymath.(two books on John Ruskin)
June 22, 2002... JOHN RUSKIN: THE EARLY YEARS. By Timothy Hilton. Yale University Press. $17.56 JOHN RUSKIN: THE LATER YEARS. By Timothy Hilton. Yale University Press. $35.00 WHEN TWENTY-NINE MEMBERS of the fledgling Labour Party were returned to the...

Size matters.(two books on poetry)
June 22, 2002... TIME'S FOOL. By Glyn Maxwell. Houghton Mifflin. $27.00 THE BEFORELIFE. By Franz Wright. Knopf. $22.00 AMBITION IN POETRY is a tricky thing. When it leads to excess it can threaten poetry's natural affinity for compression. We expect...

The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki.
June 22, 2002... By Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Translated by Ewald Osers. Princeton University Press. $35.00. LESS THAN TWENTY YEARS AFTER the Nazis brutally murdered his mother and father, Marcel Reich-Ranicki went back to live in Germany, where he remains...

The Dice Cup.
June 22, 2002... By Max Jacob. Translated by Christopher Pilling and David Kennedy. BCM Atlas Press. $10.00. THE ORIGINAL 1916 PUBLICATION of The Dice Cup received considerable attention for several decades. Max Jacob had interacted with the avant-garde...