New Criterion articles from April 2000

New Criterion archives from April 2000

Notes & Comments: April 2000.
April 1, 2000... Science & human nature We are often negligent, we admit, about keeping up with Wired, the popular monthly magazine about high technology that describes itself as "the journal of record for the future." But a news report about a long essay...

The American view of landscape.
April 1, 2000... I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" Weapon shapely, naked, wan, ...

Ataturk's creation.
April 1, 2000... Can traditional cultures in the third world break with the past in order to enjoy modern civilization? Ought they to do so? And at what price? Can a leader persuade or force his nation to make so drastic a change? Questions such as these were...

"Strange seriousness": discovering Daumier.
April 1, 2000... He was naked, and he saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal.... He approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him ...

Martin du Gard's monster a box.
April 1, 2000... On New Year's Day 1931, the novelist Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) and his wife were seriously injured in a car crash, and they spent the next few months recuperating in a Le Mans hospital. That Martin du Gard had recently finished a solid...

Epithalamium.(Poem)
April 1, 2000... for Ben and Michele If we, who have gleaned from towns jutting through fog how clarity comes in season by season, revisit the places we've been happy, then this will be one. Already, we imagine, you're away twisted in...

Casco Passage.(Poem)
April 1, 2000... i.m. Paul Wood, d. 1999 By midday, gouts of fog sock in until we almost think the weather means some harm, the way it spills over the harbor. Gauzy, a trawler on its mooring sputters close to home. A level...

Modishness & Blairishness.
April 1, 2000... This May, for the first time, London will be electing a mayor. The post shouldn't be confused with that of the Lord Mayor--the one with the golden coach, the one whose office goes back to medieval times. The Lord Mayor's jurisdiction is...

Tilman Riemenschneider at the Met.
April 1, 2000... In Form in Gothic, his provocative meditation on the art and architecture of the late Middle Ages, the German art historian and aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer concluded that the world of Northern man "yielded itself to him in all acuteness with...

Gallery chronicle.
April 1, 2000... At least since the rise of the Depression-era photographers, art photography, it seems, has drifted toward the vernacular, toward reportage. Contemporary galleries brim with work by younger photographers that is snapshot or news-photo derived....

The narrative imperative.(quality of political reporting)
April 1, 2000... Not that one wishes to minimize the importance of political bias in the media, but it cannot be said often enough--certainly, I have said it more than once--that there is something even more determinative of the direction to be taken by the...

Tiresias redux.
April 1, 2000... When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning he was a gigantic insect; when Professor Donald N. McCloskey woke up one morning he was a gigantic woman. It is a matter of opinion as to which metamorphosis was the more bizarre or surreal. Of course,...

Jan Dalley Diana Mosley.(Review)
April 1, 2000... Jan Dalley Diana Mosley. Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages, $27.50 It is lucky for England that her homegrown would-be Fuhrer finally turned out to be little more than a weird historical footnote. Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of...

James Fox Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia.(Review)
April 1, 2000... James Fox Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia. Simon & Schuster, 482 pages, $30 Just what is a Southern belle, anyway? The received definition--a form of womanhood that is dainty, sugary, and demure--begins to totter on its...

Susan Sontag In America: A Novel.(Review)
April 1, 2000... Susan Sontag In America: A Novel. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 387 pages, $26 In America begins with an epigraph from Langston Hughes: "America will be!" It is a fitting start to the story of a group of Poles who travel to Anaheim, California...

The New Sweet Style.
April 1, 2000... Vassily Aksyonov The New Sweet Style. Random House, 482 pages, $29.95 In Vassily Aksyono's 1980 novel The Island of Crimea, an upset woman named Tanya walks into a diner and orders shish kebab. A tremendously fat woman taunts Tanya and...

Life in Basqueland.(Review)
April 1, 2000... The dour city of Bilbao, located on the Basque coast of Northeastern Spain on the Bay of Biscay, has not exactly been an attraction for tourists to the peninsula over the years--nothing, that is, compared to the varied allure represented by...