New Criterion articles from April 2002

New Criterion archives from April 2002

Do architecture critics matter?
April 1, 2002... Walter Kerr, the drama critic for The New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times from the 1950s through the 1980s, once said that the difference between a reviewer and a critic is that the former assumes his reader has not seen or read or...

The runners at San Benedetto. (New poems).(Poem)
April 1, 2002... The runners at San Benedetto Two runners are crossing the shore by night: Their sound on sand, their lithe iambics gauge The certainty of arrival and return Before the wide encroachment of the waters Smooths out their...

The Etruscan graveyard at Marzabotto. (New poems).(Poem)
April 1, 2002... The Etruscan graveyard at Marzabotto At the dump, the packaged waste as neat as war-graves awaits destruction: the drone of a generator insists on efficiency, promises to destroy all traces: on the spring...

Late in the night. (New poems).(Poem)
April 1, 2002... Late in the night Late in the night I dreamed I was to die, to see through change to the unchanging season where love is said to live and reign (blue sky is for the called no less than for the chosen); my love lay with...

Father & daughter at the Met. (Art).(Artemisia Gentileschi)(Orazio Gentileschi)
April 1, 2002... These days, anyone with even a passing interest in old master art knows about Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652), one of the very few women to become, against all odds, an acclaimed painter at a time when making art was an exclusively male...

Exhibition note. (Art).(Willem de Kooning)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... "The Artist's Hand: Willem de Kooning Drawings, 1937 to 1954," at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York January 17-March 2, 2002 Willem de Kooning once pronounced that "Style is a fraud," adding, "I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind...

An operatic baggy monster.
April 1, 2002... Epic opera is a very rare breed in a large kennel, and its successes are even rarer in number. "Grand Opera; that nineteenth-century invention that updated (without even knowing it) the spectacle opera of the seventeenth century, is not epic...

Lessons in humility. (The media).(media coverage in Afghanistan)
April 1, 2002... Five months--almost to the day--after September 11, the consensus on the terror attacks and their aftermath, The Story according to the media, suddenly changed. Of course, it was never on the cards that the original Story, of American heroes...

Why the West wins wars.
April 1, 2002... Last October, when many liberal commentators in the media were predicting that America and its allies would end up in a quagmire in Afghanistan--"another Vietnam," they foretold--they would have been better advised to ponder the statistics...

The uses of quietism.(Tao Te Ching)
April 1, 2002... Laozi Dao De Jing: The Book of the Way, translated and with commentary by Moss Roberts. University of California Press, 149 pages, $22 The connection between simple-life quietism and the political left has often been noted. Orwell, in his...

Much virtue in "if".(book on William Shakespeare)
April 1, 2002... Katherine Duncan-Jones Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life. Thomas Learning, 332 pages, 20 [pounds sterling] Katherine Duncan-Jones must be granted a certain originality. There cannot be many Shakespeare scholars who combine a...

Classroom politics.(book on philosophers' political activity)
April 1, 2002... Mark Lilla The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York Review of Books, 216 pages, $24.95 In 1955, twenty-nine year old Michel Foucault accepted a teaching post in Uppsala, Sweden. Isolated for three years, he began gathering...

Wellington, well done.(battle won by the Duke of Wellington)
April 1, 2002... Rory Muir Salamanca, 1812. Yale University Press, 322 pages, $35 On the evening of August 16, 1812, the publisher Charles Knight was at his desk attempting to write a "death-song" for a Spanish guerilla when he heard the 29th regiment leave...