New Criterion articles from April 2003

New Criterion archives from April 2003

Notes & comments: April 2003.
April 1, 2003... Junk Mailer Many readers will remember what The New York Review of Books was like in the late 1960s and 1970s. It carried many thoughtful articles on a wide variety of literary and intellectual matters. It also promulgated a virulently...

Lessons from Juvenal.(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2003... It is difficult not to write satire.--Juvenal, on the Rome of his day J'ai en ce moment une forte rage de Juvenal. Quel style! quel style! --Flaubert, in a letter of 1853 Satire, if it is to do any good and not cause immeasurable harm,...

Who was Simon Raven?(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2003... Novelists who achieve a cult status write, by definition, for a narrow and usually specialist readership, and while their books are not for everyone, they attract certain passionate partisans. One cult figure, the English novelist, journalist,...

The place of poetry.(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2003... My grandfather was a self-made man, a child of immigrants, and a dandy. In later life, he lined his closets with neckties and waistcoats, with bowler hats and two-toned bucks. He enjoyed cutting a figure, as they say, and fancied himself a...

Shadow language.(poetry)(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2003... Of all the theses advanced to explain the incomparable abundance of Shakespeare's language, perhaps the most audacious--and certainly the wackiest--is that propounded some forty years ago by an Iraqi professor at the University of Baghdad. In a...

Poetry: a prognosis.(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2003... I think it's a fair bet that if you asked most people on this side of the Atlantic who claim to enjoy reading poetry who their favorite pre-twentieth-century English language poets are, they'd say "Donne and Emily Dickinson": on the other side...

Winters's curse.(Yvor Winters )(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2003... "A critic may even be specifically wrong yet theoretically right. Paul Elmer More, for instance, damns all modern literature with one irritated and uncomprehending gesture; he is academic and insensitive. The tragedy of it is, that most modern...

The thirteenth storey.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... The thirteenth storey As we flickered up the storeys the child reflected everywhere in the mirrors of the elevator had to know the reason there was no thirteenth storey. Her father said as little as was...

Ghost out of work.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... Ghost out of work I died and I tried haunting Massachusetts. Had I died inexplicably, bizarrely? I begged their pardon: No. Had I not lived in a Gothic homestead, never trod the stairs of turrets? I tried haunting...

Rogue moss.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... Rogue moss Emboldened now, no longer earthbound, No more shrinking into the shadowy lee As if plain sight were a station Not for a moment to be contemplated, Shunning attention, renouncing ambition. Finespun...

Mornings I walk past the first cemetery of Athens.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... Mornings I walk past the first cemetery of Athens Like a widow, every day the grey Dawn comes To the Proto Nekrotapheio, and sweeps the crumbs Of Night from tombstones, and the marble busts. The stone cutter in his...

Variations on an old standard.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... Variations on an old standard Come let us kiss. This cannot last-- Too late is on its way too soon-- And we are going nowhere fast. Already it is after noon, That momentary palindrome. The mid-day hours start...

Fontanelle.(Poem)
April 1, 2003... Fontanelle ... so called because it shows a rhythmical pulsation produced by the flow of blood in the vessels of the brain. --Webster's The boggy spot atop her skull, which would at birth accommodate the...

Anglo-saxon attitudes. (Letter from Paris).(French literature and French attitudes towards English)(Critical Essay)
April 1, 2003... One of the questions that always crosses my mind when I visit Paris is, What do unintelligent or uneducated people read there? Certainly, the daily newspapers cannot meet their requirements: Le Monde, Liberation, Le Figaro (to say nothing of...

"Manet/Velazquez" at the met. (Art).(Review)
April 1, 2003... Was it happenstance, luck, or careful planning that brought two exhibitions linking French and Spanish masters to New York at just about the same time this winter? Whether it was by chance or design that "Matisse Picasso" at MOMA QNS was...

Gallery chronicle.(Review)
April 1, 2003... The art world has traded the name of William Bailey as a hushed code word for thirty years. A code word for what? Well, for the legitimacy of painting, for realism, for the return of the nude, for an indifference to the art of the moment. A...

Concert note.(David Robertson with the New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall)(Concert Review)
April 1, 2003... David Robertson with the New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall David Robertson is one of the most promising young American conductors, and his one-week stint with the New York Philharmonic offered an interesting, if peculiar, mix of old...

Rather not. (The media).
April 1, 2003... Fifty-seven boxes were recently returned to the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya in Zeit trucks--large Russian military vehicles--by the Iraqi government authorities. Each box contained a dead child, eyes gouged out and ashen white, apparently...

The war to begin all wars.
April 1, 2003... Military history has not been very popular after the Vietnam War. Perhaps the unease is because war itself is felt to have little utility in a postmodern world. No longer are disagreements said to arise from good squared off against evil, but...

Native fiction.(Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 1, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Keith Windschuttle The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 1, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847. Macleay Press, Sydney. A$4-9.95 The island of Tasmania is now seen in scholarly and unscholarly circles as the setting for one of the most...

Prime problem.(Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... John Derbyshire Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. Joseph Henry Press, 412 pages, $24.95 With the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 1994, Derbyshire says, "the Riemann Hypothesis is now the...

I spy.(Unsleeping Eye: A History of Secret Police and Their Victims)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Robert J. Stove The Unsleeping Eye: A History of Secret Police and Their Victims. Encounter Books, 319 page, $25.95 My slight personal experience of arrest for political reasons has suggested to me that it as often partakes of the quality...

Another Tony. (Letters).
April 1, 2003... To the Editors: In response to John Gross's interesting account of the current mood in London ("A Tale of Two Tonies" March 2003), I should like to point out that there are British pro-American conservatives who are, nonetheless, opposed...

Poetic licence. (Letters).
April 1, 2003... To the Editors: I wish to thank William Logan for the time and effort expended in his review of my recent book, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest ("The real language of men," December 2002). However, the review contains a...