New Criterion articles from April 2006

New Criterion archives from April 2006

Michael S. Joyce, 1942-2006.(Notes & Comments: April 2006)(Obituary)
April 1, 2006... It is with great sadness that we note the passing of our friend Michael S. Joyce, who died February 24 at sixty-three. Most readers of The New Criterion will have glimpsed one or more of the many obituaries that appeared in the weeks following...

Yale's latest folly.(Rahmatullah Hashemi, Yale University)
April 1, 2006... One thing Mike Joyce would not have liked is the spectacle of the Taliban's former ambassador-at-large cozily ensconced as a special student at Yale and studying (no, we are not making this up) such courses as "Terrorism: Past, Present, and...

Meanwhile, in the art world.(Karen Finley)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... "Never varies" is the slogan for a well-known brand of scotch. The fruitier precincts of the art world might consider adopting it for their own use. We are prompted to offer this suggestion by George and Martha, a "satire" by the "performance...

Elizabeth Bishop unfinished.
April 1, 2006... Readers admire Robert Lowell, entertain a fondness for Marianne Moore, respect Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, become fanatics, a few of them, over Ezra Pound, even compete to join the cult of Sylvia Plath, but they fall helplessly in love,...

An austere opulence.
April 1, 2006... The Sheldonian Theatre, built from 1664 to 1668 to Christopher Wren's design--his very first, as it happens--felt glacial on the dank evening of February I of this year when Geoffrey Hill appeared there to read from his poems. The theater on...

Defeating the poem.
April 1, 2006... For many years, I have taught in the Department of English at New York University a course called "Modern British and American Poetry." "Modern" is deemed to mean, approximately, Whitman and after. "British" is deemed for administrative...

Johnson's divided mind.(Samuel Johnson)
April 1, 2006... On March 29, I777, the night before Easter, Samuel Johnson wrote an apologetic note in his diary: "I treated with the booksellers on a bargain, but the time was not long." By custom, Johnson set aside Easter Eve for meditation, weighing up his...

The unrealists' return.(poetry)
April 1, 2006... Every kind of composition, even the most poetical, is nothing but a chain of propositions and reasonings; not always indeed the justest and most exact, but still plausible and specious, however disguised by the coloring of the imagination. ...

"A science fiction writer of the Fifties".(Poem)
April 1, 2006... "A science fiction writer of the Fifties" I. When the Smoke Rings Sail Although it scarcely matters where he is, He's in Urbana, Illinois, tonight, As he is on most nights; it's where he lives. Move to New York,...

Goya at the Frick.(Francisco de Goya)
April 1, 2006... Why is Francisco de Goya so difficult to write about? Is it because his oeuvre encompasses everything from official portraiture and altarpieces to private nightmare fantasies and etchings? Or is it because over the course of his long career he...

"Fairfield Porter".(exhibitions)
April 1, 2006... "Fairfield Porter" Bern' Cuningham Gallery, New York. March 8-April 15, 2006 Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) has become a painter's painter, and it is easy to see why. As a representational artist in an age of abstraction, Porter went up...

"John Szarkowski: photographs".(Exhibitions notes)
April 1, 2006... "John Szarkowski: Photographs" Museum of Modern Art, New York. February 1, 2006-May 15, 2006 As MOMA's director of photography from 1962 to 1991, John Szarkowski steered the appreciation of fine-art photography from its fledgling years, to...

"Frost: Life and Culture of the Sami Reindeer People of Norway".(exhibitions )
April 1, 2006... "Frost: Life and Culture of the Sami Reindeer People of Norway" National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. October 19, 2005-April 23, 2006 "Frost: Life and Culture of the Sami Reindeer People of Norway," on display at the...

Queer eye for the Whitney Bi.(Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night)
April 1, 2006... So you are "against the war" Do you: a) articulate a coherent foreign policy and support politicians who advocate it? Or do you: b) create a film trailer for a non-existent remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula, about that "decadent...

Verdi's La Forza del Destino.(Opera review)
April 1, 2006... Verdi's La Forza del Destino Metropolitan Opera, New York Verdi's La Forza del Destino (1862; revised 1869) is a curiosity, among his works, in that it relies heavily on great singing to overcome a convoluted story that is, frankly,...

A plague of scandals.
April 1, 2006... In its early report on the death of John Profumo, the Conservative War Minister whose liaison with Christine Keeler--who was also sleeping with a Russian intelligence officer--rocked British politics in 1963, the Times of London noted that at...

Collapse of a "hyperpower".(collapse of Rome, United States)
April 1, 2006... After September II and the acrimonious war in Iraq, America was castigated as the world's sole "empire" "hegemon," or "hyperpower." A series of books, especially in Europe, not only lamented the overweening power of the United States, but...

Burkenstocks.(Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America )(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Rod Dreher Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers & Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or...

All for love.(Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems, edited by J. D. McClatchy. Library of America, 225 pages, $20 reviewed by John Simon Not so many years ago, the favorite poet of sophisticated high-schoolers and typical college students was...

By any other name.(The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Anna Pavord The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. Bloomsbury, 384 pages, $45 reviewed by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Browsing through plant encyclopedias and garden catalogs or visiting botanical gardens and...

The haiku spirit.(The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918-1975)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Charles Reznikoff The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918-1975, edited by Seamus Cooney. Black Sparrow, 445 pages, $21.95 reviewed by Anthony Cuda Charles Reznikoff had grown accustomed to publishing his own slim books for over a decade...

Paul Werner Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World.(Shorter notices)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Paul Werner Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World. Prickly Paradigm Press, 76 pages, $10. Books, books, everywhere, and not a word to read. So will go the epitaph of print media. Prickly Paradigm Press, distributed by the...

Reiner Stach Kafka: The Decisive Years.(Shorter notices)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Reiner Stach Kafka: The Decisive Years. Harcourt, 592 pages, $35 Upon finishing Kafka's The Trial, the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky noted, "The reader of a book knows after twenty or thirty, pages what kind of a writer he is dealing with,...

Tom Dalzell & Terry Victor: The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English.(Shorter notices)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Tom Dalzell & Terry Victor The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English. Routledge, 2400 pages, $175 Once "oiks" (n. a disagreeable youth, U.K., 1925) have overrun completely the civilized world, we ladies and gentlemen...

Gertrude Himmelfarb: The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Gertrude Himmelfarb The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling. Ivan R. Dee, 259 pages, $26 Readers of Gertrude Himmelfarb's brilliant exercises in historical recuperation know that she is an historian and social...