New Criterion articles from April 2007

New Criterion archives from April 2007

Eyes on Hanover.(Notes & Comments: April 2007)(Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire)
April 1, 2007... Anyone who cares about the state of higher education in this country should cast a wary eye upon what is happening just now at Dartmouth College. Since the late nineteenth century, the college has turned to its alumni for nearly half of its...

Wise words from Bernard Lewis.(Notes & Comments: April 2007)
April 1, 2007... Last month, the great scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis gave the Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Mr. Lewis's subject was Islam and Europe, and we thought it worth sharing some central bits of his...

Talleyrand: the old fraud.(book by Robin Harris entitled "Talleyrand: Betrayer and Saviour of France")(Book review)
April 1, 2007... Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, has been very well served by biographers. Alfred Duff Cooper's 1932 life of the long-serving French politician and diplomat is an ornament of English letters, and since then four other impressive...

Frost's "Road" & "Woods" redux.(Robert Frost)
April 1, 2007... Much of the recent talk about "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost's famous poem of 1916, centers on whether the speaker's choice of road really makes "all the difference." The going view is not just that is doesn't, but that it couldn't. The...

Robert Bridges's new cadence.
April 1, 2007... Robert Bridges (1844-1930) is perhaps the most conspicuous example of that faintly alarming figure, the happy poet. His strenuously archaic diction, his eccentric devotion to syllabic and quantitative measures, his bizarre attempts to simplify...

The enduring specter of E.A. Robinson.
April 1, 2007... It has been a long while--seventy-two years, to be exact--since Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) was hailed in his obituaries as America's foremost poet. In recent times, his work has been tacitly dismissed as old hat. Few current...

The three Ms of German poetry.(Music, metaphor, and meaning)("Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology" by Michael Hofmann)(Book review)
April 1, 2007... Verse translators come in three varieties: Those who get almost nothing right; those (the majority) who get some things right; and those rare birds who get everything, or at least almost everything, right. By everything I mean the three Ms:...

The Amis country.
April 1, 2007... First of all: that's Kingsley not Martin, the author of Lucky Jim not Yellow Dog, which may strike some readers as atavistic (and even a little quaint), given how fully Amis the Second has deposed Amis the First in the literary press. Still,...

The tin balls that the Planetarium.(New poems)(Poem)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... The tin balls that the Planetarium Designed to demonstrate the powers of ten Range from the pebbly fraction of an atom To a hot air balloon that means the sun, Indicting cosmologically provincial Habits they can't help...

Domestic Cappadocia.(New poems)(Poem)
April 1, 2007... Domestic Cappadocia I They seemed content enough, the married pair who owned my charming cave hotel, and ran the place commendably well, solicitous yet casual, always there when needed yet never hovering, ...

Deus ex machina.(New Poems)(Poem)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Deus ex machina Because we were good at entanglements, but not Resolution, and made a mess of plot, Because there was no other way to fulfil The ancient prophesy, because the will Of the gods demanded punishment,...

Summer in the high purpose of clouds.(Poem)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Summer in the high purpose of clouds From the porthole, a few fan-handed rays staggered across the night's mezzotint, as if they concealed a single unpleasant thing. In medias res--a whole life passed through its middles:...

The haunting.(Jerome Robbins)
April 1, 2007... "But I was happy so puzzled it interests me." No, it's not a line from E. E. Cummings. It comes from a letter the dance critic and poet Edwin Denby sent to Jerome Robbins after the 1974 premiere of his ballet Dybbuk. Denby was no longer...

No place.(Theater)
April 1, 2007... Americans are not comfortable with abstract ideas. Neither, for that matter, are the English, and a theater of ideas has never prospered in London or New York, despite the anomalous success of George Bernard Shaw. Continental Europe's passion...

Remembrance of things past.(Art)("High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975")
April 1, 2007... If the path to hell is really paved with good intentions, as my father always maintained, then the organizers of the raucous survey "High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" at the National Academy Museum, should prepare themselves...

"Hogarth": Tate Britain, London.(Exhibition notes)(William Hogarth)
April 1, 2007... "Hogarth" Tate Britain, London. February 7, 2007-April 29, 2007 It is clear from the major new exhibition in London's Tate Britain that the artist William Hogarth was seriously politically incorrect. His famous satirical series of pictures...

"George Stubbs: A Celebration": The Frick Collection, New York.(Exhibition notes)
April 1, 2007... "George Stubbs: A Celebration" The Frick Collection, New York. February 21, 2007-May 27, 2007 When George Stubbs arrived in London from the north, about 1759, he was already thirty-five and had been a practicing artist for at least fifteen...

"Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot!" International Center of Photography, New York.(Exhibition notes)
April 1, 2007... "Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot!" International Center of Photography, New York. January 19, 2007-April 29, 2007 In the early 1930S, the photographer Martin Munkacsi (the family name was Mermelstein) rescued the genre of fashion...

"Victorian Bestsellers": Morgan Library & Museum, New York.(Exhibition notes)
April 1, 2007... "Victorian Bestsellers" Morgan Library & Museum, New York. January 26-May 6, 2007 "Bestseller" is a relatively recent coinage. It doesn't even appear in the first edition of the OED. The Supplement's first citation is from 1911, given an...

The New York fairs.("The Armory Show: The International Fair of New Art" and "The Art Show")
April 1, 2007... A sea change is taking place in American taste. This thought occurred to me as I worked a table of hors d'oeuvre at a Chicago dinner party a few years ago. The apartment in which I stood was decidedly Gold Coast. In New York, we might call it...

Mr. Libby to you.
April 1, 2007... "There will be a great deal written and said in coming days about the frustrations of the Scooter Libby verdict...." So read the opening clause of the thoughtful editorial by The New York Times on the subject, which itself went on to be every...

Academimic.(book by Craig Raine entitled "T. S. Eliot")(Book review)
April 1, 2007... I heard Craig Raine interviewed on the radio about this book. (1) Didn't he feel, he was asked, that his often abrasive dismissals of fellow critics ("execrable," "stupid") lowered the standards of academic writing? His answer was contemptuous:...

Hypocrite lecteur.("Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?" by Pierre Bayard)(Book review)
April 1, 2007... Pierre Bayard Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus. Editions de Minuit, 198 pages, 15 [euro] One of the great intellectual enterprises of the last century has been the destruction of boundaries. It is as if the triumphant...

A passion for the future.("Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali)(Book review)
April 1, 2007... Ayaan Hirsi Ali Infidel. Free Press, 368 pages, $26 Ayaan Hirsi Ali has attracted many notable enemies in her life: not only the Muslim terrorists and wannabe-terrorists who threaten to kill her and who did kill her collaborator on the film...

In their youth.(Book review)
April 1, 2007... Adam Sisman The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Viking, 480 pages, $27.95 Writers, craving praise and hating criticism, are unusually contentious. Their personal quarrels, which spill into print, are notorious: Pope and Colley...

M is for messy.(Book review)
April 1, 2007... Lee Smolin The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Houghton Mifflin, 392 pages, $26 Peter Woit Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law....

Revisiting "Catalonia" again.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2007... To the Editors: I write as an occasional contributor to The New Criterion and recognized authority on Catalonia in the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939. I was coauthor with the Catalan historian Victor Alba of the 1988 book Spanish Marxism...