New Criterion articles from December 2000

New Criterion archives from December 2000

The cultural revolution comes to the ballot box.
December 1, 2000... Foremost among the many things to be said about the November elections is that they decisively confirmed what we have often observed in these pages: that the United States is now a nation in the grip of a cultural revolution. It goes without...

Plutarch & the issue of character.
December 1, 2000... What Histories can be found... that please and instruct like the Lives of Plutarch?... I am of the same Opinion with that Author, who said, that if he was constrained to fling all the Books of the Antients into the Sea, PLUTARCH should be the...

Longfellow & the fate of modern poetry.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Strolling around Disneyland this summer, re-acquainting myself with Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Mister Toad, Simba, and so on, the following reflection occurred to me: that these strange imagined characters were originally (at one slight...

Long walk to nowhere: Nelson Mandela.
December 1, 2000... What is the matter with this country? If oppression by the West is to blame, why are things getting worse under indigenous rule? AIDS, which had a manageable prevalence in the early Nineties, is now set to kill at least a quarter of the...

A sideshow of one: Umberto Saba.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Umberto Saba cultivated poetic individuality to such a paradoxical extreme that his poems often read as though written by an anonymous author. Aspiring to be simply "man among men" he yet found himself lapped in continual ripples of...

Gerard de Nerval's "Chimeras".(Statistical Data Included)
December 1, 2000... Born Gerard Labrunie in Paris in 1808, Nerval was, under his assumed name, Baudelaire's model of the "poete maudit," the doomed poet with a vision so intense the world will destroy him if he does not destroy himself. His masterpiece, "Les...

The disinherited.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... I move in darkness--widowed--beyond solace, The Prince of Aquitaine in a ruined tower. My one star is dead; the black sun of sadness Eclipses the constellation of my guitar. O you who brought me light in the night of the...

Myrtho.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... Myrtho, I think of you, divine sorceress, At proud Posillipo a thousand fires made bright; I think of your brow bathed with morning light, Black grapes wound in your golden tresses. From your cup I drank the draft of...

Horus.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... Kneph the god shuddered, shaking the cosmos; Mother Isis sat upright in bed, Pointed with spite to her barbarous spouse, Her green eyes afire as of old, and said: "See, the old lecher. He's almost dead Through whose...

Anteros.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... You ask me why I dare stick out my neck, Bull-headed, why my heart's so full of rage? It's because I come from Antaeus's lineage-- God hurls his darts at me, I throw them back. I am inspired by the Vengeful God Who...

Delfica.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... Daphne beneath pale laurel or in the lee Of the fig tree, hear, do you know the old refrain, Daphne in shade of olive or myrtle tree, Remember the love song, ever beginning again? You know the Temple, the range of...

Artemis.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... The Thirteenth comes 'round again. Still she's first And always my Only, the moment unchanging. O Queen of the lovely! Of all, first or last, My last lover, dear one, are you also my King? Love the one who adored you...

Christ on the Mount of Olives.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... God is dead! The sky empty... Weep, children, you have no more father! --Jean-Paul Richter I Our Lord lifted his arms skyward, like a poet In a sacred wood. For a long, long time He had been lost in sorrow too...

The golden verses.(Poem)
December 1, 2000... So! Everything is sentient! --Pythagoras Man, freethinker! Do you believe that you alone Can think, in this world where life's splendor Bursts forth in everything? Your freedom has its power --But you leave the...

Lee Krasner in Brooklyn.
December 1, 2000... It would have been nice to say that the Lee Krasner retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum(1) totally changed my mind about the work of this problematic painter, to say that the show makes a convincing case for Krasner as an important artist in...

Gallery chronicle.
December 1, 2000... Though he often worked in both marble and bronze, Jean Arp (1886-1966) infused all his efforts with a lightness not to be mistaken for mere humor. His was a buoyant, amused, and somewhat wry approach to making, which resulted from an...

Onstage politics.
December 1, 2000... Capital punishment has long been a vexatious problem in American society, and one commented on widely as an example of American brutality by those in other countries. The putting to death of certain convicted criminals was once more or less the...

Complicity, objectivity & stupidity.
December 1, 2000... For connoisseurs of historical irony, the election--still undecided as I write--has provided one of the best things to come along since Bill Clinton's signing into law the statute under the provisions of which (involving an accused sexual...

Author! author!
December 1, 2000... John Ashbery's nonsense is a lot more amusing than most poets' sense. What he does well is nearly inimitable, as the mutilated bodies of his imitators show (what he does badly nearly anyone can do, though most poets wouldn't even try). In the...

The blaming of Leonard Woolf.(Review)
December 1, 2000... It is for her beauty, her psychic pain, and the odd and tragic circumstances of her life as much as for the quality of her work that Virginia Woolf has attracted a certain type of critical attention; as one sharp commentator noted, she is the...

Larger than proof.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Larger than proof John L. Casti and Werner DePauli Godel: A Life of Logic. Perseus Books, 224 pages, $25 David Hilbert, the great German mathematician (he died in 1943), had a stupendous, dazzling vision. He hoped and believed that...

Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Shorter notices Kathleen Burk Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor. Yale University Press, 506 pages, 19.95 [pounds sterling] A. J. P. Taylor was once a household name. A fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a...

Basil Bunting on Poetry.(Review)
December 1, 2000... Peter Makin, editor Basil Bunting on Poetry. Johns Hopkins University Press 232 pages, $42 From an American vantage point, it may seem as if the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting by rights ought to round out a raffish group portrait...

The Padilla affair in retrospect.
December 1, 2000... The Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who died at the end of September, aged sixty-eight, was among those writers of whom it may be said that he made history, less by what he wrote or even thought than by the course of events, which in his case has...

Life in Basqueland.(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2000... To the Editors: I wanted to take the time to briefly respond to Alexander Coleman's review of my book, The Basque History of the World, in your April 2000 issue because it attempted to be, and in many ways succeeded in being, an unusually...