New Criterion articles from February 2000

New Criterion archives from February 2000

Notes & Comments: February 2000.
February 1, 2000... Oh, the poor, innocent child Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite...

Little god, big Wilson.
February 1, 2000... A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless, transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything...

Hazlitt & Wordsworth: the language of poetry.
February 1, 2000... The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. --William Hazlitt, essay on Coriolanus William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was a democrat in his youth, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, his contemporaries in...

W. Somerset Maugham: the pleasures of a master.
February 1, 2000... A few months ago I went to dinner with an old friend, a retired professor of great distinction who suffered throughout his career from the vituperation of his academic colleagues who took a view of their chosen subject almost diametrically...

Little porch at night.(Brief Article)(Poem)
February 1, 2000... Pull up a porch chair next to this chaise longue. Tell me the empty dark will fill with voices And talk to me before I end my song. A summer night, and something has gone wrong To rob the mild air of familiar faces. ...

Reading David Ferry's poems.(Brief Article)(Poem)
February 1, 2000... The words run clear like water in these poems. The fluency feels generous and easy, naturally eloquent, carrying in its current grains of incident and meditation. Many tiny facets briefly flash before they are carried...

On the other hand.(Brief Article)(Poem)
February 1, 2000... No wonder we so love the dead. The living are brittle, easily wounded, petty, distracted by shadows, ungrateful, obsessive, persistent, needy, greedy, vain, impulsive, wrapped in day's opacity. Better at...

Muddling through in Bosnia.
February 1, 2000... Sarajevo is not one of the great European capitals. Its population stood at no more than 600,000 before the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and the effects of the long siege left it with half that. Peace has restored its population by a...

Two views of Caravaggio.
February 1, 2000... It's difficult to believe, given the current high reputation of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), that he was ever considered to be anything but one of the great figures of Italian painting. To his contemporaries, his horrifying,...

"Angelo Ippolito: A Selection of Paintings and Works on Paper" at the New York Studio School.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... "Angelo Ippolito: A Selection of Paintings and Works on Paper" at the New York Studio School. November 29, 1999-January 8, 2000 The exhibition pamphlet for "Angelo Ippolito: A Selection of Paintings and Works on Paper" states that...

"Alfred H. Maurer: Aestheticism to Modernism" at Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... "Alfred H. Maurer: Aestheticism to Modernism" at Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York. November 30, 1999-January 22, 2000 Today the painter Alfred H. Maurer (1868-1932) is known mainly to aficionados of early American modernism, a...

Fantasy island.
February 1, 2000... "New York: A Documentary Film," which aired on the Public Broadcasting Service in five two-hour installments this past November,(1) marks the convergence of two trends. One is the growing cottage industry of the historiography of New York City....

The great ghastly.
February 1, 2000... The Metropolitan Opera has long been lucky in many ways, but it has never enjoyed much success with world premieres. Excepting two Puccini efforts (La Fanciulla del West and Il Tritico), a pair of Barber operas (Vanessa and the undervalued...

Against linguistic libertarianism.
February 1, 2000... Opening my Washington Post to the op-ed page one day early in the new year, my eye fell on the opening sentence of David Ignatius's column: "Sailing smoothly into this first week of the 21st century, it's hard to see storm clouds on the...

He told us so.(Review)
February 1, 2000... There was a great Marxist called Lenin Who did two or three million men in --That's a lot to have done in But where he did one in That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in. Late and unlamented though it now is, the Soviet Union used to be a...

The Rose Garden.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Maeve Brennan The Rose Garden Counterpoint Press, 307 pages, $23 Maeve Brennan left Dublin for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. While her entire thirty years' writing career was conducted under the aegis of The New Yorker and while...

See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups and Discoveries of the Souset Camp Experience.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Dariusz Tolczyk See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience. Yale University Press, 361 pages, $37.50 The huge and still growing literature of personal recollections of the (mostly Soviet) Communist...

Letters.
February 1, 2000... Howard's rendering To the Editors: I should like to call attention to a twice-committed typo, a very perverse typo, in my review of The Charterhouse of Parma (January 2000). The French quotation three-quarters of the way down the...