New Criterion articles from February 2001

New Criterion archives from February 2001

Notes & Comments: February 2001.
February 1, 2001... What more can they ask for? In June 1996, the critic Mary Eberstadt wrote a much-noticed article for The Weekly Standard entitled "Pedophilia Chic" Detailing the many signs in our culture that the taboo against pedophilia was eroding, the...

The museum as fun house.
February 1, 2001... fun house, n. A building or an attraction in an amusement park that features various devices intended to surprise, frighten, or amuse. --The American Heritage Dictionary I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a...

The last Elizabethan: Hart Crane at 100.(poet appreciation)
February 1, 2001... With that odd mixture of verbal genius and sheer bumpkinship that he so distinctively embodied from the beginning, Hart Crane plundered and ransacked the English language, especially the diction and vocabulary of the Elizabethans, like a...

Morality for solipsists.
February 1, 2001... Medicine might at first sight appear to be an unpromising field for political correctness. After all, a broken leg is a broken leg, and there is pretty wide agreement about how to treat one, even among those who would agree about little else....

Exorcising sociobiology.
February 1, 2001... Innocents imagine that universities, the names of many of whose departments include "science" (as in social science), do not perform exorcisms. That is a mistake. Today, universities are among the busiest sites for the practice of intellectual...

From the guest room window.
February 1, 2001... A gray autumn day. Down in our back yard green shrubs are washed by rain. At the far end the little naked boy stands patiently holding his dolphin. His basin is empty. The fountain has been turned off for...

The refuge.(Poem)
February 1, 2001... High in his small clean bedroom he lived a fantasy tale of magic aspiration-- a refuge from the real, which he'd been taught to fear as a thing one mustn't trust and thus had little purchase on (he'd learn...

1932.(Poem)
February 1, 2001... At Twelfth Street and Fifth Avenue in front of the old Longchamps one frigid winter morning, as I watched for the bus to come, I saw a dark unshaven man whose skin was snowy pale set up a stand at the corner....

Three songs for Franz Schubert.(Poem)
February 1, 2001... 1. The young man sings of love and winter with the snow of his voice and his passionate breath. When it was summer she gave flowers and welcome but now it is winter his sweetheart's door is closed....

In the land of fulfillment.(Evaluation of popular culture)
February 1, 2001... It was the most sensitive of times, it was the crudest of times. It was the most informal of times (all that cheerful use of first names), it was the most impersonal of times (all those recorded messages). It was the most tolerant of times, it...

Making the case for figuration.
February 1, 2001... Every city has its little, uncrowded museums offering special pleasures to the initiated. In Paris, there's the Musee Dapper, with its superb exhibitions of African art, hidden behind a bourgeois apartment house. In London, there are Sir John...

Luc Tuymans: Mwana Kitoko.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2001... "Luc Tuymans: Mwana Kitoko" at David Zwirner, New York. November 23-December 23, 2000 One of the less remarked-upon artistic phenomena of the last decade or so is the way the recent vogue for painting from photographs has ushered in a...

Kenneth Noland: Circles.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2001... "Kenneth Noland: Circles" at Ameringer Howard, New York. December 7, 2000-January 20, 2001 Two years ago, in the valedictory show at Andre Emmerich's gallery, Kenneth Noland brilliantly reimagined the circle paintings that had made him...

The Draftsman's Art: Master Drawings from the National Gallery of Scotland.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2001... "The Draftsman's Art: Master Drawings from the National Gallery of Scotland," at the Frick Collection, New York. December 12, 2000--February 25, 2001 While I was leafing through the catalogue for "The Draftsman's Art: Master Drawings from...

Il Trovatore.(Review)
February 1, 2001... Il Trovatore, by Giuseppe Verdi, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. There is something quintessential about Verdi's Il Trovatore. It is not, to be sure, the most performed opera in the canon (Carman or La Boheme is more likely), nor is...

Outside the mainstream.
February 1, 2001... Not long ago, I went to a movie that was all too typical of small, independent American films--and not a few big studio productions, too. Spring Forward, written and directed by Tom Gilroy, had a lot going for it--mainly two terrific...

Chicago Dostoyevsky.(Review)
February 1, 2001... Saul Bellow, our most intellectual writer, mainlined the European novel of ideas into the veins of American literature and infused it with a high-octane style. His prose is exuberant, energetic, torrential; his voice intimate, learned, and...

Octavio Paz.(Review)
February 1, 2001... Octavio Paz Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey, translated by Jason Wilson. Harcourt Brace, 128 pages, $22 How would the reading public react if a beloved, widely read American author--a poetic commentator on art, love, and history, with a...

Petronius Satyricon.(Review)
February 1, 2001... Petronius Satyricon, translated & with commentaries by Sarah Ruden. Hackett, 256 pages, $9.95 paper The Satyricon is the Ulysses of Roman literature. It is a comic novel intoxicated with language, with the power of verbal craft. As Joyce...

Cynthia Ozick Quarrel and Quandary.(Review)
February 1, 2001... Cynthia Ozick Quarrel and Quandary. Alfred A. Knopf, 247 pages, $25 Cynthia Ozick is keenly alert to the sometimes uneasy tension in literature between reality and fiction, history and imagination, and she doesn't shy away in the least from...

John Ashbery Other Traditions.(Review)
February 1, 2001... John Ashbery Other Traditions. Harvard University Press, 160 pages, $22.95 In his recent paean to the New York School poets, The Last Avant-Garde (1998), David Lehman describes the composition of John Ashbery's Charles Eliot Norton Lecture...

Rick Moody Demonology.(Review)
February 1, 2001... Rick Moody Demonology. Little, Brown, 288 pages, $24.95 "Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find that he had been transformed into a cockroach" is no longer enough. What the thing needs is a corollary narrative about an estranged sister...

Walsall redux.
February 1, 2001... In the September 2000 New Criterion, I published an article about the town of Walsall and its fantastically bad new art gallery ("Crudity Beyond Belief"). I passed what I thought was an uncontroversial aesthetic judgment upon that unfortunate...