New Criterion articles from February 2003

New Criterion archives from February 2003

Notes & comments: February 2003.
February 1, 2003... The diversity con game ... the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. --G. K. Chesterton Last month, the Bush administration announced that it was filing legal briefs...

Why I became a conservative.
February 1, 2003... I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term "conservative" as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side...

What happened to Aldous Huxley?(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2003... Metaphysics is out of fashion. There is, as department-store sales assistants say, not much call for it nowadays. The word "metaphysics" does not even occur in the index of the current bestseller about human nature, Steven Pinker's The Blank...

The anatomy of murder.
February 1, 2003... One way and another, I meet quite a lot of murderers. Their crimes are merely sordid: there is nothing about them that remotely brings to mind De Quincey's famous essay, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." The passions that lead to...

A mild & harmless relativism?
February 1, 2003... Extreme relativism probably isn't explicitly accepted by even the most scatterbrained of postmodernists or sociologists of science. Most postmodern views certainly lead to extreme relativism, and in some cases amount to little more than extreme...

Edna St. Vincent Millay. (A new poem).(Poem)
February 1, 2003... Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) Unquiet spirit, by what right Do I come to disturb your dust In this omniscient October light A half century almost from the day You rambled down your library stairs Into...

Richness, quietness, pleasure. (Art).
February 1, 2003... Finding the modern French paintings at the Hermitage is not easy--and that's without taking into account the time and effort it takes to get to St. Petersburg. Once you get past the clogged entrance and the hostile babushka selling tickets, you...

"Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art". (Exhibition notes).
February 1, 2003... at the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 21, 2002-February 16, 2003 Whatever you do this month, get yourself to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There you will find a perfect exhibition from a heretofore anonymous art collector...

"Wolfgang Tillmans: Still Life". (Exhibition notes).
February 1, 2003... at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. October 25, 2002-February 23, 2003 Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) proves that for every ying there is a yang. Remember Tillmans? The year 2000 was that halcyon year in which this artist...

"The Park Avenue Cubists: Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen, and Shaw". (Exhibition notes).
February 1, 2003... at the Grey Art Gallery, New York. January 14-March 29, 2003 Clement Greenberg was undoubtedly a great critic. But he also undoubtedly had his crotchets and blind spots. One crotchet he inherited from Marxism. He tended to see artistic...

Confidence motion. (The media).(Trent Lott's attempts to apologize for racist remarks)
February 1, 2003... Not unusually, Time magazine's story got the thing just exactly wrong: "Whitewashing the Past" read its cover line, superimposed on the photo of a worried-looking Trent Lott. What the editors appear to have meant was that Lott himself was...

The scabrous lyricism of Thomas Bernhard. .(Book Review)
February 1, 2003... With his elongated and bulbous nose, his pockmarked cheeks and his sly ruminative glance, invariably from under half-closed lids, Thomas Bernhard seemed more a Tyrolean version of W. C. Fields than the major shit-disturber of modern German...

Horace for our time?(Book Review)
February 1, 2003... J. D. McClatchy, editor Horace: The Odes. New Translations by Contemporary Poets. Princeton University Press, 240 pages, $24.95 reviewed by D.S. Came-Ross I see my reputation is at stake; My fame is shrewdly gored.--Troilus anal...

Becoming Darwin.(Book Review)
February 1, 2003... Janet Browne Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Alfred A. Knopf, 624 pages, $37.50 There were hagiographers at work in the heyday of whiggish history of science, but for decades that breed has been nearly extinct. Nevertheless at least...

Beauty blasted.(Book Review)
February 1, 2003... Dominic Hibberd Wilfred Owen: A New Biography. Ivan R. Dee, 424 pages, $30. When I was in high school in the late 1970s, my English class did a unit on war poetry. I remember reading Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead" Randall...

My Maso problem.(Book Review)
February 1, 2003... Carole Maso Beauty Is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo. Counterpoint, 170 pages, $24 I first came across the singular writings of Carole Maso about ten years ago, when she submitted to the journal I help edit a piece of what is known...