New Criterion articles from February 2004

New Criterion archives from February 2004

Notes & comments: February 2004.
February 1, 2004... Relieving man's estate In October 2003, the President's Council on Bioethics published Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. This three-hundred-and-some-odd-page report summarizes the Council's reflections on a wide...

How good was Maugham?
February 1, 2004... In The Summing Up, published in 1938 when he was sixty-four years old, Somerset Mangham inveighed against literary obscurity and extolled the virtue of clarity (his own peculiar forte). His sentiments were unlikely to endear him to many of the...

Remembering George Gissing.
February 1, 2004... George Orwell, who was born in 1903, the year of George Gissing's death, noted that most of Gissing's works were already, by the 1940s, out of print and virtually unobtainable. He admired Gissing's writing greatly. Orwell had read only a few of...

Of human accomplishment.
February 1, 2004... Readers familiar with Charles Murray's work (Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life) know that he is not a man to shy away from controversy or bold opinions. In Human...

For Hugues Cuenod--in his 100th year.(New poems)
February 1, 2004... For Hugues Cuenod --in his 100th year. Midway along our road sometimes a voice Sounds, prohibiting all heldenblustering choices Of timbre, overtones or fashions; Fifty years back, when I first heard you sing I...

A Chapter in the Life of Mr. Kehoe, Fisherman.(New poems)
February 1, 2004... A Chapter in the Life of Mr. Kehoe, Fisherman Some nights on the dock, When only scales And a few popeyed fish-heads Are left out for the moon (Which the spread nets entangle), There comes the sound Of bare...

Losses.(New poems)
February 1, 2004... Losses The earth, an oblate sphere, slows down, Second by second, in its erratic, elliptical orbit, As molten, metallic seas slosh around its interior. The moon slides in and hooks onto twigs, The fingertips of the...

Waiting for the golden pig.(Letter from Prague)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... In the week before Christmas, carp farmers from Southern Bohemia begin setting up their tables in the center of Prague, and as Christmas Eve approaches the sounds of their mallets and cleavers echo through the ancient stony squares. The carp,...

La Belle Fernande in Washington.(Art)
February 1, 2004... In the fall of 1909, the young Pablo Picasso modeled a clay and plaster sculpture of a female head, a searching, experimental work that now, cast in bronze, is considered a modernist icon, a benchmark in the development of Cubism. Head of a...

Armchair adventures.(Art)
February 1, 2004... What if Homer had decided to be post-Homeric: smiles about heroes? Been there. Linear B? Done that. The new thing: Homer sings his poems into an amphora--instead of writing them down--and deposits the vase in the Hellespont. He then composes a...

"Cellini" at the MET.(Music)
February 1, 2004... "Malvenuto Cellini"? How astonishing that the public dismissed Berlioz's early opera Benvenuto Cellini with that contemptuous epithet. Luscious arias for the female roles, astonishing rhythmic innovations, a dramatic score that transcends a...

Beast-man politics.(The media)
February 1, 2004... In late December and early January, the repose of my study was disturbed by a sound-truck belonging to Lyndon LaRouche--sometimes on its own, blaring beneath my window, and sometimes as part of a minuscule procession, a pathetic gaggle of...

The mystery of Marianne Moore.
February 1, 2004... What most readers remember of Marianne Moore are her beasts--her jerboa, her ostrich, her pangolin. Late in her life, when the brilliant strangeness of her early poems had receded into the mists, she became a fabulous beast herself, poetry's...

More than natural grace.
February 1, 2004... Frederick Law Olmsted Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. Library of American Landscape History, 530 pages, $24.95 (paper) In 2003, New York City celebrated the "sesquicentennial" of Central Park. I put that word in quotes...

The great imperialist.
February 1, 2004... David Gilmour Curzon: Imperial Statesman. Farrar, Strans and Giroux, 684 pages, $45 This long but splendid biography of George Nathaniel Curzon is worth reading, if for no other reason than that the problems Curzon wrestled with in Asia,...

Nothing shabby.
February 1, 2004... Penelope Fitzgerald The Afterlife: Essays & Criticism. Counterpoint, 320 pages, $26.95 The tale of Cinderella tugs at us in many directions, so that even after we've long outgrown the glass-slipper version of virtue rewarded we might very...