New Criterion articles from February 2005

New Criterion archives from February 2005

Guy Davenport, 1927-2005.(Notes & Comments)(Obituary)
February 1, 2005... It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Guy Davenport, poet, novelist, book illustrator, essayist nonpareil, raconteur indefatigable, master of humane inquiry. Guy was entirely sui generis, an autodidact of the old school who...

Journalism: power without responsibility.
February 1, 2005... Stanley Baldwin's bitter jibe that journalists enjoy "the privilege of the harlot down the ages--power without responsibility"--still resonates. One reason is certainly because we recognize that--alas!--we cannot live without journalism. We...

Philip Larkin's "element".(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... Philip Larkin died in 1985, at the age of sixty-three. Even before his death he had come to be regarded in Britain as a kind of national institution, rather than as just another distinguished writer. His poems were the most widely quoted and...

Desert-island reading.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... Betteredge, the butler-narrator in Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, consults Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe much in the way that New Age spiritists consult the I-Ching, as a guide to future actions in difficult circumstances. The character of...

Alfred Duggan's past.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... It is no use making any large claims for historical fiction. As is the case with science fiction, the historical genre certainly has its masterpieces. Yet with few exceptions--Henry Esmond, perhaps, War and Peace, and one or two others--even...

Sunday morning at the Carmelite monastery.(New poems)(Poem)
February 1, 2005... Sunday morning at the Carmelite monastery My breath, on this January morning, a small white cloud as, shivering, I step into a room of light. There, on the bare table, the plate of bread, the cup. ...

Due soldi di speranza.(New poems)(Poem)
February 1, 2005... Due soldi di speranza I leave two pennies On my table To keep hope in sight I enable myself By any device An angel would recognize Even if he came While I was away A good sign Might make...

Kiblah.(New poems)(Poem)
February 1, 2005... Kiblah --from Arabic qiblah, "that which is placed opposite" (OED) To Muslims it means a number of things: the point toward which they turn in prayer (Mecca now but once Jerusalem); that side of a mosque thus...

Gallery chronicle.(Art)
February 1, 2005... Last May I wrote about the painter Milton Avery in this space. Avery excited me not only for what he could do on canvas but also for what his canvases could do to the world at large. Red Rock Falls (1947) unlocked a host of memories in me and...

Showing that you care.(The media)(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... One of the few pleasures to be derived from studying the media comes from watching the re-discovery by the hype industry and those who share its world-view of things known to the folk wisdom of mankind since time immemorial as if no one had...

Wagner: moralist or monster?(Books)(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... To succeed with a new biography of Wagner a writer must have access to unpublished sources, or a new vision of the composer's work, or literary abilities that match those of such accomplished predecessors as Ernest Newman, or at the very least...

"Being a poet".(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... John Sutherland Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography. Oxford, 627 pages, $40 Stephen Spender New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Brett. Faber & Faber, 393 pages, 30 [pounds sterling] There have been two previous biographical...

De Kooning declined.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan De Kooning: An American Master. Knopf, 752 pages, $35 It's not news that the New York Abstract Expressionists were an anxiety-ridden, hard-drinking group of cantankerous guys, passionate about art and (for the...

James & the Zeitgeist.(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... David Lodge Author, Author. Viking, 389 pages, $24.95 Colin Toibin The Master. Scribner, 352 pages, $25 In the acknowledgments to his nicely nuanced novel, David Lodge writes: "A few weeks after I delivered the completed Author, Author...

The White Queen?(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... The White Queen? Leonie Frieda Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France. Fourth Estate, 464- pages, $29.95 Every country has its national myths, its defining narratives, its untouchable heroes and unspeakable villains. But most...

P. W. Singer: Children at War.(Shorter Notices)(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Pantheon, 288 pages, $25 Saddam Hussein, alarmed by his swift defeat in the first Gulf War, formed the Ashbal Saddam. Saddam's "Lion Cubs" were his very own Hitler Jugend, boys ten to fifteen trained in weaponry, tactics, unthinking party...

Masayo Duus: The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders.(Shorter notices)(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... translated by Peter Duus. Princeton, 432 pages, $29.95 The life of Isamu Noguchi is a store' of near-operatic proportions. His mother, Leonie, a Bryn Mawr girl, finds work as a translator in turn-of-the-century California. His father,...

The Metropolitan Duccio.(Notebook)(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... Imagine this: like most other civilized people, you have more than a superficial interest in the great music of the past. For decades you have been aware of a rumor circulating among music professionals that a manuscript score for an early...