New Criterion articles from February 2007

New Criterion archives from February 2007

Notes & comments: February 2007.(New York Times Book Review's paean to Norman Mailer)(human animal relations)(Viewpoint essay)
February 1, 2007... "His perfect sense of the other" We had thought that by this time we would be immune to being surprised by The New York Times Book Review. We have often had occasion to criticize that mighty organ of literary celebrity, as much for what it...

The English-speaking century.(A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... In the past one hundred years, four successive political movements--Prussian militarism, German Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and international Communism--mounted military campaigns to conquer Europe, Asia, and the world. Had any of them...

Orwell's "Catalonia" revisited.(George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia)(Critical essay)
February 1, 2007... Sainthood is a thing that human beings must avoid. --George Orwell on Gandhi In any political argument of philosophical significance, everyone wants George Orwell as an ally. To be able to claim that he is so, however, you must first...

The god within?(American religious poetry)(Critical essay)
February 1, 2007... In The Varieties of Religious Experience, originally delivered as the "Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion" at the University of Edinburgh just over a century ago--and published, to great acclaim, in 1902--William James distinguished two types...

Courtesy.(Poem)
February 1, 2007... Courtesy I feel so bad for you, my friend, your sufferings unsettle my faith in meaning, I meant to say. I hadn't meant to nettle when, sad and blundering, I said, "I know just how you feel" and got it...

Son of Telamon.(Poem)
February 1, 2007... Son of Telamon Sick with fear by the blood hole, I saw fighters dragging 'round their gory combat gear, each one craving recognition, sympathy, so many of them still amazed, going through the dark. Here...

In bed for a week.(Poem)
February 1, 2007... In bed for a week It happens to us all, at least one time, The black, caught knot of storm threatens, distant, But buckling closer, waves capped and blown white. Heavy tides, laden with fresh wreckage, climb, Drop down...

Remembering Eliot's Criterion.(Reconsiderations)(T.S Eliot's periodical, The Criterion)
February 1, 2007... In his essay on the function of the critical quarterly, Allen Tate was moved to remark, "The great magazines have been edited by autocrats." Among so many editors and their fiefdoms--Harriet Shaw Weaver's The Egoist, Ford Madox Ford's...

Irrepressible urges.(Theater)(Spring Awakening)(Theater review)
February 1, 2007... In December the new "rock musical" Spring Awakening opened on Broadway after a downtown run at the Atlantic Theater, and became the only show of the season to satisfy both jaded critics and large audiences in search of a bona fide hit. The hype...

Morris Louis reconsidered.(Art)
February 1, 2007... In a mature career of eight feverishly productive years, Morris Louis made an astonishing number of the most ravishing, mysterious, unyieldingly abstract paintings of the twentieth century. Between 1954 and his death, aged fifty, in 1962, Louis...

"The Odyssey Continues: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art & Private New Orleans Collections".(Exhibition notes)( Georges Wildenstein)
February 1, 2007... "The Odyssey Continues: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art & Private New Orleans Collections" Wildenstein & Company, New York. November i6, 20006-February 9, 2007 Natural disasters--as opposed to the manmade variety such as wars...

"Saul Steinberg: Illuminations".(Exhibition notes)
February 1, 2007... "Saul Steinberg: Illuminations" Morgan Library & Museum, New York. November 30, 2006-March 4, 2007 When we enter the world of Saul Steinberg's drawings, we find ourselves enclosed in a paradise of delightful absurdities. What we normally...

Gallery chronicle.(Art)(art museums in US)(Viewpoint essay)
February 1, 2007... Walking into my favorite gallery, can be like stepping into grandma's kitchen when the oven's on. Something's cooking, I don't know what it is, but chances are I'm going to like it. In New York, I depend on a dozen or so galleries for such...

We vote for Brand X.(The media)(George Bush's military policy for Iraq)(Viewpoint essay)
February 1, 2007... After checking the obituaries section of The Times of London for war heroes, explorers and outdoorsmen, people I know, writers and journalists, academics and schoolteachers--for The Times, like other British papers, quite often does run...

A triumvirate for our time.(The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... The basic moral drive of Western civilization in the twentieth century has been appeasement. The civilization that has come to define what modernity actually is spends a lot of its time apologizing for its sins and accommodating the grievances...

William's tale.(William Empson: Against the Christians)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... John Haffenden William Empson: Against the Christians. Oxford University Press, 797 pages, 30 [pounds sterling] This is the second and final volume of John Haffenden's epic biography of William Empson (I reviewed the first for The New...

Gesamtkunstwerk.(Das Nibelungenlied)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... Anonymous Das Nibelungenlied, translated by Burton Raffel. Yale University Press, 351 pages, $40 If you want to enjoy the Song of the Nibelungs, you must try to do one thing: forget Wagner. His music drama Der Ring der Nibelungen is such...

Pynchon's progress.(Against the Day)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... Thomas Pynchon Against the Day. The Penguin Press, 1120 pages, $35 Thomas Pynchon's many fans love him the way teenagers love pop idols. For this kind of attention to be accorded to a writer of long, hermetic novels goes against everything...

Dark & dire.(The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Sourcebook)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... Gerard Manley Hopkins The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Sourcebook, edited by Alice Jenkins. Routledge, 174 pages, $26.95 When I was in graduate school at Boston University, I had the privilege of studying Gerard Manley Hopkins with the...

Guys & Dahls.(The Collected Stories of Roald Dahl)(Book review)
February 1, 2007... Roald Dahl The Collected Stories of Roald Dahl. Everyman's Library, 888 pages, $30 I was surprised to learn, from Jeremy Treglown's 1994 biography of Roald Dahl, that the British short-story writer and now-beloved children's author was in...

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 1941-2007.(Notebook)(In memoriam)
February 1, 2007... Two years ago, Betsey Fox-Genovese, a prize-winning historian and recipient of a National Humanities Medal (from the administration of George W. Bush) played to a packed house at Hamilton College. One of my colleagues, one of Betsey's former...