New Criterion articles from January 2000

New Criterion archives from January 2000

Notes & Comments: January 2000.
January 1, 2000... Postscript to "Sensation" "O what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practise to deceive!" It is a pity that no one introduced Arnold Lehman--as of this writing, still the director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art--to these thoughtful...

The perils of activism: Ken Saro-Wiwa.
January 1, 2000... The last time I visited the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in Port Harcourt, two years before he was hanged in the city's prison, the naked corpse of a man lay on the sidewalk of the Aggrey Road, about a hundred yards from his office. Broiling...

Willa Cather's "The Professor's House".
January 1, 2000... For there to be a humanitas and for this to build up a "world" around itself, a habitable "cosmos" on earth, this classical common sense posited a natural and divine "cosmos" as an original and prior ontological model, independent of all human...

A great, baggy monster: Rilke's "Duino Elegies".
January 1, 2000... The long poem, if we rightly exclude the dramatic, comes in three varieties: narrative, including epic; philosophical, including existential; and metaphysical, including religious. And, of course, in any combination of the above. When we, here...

The Saint-Saens enigma.
January 1, 2000... Poor Saint-Saens! He was blessed from childhood with a polished facility of utterance that made most of his fellow composers (Ravel excepted) seem like hysterical tyros by comparison. But somehow, even at the apex of his renown, Camille...

Swans.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Cambridge, off-season. The old city mortared to new age, Victorian terrace houses razed and rebuilt for business--young men in flash suits own the footpaths. Each railway viaduct to London frizzes with buddleia the...

Samphire.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Girls from the language schools go chittering in birdlike tongues, thin-breasted, doe-eyed, Spanish or Italian, full of hormones, angst, vocabulary. You caught me eyeing a Swede with bee-stung lips, Botticelli face in a...

Deceit.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Death never/always betrays retrospection. Thou Shalt Not guards the approaches: an asphalt road, a badly constructed hill, the view laid out where all the patchwork fields lie in error. Down through the medieval ridge...

The river.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Zero hour. The streets cooling in aftermath, papers offered news new-risen each morning in the communion wafer of overnight knowledge. Agents unlocked their shops to fresh loaves cheaper than newsprint and without...

Rethinking modernism.
January 1, 2000... The most discussed exhibition of the past few months--at least in some circles--was not the Brooklyn Museum's over-hyped "Sensation," but rather "Modernstarts: People, Places, Things," the Museum of Modern Art's truly sensational, genuinely...

"Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century" at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... "Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century" at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. October 7, 1999-January 17, 2000 Prior to entering the exhibition "Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth...

"Naum Gabo: Pioneer of Abstract Sculpture" at PaceWildenstein.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... "Naum Gabo: Pioneer of Abstract Sculpture" at PaceWildenstein, New York. November 4-January 8, 1999 Naum Gabo (1890-1977) possessed an astonishing consistency of vision. Nothing in the design of his complex sculpture Column (1975), in...

"Milton Avery: Edge of Abstraction" at Knoedler & Company.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... "Milton Avery: Edge of Abstraction" at Knoedler & Company, New York. November 10, 1999-January 22, 2000 "Ripeness is all," Shakespeare reminds us, invoking both age and timeliness. "Milton Avery: Edge of Abstraction" an outstanding show of...

A View from the Bridge.(Review)
January 1, 2000... A View from the Bridge, by William Bolcom, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. October 9-November 5, 1999 The second most eagerly anticipated operatic event of 1999--the first being John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, which opened at the Met in...

Superior soap opera.(Review)
January 1, 2000... CHRISTOPHER: I'm workin' my ass off on this movie script. You know how many pages I got? Nineteen. PAULIE: Is that a lot or a little? CHRISTOPHER: Books say a movie's supposed to be about 120 pages. PAULIE: [whistles softly]. ...

Howard's rendering.
January 1, 2000... If The Charterhouse of Parma (1859) is not the greatest work in that great body of literature which is the French realistic novel of the nineteenth century--and more than one good critic has thought it so--it is surely the most brilliant....

Balthus: A Biography.(Review)
January 1, 2000... Nicholas Fox Weber Balthus: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 644 pages, $40 Nicholas Fox Weber adopts an interesting biographical technique for his hefty book on Balthus. He does not offer straight, researched reconstructions of the events,...

Illumination & Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers.(Review)
January 1, 2000... Carlos L. Dews, editor Illumination & Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers. University of Wisconsin Press, 234 pages, $24.95 To call Carson McCullers an eccentric, as some have done, is one of the great...

The Bible and Its Rewritings.(Review)
January 1, 2000... Piero Boitani The Bible and Its Rewritings. Oxford University Press, 231 pages, 35 [pounds sterling] At each end of this book is a biblical encounter with the Other, an apprehension of the numinous. It begins with the visit to Abraham of...

Reputations of the Tongue.(Review)
January 1, 2000... William Logan Reputations of the Tongue. University Press of Florida, 274 pages, $34.95 One of the things that chiefly distinguishes William Logan's thinking about poetry from that of other critics is the reasonable separation he grants...

Letters.
January 1, 2000... Grotesque liberties To the Editors: Recently, we attended the Portland Opera's performance of Handel's opera Giulio Cesare with our fourteen-year-old son. Our experience paralleled many of the points made in Roger Kimball's article on...