New Criterion articles from January 2001

New Criterion archives from January 2001

Snow.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... The soundless character Of snow was like a mood. Out after supper, we Felt both thrilled and subdued: Our street had been transfigured Into a lovely waste But for the cones of lamplight Its boundaries...

Guides for the soul.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Who thickens from the shadows as you die? Who silences your comprehending cry? Emblem of all you lost and now inherit, What psychopomp attends your parting spirit? The unattainable beloved who Usurped your life...

Baschenis at the Met.(Review)
January 1, 2001... "Who?" is a perfectly acceptable response to the news that an Evaristo Baschenis exhibition recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum. Until the early 1950s, this Northern Italian painter of still lifes was obscure to the point of being known...

Gallery chronicle.
January 1, 2001... In his paintings, R. B. Kitaj reminds me of no one so much as Saul Bellow. In addition to grand ambition and wholehearted expressivity, which often result in a certain lack of subtlety, both men caricature isms and ideas while habitually...

"Inventing the Skyline": the career of Cass Gilbert.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Cass Gilbert practiced architecture in New York from 1899 to 1934, the year of his death. One tends to think of Gilbert as coming a generation later than Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White because his major works began to appear much later...

The familiar hypocrisy.
January 1, 2001... The election gods will have their little jokes won't they? Last month we noticed the irony of brainy Al Gore's desperate appeal on behalf of a putative army of disenfranchised Morons for Gore in Palm Beach County, Florida, for a second chance...

No idiocy like educated idiocy.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Man is born rich, but almost everywhere is poor. It is to the elucidation of this paradox that many of the finest minds of Latin America have been devoted for nearly a century. And the best answer they have been able to give is that most...

Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? Discourses on Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, and Other Dubious Subjects.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Martin Gardner Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? Discourses on Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, and Other Dubious Subjects. W. W. Norton, 336 pages; $26.95 I find it difficult to speak temperately about Martin Gardner because I owe him...

Thomas Gray: A Life.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Robert L. Mack Thomas Gray: A Life. Yale University Press, 701 pages, $39.95 One of the most important facts about Thomas Gray (1716-1771) is that he was the only one of his parents' twelve children to survive into adulthood, and survival...

Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Peter Brooks Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. University of Chicago Press, 192 pages, $24 Confession is all the rage these days. During one recent week, The New York Times Magazine ran an "Endpaper" about the...

This Craft of Verse.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Jorge Luis Borges This Craft of Verse, edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu. Harvard University Press, 154 pages, $22.95 The publication of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures given by Jorge Luis Borges at Harvard in 1967 is an unusual, as well...

Notes & Comments: January 2001.
January 1, 2001... Michigan's thin line Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. -- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four We have often had occasion to dilate on the...

Telling stories, denying style: Reflections on "MOMA2000".
January 1, 2001... "L--d!" said my mother, "what is all this story about?"--"A Cock and a Bull," said Yorick. --The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. It has come as no great surprise that the series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art called...

Philhellene's progress: Patrick Leigh Fermor.
January 1, 2001... I have carried the soldier's musket, the traveler's stick, the pilgrim's staff. --Chateaubriand The captive must have been exhausted and afraid, but when, on the fourth day of his grueling forced march across Crete, he saw dawn break...

Sadness balancing wit: Thackeray's life & works.
January 1, 2001... Throughout William Makepeace Thackeray's professional life, he was plagued by explicit and implied comparisons with his great contemporary, Charles Dickens. Thackeray was born in 1811, Dickens a year later. By the mid-1830s, when the callow...

Emmanuel Chabrier & French musical tradition.
January 1, 2001... The works that produce the most traceable effects in the subsequent history of an art are not always those which come to be regarded as epoch-making. --Donald Francis Tovey Perhaps the most productive midlife crisis in the history of...

Starr Farm Beach.(Poem)
January 1, 2001... Although the beach, with its adjacent r's, Alluded to a dairy farm nearby, We liked to think that, on the shoreline, stars Were sown and grown and gathered for the sky. Along the cliffs that led there, we would try To...