New Criterion articles from January 2002

New Criterion archives from January 2002

Notes and comments: January 2002: the struggles of Anthony Lewis.
January 1, 2002... We know it seems churlish to say "Good riddance!" when someone bids farewell. Just as obituary is a genre that favors eulogy--de mortuis nil nisi bonum--so valedictions tend to elicit polite good wishes. There are exceptions to every rule,...

The cultural war on Western civilization. (The survival of culture: V).
January 1, 2002... In the last week of September, shortly after the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, made an extraordinary statement. During a visit to Germany, he declared Western...

The strange case of D. S. Mirsky.(D. S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890-1939 )
January 1, 2002... Of the millions put to death in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign of terror in the 1930s, the case of the Russian literary critic and historian D. S. Mirsky (1890-1939) is surely one of the strangest. Unlike so many other victims of the...

Laurence Sterne.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... Laurence Sterne's masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, is seldom read any more outside of graduate seminars. This is a sad fate for the author whom Nietszche deemed "the most liberated spirit of all time," and whose style, in its day, was considered...

The asymmetrical George Moore.(George Moore: 1852-1933)
January 1, 2002... Once numbered among the best-known authors and most-controversial literary figures of his day, George Moore has been relegated to a footnote on the Irish Literary Revival of the first decade or so of the twentieth century. His most important...

Clay and flame. (Three poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Clay & flame Nature... has mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind. -- William James Up from the mineral and mud and ore, from mildew and bacterium and mold and thallophyte and spore to fungus, rust, and...

Prepositions. (Three poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Prepositions After, about, above, across, among-- around the table, bent upon cognition just by rote, she paces with a long list of prepositions: A catalogue of locus and direction, polky words so insignificant...

Dido, it would have ended anyway. (Three poems).(Poem)
January 1, 2002... Dido, it would have ended anyway Dido, it would have ended anyway. Command the sun to linger at its crest in hot abeyance--order noon to stand stopped, as if there isn't any west-- maybe you can get it to obey. ...

New York's newest gem: the Neue Galerie. (Art).(various artists, Neue Galerie, New York)
January 1, 2002... More than thirty years ago, when I was a graduate student, a college classmate and her husband took me to meet a friend of theirs. I remember almost nothing about the evening except entering the apartment and being stunned by the sight of two...

Concert note.
January 1, 2002... Ivan Moravec, at Carnegie Hall, New York. The Czech pianist Ivan Moravec gave the final concert of his U.S. tour at Carnegie Hall on November 27th with a program of works by Janacek (Sonata I.X. 1905), Debussy (the second of the Estampes,...

Their pretty little heads. (The media).
January 1, 2002... "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," says the bestselling pop psychologist John Gray, and no one thinks twice about it. For the high-brow set, the bestselling pop linguist Deborah Tannen writes book after book to explain how men and women...

Isaac Babel's genre of silence. (Books).
January 1, 2002... The romance of revolution has repeatedly seduced European intellectuals and nowhere more intensely than in Russia. In the late nineteenth century, Russia became the first country in which young members of the intelligentsia, when asked their...

When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. (A lost lady).
January 1, 2002... Carolyn G. Heilbrun When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. University of Pennsylvania Press, 159 pages, $24.95 This is an extraordinary book, I am relieved to say. If Mr. Kurtz had kicked free of the...

Philip Sidney: A Double Life. (All that glisters).
January 1, 2002... Alan Stewart Philip Sidney: A Double Life. St. Martin's Press, 400 pages, $26.95 The one thing most people know about the life of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was almost certainly invented by the man who first told the story, Sidney's...

Life at the Bottom. (The age of bad ideas).
January 1, 2002... Theodore Dalrymple Life at the Bottom. Ivan R. Dee, 272 pages, $27.50 There is an odd conservatism in the common perceptions of life in other lands. I grew up among English people who still thought of France--a rather stuffy and...

Letters from England, translated by Geoffrey Newsome. (At home abroad).
January 1, 2002... Karel Capek Letters from England, translated by Geoffrey Newsome. Claridge Press, 183 pages, 12.99 [pounds sterling] The Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek was thirty-four when he finally decided to accept a year-old offer from...

Oscar: six acts at the Morgan. (Notebook).
January 1, 2002... In a letter to Robert Lowell of November 29, 1967, Dwight Macdonald wrote, "Oscar was almost always right (except in his erotic tastes and habits) about all the big issues of his time--social, moral, aesthetic." During the past century, Oscar...