New Criterion articles from January 2003

New Criterion archives from January 2003

Annals of transgression. (Notes & Comments: January 2003).(women's suicide mistaken for performance art in Germany)
January 1, 2003... "Is it a hoax?" Why is it that some variation of this anxious question accompanies so much of our experience of contemporary art? Why is it, to speak bluntly, that so much of what we are called upon to admire as art has the smirking,...

"Brave new world" watch. (Notes & Comments: January 2003).(new British laws make it legal for transsexuals to marry and obtain updated birth certificate)
January 1, 2003... The art world is not the only contemporary circus of the absurd. Everyday life competes with and often outstrips the most bizarre forces of the cultural avant garde. Or perhaps we should say that everyday life, too, has its avant garde. If...

Stuck in the 1960s. (Notes & Comments: January 2003).(liberal attacks on Henry Kissinger's appointment to a bipartisan committee investigation September 11, 2001 )
January 1, 2003... Back when the Vietnam War was raging, perhaps the only person more reviled than Richard Nixon by the radical Left was Henry Kissinger. The former National Security advisor and Secretary of State has served his adopted country with intelligence...

Why the West?('The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat')(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Toleration is of all ideas the most modern. --Walter Bagehot, 1872 In my eyes the west is a perpetual aggressor. --Arnold, Toynbee, 1961 If one allows the infidels to continue playing their role of corrupters on Earth, their...

Eric Hobsbawm: lying to the credulous.(communist history )
January 1, 2003... Eric Hobsbawm is no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian. Unfortunately, lifelong devotion to Communism destroyed him as a thinker or interpreter of events. Such original work as...

The irrepressible Pepys.(17th century diarist Samuel Pepys)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2003... Samuel Pepys's Diary (1660-1669) is an extraordinary document in many ways, but its most extraordinary aspect is that Pepys seems to have had no model for it. In terms of informality and naked self-revelation, it was unprecedented; the only...

Lionel Trilling & the crisis at Columbia.
January 1, 2003... The seventy-five-page interview with Lionel Trilling conducted in May 1968, which I recently discovered in the Oral History Research Office at Columbia, reveals for the first time his role in the dramatic and sometimes violent uprising at the...

In the guesthouse.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... In the guesthouse I. Long exposure, 1892 All of them dead by now, and posed so stiffly, in their sepia Sunday best, they seem half-dead already. Father and Eldest Son, each dressed in high-cut jacket and...

Late style Anthony Caro. (Art).
January 1, 2003... "Late style" is what is supposed to happen to gifted, long-lived artists. At best, it manifests itself as a bold expansion of ideas implicit in earlier work or as a reckless exploration of new possibilities. The most exciting late style works...

"Media bias" revisited. (The media).
January 1, 2003... Well, it was enough to make a cat laugh, as Mark Twain says. Normally, I don't like to write about "media bias." You can't have an argument with someone who doesn't argue in good faith, and those who deny the charge of bias are nearly always...

Who reads Mencken now?(H.L. Mencken)
January 1, 2003... I observe a tendency since his death to estimate him in terms of the content of his books.... Nothing could do him worse justice --H. L. Mencken, on Huneker, in Prejudices: Third Series The passage of time has not been kind to the...

The prophets today.('The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are')(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Norman Podhoretz The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are. Free Press, 390 pages, $30 Norman Podhoretz approaches the prophets of the Hebrew Bible with all the care that scholarship can bring to the project. But his purpose in the end is...

Whispered disclosures.('Complete Poems')(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Charles Baudelaire Complete Poems, translated by Walter Martin. Routledge, 4-63 pages, $14.95 To all the fierce technical difficulties of translating French verse into English--the relative restrictiveness of French vocabulary, the...

Love and error.('Ovid: The Poet and His Work')(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Niklas Holzberg Ovid: The Poet and His Work, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Cornell, 217 pages, $39.95 Ovid is not exactly the proper example for Roman greatness. He is the author, after all, of famously lascivious love manuals and erotic...

Big science.('A New Kind of Science')(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Stephen Wolfram A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, 1250 pages, $44.95 This is a book about mathematics. It is easy to read. It is not a popular survey of old knowledge, but an exposition of a distinctive idea by a leading thinker. What...

Master taxonomist.('The Compleat Naturalist')(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... Wilfred Blunt Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist. Princeton University Press, 264 pages, $35 First published more than thirty years ago (in 1970), Wilfred Blunt's thorough biography of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) has been...

Ivan Illich, 1926-2002. (Notebook).(radical philosopher and social commentator)(Obituary)
January 1, 2003... Ivan Illich, the polyglot Austro-Croatian-Sephardic-Mexican-American philosopher and social theorist, died at the beginning of December last in Bremen, Germany. He had his hour of fame in the first half of the 1970s, when he appeared to be the...