New Criterion articles from January 2004

New Criterion archives from January 2004

Notes & comments: January 2004.
January 1, 2004... Life at the MLA The jury is still out in the great contest for the most discredited academic organization in America. The contenders are many. The competition is fierce. Almost every discipline in the humanities and social sciences has...

Leibniz & job: the metaphysics of evil & the experience of evil.
January 1, 2004... To review human reflection about evil is to review the entire history of theology, philosophy, religion, and literature, from the Rig Veda to Plato to Dostoyevski to Wittgenstein. And to consider the effective operations of evil in human life...

Booker vs. Goncourt; or, when silence is a duty.
January 1, 2004... When I was a child, I tormented nay father with questions such as "Which is the best orchestra in the world?" and "Who was the greatest English writer?" In my childish way, I believed such questions were susceptible to unequivocal answers, and...

Are emotions moral?
January 1, 2004... On October 2, 2002 a sniper shot and killed James D. Martin in the parking lot of Shoppers Food Warehouse in Wheaton, Maryland. Martin was fifty-five and lived in the middle-class suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. There were no witnesses or...

The ghost.(No poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The ghost The shabby, dishonored, unnamed ghost who haunted my parents' dream life like a guest must have been, I realized thirty years late, my father's alcoholic father, who, light on his feet, jitterbugged...

The death of Ovid.(New poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... The death of Ovid The arched trees flare against the early leaf. Against the spent horizon, like a scrawl, gold clouds have worked a naked bas-relief. The smoke of raging fires casts a pall.

Zero hour.(New poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Zero hour Bittern, hawk, and osprey tend in their private circles near orders scrawled across the page, though the willing victims send postcards to another age gazing up in fear. Alligators known to dwell...

Three phases of culture.(New poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... i. The anthropologist Their land was barren of all habitation, their tribal structure hard to understand and useless to the business of a nation. He gasped and saw a dead thing in his hand. He asked the natives what they called each...

Sculpture in Dallas.(Art)
January 1, 2004... Sculpture isn't easy. As that hoary artists' joke goes, it's what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting. Unlike paintings, which (for the most part) stay decorously on the wall and can even escape scrutiny, sculpture is...

Strange fruit.
January 1, 2004... As this issue goes to press, it is announced that a remarkable discovery has been made in the Swabian Mountains along the Upper Danube: ancient figurative art, the product of Late Stone Age artists living 30,000 years ago, has been uncovered in...

La Juive.(Concert notes)(Opera Review)
January 1, 2004... by the Vienna State Opera, Metropolitan Opera House, New York Exemplified by the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, French Grand Opera was among the dominant styles of the early nineteenth century. With the exception of Verdi's Don Carlos,...

Pelleas et Melisande.(Concert notes)(Opera Review)
January 1, 2004... by the Boston Symphony, Carnegie Hall, New York Concert performances of opera combine advantages with disadvantages. The advantage of hearing Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande in concert, for example, as performed by the Boston Symphony...

The mountains of instead.(The media)
January 1, 2004... It takes but a slight acquaintance with the newspaper business to see that the large corporations which run America's newspapers are worried sick about the demographic profile of their product. The average age of newspaper readers in this...

The achievement of Robert Lowell.(Books)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... Robert Lowell was notably unlucky in Ian Hamilton's major biography written on him in 1983. Hamilton's biography, while impressively comprehensive, presented a damagingly wrong-headed and skewed picture of Lowell the man. The reading public on...

Messages from the gods.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Mary Lefkowitz Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths. Yale University Press, 288 pages, $30 The Iliad, one of the oldest Greek narratives to have survived, depicts the gods themselves using mythology to help to understand,...

The disaster parade.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Blake Bailey A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. Picador, 683 pages, $35 Anyone who aspires to write the Great American Novel should read Blake Bailey's new biography of Richard Yates and think twice. By turns modest and...

The Steiner school.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... George Steiner Lessons of the Masters. Harvard University Press, 8 pages, $19.95 A book about great teachers--by George Steiner? One's eyes narrow suspiciously. But no, he is in chastened mood. "Why have I been remunerated," he asks, "for...

Evocations.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Irving Louis Horowitz Tributes: Personal Reflections on a Century of Social Research. Transaction Publishers, 392 pages $34.95 In Song of Myself, Walt Whitman asks a question that has been repeated by many contemporary Americans: "Why...

Hugh Kenner, 1923-2003.(Notebook)
January 1, 2004... In 1976 there appeared in bookstores Geodesic Math and How to Use It (University of California Press). The author was Hugh Kenner, whose next book would be Joyce's Voices (1978) and whose previous book had been A Homemade World (1975), a study...