New Criterion articles from January 2007

New Criterion archives from January 2007

Hamilton capitulates.(Hamilton College's Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization)
January 1, 2007... Salvador Dali would have found a lot to admire about higher education today; George Orwell, for his part, would have found in it a veritable lexicon of Newspeak. Dali would have savored the surrealistic aspect of the enterprise: the vertiginous...

Introduction: utopia a vs. nationhood.
January 1, 2007... I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau In a memorable passage at the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant evokes a soaring dove that, "cleaving the air in her free flight," feels the...

Islam, Western civilization & the nation state.
January 1, 2007... The relationship between Islam and the West is profoundly, multifariously, inescapably asymmetrical. In an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance this creates for a Western mentality schooled in the less complex oppositions of the Cold...

The nation & the intellectual left.
January 1, 2007... In December 2005, some of Sydney's surfing beaches were sites of what politicians and the press called "race riots." After a gang of Lebanese Muslim youths had assaulted a volunteer lifeguard at Cronulla Beach, a gang of Anglo-Australian youths...

Is the nation state threatened?
January 1, 2007... "Is the Nation State Threatened?" This question, though apt, may fail to convey how dire the threat to sovereignty truly is. It might be better to ask, "Is the Nation State Terminally Ill?" Are we witnessing the death march of sovereignty, and...

Pound's depreciation.(ABC of Economics, Ezra Pound, )(The Route of All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound)
January 1, 2007... Anyone who pronounced himself satisfied with the state of the world would be regarded either as an idiot or as an unfeeling and unthinking egotist, whose satisfaction with his own life had culpably blinded him to the misery of the generality of...

Before.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Before Deep-set in a brown cusp, seeds cringe from the stalk and cling to the outstretched flower head stashed grudgingly. Hardened, massy, details seize: a coat sleeve, sock cuff, will receive these...

River & ocean.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... River & ocean Went swimming twice this summer, and each time Marked a page in memory's thick tome. Emerson Falls: I sprawled on warm grey stone Near the remains of an unfinished dam In the Sleepers' River...

Fields.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Fields Furrowed as the heaviest brow yet plain As our forgetfulness, they are unmoved By change the way all origins lie stilled By what they start. Long genealogies Of fields rest in courthouse records But lack...

Learning to read.
January 1, 2007... My father taught me to read when I was four, and I never stopped. But reading, to me, promptly suggested emulation: writing verse, mostly love poems to older women. At six, I wrote them to Gabriela, the pretty, fourteen-year-old upstairs...

Well-made & not-so-well-made.(The Voysey Inheritance)(Regrets Only)(Theater review)
January 1, 2007... The term "well-made play" was coined in about 1825 by the French dramatist Eugene Scribe, whose ideal of tightly plotted plays (complete with exposition, peripeteia, and denouement) had a tremendous influence throughout the nineteenth century:...

Spain & Picasso.(Art)(Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso, Picasso and American Art)
January 1, 2007... Pablo Picasso should be looming large just now. In theory, the apparently fortuitous overlapping of two of this season's major exhibitions, "Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History" at the Guggenheim and "Picasso and...

Velazquez in London.(Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez )
January 1, 2007... Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez is often thought of as a painter of people but his early pictures are best regarded as still lifes. Three Musicians (1616-1617) should be renamed "Bread on a table napkin," Tavern Scene (1616-1617) should be...

Gallery chronicle.(Sanctuary Revealed: Restoration of an Architectural Icon)(Responses to ... Solitude)(Biblical Art in a Secular Century: Selections, 1896-1993)
January 1, 2007... In the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse, Hilary Spurling describes the reaction of French Communists to the elderly artist's chapel at Vence, for which he designed not only the stained glass windows, but also the architecture,...

Delusions of "reality".(The media)(the Iraq war)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... Not long ago, as I was listening to a BBC reporter describing the latest terrorist outrage in Baghdad--scores killed... deteriorating security situation... Iraqi government helpless... military untrained and disorganized... terrorists...

Donne's "dialogue of one".(Donne: The Reformed Soul)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go, And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so. These lines...

Homer & history.(The Trojan War: A New History)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Barry Strauss The Trojan War: A New History. Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $26 Somewhere around 1200 B.C. a group of Greek raiders attacked a prominent Hittite town in northern Asia Minor. After a prolonged siege, they sacked Troy and left....

Chronicle of decline.(New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism between the Bicentennial and the Millennium)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Robert A. M. Stern, et al. New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism between the Bicentennial and the Millennium. Monacelli, 1,520 pages, $100 New York 2000 is the fifth in the monumental series of encyclopedic tomes by the architect and...

An American Tory.(The Essential Russell Kirk)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Russell Kirk The Essential Russell Kirk, edited by George A. Panichas. ISI Books, 575 pages, $20 A few years ago, C-SPAN's "American Writers" series featured a segment on Russell Kirk (1918-1994). The episode toured Kirk's Italianate home...

Dum dum da da.(Jerome Kern)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Stephen Banfield Jerome Kern. Yale University Press, 392 pages, $35 George Dorris notes, "To an astonishing degree, the study of the American musical, like the study of Greek drama and baroque opera, ought to come under the heading of...

Eric Newby, 1919-2006.(Notebook)(In memoriam)
January 1, 2007... In his 1982 autobiography A Traveler's Life, the delightful travel writer Eric Newby, who died this past October at the age of eighty-six, expressed his thoughts on human existence. In his writings, the Venerable Bede compared the...