New Criterion articles from June 1999

New Criterion archives from June 1999

Notes & Comments: June 1999.(class in pornography at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; moralism and foreign policy)
June 1, 1999... Over the line at Wesleyan Here are a couple of facts about Wesleyan University, the elite liberal arts institution in Middletown, Connecticut, that has taken to calling itself "The Independent Ivy." Tuition, room, and board this year are...

The moral consequences of impatience.
June 1, 1999... When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgement until the first...

A major minor: Ezra Pound's poetry.(Critical Essay)
June 1, 1999... The Pound that matters is early Pound, essentially the Pound of the London years. He arrived in London to stay (he had visited earlier) on August 14, 1908 and within a decade or so of that date had composed most of what is permanently valuable...

Dawn Powell: the fruits of revival.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Dawn Powell (1896-1965) wrote novels about the artist's struggle for recognition. Her own struggle for it and the recent recovery of her work make a poignant story. I have heretofore been reluctant to accept the idea that a full-fledged Powell...

Victimized Verlaine.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Is there anything harder to define than poetry? Beyond matters of prosody, imagery, cadence, and such--the mysterious essence and quiddity of poetry? What, for instance, makes the odd verse quintessentially poetic, engraved on the mind,...

Where and what you are.
June 1, 1999... I see you in a hundred places. Now You've gone into the writing where anything Can happen, and nothing is still. If you know A short-cut to the flesh, a sweet sighing From the souls of trees that we might make our c ...

Ralph: a love story.
June 1, 1999... In what had been a failing music store A man named Flowers opened the first cinema In Moultrie. Ralph was the projectionist, At seventeen the first projectionist. And there was a piano from the store On which the wife...

New histories for old.
June 1, 1999... The Kosovo war has inevitably dominated British headlines in recent weeks. But lesser wars--culture wars--have continued unabated; and if the Blair government has become somewhat less frenetic in its campaign to "rebrand' Britain, there have...

Goya in Philadelphia.('Goya: Another Look' at the Philadelphia Museum of Art)
June 1, 1999... We've all been to exhibitions where the whole was more than the sum of its parts, shows where not entirely stellar works combined to make an illuminating point, enlarge our understanding of a period, or change our conception of what an artist...

Exhibition Notes.
June 1, 1999... "The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 14-June 1, 1999. The last artist viewers encounter on exiting the exhibition "The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect" is the eighteenth-century French painter...

The Guggenheim in Bilbao.[Critical Essay]
June 1, 1999... Since its opening in October 1997, the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has been greeted with giddy and almost universal acclaim. For Ada Louise Huxtable, it is "one of the most beautiful museums in the world today." Certainly as a piece...

Gestural politics.
June 1, 1999... At its margins, human life dissolves into banality. Our milestone moments seem to invite other people to hang on them millstones of ponderous rhetoric of which few ever question the desirability or even the necessity. Having for family reasons...

Vanity Fair.(poetry reviews)(Review)
June 1, 1999... Rita Dove's slickly written poems are professional in a completely professional way. Her poems have a message, though rarely a subtle message--more often it's a billboard or full-page ad. I understand why Black poets, particularly ones as...

"A jelly minus its mould".(biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge)(Review)
June 1, 1999... "The story of Coleridge's life," observed I. A. Richards in 1950, "has been told many times, in outline and at length--too often to an accompaniment of wrung hands, wry faces, set frowns, and worse." Such biographical opprobrium, tedious though...

Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Lawrence Lipking Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author Harvard, 372, pages, $35 Lawrence Lipking's Samuel Johnson is not a conventional birth-to-death biography. It is entirely focused on the writings. "The Life of an Author," in this...

Shakespeare: A Life.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Park Honan Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford University Press, 460 pages, $35 "Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it." Keats's remark has licensed too much irresponsible speculation and novelettish embroidery...

The Hours.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Michael Cunningham The Hours. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 230 pages, $22 A bunch of gay people in Greenwich Village unconsciously re-enacting Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway? It sounded like one of the worst ideas of all time. Michael...

The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Ian Gibson The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. W. W. Norton & Company, 798 pages, $45 The first difficulty in reviewing this book is that its subjects, Salvador and Gala Dali, really were quite unappealing people: self-centered to the...

Heshel's Kingdom.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Dan Jacobson Heshel's Kingdom. Northwestern University Press, 243 pages, $24.95 In 1919, at the age of fifty-three, Heshel Melamed, the rabbi of the shtetl of Varniai and a Lithuanian Jew of great faith and will, died suddenly of heart...

A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold.(Review)
June 1, 1999... Ian Hamilton A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold. Basic Books, 241 pages, $24 Who was the poet Matthew Arnold, the true poet who wrote "Dover Beach," "The Buried Life," and the lyrics addressed to Marguerite, masterpieces...