New Criterion articles from June 2000

New Criterion archives from June 2000

Notes & Comments: June 2000.
June 1, 2000... The New Criterion Poetry Prize The New Criterion began publishing poetry in April 1984, about a year and a half after its first issue appeared in September 1982. That April, we published poems by Donald Hall, Brad Leithauser, and Donald...

Closing time? Jacques Barzun on Western culture.(Review)
June 1, 2000... One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be -- though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain -- because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone....

A hero of culture.(Review)
June 1, 2000... In The Tragic Muse, Henry James has a character, a Mr. Carteret, of whom he writes, "Life, for him, was a purely practical function, not a question of phrasing" For James, life was not entirely but in good part precisely a question of phrasing....

Lord Acton: in pursuit of first principles.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Almost fifty years ago, introducing my biography of Lord Acton, I wrote: "He is of this age, more than of his. He is, indeed, one of our great contemporaries." A decade and a half later, in an essay on Acton, I described him as being "totally...

Thomas Kuhn's irrationalism.(Review)
June 1, 2000... For an insight into trends and fads in the humanities world, it is hard to improve on the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. It lists all citations in the major humanities journals--that is, an army of trained slaves keys in every footnote of...

Alone in the house.(Poem)
June 1, 2000

To my dear parents.(Poem)
June 1, 2000... In a new house I live alone. My mother and father Both are gone. They are cancelled by Electric words And classed as something I once heard From a woods now buried, From a sky now full. ...

Things.(Poem)
June 1, 2000... I have respect for bricks and kitchen shelves: So patient, asking nothing for themselves. I never heard one shout in someone's face, Or mutter, "Um, excuse me--that's my place." I think I'd make a better garden spade ...

The little brass gods.
June 1, 2000... An average evening of British television. Seeking respite from the sitcoms and soap operas, you turn to the main BBC channel, where there is a documentary about blindness in India and new methods of curing it. A serious subject: properly...

British invasion.(art)
June 1, 2000... British art invaded New York this spring. The three-pronged attack was mounted not by the YBAS responsible for the adolescent tantrums in Brooklyn last year, but by a group of seasoned painters, all over seventy, all with distinguished track...

"Christopher Wilmarth: Every Other Shadow had a Song to Sing".
June 1, 2000... "Christopher Wilmarth: Every Other Shadow had a Song to Sing" at Robert Miller Gallery, New York. April 7-May 6, 2000 Christopher Wilmarth worked in the materials of modern urban architecture: glass, steel, and cable. Though a student of...

"Francis Picabia: Late Paintings".
June 1, 2000... "Francis Picabia: Late Paintings," at Michael Werner Gallery, New York. April 12-June 10, 2000 Francis Picabia (1879-1953) embodied the spirit of eclecticism. An inconstant, philandering lover of art, he had no respect or patience for the...

Cold Sassy Tree.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Cold Sassy Tree, by Carlisle Floyd, at the Houston Grand Opera. At seventy-four, the composer Carlisle Floyd ought to be enjoying the pleasures associated with eminence and old age. His music-drama Susannah (1955) is said to be the most...

The politics of posturing.(gun control)
June 1, 2000... The Weekly Standard marked the first anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings with an excellent essay by David B. Kopel, the research director at the Independence Institute of Colorado, entitled: "What If We Had Taken Columbine...

The way of all flesh.(Review)
June 1, 2000... At seventy-nine Richard Wilbur has survived most of the poets in the generation before him and some in the generation after. The new poems in Mayflies(1) often seem like things written forty years ago and put in long-term storage, but they...

Recognizing the real thing.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Jed Perl's project as an art critic has been reformulated and reiterated over a long period. He currently writes a column on art in The New Republic, and has contributed for many years to such publications as the British magazine Modern...

Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Margo DeMello Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community. Duke University Press, 248 pages, $16.95 paper I was recently consulted in the prison in which I work by an inmate who was the proud father of two...

World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Nicholas Murray World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell. St. Martin's Press, 294 pages, $27.95 If, in 1658, you had been a spectator of the funeral procession of Oliver Cromwell--strictly speaking a memorial procession, the body...

Demons Don't.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Robert Conquest Demons Don't. London Magazine Editions, 60 pages, 7.95 [pounds sterling] In his introduction to New Lines (1956), the anthology that fostered the Movement, the British poet and historian Robert Conquest observed that ...

In Siberia.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Colin Thubron In Siberia. HarperCollins, 287 pages, $26 Rudolph, Dasher, Blitzen, and the rest don't come around Potalovo much anymore. The village, located north of the Arctic Circle, was bullied into restyling itself as a reindeer...

The Crisis Reader.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor The Crisis Reader. Modern Library, 422 pages, $14.95 For nearly ten years, our Negro [artists] have been "confessing" the distinctive sordidness and triviality of Negro life, and making an exhibition of their...

The Opportunity Reader.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor The Opportunity Reader. Modern Library, 538 pages, $14.95 For nearly ten years, our Negro [artists] have been "confessing" the distinctive sordidness and triviality of Negro life, and making an exhibition of...

The Messenger Reader.(Review)
June 1, 2000... Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor The Messenger Reader. Modern Library, 418 pages, $14.95 For nearly ten years, our Negro [artists] have been "confessing" the distinctive sordidness and triviality of Negro life, and making an exhibition of...

Mark Van Doren remembered.
June 1, 2000... Above the columns of Butler Library at Columbia University, inscribed in the stone frieze, you read permanent testimony that some writers are in fact important: Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe,...

Letters.
June 1, 2000... Lightening the load To the Editors: Patti Dean's review (March 2000), of The Oxford Book of English Verse is generously stimulating, and I am grateful. One point, though. "There is nothing from The Prelude in the Wordsworth section."...