New Criterion articles from June 2001

New Criterion archives from June 2001

Culture contra ideology.
June 1, 2001... In The Revolt of the Masses (1922), Ortega y Gasset, describing the "triumph of hyperdemocracy" observed that a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar....

The museum as culture mall.
June 1, 2001... Absence of heart--as in public buildings--Absence of mind--as in public speeches--Absence of worth--as in goods intended for the public, Are telltale signs that a chimera has just dined On someone else; of him, poor foolish fellow, Not a...

"Second city" syndrome.
June 1, 2001... As every visitor to London knows, Time Out is a weekly publication featuring a comprehensive listing of goings-on about town. Its orientation is very youth-trendy, but the listings are extensive enough that all kinds of people purchase it--it's...

Rimbaud: sophist of insanity.(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2001... Stephane Mallarme caught a glimpse of Arthur Rimbaud on only one occasion and it was the younger poet's hands that stuck in his memory. These were, he later wrote, "vast hands, red with sores" which prompted the fastidious Mallarmd to say that...

Talking to oneself.
June 1, 2001... I have been keeping a journal for more than thirty years, and if you were to ask me why I continue to do so, the best answer I can offer is that I cannot stop now. I consider scribbling a paragraph or two each morning in the notebooks that...

How to murder a Bolivian boy.(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2001... There is nothing so foolish that some philosopher has not said it, and there is nothing so evil that some bioethicist has not proposed it. Indeed, the entire purpose of the new discipline of bioethics often seems to be the finding of bad...

Master knife (one woodblock extant).(Poem)
June 1, 2001... He worked mourning doves into a sliver of sky. It's not this delight we measure him by, but how the fierce wing of his task defied mourning. He worked doves into a sliver of sky and with them, light--sorrow couldn't fly ...

In the hallway.(Poem)
June 1, 2001... What I like in a house is the room one cannot quite see-- the one with its door half-open, showing a mere sliver of wall, a picture sliced in half, a mirror reflecting a window that is invisible from outside ...

The rain is over.(Poem)
June 1, 2001... The rain is over, the sky has fallen in bright blue pieces: you can no more pick them up than before they fell becoming sky-shards, segments, a sliver bisecting the road with its shining chasm which you...

Vermeer's world.(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2001... Vermeer mesmerizes. His paintings cast a spell on present-day audiences, so much so that when a strike disrupted bookings for the comprehensive exhibition of his work at the National Gallery, Washington, five years ago hordes of hardy art...

Exhibition notes.("Joel Shapiro on the Roof" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2001... "Joel Shapiro on the Roof" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. May 1-October 31, 2001 "Joel Shapiro: Recent Sculpture and Drawings" at PaceWildenstein, New York. April 27-May 26, 2001 Much of the art of the twentieth century...

Berg's femmes fatales.
June 1, 2001... In The Dyers Hand (1962), W. H. Auden noted that implausibility is the stuff of opera. Librettists revel in shopworn stage conventions--selected villains and nobles, cross-dressers and crossed identities, fluently managed hide-and-seek,...

Concert note.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... The Guarneri String Quartet, at Carnegie Hall, New York. The best way to hear chamber music, someone said many years ago, is through the feet. By which he meant that, optimally, one should be so close to the players that the cello's...

Melancholy facts.
June 1, 2001... Journalists of today like to call what they write "the rough draft of history" but this is only true if you assume that history will share the interests and values of the journalists. Admittedly, there are few signs as yet that it will not....

Folk tales.
June 1, 2001... Louise Gluck has become our Persephone of quiet hurt and bruised longing. When she says, with professional sorrow, "I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way" you know she'd rather be one of Ovid's heifers or laurel trees, punished...

Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind.(Review)
June 1, 2001... The eminent Victorian Frank Furness (1839-1912) was the first great American architect after Thomas Jefferson and the first to design buildings that could, in any sense, be called original. Jefferson's Greek Revival buildings were academically...

The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal.(Review)
June 1, 2001... James Franklin The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal. Johns Hopkins University Press, 485 pages, $55 What do we know, and how surely do we know it? The general answer was given by Aristotle in the Nicomachean...

The Shadow of the Sun.(Review)
June 1, 2001... Ryszard Kapuscinski The Shadow of the Sun. Alfred A. Knopf, 325 pages, $25 Joseph Conrad believed that Catholic, Western-oriented Poland was historically destined to be a mediator between the civilization of Europe and the barbaric hordes...

"The grisly science of embryo cloning".(response to Roger Highfield, The Daily Telegraph, August 2000)
June 1, 2001... An article by Roger Highfield, the science correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, appeared under this headline in London's Week in August 2000. Highfield described how recent authors distinguish between reproductive cloning, in which a new...