New Criterion articles from June 2002

New Criterion archives from June 2002

Notes & comments: June 2002.(The New Criterion's 20th anniversary; course offerings at University of California at Berkeley)(Editorial)
June 1, 2002... A note of thanks With this issue, The New Criterion completes its twentieth year of publication. Twenty years is a significant anniversary for any magazine devoted to serious criticism of culture and the arts. For a magazine as outspoken...

The fortunes of permanence. (The survival of culture: X).
June 1, 2002... Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a...

Radical history.(The Encyclopedia of the American Left)
June 1, 2002... In Israel's war of independence in 1948, American Communists were deeply involved in the covert shipment of arms to the new state of Israel, and Communists were prominent among those Americans wounded or killed in battles protecting Israel from...

Steinbeck's myth of the Okies.(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath)(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2002... John Steinbeck performed a rare feat for a writer of fiction. He created a literary portrait that defined an era. His account of the "Okie Exodus" in The Grapes of Wrath became the principal story through which America defined the experience of...

Surtees & money.
June 1, 2002... Money and literature have an awkward relationship. Most authors are very human and like to be well paid. Yet authors also have a tendency to distinguish between literature as an art form and writing as a way of making a living, and they put...

Inventing Claude Debussy.
June 1, 2002... There is a subtle temptation which leads a man on from mere disinterested craftsmanship, through a positive delight in his own virtuosity, to the exquisite private satisfaction of deceiving the elect. --Hugh Trevor-Roper, A Hidden Life ...

Borges.(Poem)
June 1, 2002... Borges So what did Borges think when he first learned that Camoes dueled and beat a Borges (who collapsed to the bloody street) when he returned back home from Lisbon in 1552? Maybe he said, "Ah, blades, of course, why...

Sleeping in the open.(Poem)
June 1, 2002... Sleeping in the open. The touch that for one moment seemed Her touch recovered in his dream Is as he wakes only the wind Moving over his bare skin And through the single towering tree That seems to rouse,...

A field in Scurry County.(Poem)
June 1, 2002... A field in Scurry County Late evening, cool, September, the ground giving its clays and contours to the sky. The colors swirl and merge and fall back down and for a moment, as the reds intensify, I am a ghost of all...

In the year of Jubilee. (London journal).(BBC)
June 1, 2002... This year is the Queen's Golden Jubilee, and to mark the occasion one of the biggest British recording companies is bringing out a CD in which the principal song is entitled "God Save the Queen." It is going to be heavily promoted, with the...

A celebration of painting in Boston. (Art).(Impressionist Still Life exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
June 1, 2002... The most effective antidote to the dour astringency of the Gerhardt Richter retrospective this spring was probably a trip to Boston to see "Impressionist Still Life." (1) Before anyone says anything about the salutary effect of exhibitions with...

"Stuart Davis: Major Late Paintings" at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York. April 9-May 11, 2002. (Exhibition note).
June 1, 2002... Lines broad and narrow, rectangles, trapezoids, triangles, parallelograms, columns, circles, planes, and words; shapes named and eccentric, lines as shapes, words as shapes, words as lines; simple, unmodulated reds, yellows, blues, greens,...

Irrevocable vulgarization. (The media).
June 1, 2002... They have started appearing on the streets of Washington, the gaily painted, smaller-than-life-sized effigies of elephants and donkeys collectively known as "Party Animals" that are the latest incarnations of the kind of public art pioneered by...

Falls the shadow. (Verse chronicle).(6 books of poetry)
June 1, 2002... A Short History of the Shadow (1) is a pendant to Charles Wright's Appalachian Book of the Dead, the three trilogies that took him a quarter-century to complete. The new poems are written in the sketchy, hither-thither manner, like the musings...

The art & life of Dostoevsky.(Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881)
June 1, 2002... Fashions of literary criticism seem to have a half-life of about ten years. Interestingly enough, through all the changes of schools and approaches, the biography of writers has continued to compel an undiminished interest. Read not only by...

Where Eagletons dare.(Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper: A Memoir)
June 1, 2002... Terry Eagleton The Gatekeeper: A Memoir. St. Martin's Press, 128 pages, $21.95 "I can't see" Sir Frank Kermode is quoted as saying on the back cover of The Gatekeeper, "how this book could fail to amuse" In that case I will have to tell...

To the shores of Tripoli.(Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power)
June 1, 2002... Max Boot The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. Basic Books, 448 pages, $30 If this book can be said to have heroes and villains, the heroes are the Marines and the villains the one-dimensional army thinkers...

Arrested development. (Notebook).(Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol)
June 1, 2002... The last time I attended a hanging in the prison it was a murder, not a suicide. I arrived too late to bring the hanged man back to life: for, if there are degrees of deadness, he was by then already very dead. The cellmate of the hanged...