New Criterion articles from June 2003

New Criterion archives from June 2003

The New York Times at bay. (Notes & Comments: June 2003).
June 1, 2003... By now, most readers will have had their fill of l'affaire Blair--the story of Jayson Blair, the twenty-seven-year-old black reporter for The New York Times who for five years lied, fabricated interviews and datelines, and plagiarized the work...

"Christophobia" and the West. (Notes & Comments: June 2003).
June 1, 2003... Public policy in a democracy rests upon public opinion, which in turn rests on public feeling. The feelings people have towards remote and abstract objects such as states and categories are normally pretty stable, but when they do change, they...

Malcolm Muggeridge's journey. (Notes & Comments: June 2003).
June 1, 2003... I came to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lusts. I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing made me despise myself for not being more...

From "the Evil Empire" to "the Empire for Liberty". (Notes & Comments: June 2003).
June 1, 2003... Is the United States imperialist? Has it created, or is it creating, an empire? If so, should we regard this process as desirable, even inevitable? These questions are raised by the American conquest of Iraq which, together with the...

Dreiser in 1925. (Notes & Comments: June 2003).
June 1, 2003... The date 1925 helps us to look at Theodore Dreiser's work through a clear mental lens, unblurred by the political-cultural wars that have clouded estimates of Dreiser's reputation ever since. Nineteen twenty-five was the date of Dreiser's novel...

Discourse: for Stanley Rosen. (Notes & Comments: June 2003).(Poem)
June 1, 2003... 1 As to whether there persists--enlighten me-- a dialectic: labour into desire. Forgive my small vocabulary that tries and abides your patience. What a wonder's man the philosopher set on his throne. What a...

The elusive truth. (London journal).
June 1, 2003... Fresh from its triumphs in Iraq, BBC television has turned its attention to Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt. The series which it has been devoting to them, Cambridge Spies, is no small affair, either. Four episodes,...

Bubble boy: Mark Morris at BAM. (Dance).
June 1, 2003... Mark Morris's arrival on the New York dance scene was spectacularly timed. George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, leaving a company shaken, a following forlorn, and an art form facing a new era: classical dance post-Balanchine. Nine months...

Anywhere in between. (Art).
June 1, 2003... In the seventies, when I was a fledgling curator, any gathering of artists inevitably led to at least one acrimonious exchange about the exhaustion and imminent demise of figurative painting. At some point during these years, perhaps spurred by...

Gallery chronicle. (Art).
June 1, 2003... Summertime means sculpture time, and what better place to start than with the sculpture of Joel Shapiro. With each passing year, and with each successful show, this artist edges towards greatness. The last time I saw Shapiro it was his colorful...

Spurious objectivity. (The media).
June 1, 2003... The bias of the BBC with respect to the British and American war effort in Iraq, mentioned in this space last month, has contributed to a formal complaint to the Corporation by the British Conservative party leader, Iain Duncan Smith. Mr....

Satanic mills. (Verse chronicle).(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... More than fifty years ago, during the Truman administration, Sharon Olds's parents tied her to a chair, and she has been writing about it ever since. The Unswept Room (1) revisits the realistic dioramas of her childhood, pays homage to the...

A nose for the bogus.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... The subtitle of As of This Writing, Clive James's new collection of literary and cultural criticism, is "The Essential Essays, 1968-2002." (1) It would be easy to condemn the adjective as hubristic: "essential" to whom? one might ask. But in...

"I will be a hero."(book on Lord Horatio Nelson)(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Edgar Vincent Nelson: Love and Fame. Yale University Press, 640 pages, $35 Decisive naval battles are the rarest of military engagements. The difficulty of finding and closing with your enemy has always meant that naval warfare is extended...

Uncommon pilgrims.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Paul Elie The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 555 pages, $27 Lionel Trilling once lamented that our age has few "representative figures," people who live their visions as well as write them....

Hail, muse! Etc.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Fiona MacCarthy Byron: Life and Legend. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 674 pages, $35 George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) is a "Romantic poet." That tells us little, for Romanticism meant different things to different poets. For Wordsworth it...

The Book Against God.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 272 pages, $24 In Father and Son, Edmund Gosse's great memoir of his Victorian childhood, he writes of the event that first made him aware of his own self as independent being--and set him on the path away from the...

The future of abstract art. (Letters).
June 1, 2003... To the Editors: In "Does abstract art have a future?" (December 2002), Hilton Kramer speculates that it may not. He could be right. I am an abstract painter, however, and I would rather that he isn't. Kramer points out that abstract...

The unsleeping eye. (Letters).
June 1, 2003... To the Editors: As always, Anthony Daniels brings great expertise, literary skill, and moral authority to his article "I spy" (April 2003). Unfortunately the piece contains a serious error of fact. Dr. Daniels writes that "no reference...