New Criterion articles from June 2004

New Criterion archives from June 2004

Notes & comments: June 2004.(Editorial)
June 1, 2004... Pursuing moral equivalence Whatever else can be said about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, the forces arrayed against the U.S.-led coalition have welcomed the episode as a bonanza. Which forces? We don't mean...

Institutionalizing our demise: America vs. multiculturalism.(Lengthened shadows: X)("Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity" )(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. --J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782 The one absolutely...

Fundamentalism isn't the problem.
June 1, 2004... Like Yossarian in Catch 22, I'm exercised by the fact that people are trying to kill me. You may remember that Yossarian was flying bombers over Italy in 1944 and German gunners were trying to shoot his plane down. Yossarian and I are in a...

The man who made Scouting.(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... There used to be a beer in Tanzania--Safari brand--that gave you a hangover without making you drunk. In similar fashion, children are often now disillusioned without ever having had any illusions. They are disenchanted without ever having been...

Writer-in-residence in limbo.(New poems)(Poem)
June 1, 2004... Writer-in-residence in limbo after Li Po How little they cared the cost! Fine food on dishes of green jade, like Ming grave goods-- if I had died and gone to heaven, heaven was a minor outpost, far from...

Camille Monet on her deathbed.(New poems)(Poem)
June 1, 2004... Camille Monet on her deathbed --after the painting by Claude Monet Camille has ventured out in a blizzard it seems. Her husband has brushstroked her in a hurry as she lies there dead. What looks like a bridal veil...

A hill.(New poems)(Poem)
June 1, 2004... A hill The net of stars that holds the night in place, with Cassiopeia and Berenice's Hair as fixed as a cage across the dome of space, with Cygnus, the Lion and the Little Bear and Taurus tame, with Orion lying...

Byzantium at the Metropolitan.(Art)
June 1, 2004... It's hard to decide what is most remarkable about "Byzantium: Faith and Power, 1261-1557," at the Metropolitan Museum. (1) It's astonishing that the museum has once again assembled an extraordinary group of rarely or never-before-seen...

Exhibition note.(Art)(Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser)
June 1, 2004... "Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser" at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, March 5-July 25, 2004. The strange career of Christopher Dresser can be summed up in a frieze and a teapot, both on view at the Cooper-Hewitt....

Gallery chronicle.(New York Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibits)
June 1, 2004... If you spotted a crazed man shouting hosannas and hallelujahs up Madison Avenue the other day, that was me. What can I say? A great season for art has descended upon New York. No, it has nothing to do with the 2004 Whitney Biennial. This year's...

Concert note.(4 opera performances)(Opera Review)
June 1, 2004... Sweeney Todd, Xerxes, Mourning Becomes Electra & Ermione at City Opera, New York. For the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center, the spring season in the New York State Theater typically begins with a run of a musical theater work. This...

Not made up but unmade.(The media)("Plan of Attack")(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... Here's how Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster), introduces the reader to the President of the United States on page two--according to Woodward's usual practice, as if he were a character in a novel, as if we knew nothing...

Stouthearted men.(Verse chronicle)(poems of George Oppen, Franz Wright, Tony Hoagland and Spencer Reece and Philip Larkin)
June 1, 2004... George Oppen was one of the minor literary figures of the 1930s. (1) Friend of Pound, employer of Zukofsky, collaborator with Williams and Reznikoff, an animating spirit of the Objectivist movement, he was a young man with ideals and a little...

Constant's middle path.("Constants Principles of Politics Applicable to All Modern Governments")(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... Liberty Fund has published an elegant, faithfully translated edition of the first (1810) and longest version of Constants Principles of Politics Applicable to All Modern Governments (the shorter 1815 edition is available in English in the...

The oval Welshman.(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... Andrew Lycett Dylan Thomas. Overlook Press, 416 pages, $35 "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness." Wordsworth was writing about Thomas Chatterton, "the marvellous boy," but these...

Blowin' in the wind.(Dylan's Visions of Sin)(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... Christopher Ricks Dylan's Visions of Sin. Ecco (HarperCollins), 528 pages, $26.95 Whether writing on Tennyson, Eliot, Housman, Beckett, or many others, Christopher Ricks has always been a critic of exceptional learning and aplomb; that he...

The Napoleonic code.(The Age of Napoleon)(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... Alistair Horne The Age of Napoleon. Modern Library, 240 pages, $21.95 In 1801, First Consul for Life Napoleon Bonaparte sent an army of 35,000 men to take control of the city of New Orleans, the key to the vast territory returned to France...

So very Irish.(The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely)(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... Benedict Kiely The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely. David R. Godine, 762 pages, $24.95 That Benedict Kiely is not a well-known name in this country is a sign either of American provincialism or Irish provincialism--probably both....

Made in myth.(The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy)(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... James M. Redfield The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy. Princeton University Press, 4-59 pages, $55 Epizephyrian Locri is a no man's land for classicists. Those who study this strange Greek colony on the Italian peninsula--and...

Making the grandest tour.("Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France, 1903-2003")(Book Review)
June 1, 2004... The Tour de France is the most arduous of the world's sporting events. Riders cover more than 2,000 miles in three weeks at an average speed of around twenty-eight miles per hour. The race can seem more like a test of simple endurance than a...

The Red Brigade & others.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2004... To the Editors: I appreciated David Pryce-Jones's interest in my book Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition ("Delusion & inhumanity;' December 2003). In some important respects, he would have approached the...

Positive negatives.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2004... To the Editors: In "Are emotions moral?" (January 2004), F. H. Buckley says the opposite of what he means when he says, "In the language of statisticians, the danger of false positives is greater than that of true negatives"; he means, of...

Critical indignation.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2004... To the Editors: In his dissection of the painter John Currin in "Strange Fruit" (January 2004), James Panero quotes ironically from Peter Schjedahl's December 15, 2003 New Yorker review. In the same article, Mr. Schjeldahl states that...

What pound translated.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2004... To the Editors: I greatly appreciated Eric Ormsby's essay on Ezra Pound in the March 2004 issue ("The voice impersonator"), but was baffled by his suggestion that Pound had ignored Li Po in his translations from Chinese poets. The "Rihaku"...