New Criterion articles from June 2005

New Criterion archives from June 2005

Faculty follies: a selection.(Notes & Comments: June 2005)
June 1, 2005... It's been a great year for academic absurdity--understanding the word "great" in the quantitative, not the qualitative, sense, i.e., "big," or "extensive," not "excellent." Where to start? With Larry Summers, science, and women at Harvard?...

New grub street.(Notes & Comments: June 2005)
June 1, 2005... Everyone now knows about Newsweek's preposterous Koran-down-the-toilet story. That little escapade, based upon the Great Source Anonymous, ignited a tinder box in Afghanistan and, at last count, had claimed seventeen lives. Honest mistake?...

Some words of thanks.(Notes & Comments: June 2005)(Editorial)
June 1, 2005... With this issue, The New Criterion completes its twenty-third volume. That's more than 200 issues of the liveliest, best-written, and most informative cultural criticism you will find anywhere. In our first issue we promised a "dissenting...

Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism.(Biography)
June 1, 2005... It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way. --Marx to Engels, 1857 What socialism implies...

The journalism of warfare.
June 1, 2005... In December 1996, Robert Fisk of the London newspaper The Independent traveled to the mountains north of Khartoum where he met Osama bin Laden. The opening sentences of the article he wrote about the meeting went as follows: Osama Bin...

Mau Mau revisited.(Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya)(Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War and the End of the Empire)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... All history, it has been said, is contemporary. What is remembered and how it is remembered depends on the axes that people wish to grind. Whether or not this is always the case, it is clearly sometimes the case. For example, there has been...

Umbilical.(New poems)(Poem)
June 1, 2005... Umbilical for my mother Not flesh but string, the line which bound your foot To mine, hobbling me so you could nap And not worry I would wander loose Those summer afternoons. But who could sleep In such light? No...

Cellar.(New poems)(Poem)
June 1, 2005... Cellar This is where we keep them: toy trucks with busted wheels, the broken stuff we can't get rid of, our old books, the splintered chair, the fractured tabouret. There's something stagey in our garbage. The...

Packing up the lute.(New poems)(Poem)
June 1, 2005... Packing up the lute I ease you down, your strings set loose A tone or three, all twinkle gone, Into this snug case shaped like a goose Or casket for some crook-necked swan, Your body wrapped in satin cloth, ...

Living.(New poems)(Poem)
June 1, 2005... Living In winter, once the ice on the lake is safe, a group of local ice-fishers build a town with houses, streets, a store, a tavern-all the necessities--then move out there. By day they wait for nothing they...

Martha contra mundum.(Martha Graham's dancing)
June 1, 2005... In the 1954 movic White Christmas, an Irving Berlin no-people-like-show-people musical that should be a cult classic but is more often labeled kitsch (it's that Santa Claus finale complete with pre-teens in tutus doing bourrees under the tree),...

The fabric of dreams.(Matisse's fabric collections and paitings)
June 1, 2005... In The Unknown Matisse, the first volume of her excellent two-part biography, Hilary Spurting reminds us that this master of radiant hues and dazzling evocations of light spent the first twenty-one years of his life in gritty, industrial...

"Max Ernst: A Retrospective" The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. April 7-July 10, 2005.(Exhibition notes)
June 1, 2005... As a maker and manipulator of images, Max Ernst was in a very high class. He did not deal simply in surprises, but in surprises that would never fail in their effect. At the time of his death in 1976, he had French nationality. But he was...

"John Szarkowski: Photographs" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. February-May 15, 2005.
June 1, 2005... Attack, heightened nerves, a quivering alertness to patterns of relatedness, a tasteless (or taste-free) acquisitiveness... these are what I like and value most in modern American photography. Image-makers like Walker Evans and Edward Weston...

"Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile" The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. February 1-April 24, 2005.
June 1, 2005... Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Williamstown, Massachusetts. June 5-September 5, 2005 About the last thing one should wish on anyone is "curator of an exhibition on Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)." But this is the fate that has...

Gallery chronicle.
June 1, 2005... Accomplished abstraction has become the heirloom varietal of painting, a pre-Phylloxera strain that springs forth for a few odd weeks in a tucked-away grove here or there frequented by hermits and the lonely few. So it was that last month's...

Gounod's Faust at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.(Charles Gounod)
June 1, 2005... The Metropolitan Opera has had a long relationship with Gounod's once popular opera Faust, beginning with its first night in 1883 and coming up so often thereafter that the house was dubbed the Faustspielhaus. The Met has had far less success...

Angela Hewitt at Zankel Hall, New York.(performance of the pianist)(Concert Review)
June 1, 2005... One of the most enjoyable evenings I have spent in this concert season was at the pianist Angela Hewitt's performance at Zankel Hall on April 7. Hewitt, a Canadian who has succeeded her countryman Glenn Gould as a leading performer of Bach on...

What "objectivity"?(The media)
June 1, 2005... Outside the Capital Hilton on 16th Street in Washington one evening in May, you might have seen a demonstrator dressed like an old-fashioned carnival barker in a colorful vest and a straw boater. Around his neck he had hung a sign reading...

The great American desert.(John Ashbery's poetry analysis)
June 1, 2005... John Ashbery was born when Pola Negri was box office, yet his poems are more in touch with the American demotic--the tongue most of us speak and few of us write--than any near-octogenarian has a right to be. He has published more than a...

The house on Middagh Street.(The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in Wartime America)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... When I first moved to Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights a few years ago, I was pleased by its literary associations: back in the early 1940s, I remembered, it had been home to a wildly unlikely household which included W. H. Auden, Carson...

Beyond disbelief.(The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Alister McGrath The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World. Doubleday, 206 pages, $23.95 In The Daily Telegraph not long ago, A. N. Wilson produced one of those short but seemingly interminable (and morbidly...

On the march.(Liberty & Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... David Hackett Fischer Liberty & Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas. Oxford University Press, 851 pages, $50 In 1843, a young historian eagerly interviewed ninety-one-year-old Captain Levi Preston, one of the last...

Bad counsel.(One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Sally Satel & Christina Hoff Sommers One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance. St. Martin's Press, 320 pages, $23.95 A few days ago I attended a talk by a leading member of the British psychiatric...

Hanging judge.(Art & the Power of Placement)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Victoria Newhouse Art & the Power of Placement. The Monacelli Press, 304 pages, $50 A more descriptive title for the splendid new book by the architectural historian Victoria Newhouse would be Art as Diminished by Curatorial Incompetence....

Georgics on my mind.(Virgil's Georgics)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Virgil's Georgics, translated by Janet Lembke. Yale University Press, 114 pages, $50 Translating Virgil these days is either eccentric or... well, there really is no "or." It is eccentric. Virgil is the archetype for what were called in...

Dumb & dumber.(Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Steven Johnson Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Riverhead Books, 256 pages, $23.95 The editors at Riverhead probably thought that this title was the ultimate in counterintuitive...

Kinderkampf.(Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Houghton Mifflin, 326 pages, $24.95 The plot of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close hinges on a mysterious key. Fitting: it's a roman a clef in several ways. Look at Oskar Schell, age...

The soul of wit.(Ogden Nash: The Life & Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Douglas M. Parker Ogden Nash: The Life & Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse. Ivan R. Dee, 336 pages, $27.50 For me, at any rate, the name "Ogden Nash" brings a smile to the lips and an itch to quote. Some poems stick easily in my...

The saddhu responds.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... To the Editors: Since Mr. Dalrymple finds me in his review of my book The Surrender ("The saddhu of sodomy," December 2004) to be "a person whom one would not cross the street to meet," I wish to extend an offer on my part to cross the...

A curious omission.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... To the Editors: Stephen Schwartz notes in his justifiable attack on H. P. Lovecraft and his conservative admirers ("Infinitely abysmal," May 2005) that "no work of [Edmund] Wilson... is to be found on the Library of America's roster." ...

Hylas who?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... To the Editors: There is an odd misreading of one of Richard Wilbur's poems in Daniel Mark Epstein's otherwise interesting essay on Wilbur and metaphysics ("The metaphysics of Wilbur," April 2005). In the poem about George Berkeley, "A...

A naval battle.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... To the Editors: Robert Messenger's article on Patrick O'Brian's naval novels ("Patrick O'Brian's naval mastery" May 2005) contains five errors in the first three sentences. Three British warships are referred to as "the HMS"...

Prosody, of course.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... To the Editors: In "The Fortunes of Formalism" (April 2005), David Yezzi claims that Columbia recently cut the prosody course. He is a little off on that. Columbia just brought back the prosody course in response to student demand. I know....