New Criterion articles from June 2006

New Criterion archives from June 2006

History lessons?(Notes & comments: June 2006)(Jean-Francois Revel's works)(Obituary)
June 1, 2006... When the French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel died on April 30, the world lost an important voice for political and intellectual sanity. Revel's books Without Marx or Jesus and How Democracies Perish are modern classics, as is The...

No good deed ...(Boston University's John Silber's compensation)
June 1, 2006... Historical revisionism, AKA lying about the past, seems to be a popular sport these days. Consider The New York Times. "All the news that's fit to print" says its famous motto. But is what our paper of record prints really news, i.e., things...

Moving passages.(Notes & comments: June 2006)
June 1, 2006... Regular readers will know that we are fond of T. S. Eliot's definition of criticism as "the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste." Those tasks are a large part of what The New Criterion is about, and we are grateful to be...

Some words of thanks.(Notes & comments: June 2006)
June 1, 2006... In a recent issue of the London Telegraph, the journalist Harry Mount described The New Criterion as "America's leading review of the arts and intellectual life" Many people reading this will agree, though perhaps not all will be happy about...

The forgotten founder: John Witherspoon.(Biography)
June 1, 2006... He is as high a Son of Liberty, as any man in America. --John Adams on John Witherspoon, 1774 Who is the most unfairly neglected American Founding Father? You might think that none can be unfairly neglected, so many books about that...

Tales from the crypt.(The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine)(Video recording review)
June 1, 2006... When word arrived last autumn that The New Yorker was releasing a deluxe boxed CD set of every issue of the magazine published since its monocled dandy espied a butterfly on the cover of the February 21, 1925 debut, my first thought was:...

Out of the time machine.(The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... A few weeks ago, I emerged from the concert hall into the night of an English provincial city. Somewhat against the militant philistinism of the times, which contrives to combine the vices of the demotic with those of elitist bureaucratic...

Orpheus dissembling.(Hugo von Hofmannsthal's poems)
June 1, 2006... Hugo von Hofmannsthal was--besides poet, playwright, essayist, librettist, and fiction writer--a universally admired sensitive soul, the kind imperial Austria seemed to specialize in. It may be that empires, with their hierarchies, traditions,...

"Why do I exist?".(Poem)
June 1, 2006... "Why do I exist?" Answer it? Nobody can. (At least nobody's done it yet.) But as for having the question down, You know you're really asking it When it isn't merely answerless But answerless in the strongest...

Olives.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... Olives Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet, For fruits that you can eat Only if pickled in a vat of tears-- A rich and dark and indehiscent meat Clinging tightly to the pit--on spears Of toothpicks,...

Accident waiting to happen.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... Accident waiting to happen Like the scalding cup Of coffee you left At the brink of the table, I brim with potential. I'm bright and unstable As a just-mopped floor, I'm a curtain near a candle, ...

First giver.(Poem)
June 1, 2006... First giver Enter the past with all its variable light and shade, a tunnel of ferns and evergreens, wet open meadows, fields that have known blight and broken bottles left from angry scenes. Mother, the shame is...

Art imitates war.(Letter from Baghdad)(Thucydides' poetry)
June 1, 2006... Art and history begin to emerge when informed reflections on experience replace immediate reactions--when experience trumps sensation. Thucydides denounced "prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the...

One is the loneliest number.(New York City Ballet)
June 1, 2006... In 1984, when I began reviewing dance in New York City, I was living in Philadelphia. The commute on Amtrak was an hour and a half each way, with a bus or subway on each side. I was on that train three or four times a week, and sometimes both...

Springtime in D.C.(art exhibitions)
June 1, 2006... The cherry blossoms on the Mall vanished in an early April downpour and frost nipped the buds on the magnolias between the East and West Buildings of the National Gallery, but there were still visible signs of spring in Washington, in the form...

"Veronese's Allegories: Virtue, Love & Exploration in Renaissance Venice.".(Exhibition notes)
June 1, 2006... "Veronese's Allegories: Virtue, Love & Exploration in Renaissance Venice" The Frick Collection, New York. April 11, 2006-July 16, 2006 Initiated over a decade ago by its former Director Samuel Sachs, and continued by his successor, Anne...

"The Art of Betty Woodman.".(Exhibition notes)(Metropolitan Museum of Art)
June 1, 2006... "The Art of Betty Woodman" Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. April 24, 2006-July 30, 2006 Ad Reinhardt once said, "The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing." Betty Woodman's art is definitely not one thing. It is, in...

Gallery chronicle.(Art)
June 1, 2006... For everyone who has had his head scrambled by a season of theory and commercial madness, what a relief: the summer shows are here. Just when you think the art world has done you in and the storm troopers of Jacobin self-referentiality have got...

Renzo Piano & the Morgan Library.(Architecture)
June 1, 2006... It is nearly impossible to convey to someone who has not been to New York's Morgan Library how splendid it is. Here is an experience comparable to that of the world's great museums, but without the walking. In a few superb rooms is a compact...

Concert note.(Music)(Concert review)
June 1, 2006... Yo-Yo Ma, cello. Carnegie Hall, New York The last decade or so has seen the American cellist Yo-Yo Ma turning in a widening gyre away from core classical repertoire and toward the less familiar airspace of World Music, a catchall that makes...

Cheap laughs.(president's press secretaries)
June 1, 2006... One thing that living in the media age ought to have taught us by now is that reality has to be manufactured and marketed, and that the media are the monopoly producers, the Standard Oil of reality for our time. To this extent, they are right...

Victoria's secret.(Verse chronicle)(Seamus Heaney's poetry)
June 1, 2006... Last year a Dublin literary magazine sponsored an open competition for the best Seamus Heaney imitation. The winning poem began, Niall Fitzduff brought a jar of crab apple jelly made from crabs off the tree that grew at...

Haphazard spirits.(The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... In Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, Lord Holland recalls of Horace Walpole that "He felt, or pretended to feel, great disgust at the practice adopted by the bookmaking admirers of Johnson, who scrupled not to commit to print whatever they...

The hamburger cell.(Terrorist)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... John Updike Terrorist. Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95 reviewed by Stefan Beck Fat is everywhere. There's even a term for the fat squeezed up from the waist of a woman's too-tight jeans: the "muffin top?' In our self-flagellating society,...

What fall?(Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Alice Goldfarb Marquis Art Czar: The Rise & Fall of Clement Greenberg. MFA Publications, 312 pages, $35 reviewed by John Russell This reader was momentarily put off by the title of this fascinating book. Clement Greenberg was like no...

Of two minds.(Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet's Life)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Anthony Kenny Arthur Hugh Clough: A Poet's Life. Continuum, 298 pages, $39.95 reviewed by Paul Dean "Say not the struggle nought availeth" and "Thou shalt not kill, but need'st not strive/ Officiously to keep alive" are probably the...

Irish-American dreams.(There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Thomas Flanagan There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History. New York Review Books, 300 pages, $24.95 reviewed by Richard Tillinghast Thomas Flanagan, who died in 2002 at the age of seventy-nine, was, in...

The claims of realism.(Darwinian Conservatism)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Larry Arnhart Darwinian Conservatism. Imprint Academic, 162 pages, $17.90 reviewed by Paul R. Gross Since a revolutionary day in June 1860, when the Bishop of Oxford, "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, rose before the British Association to put...

C'est moi!(Omar Calabrese Artists' Self-Portraits)(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Omar Calabrese Artists' Self-Portraits, translated by Marguerite Shore. Abbeville, 391 pages, $135 reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers The self-portrait, an autobiography in paint, began in fifteenth-century Florence when artists first asserted...

Stuart Kelly: The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Books You'll Never Read.(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Stuart Kelly The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Books You'll Never Read. Random House, 368 pages, $24.95 In his short story "The Library of Babel," Jorge Luis Borges describes an infinite library, one which contains...

Jason Shinder, editor: The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later.(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Jason Shinder, editor The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages, $30 Why did many writers-mainstream as well as countercultural--take a shine to "Howl," Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem, which...

Stephen Christopher Quinn: Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History.(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Stephen Christopher Quinn Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History. Abrams/AMNH, 180 pages, $40 "With its great holdings of magnificent background paintings, sculptural taxidermy, and models...