New Criterion articles from March 2000

New Criterion archives from March 2000

Notes & Comments: March 2000.
March 1, 2000... Welcome aboard Has a sense of reality finally insinuated itself into the pages of the New Statesman? The venerable English weekly, founded in 1913, has always had a decidedly--often, indeed, militantly--left-of-center cast to it. Imagine...

Rudyard Kipling & the god of things as they are.
March 1, 2000... How fortunate we are! After eighty-five years of assorted errors and miseries, the human race has emerged into sunlit uplands. There is no major war, nor any visible prospect of any. Utopian socialism, the principal motive for revolutions...

The passion of Walker Evans.
March 1, 2000... America's infatuation with photography has thrived upon its easy accessibility. By 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, George Eastman had made the roll-film camera so cheap that soon no family reunion or Sunday picnic need ever lack a "photo...

Rosy nights at the opera.(Review)
March 1, 2000... It was quite a shock to take down from my library shelf Joseph Kerman's esteemed study Opera as Drama (1956) and be reminded that an opera I love did not pass muster. For Kerman, Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier consists of "four finicky...

Between head & heart: Penelope Fitzgerald's novels.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2000... All accidents of our lives are materials out of which we can make whatever we like. One who has much intelligence will make much of his life. Every acquaintance, every incident might, for a thoroughly gifted person, become the first link of an...

Villanelle of the hidden life.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... For years, I sought to walk a godly pace, Not sensing all things rushing into God. But now I run, I run as in a race. There was a stream, but one I could not trace While I was wading dust as thick as blood And...

The alley behind Ocean Drive.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... On beach sand two thousand footprints Cross and overlay And form or seem to form a pattern. Girls speaking Italian Take off their tops And breathe the sun in through their pores. The sun sets gorgeously ...

Exilium.(Poem)
March 1, 2000... The imperial city toward which all roads tend, Which codifies the laws and dispatches them By runner or fax to expectant provinces This is not. It's an improvised melange Mushrooming along the banks of a tidal river, ...

A treasure trove of conducting.
March 1, 2000... In an era when America's television networks have graced the nation's airwaves with artistic gems featuring the likes of Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake--Oprah Winfrey having somehow been transformed from an annoying, chatty presenter of similar...

Concert note.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Thomas Hampson at Segerstrom Hall, Costa Mesa, California What a puzzlement Thomas Hampson is. This American baritone, who will turn forty-five in June, is at once a prodigiously gifted singer and an infuriatingly pompous, aloof artist. On...

"The candor pander".
March 1, 2000... The most revealing and in some ways the most poignant moment to come out of the series of "debates" among the presidential candidates that took place in November, December, and January, before the voting actually started, came during the...

Between Father and Son.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Despite the implications of the marital misadventures of a certain gentleman from Thebes, a fellow who wed with all too little forethought, there is not much evidence that a mother exerts a more telling influence over a son than a father. Just...

Nicholas Shakespeare Bruce Chatwin.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Fallen Angel Nicholas Shakespeare Bruce Chatwin. Doubleday, 618 pages, $35 Plato believed a beautiful face reflected a beautiful soul; Shakespeare, in the opening speech of Richard III, equated physical deformity with evil. Tolstoy,...

Robert Musil Diaries 1899-1941.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Flypaper for ghosts Robert Musil Diaries 1899-1941. Translated by Philip Payne. Basic Books, 607 pages, $40 Robert Musil was a truculent citizen of a vanished empire. Old Austria may have been defunct after 1918 but in Musil's...

Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Tolle, lege Allan D. Fitzgerald, editor An Encyclopedia. William B. Eerdmans, 902 pages, $75 A. D. 383: an ambitious twenty-nine-year-old provincial teacher of rhetoric boarded a ship in Carthage. He was bound for Rome, where powerful...

The Oxford Book of English Verse.
March 1, 2000... Lightening the load Christopher Ricks, editor Oxford University Press, 690 pages, $39.95 The Oxford Book of English Verse is exactly one hundred years old. The first editor was a gentleman-amateur, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who was...

Bolivar's platter.
March 1, 2000... There are two principal objections to the kind of modern art whose claim to significance depends upon the philosophical or social theory it allegedly illustrates, embodies, or exemplifies. The first is its aesthetic nullity, and the second is...