New Criterion articles from March 2002

New Criterion archives from March 2002

This way to the egress. (Notes & comments: March 2002).(exhibiting ethnic art)(Brief Article)(Column)
March 1, 2002... Take one part liberal guilt about race, two parts political correctness, and add a large measure of contemporary lit-crit speak about art. Mix well in a macedoine of whatever leftist political cliches are current this week and, presto! out...

The rewards of radicalism. (Notes & comments: March 2002).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... If there is one thing we know about those 1960s radicals, it is that they were idealists. Maybe they were a bit loopy; maybe they were irresponsible, drug-ingesting hedonists; but at least they were--and, those who are still with us, are--free...

Higher education, Berkeley style. (Notes & comments: March 2002).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... While Stanford and UCLA have been ponying up large sums for the doodles of aging Sixties radicals, the University of California at Berkeley has been keeping the Sixties flame alive. According to a story in the February 15 issue of The Daily...

Burke & political liberty. (The survival of culture: VII).(Edmund Burke)(Column)
March 1, 2002... Politics today, though it must deal with the most serious matters, is a great deal lacking in seriousness. This is due partly to a lack of thoughtfulness among politicians: to their inability, or refusal, to appreciate the questions of...

Simone Weil: a saint for our time?(Column)
March 1, 2002... August 23, 2002, will be the fifty-ninth anniversary of the death of Simone Weil, a French Jew revered by many Christians as an uncanonized saint. Exegetes of diverse faiths (and none) have written at length about her mystical meditations....

Merrill's progress.(Column)
March 1, 2002... James Merrill's Collected Poems should be read at the rate the poems were published: a book every four years or so for forty-five years. (1) His language is so rich and elaborate that most of his works require a second reading at once,...

Bank voles at Trinity College, Cambridge. (Three poems).(Poem)
March 1, 2002... Bank voles at Trinity College, Cambridge At first the damp leaves rustled with the thought of unharvested sheaves and undergrads untaught, the myrtle greens, the browns of soggy paper bags or satin May...

Odalisque. (Three poems).(Poem)
March 1, 2002... Odalisque And so she took off her shirt, all in one motion, pausing to make her hesitation an act of modesty, yet immodest. We had not had an affair, and could never have an affair. It was not that she was not...

An ordinary afternoon in New Haven. (Three poems).(Poem)
March 1, 2002... An ordinary afternoon in New Haven It was Valentine's Day, a blind date, and on the sidewalk, angry since I was late, she sat astride the leather suitcase, chainsmoking, frowning, wearing a lace camisole, her...

Petipaw. (Dance).(George Balanchine)(Column)
March 1, 2002... In his New York apartment, George Balanchine had an Audubon print of a bald eagle. It was in his living room; you can see it in the famous photographs of Balanchine playing with his cat Mourka. In these photos the cat is in the air, fully...

Compressed narratives, minute actions. (Art).(Column)
March 1, 2002... In the hands of Picasso and Braque--the first to employ it as artistic technique--collage was a formal means of exploring and testing the limits of two-dimensionality in painting. For the Surrealists, it was, in the words of T. G. Nguyen, "a...

Whither the "Philadelphia Sound"?(Column)
March 1, 2002... It is hardly surprising news that, in today's fragmented performing arts environment, the centrality of the symphony orchestra in the civic world is in severe jeopardy. Certain cities, with a history of important symphony orchestras, have...

Reporting innuendo. (The media).(Column)
March 1, 2002... What do you think? Is the Bush administration "hiding something or lying" about what it knows about the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation? Or are you, perhaps, the sort of sucker who just accepts things on trust and believes everything that...

Anthony Blunt: his lives.(Column)
March 1, 2002... Disbelief is the instinctive reaction to the double life of Anthony Blunt. One of the sons of the quite conventional chaplain of the embassy church in Paris. Attentive to his mother. Marlborough and Cambridge. Frequent long spells in France and...

Darwin's Audubon: Science and the Liberal Imagination.
March 1, 2002... Gerald Weissmann Darwin's Audubon: Science and the Liberal Imagination Perseus, 354 pages, $28.95, $17 paper Of all literary genres, the essay is perhaps the best known and most widely despised. This is probably because few people reach the...

Johanna Fiedler Molto Agitato: the Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera.
March 1, 2002... Johanna Fiedler Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera. Doubleday, 393 pages, $30 Norman Lebrecht Covent Garden: The Untold Story (Dispatches from the English Culture War, 1945-2000). Northeastern University...

Ted Hughes: the Life of a Poet.
March 1, 2002... Elaine Feinstein Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet W. W. Norton, 273 pages, $29.95 In recent years, as constraints have been lifted, the secrets surrounding the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath--the most brilliant literary couple since...

The "deliberate sense" of Willmoore Kendall. (Notebook).(Column)
March 1, 2002... It was a leisurely drive up from green and ocher Catalonia through the border town of Port-Bou to Paris, where I had an approximate date to visit Willmoore Kendall. I had read much of what he had written and arrived at the view that he was an...