New Criterion articles from March 2003

New Criterion archives from March 2003

Notes & comments: March 2003.(commentary on newsworthy events, including a poetry cancellation at the White House)
March 1, 2003... Squeals from the nursery Perhaps Laura Bush should have known better. When she invited a group of poets and critics to the White House in February to celebrate American poetry, she counted on a literary crowd acting in a way that would...

Vuillard's mysteries.(Edouard Vuillard)(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2003... No artist has ever so suggested the soul of an interior--the sense of habitation.--Julius Meier-Graefe, on Vuillard I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just...

Rabbit-Proof Fence: "a true story"?(critique of the truth of a film supposedly based on a true story)
March 1, 2003... The Australian-born Hollywood film director Phillip Noyce built most of his career on thrillers and action adventures, but this year he has simultaneously released onto the market two highly political films. One is his adaptation of Graham...

The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2003... Always demand proof, proof is the elementary courtesy that is anyone's due. --Valery, Monsieur Teste The name Paul Valery carries its own music. For those who know something of what lies behind it, the music deepens, is suggestive, and...

Peter Taylor today.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2003... The territory Peter Taylor staked out for himself may be summed up easily and neatly enough. His characters are primarily upper-middle-class and upper-class people from the upper, as opposed to the "deep," south, living in the middle decades of...

Song. (New poems).(Poem)
March 1, 2003... Song The alluringest sleep by far is flesh-- Mandrake on an ordinary day. The women on the street are a walking wish, And the children come out to play. The warriors in Homer disdained Paris Because he liked...

May Day black locust. (New poems).(Poem)
March 1, 2003... May Day black locust The longer I look At the dry brown pods And white, bell-shaped, Honey-fragrant blossoms Among which the bees Are plunging their heads, The more the bees seem The moving members ...

Venice. (New poems).(Poem)
March 1, 2003... Venice Why must I see as if the course were charted the ways that we unravel? Once, you were the faith I built on, the solid place I traveled to, the city whose liquid streets I endlessly investigated--happy...

A tale of two Tonies. (London journal).
March 1, 2003... Social life in London has become a dangerous business. You are at an apparently relaxed dinner party, and someone suddenly launches into an anti-American diatribe--as often as not, to general applause. You are having a friendly conversation,...

"Matisse Picasso" at MOMA QNS. (Art).(Review)
March 1, 2003... When the great Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art ended, in January 1993, it was followed for one amazing week by an unpublicized epilogue--a small show that could only be described as modernist heaven. Improvised at the last...

Marsden Hartley & American modernism.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2003... America is an unenlightened nation. America is predestination, transcendentalism, superstition, and sin. Walt Whitman famously wrote that "the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion." Behind the outgrowths of...

Les Troyens. (Opera note).(Opera Review)
March 1, 2003... by Hector Berlioz, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. There are two varieties of Berlioz. The first is the "subscription concert" Berlioz: the composer known for his concert overtures, the Symphonie Fantastique and, on a good day, the...

Himalayan self-righteousness. (The media).
March 1, 2003... By the time these words are published, the United States will, by most estimates, have gone to war with the vile Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. God willing, the war will be over. Although I was never quite persuaded that anyone outside of Iraq...

E pluribus plurimum. (Books).(The Living Races of Man)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... A few weeks ago I happened to acquire a copy of Carleton Coon's 1965 book The Living Races of Man. What a gem! Coon was an anthropologist--was in fact Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His book is a world-wide survey...

The good German.(Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art: A Biography)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Hermann Kurzke Thomas Mann: life as a work of art: a biography. Translated by Leslie Willson. Princeton University Press, 582 pages, $35 In Phaedrus, which inspired Death in Venice, Plato writes that when the lover "beholds a god-like face...

Aspiration and reality.(The Sweetest Dream)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Doris Lessing The Sweetest Dream. HarperCollins, 478 pages, $26.95 The Sweetest Dream continues Lessing's longstanding preoccupation with the intimate connection, most insistently proclaimed in our times by radical feminists, between the...

Laughing matters.(The Mirth of Nations)(Book Review)
March 1, 2003... Christie Davies The Mirth of Nations. Transaction, 360 pages, $35.95 "I like jokes" remarks the hero of Peter Ustinov's play Romanov and Juliet, alerting the audience at once to the fact that he has no sense of humor. Liking jokes doesn't...

Cliquez ici for Alexandria. (Notebook).
March 1, 2003... A Greek Cypriot medical colleague of mine sometimes pays us a social visit, and I ask her as a favor to recite Cavafy in Greek, a language I do not speak or understand. The sound of the poetry alone is to me beautiful: but knowing it in...