New Criterion articles from March 2006

New Criterion archives from March 2006

Craven at the BBC.(Notes & Comments: March 2006)
March 1, 2006... In their continuing effort to raise consciousness, spread enlightenment, and deprecate the traditions that made Britain Britain, the BBC has posted extensive information on major world religions on their internet site (www.bbc.co.uk/religion)....

Business as usual at CPB.(Notes & Comments: March 2006)(Corporation for Public Broadcasting)
March 1, 2006... Not that the BBC has a monopoly on political correctness. Consider the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the grant-making, quasi-governmental agency that distributes some $400 million of taxpayer money to VBS, NPR, and other entities and...

Larry Summers, sacrificial beast.(Notes & Comments: March 2006)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... Here's the message flashed to the world by the Harvard Corporation, that tiny politically correct squad that sits upon a $26 billion endowment and controls Harvard University: no one with courage or in the habit of independent judgment need...

Democracy & political naivete.
March 1, 2006... The major problem with democracy is the foolishness of our fellow citizens. This may sound like an arrogantly partisan remark, but it is not. Wherever we are on the political spectrum, we all agree on that. Each of us would describe foolishness...

What Auden believed.(books by and about W. H. Auden)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Mr. Matthew Arnold. To him, Miss Mary Augusta, his niece: "Why, Uncle Matthew, oh why, will not you be always wholly serious? --Max Beerbohm, in a caption But why do you take everything I say so seriously?--W. H. Auden to Stephen...

A satyr against mankind.(The Possibility of an Island)(H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Novelists today tend to be pretty bloodless creatures. Look at their bios: They're mostly workshop professors or M.F.A. hatchlings. They review their peers' books, sit on grant panels, give readings and interviews, and, during their free time,...

Revolution for the rich: James's Princess Casamassima.(Henry James)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2006... Henry James is most often thought--quite rightly--as a novelist of manners, typically taking for his subject the clash of sensibilities between his American subjects and their European counterparts. His world--the one in which he moved...

"A Death at Badenweiler".(Poem)
March 1, 2006... 1904 Moscow! You should have seen the city then. Even in winter, the slate-blue river locked in ice below the Kremlin walls, the glaring plain of small boats frozen against the banks, the crowds in lush fur capes or...

Bang or whimper?(Letter from Paris)(Centre Pompidou, Place Beaubourg in Paris, France)(Column)
March 1, 2006... Not having seen every building in the world, I cannot positively assert that the Centre Pompidou in the Place Beaubourg in Paris is the worst, but I should be surprised if anyone were able to point to a building that was very much worse. ...

Naughts & crescents.(Reconsiderations)(The Flying Inn)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2006... Like Gilbert Chesterton's The Ball and the Cross, The Flying Inn is a comic fantasy almost totally forgotten today, even by Chestertonians. In view of the current explosion of Islamic fundamentalism, and the rise of terrorism against infidel...

Cezanne in Provence.(Art)(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
March 1, 2006... When Paul Cezanne died in October 1906, aged sixty-seven (he was born in January 1839), ten of his paintings were hastily assembled for exhibition that month at the Salon d'Automne, in homage. A year later, a large memorial retrospective was...

"David Smith: A Centennial".(Exhibition note)(Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)
March 1, 2006... "David Smith: A Centennial" Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. February 3, 2006-May 14, 2006 On the occasion of "David Smith: A Centennial," the marvelous exhibition that has been organized this winter at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum by...

Gallery chronicle.(Art)(Edvard Munch, William Kentridge, William Nicholson, Jake Berthot, Lois Dodd)
March 1, 2006... Once upon a time modern art had a third dimension: a mood-axis. In 1890s Europe, Symbolism plumbed the depths of myth and the macabre in order to dive beneath the surfaces of Impressionism. At the same moment in America, Tonalism whipped up a...

Warlord rules.(The media)
March 1, 2006... The Prophet Muhammad--"peace be upon him" as the BBC has sycophantically taken to adding when the name is mentioned in its broadcasts--with a cartoon bomb in his turban? Well, it's not exactly a side-splitter. Danish humor, I guess. They must...

Duff Cooper's game book.(The Duff Cooper Diaries)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... That Alfred Duff Cooper had very small feet strikes me as one of the most emblematic facts about him, but I'm hard pressed to say just how. Certainly it's tempting to quip, in view of his prodigious adulteries, that this helps explain why he...

Analyzing evil.(The Roots of Evil)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... John Kekes The Roots of Evil. Cornell University Press, 261 pages, $29.95 Remarking on the exceptional lucidity of Bertrand Russell's prose, the philosopher Stuart Hampshire once described clarity of expression as almost a moral...

Simious seductions.(The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Dane Kennedy The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World. Harvard University Press, 354 pages, $27.95 Just outside London, in the village of Mortlake, the massive tomb of Sir Richard Burton rises among the humbler...

Dissed & dismissed.(Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Lynne Truss Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. Gotham Books, 206 pages, $20 For many years now, incivility has been in fashion. Not just in how we behave in...

Margo Jefferson: On Michael Jackson.(Shorter notices)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Margo Jefferson On Michael Jackson. Pantheon, 14-6 pages, $20 What would propel Margo Jefferson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times critic, and self-styled intellectual (she spells Napoleon with an acute accent) write a...

Rodolphe Rapetti: Symbolism.(Shorter notices)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Rodolphe Rapetti Symbolism. Flammarion, 320 pages, $95 Just as no one today longs for the art of the 1990s, so the Symbolist art of the 1890s never fared well in the public opinion polls of the twentieth century. Such disdain is...

Michael Donaghy: Safest.(Shorter notices)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Michael Donaghy Safest. Picador UK, 47 pages, 12.99 [pounds sterling] When the poet Michael Donaghy died in 2004 at the age of fifty, he left behind three slim volumes of poetry and a computer file called "Safest" containing the poems in...

Liza Picard: Victorian London: The Tale of a City 1840-1870.(Shorter notices)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Liza Picard Victorian London: The Tale of a City 1840-1870. St. Martin's Press, 368 pages, $29.95 Walter Bagehot said of Dickens, "He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity." Liza Picard, a former Inland Revenue lawyer...

Benjamin Franklin: The Portable Benjamin Franklin.(Shorter notices)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Benjamin Franklin The Portable Benjamin Franklin, edited by Larzer Ziff. Penguin Classics, 576 pages, $17 "What would the Founders say?" Right and left, this is surely the most chafing piece of rhetoric in politics. Waterboarding,...

Claire Harman: Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.(Shorter notices)(Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2006... Claire Harman Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. HarperCollins, 528 pages, $29.95 Claire Harman's Myself and the Other Fellow has enough ribald anecdote and irreverent detail to do her subject proud, though she...

Susan Sontag: discord & desire.(Notebook)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2006... When Susan Sontag died in the winter of 2004--at seventy-one, far too soon for her powers to have been exhausted or her intellect to have been slaked--she left a memorable and mottled trail. Much of her life will endure in photographs--but...