New Criterion articles from March 2007

New Criterion archives from March 2007

Nasty, brutish, but tolerant.(Notes & Comments: March 2007)(John Gray's views on curbing terrorism in UK)(Viewpoint essay)
March 1, 2007... On the cover of The Spectator for 17 February is an arresting photograph of a woman staring--worriedly, we think--out of that little headdress slit that traditionalist Muslims regard as the only seemly point of female contact with the world at...

D'Souza goes native.(The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Dinesh D'Souza was an early editor of The Dartmouth Review, the conservative student newspaper. He earned a reputation as an enfant terrible before he graduated from college. In his tenure at the Review, D'Souza brilliantly tormented the...

Chez Proust.(Proust in Love)(Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris)(Proust's English)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... On the face of it, Proust was not obvious great-writer material. He was in some ways a dilettante, social butterfly, snobbery-deprecating snob (except when he sought out young lower-class men as sex objects), and an extraordinary hypochondriac...

A dime store Jane Austen.(The Collected Letters of Martha Gellhorn)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Late in her life, Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) produced a masterpiece of travel writing. Travels with Myself and Another (1978) belongs in company with the classics of the genre: Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure, Robert Byron's Road to...

A giant.(New poems)(Poem)
March 1, 2007... A giant Big world when I was very young. The shopping aisles a mile long... Our lawn, though anything but wide, Unfolding like a countryside... The sky! A giant, far away. (As if it's not the same today.)

Something like that.(New poems)(Poem)
March 1, 2007... Something like that You know how in Spanish they put An -ita on things? So this girl Mildred, this Puerto Rican girl Where I work, pretty girl--so I get To thinking that a funny thing about Her name is that it's...

Rapt.(New poems)(Poem)
March 1, 2007... Rapt Psych IOI: we just can't get enough of the man who lathers only half his beard, or suddenly can't clap, for in the weird there's so much beauty. So we're taught. It's tough, this life of scholarship and...

Stickball at St. Mike's.(New poems)(Poem)
March 1, 2007... Stickball at St. Mike's We strained to follow hits to the top story. The traceries were triples, grounders strikes. A homer had to clear the slated pitch. Like Michael's sword, our broomstick swung at strikes, As...

Stepson of the time.(Reconsiderations)(Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2007... This could be Arthur Koestler apostrophizing the condemned Rubashov in his novel Darkness at Noon (1940): There is nothing more difficult than to be a stepson of the time; there is no heavier fate than to live in an age that is...

Sufficient goals.(Theater)(Video recording review)
March 1, 2007... Frank's Home, the Richard Nelson play, directed by Robert Falls, now at Playwrights Horizons, happens to be "about" Frank Lloyd Wright, but like all good plays it is really "about" far more than its ostensible subject. Its true theme is the...

The other Matisse.(Art)(Henri Matisse's exhibition)
March 1, 2007... Sculpture, according to Clement Greenberg, lagged behind painting in ridding itself of things not intrinsic to its medium, partly because of its literal presence. Because it had less to discard, painting, he believed, led the way in jettisoning...

Exhibition note.(Art)(Henri Cartier-Bresson's exhibition)
March 1, 2007... "Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrapbook: Photographs, 1932-1946" International Center of Photography. January 19, 2007-April 29, 2007 In June of 1940, Henri Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Stalag V-A, number 845....

Gallery chronicle.(a look at the art galleries)
March 1, 2007... Art galleries usually rise and fall through the personalities of their founders. Betty Cuningham, David Nolan, and Salander-O'Reilly, the three galleries featured in the chronicle last month, all owe their success to the name on the door. ...

Time on the cross of hype.(The media)(covering the death of Anna Nicole Smith)(Viewpoint essay)
March 1, 2007... Where were you and what were you doing when you heard that Anna Nicole Smith had died? Philip Kennicott led off one of his hugely portentous big-think pieces for The Washington Post's Style section--"The Fantasy of Happily Ever After: Anna...

Arc of surrender.(The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... In 1940, C. S. Lewis wrote a letter to the German scholar Eliza Marian Butler in which he undercuts a passage from his book The Allegory of Love: "there are parts of it which I don't feel too happy about now and the passage on symbolism and...

Vale, Vidal.(Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964-2006)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Gore Vidal Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 to 2006. Doubleday, 277 pages, $26 August 1968. William F. Buckley Jr. had been goosed, against his better judgment, into a series of television debates with Gore Vidal, set against that...

The holiday in his eye.(The Lay of the Land)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Richard Ford The Lay of the Land. Knopf, 496 pages, $26.95 As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in "Manners" in 1844: I have seen an individual whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never...

Finding his way.(What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Nick Cohen What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way. Fourth Estate, 400 pages, 12.99 [pounds sterling] The author of this book, a respected columnist on Britain's venerable Sunday newspaper of liberal outlook, The Observer, was born into...

Classic spin.(Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Paul Cartledge Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World. Overlook Press, 376 pages, $30 Thermopylae is legendary, its story, is simple: three hundred Spartans stood in a narrow pass, where the mountains came down to the sea, and...

The escape artist.(The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving)(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Andrew Burstein The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving. Basic Books, 348 pages, $27.50 It is the sad irony of Washington Irving's career that he was forgotten by the very literary tradition he engendered. Once read by...

Revisiting "Catalonia".(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... To the Editors: I trust that I am mistaken in finding something willfully and sometimes almost maliciously "off" about Anthony Daniels's essay ["Orwell's 'Catalonia' Revisited"] in your edition of February 2007. I began to feel this way...