New Criterion articles from May 1999

New Criterion archives from May 1999

Notes & Comments: May 1999.
May 1, 1999... More and more of everything The dictum "less is more" is usually attributed to the German architect Mies van der Rohe. It is a saying easy to mock. There are many circumstances, however, for which we are tempted to regard it as Algernon...

Procedure or dogma: the core of liberalism.
May 1, 1999... Liberalism: has any other word been used in more senses? Is there another word whose definition is so constrained by time and context? I face the issue baffled, and my bafflement is personal as well as conceptual. I have almost always thought...

The permanent Auden.(Review)
May 1, 1999... "It's such a pity Wystan never grows up." --Auden, Letter to Lord Byron "I shall only ask you to apply to the work of the deceased a very simple test. How many of his lines can you remember?" --Auden, "The Public v. the Late Mr. W....

How did Dostoevsky know?
May 1, 1999... If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be [routinely] practiced in Russia; that...

Alexander Hamilton: precocious & preeminent.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Richard Brookhiser, the author of Rediscovering George Washington (1996), has intruded again upon the specious present, holding up for praise the character and achievements of Alexander Hamilton.(1) "He is a great man" Brookhiser writes, "a...

On a cliff above Seal Rocks.
May 1, 1999... Behind us the city, the ocean below us. Cold wind combed the headlands; your fingers were cold. How long the light lasted there, light that at nightfall moved over the transom of a slowly moving yawl. We kept its...

Invention with seascape.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Let's say our days were not immutable but free for us to order as we choose. Arrayed at noon, our possibilities would hang like summer linens airing dry, blown front- or sidewise in the saltish air, simultaneous,...

What to do with a mountain lake.
May 1, 1999... We pushed off from the crumbled dam into a lake of clouds, with duckweed on our scudding chins, gliding without sound. The jinking trees grew quietest where water sketched in the shore, their disheveled...

Nostalgia for bad times.
May 1, 1999... In Prague as it approaches its second millenium, nothing appears to change faster than the past. The present, of course, has been in a state of agitated flux for a decade. Hardly a week goes by that does not produce a change, often to the...

Disaster relief.(Review)
May 1, 1999... The Great Plains are famous for bitter winters and long-lasting snowfalls. (I know this from experience, having worked at a museum on the Canadian prairies for seven years.) But the snow that blankets those flat stretches of land from November...

A Spring roundup.
May 1, 1999... Few venues embody the free-for-all that is today's art world as fully as the P.S.I Contemporary Art Center in Queens. An old school building located in industrial Long Island City, P.S.I is an institution dedicated to the anti-institutional....

At last, the promised land?
May 1, 1999... On Saturday, February 20, most of the usual weekly listeners to the Texaco-sponsored broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera cannot have been pleased by the sounds emanating from their radios. For the first time, Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses...

Moses und Aron.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Moses und Aron, by Arnold Schoenberg, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Center, Chicago. Perhaps New York audiences got the better deal with the near-simultaneous performances of Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron that took place...

Caring, compassionate imperialism.
May 1, 1999... In all the media's coverage of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, there was hardly a mention of the word "imperialism." Since the last European empires dismembered themselves in the 1960s and 1970s, the media mind, addicted to the short-term view,...

Berryman at Shakespeare.(Review)
May 1, 1999... John Berryman's Shakespeare problem first gripped him during the war, when he accepted a Rockefeller fellowship to work on a new edition of King Lear. Soon he was writing to his old teacher Mark Van Doren, "Lear's renovation is going on rapidly...

Another World.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Pat Barker Another World. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 278 pages, $25 The last couple of decades have produced a lot of loose talk about the "dysfunctional family" whatever that might be. Every time a definition is attempted, its vagueness and...

Aristophanes.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Jeffrey Henderson, editor and translator Aristophanes. Volume 1: Acharnians, Knights; 408 pages, $19.95. Volume 2: Clouds, Wasps, Peace; 606 pages, $19.95. Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. The revitalization of the Loeb...

What to do with a mountain lake.(Poem)
May 1, 1999... We pushed off from the crumbled dam into a lake of clouds, with duckweed on our scudding chins, gliding without sound. The jinking trees grew quietest where water sketched in the shore, their disheveled...