New Criterion articles from May 2000

New Criterion archives from May 2000

Notes & Comments: May 2000.
May 1, 2000... The future of taboo Anthony Trollope once described his great novel The Way We Live Now (1875) as "an attack on the commercial profligacy of the age." Trollope went on to criticize his novel for exaggerating the social and moral evils it...

Rewriting the history of the British Empire.
May 1, 2000... In the new film of Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park, the writer and director Patricia Rozema includes an early scene that is not in the book. As Fanny Price departs from her family in Portsmouth to live in the grand household of her aunt and...

Five Yugoslav classics.
May 1, 2000... In the former Yugoslavia, literature matters. The world knows that the former Yugoslavia boasted numerous good writers, in the same way that it produced remarkable films and, recently, even more notable ethnic demagogues and frightful wars....

Roman holiday.
May 1, 2000... Let's try a game--something like those "which does not belong" quizzes in elementary school--think of a great period for art in Rome. Ancient Rome. Yes, obviously. Medieval Rome. Yes, although there isn't much of it left. Renaissance Rome. Of...

Seamus Heaney: redistributing the field.(Review)
May 1, 2000... Seamus Heaney's Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996(1) makes it possible to form something like a comprehensive picture of the Irish poet's work. Slowly but unmistakably over the past thirty years, Heaney has emerged as our major...

The owner of the house.(Poem)
May 1, 2000... The movers came, and took her bed, table, everything, until the house was empty. She was walking on a road at night, in a dark dress, and so she was hit. A driver who had seen it said that he thought...

Mole.(Poem)
May 1, 2000... For weeks he's tunneled his intricate need Through the root-rich, fibrous, humoral dark, Buckling up in zagged illegibles The cuneiforms and cursives of a blind scribe. Sleeved by soft earth, a slow reach knuckling, ...

Quiet alarm, deep foreboding.
May 1, 2000... Important changes are evident in Vienna these days. When I was there in March, for the first time in my memory, there was a real sense of political turmoil, occasioned by the recent entry into Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel's government of the...

Gallery chronicle.
May 1, 2000... John Heliker, who died this Spring in his nineties, had his first show at Kraushaar Galleries in 1945. His last, "A State of Seeing,"(1) was the gallery's first devoted exclusively to the artist's drawings. While Heliker was of the same...

The news from Olympus.
May 1, 2000... Last month I had the curious experience, which must be much more familiar to the eminences of the journalistic "profession" than it is to me, of becoming part of a story I had attempted to write. In my case, the story was a humble book review....

Meditations, good & bad.(Review)
May 1, 2000... If there were to be a competition for the most pretentious novelist of the last decade or so, honorable mention (after Salman Rushdie, perhaps, and David Foster Wallace) would have to go to Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient (1992) was the...

Crux: The Letters of James Dickey.(Review)
May 1, 2000... Virgil's Aeneas, weeping over the frescoes that depict the fall of Troy, voices the tragic sense of life that animates all poets: "Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience." In "Resolution and Independence," Wordsworth...

Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend.(Review)
May 1, 2000... Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend For and Against Method. Edited with an introduction by Matteo Motterlini. University of Chicago Press, 451 pages, $34 The old century--and we hardly need a longer perspective to see this--was beset by, and...

Selected Letters of Rebecca West.(Review)
May 1, 2000... Bonnie Kime Scott, editor Selected Letters of Rebecca West. Yale University Press, 544 pages, $35 Readers of The New Criterion will not need an introduction to Rebecca West. Yet even those familiar with her life and work will find...