New Criterion articles from May 2003

New Criterion archives from May 2003

The end of the line? (Notes & comments: May 2003).(The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe)
May 1, 2003... In Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Purloined Letter," the trick is that the incriminating letter is not hidden but has been sitting in plain sight all along. The moral is that what is most obvious is sometimes easiest to overlook, as the vain and...

Annals of the BBC. (Notes & comments: May 2003).(Editorial)
May 1, 2003... Later in this issue, James Bowman reports on the mainstream media's coverage of the war with Iraq. It is an inglorious tale: a compendium of anti-American broadsides, half snide, half furious, almost comically wrongheaded and inaccurate. A few...

Farewell to PR. (Notes & comments: May 2003).(William Phillips, Partisan Review)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... In this space in October 2002, we noted the death at ninety-four of our friend William Phillips, the founding co-editor (with Philip Rahv) of Partisan Review. In its great period, in the 1940s and 1950s, Partisan Review was a catalyzing force...

The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky.
May 1, 2003... There's a famous definition in the Gospels of the hypocrite, and the hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called War on...

Minimalist fantasies.
May 1, 2003... All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.... What you see is what you see. --Frank Stella, 1966 Minimal works are readable as art,...

Can Europe happen?
May 1, 2003... In September 194-6, when Winston Churchill, speaking at the University of Zurich, was calling for the creation of a United States of Europe, parts of that continent still lay in ruins; the wounds of war had not yet scarred over. There were...

Up from communism.
May 1, 2003... My father was a communist. As is often the case, what attracted the father repelled the son. Of course, I don't mean to imply that my anticommunism was merely the consequence of a conflict of generations: I read a fair bit and went to see for...

A Fortieth Birthday Poem to Myself. (New poems).(Poem)
May 1, 2003... A fortieth birthday poem to myself What a long way my children have to go To come from me. About them, all I know Is that odd journey. Through a crowding wind They bike to church. They queue for an exam. They...

For the War Dead. (New poems).(Poem)
May 1, 2003... For the war dead Rapidly, darkly, all around, The groves and fields are falling down. We see it from the yard today: The land, that's endless, ebbs away. We did not dream this could be done. Relentlessly we...

After Ecclesiastes, Chapter 12. (New poems).(Poem)
May 1, 2003... After Ecclesiastes, Chapter 12 Nobody can be ready to go through Clear to the time to come, no more to be Gazed at, no more to choose. What will she do? How terrified she is to have to see That she was happy in the...

The house gods of Elie Nadelman. (Art).
May 1, 2003... Where lies the final harbor whence we unmoor no more? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to...

"Nell Blaine, artist in the world: works from the 1950s" at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. March 22, 2003-April 26, 2003. (Exhibition notes).
May 1, 2003... Nell Blaine (1922-1996) can tell a story through a remarkable economy of language. Her best work is lyrical, self-aware, in control, and inviting without the hints of self-indulgence that befell many in the New York School. A native of...

"Titian" at the National Gallery, London. February 19, 2003-May 18, 2003. (Exhibition notes).
May 1, 2003... With the exception of the museum personnel whose livelihood depends on them, nobody likes a crowd at an art exhibition. Aesthetic experience isn't encouraged by peering over the shoulders of a half-a-dozen onlookers, the tinny squawk of audio...

The rise of the vocal recital.
May 1, 2003... One of the more interesting features of concert life in New York in the past decade has been the growth--one might almost say the ubiquity--of the vocal recital. By the "vocal recital" I mean the classic "art song evening" as opposed to an...

Superior to the truth. (The media).
May 1, 2003... How wonderfully appropriate that the public discovery of the most serious media scandal to come out of the war in Iraq should have been made by one of its authors--and in a statement which he himself obviously supposed was an occasion for...

A safe preserve for sport. (Fiction chronicle).
May 1, 2003... It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. --Henry James, "The Figure in the Carpet" The search for an enigma catalyzes the revelations of character in "The Figure in the...

Remembering the Gulag. (Books).
May 1, 2003... The first account of the concentration camps that I can remember reading was an essay by Hannah Arendt in the July 1948 number of Partisan Review when I was a sophomore in college. What I now mainly recall about my first reading of this essay,...

The apple in our eye.(Newton: The Making of Genius)(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... Patricia Fara Newton: The Making of Genius. Columbia University Press, 347 pages, $27.95 I picked up this book thinking it was a biography of Newton. Thus disposed, I picked it up with some reluctance--and then, only after two or three...

Dark comedy.(Euripides. Vol. 5: Helen, Phoenician Women, Orestes)(Euripides. Vol. 6: The Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus)(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... David Kovacs, editor Euripides. Vol. 5: Helen, Phoenician Women, Orestes. 605 pages, $21.50. Vol. 6: The Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus. 480 pages, $21.50. Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press What Thucydides says about...

From little acorns.(Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God)(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... A. C. Grayling Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God. Oxford University Press, 256 pages, $27.50 First off, despite the title and the famous Man Ray nude on the cover, there is little about sex here; titillation seekers will have...