New Criterion articles from May 2004

New Criterion archives from May 2004

Notes & comments: May 2004.(Editorial)
May 1, 2004... A victory for memory It is said that the first casualty of war is truth. In fact, we believe, memory--that indispensable advocate for historical truth--is the first to go. In war's cataract, momentary crises gobble up our attention...

Olympians on the march: the courts & the culture wars.(Lengthened shadows: IX)
May 1, 2004... [T]o be "reactionary" means nothing more than to believe that in some of its aspects, however secondary, the past was better than the present.--Leszek Kolakowski Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep...

Giovanni Verga's verismo.
May 1, 2004... ... il vero dell' aspra sorte e del depresso loco che natura ci die. --Leopardi, La Ginestra Italy, a late united nation, lagged too in producing a modern narrative literature. That had to wait till the twentieth century. She did...

Milton Avery: then & now.("Red Rock Falls")
May 1, 2004... In the new art we can trace two main currents; in one synthesis predominates, in the other analysis; the latter preponderates enormously. Indeed, this is the direction in which abstract art has tended to develop ever since the Renaissance. ...

Traveler.(New poems)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... Traveler An old horse in Appalachian rain I stand at tether since the storm began, remembering the first meadow where a man taught me the bridle and the mouth-bit's pain. Later he tutored me to thrill to the rein, ...

My grandfather's pocket watch.(New poems)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... My grandfather's pocket watch 1 The filigreed watch case clicks open and inside I find time's intimate machinery: the interlocking wheels' circumference, the pintoothed sprockets that still coincide, even...

The tide pool.(New poems)(Poem)
May 1, 2004... The tide pool The name of the town is lost. A Kodak memory restores the glacial scree our bored Atlantic crossed that burning July day. The crowded tide drove in like a release of sin along the rocky...

Borrowed time in the botellon.(Letter from Madrid)
May 1, 2004... I don't remember having smelled so much hashish in the streets of Madrid on my last research trip here three years ago. This time it seems that there are few sixteen- to twenty-year-olds on the street who are not either rolling or smoking a...

The ancient Greeks: were they like us at all?(Art)(art exhibition)
May 1, 2004... The classical Greeks were really nothing like us--at least that now seems the prevailing dogma of classical scholars of the last half-century. Perhaps due to the rise of cultural anthropology or, more recently, to a variety of postmodern...

Concert note.(Music)(Concert Review)
May 1, 2004... Wolfgang Sawallisch, Christoph Eschenbach & Sir Simon Rattle with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Carnegie Hall. To hear a major orchestra under three eminent conductors in the space of a little more than one month is a privilege. Carnegie Hall...

Obligations to "spin",.(The media)
May 1, 2004... At other times, the pressures of editing on a tight deadline and the fundamental belief that a reporter is telling his editor the truth appeared to work in Mr. Kelley's favor. --From a New York Times article on the disgrace of USA Today...

Not to comment, but to illustrate.("The Confessions of Max Tivoli")(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... I recently saw a man wearing a t-shirt that said "I bring nothing to the table." These t-shirts should be handed out at the orientation session of every MFA program in the country. Not as a rebuke, but as celebration and encouragement. It is...

Why we won.("Washington's Crossing")(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Most Americans think of 1776 as a glorious year in revolutionary history, capped off when the Founders declared independence to the peals of Philadelphia's Liberty Bell. Indeed, as the summer of 1776 approached, the country did have much to...

Farrell's achievement.("An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell")(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Robert K. Landers An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell. Encounter Books, 562 pages, $28.95 This superb biography of James T. Farrell shows why the genre is so vital to an appreciation of literature and the literary life....

Beyond faeryland.("W. B. Yeats: A Life Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939")(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... R. F. Foster W. B. Yeats: A Life Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939. Oxford University Press, 798 pages, $45 The four great twentieth-century anglophone poets are, in my reckoning, Eliot, Graves, Pound, and Yeats, followed by Auden,...

The strangest travel book ever written.("An African in Greenland")(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Our dinner guest a few weeks ago got to talking about the thing we always get to talking about with dinner guests, The State of The Culture. He must have been drinking from the well of Evolutionary Psychology, because that is the angle he came...