New Criterion articles from May 2006

New Criterion archives from May 2006

Muriel Spark, RIP.(Notes & Comments: May 2006)(Obituary)
May 1, 2006... It was on Easter Saturday that we heard the sad news that the Scottish poet and novelist Muriel Spark had died, age 88, in Florence (her adopted home many years). We thought, "How suitable that it should have been on Good Friday." As a Catholic...

William Sloane Coffin, RIP.(Notes & Comments: May 2006)(Obituary)
May 1, 2006... Only a few days before Muriel Spark died, we read that the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, too, had gone to his reward. What a character in a novel by Muriel Spark that icon of Left-liberal sentimentality might have been! Coffin's heyday was in the...

D. H. Lawrence in decline.
May 1, 2006... In the introduction to her 1958 selection of D. H. Lawrence's letters, Diana Trilling complained that "so much a poet, he yet insists that we read him as a preacher." This undeniable fact made a full appreciation of Lawrence's imaginative...

Is manliness obsolete?(Manliness)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Half the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.--Jane Austen, Emma Both Homer's Iliad and the book of Genesis tell us that the battle between the sexes has been with us since the beginning of recorded time. As contemporary...

The enigmatic R.S. Thomas.
May 1, 2006... For reasons both complex and uninteresting, I found myself living for a time in North Wales: near Bangor, to be precise. Bangor is a university town, situated on the Menai Straits, the narrow stretch of water that separates the mainland...

Mark Van Doren & American classicism.
May 1, 2006... Above the columns of Butler Library at Columbia, inscribed in the stone frieze, you read permanent testimony that some writers are especially important: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Milton, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Spinoza....

On tenterhooks.(New poems)(Poem)
May 1, 2006... On tenterhooks Suspense seldom kills, but too often stretched between the hooks, the cloth drying in the sun so its weave might be straightened rips in one section and the whole taut fabric, so like a riveted drumskin...

The nosebleed.(New poems)(Poem)
May 1, 2006... The nosebleed Waiting for a Bennington light to change, I saw, last week, a girl lean against a woman, both blond, standing outside a supermarket. Mother, bent over, asked some question (all this I saw; heard...

"Script Ohio".(New poems)(Poem)
May 1, 2006... "Script Ohio" fall 1965 --The film an old one, whirring the way memory whirs, our rotund band director, Mr. Kerns, playing it week after week as falling leaves signalled another football season, the slanting autumnal...

Shade's shadow.(Reconsiderations)(Samuel Johnson and Vladimir Nabokov's works)
May 1, 2006... Samuel Johnson and Vladimir Nabokov seem diametrically opposed. The quintessential Englishman, the epitome of the eighteenth-century "Age of Johnson," favored lofty, abstractions, moralistic content and elaborate Latinate style. Modern readers...

David Smith: a centennial celebration.(Art)
May 1, 2006... On March 9 of this year, David Smith would have turned one hundred, which explains this spring's cluster of Smith and Smith-related exhibitions held more or less simultaneously. Of these, "David Smith: A Centennial," the retrospective at the...

The New York fairs.(art shows)
May 1, 2006... Remember Doctor T. J. Eckleburg? Think back to high-school English. Eckleburg is the defunct optometrist who stares down from his billboard on the protagonists of The Great Gatsby. "Standing behind him Michaelis saw with shock that he was...

Judas makes a comeback.(Judas Iscariot's new media image)
May 1, 2006... Last month, a man once so hated, especially in the historically Christian countries of Europe and the Americas, that he was widely regarded as the most evil man ever to have lived experienced something of a rehabilitation in the popular media,...

The ever-present human hint of yellow.(Fiction chronicle)(Zadie Smith's "On Beauty")
May 1, 2006... Glancing over the metaphorical shelves, one is forced to admit a certain trade deficit. Most interesting novels today seem to have been for sale in the U.K. first. Of course, generalizations are dangerous--generalizations based on national...

The cracked kettle of Flaubert.(Flaubert: A Biography)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... In the summer of 1930, Willa Cather chanced to form a brief friendship with an elderly lady at the Grand Hotel d'Aix in Aixles-Bains. As they chatted, Cather realized that her companion was Caroline Commanville, Flaubert's beloved niece, then...

The devil's music.(Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Park Honan Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. Oxford University Press, 4-40 pages, $32.50 The twentieth century was a good time to be a Marlovian. When John Ingram, in 1904, published the first full-length biography of Christopher Marlowe...

Practical & symbolic.(The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Peter Pennoyer & Anne Walker The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore. W. W. Norton, 256 pages, $60 The violent contempt of modernist architects for the classical revival can be understood intellectually, but no longer can it be appreciated...

Diagnosing the left.(The Intellectuals and the Flag)(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Todd Gitlin The Intellectuals and the Flag. Columbia University Press, 167 pages, $24.95 Todd Gitlin used to be a 1960s radical, an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) leader, a committed activist in the protests movements of the...

Fifty years of "Quadrant".(Notebook)
May 1, 2006... In Sydney in 1956, in the depths of the Cold War, the publisher Richard Krygier, a Polish-Jewish refugee and one-time representative of the Polish Socialist Party in exile in Australia, and the editor James McAuley, a poet, brought out the...

Jeff Reese.(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The maker or skillful user of tools feels a different attachment to them from that which the farmer feels to his land or his cattle. His possessions lend the landlord his dignity; they probably have been inherited, since they form a continuous...