New Criterion articles from November 2000

New Criterion archives from November 2000

Notes & Comments: November 2000.
November 1, 2000... Will there always be an England? We have often remarked on what difficult times these are for the art of parody. If he is to be successful, a parodist must be able to count on his audience's ability to distinguish clearly between the...

Tocqueville today.
November 1, 2000... What saddens me is, not that our society is democratic, but that the vices which we have inherited and acquired make it so difficult for us to obtain or to keep well-regulated liberty. And I know nothing so miserable as a democracy without...

Reticence or insincerity Rattigan or Pinter.
November 1, 2000... History is a seamless robe, of course, but there are nevertheless discernible tears in its fabric. One of these occurred in the 1950s, in the small world of the British theater. No doubt unimportant in itself, this quasi-revolution heralded,...

Women & politics: Madame de Duras.
November 1, 2000... You were made to rule the world. --Chateaubriand to Mme de Duras In 1786 the chevalier de Boufflers, then governor of Senegal, brought back for his aunt, the princesse de Beauvau, a black girl called Ourika, some two years old, who was...

The fortunes of Aby Warburg.
November 1, 2000... When conflicting worldviews kindle partisan emotions, setting members of a society at each other's throats, the social fabric inexorably crumbles; but when those views hold a balance within a single individual--when, instead of destroying each...

Engine work: variations.(Poem)
November 1, 2000... i June morning. Sunlight flashes through the pines. Blue jays razz and bicker, perch on a fence post Back of my grandfather's yard. His stripped engines Clutter the lawn. And everywhere the taste Of scuppernongs,...

The music of farewell.(Poem)
November 1, 2000... Descending for the last time to the underworld, the soul of Orpheus addresses his audience. It's true, of course, that the dusk-umbered leaves Deepening on the hawthorn are a mere sleight Of sun and shadow, true the olive...

The triumph of experience over hope.
November 1, 2000... There is an old vaudeville routine, in which a comedian dons a succession of scary masks. As he puts each one on, he taps the shoulder of a man standing in front of him; when the man turns round, he is not in the least shocked, only irritated....

Rembrandt & Venice.
November 1, 2000... It's a truism these days that there is no single way of thinking about the history of art, no single way of telling the story of what happened or of interpreting the visual evidence that has come down to us. The only constant is the fact that...

The sorrow & the pity.
November 1, 2000... Wagner's Parsifal stands alone in the operatic canon. No other opera is so fraught with interpretive perils, so encumbered by tradition, so undermined by preconceptions as this one. Wagner called this work a Buhenweihfestspiel, a uniquely...

The joke's on us.
November 1, 2000... My favorite Washington Post headline of this election season, which appeared above an article by Terry M. Neal and Ceci Connolly on the morning before the second presidential debate, read: "Debate Challenges Are Same as Before." As I have had...

Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation.(George Orwell)
November 1, 2000... Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me. "Orwellian" has entered the vocabulary as a shorthand adjective for the abiding fear of the twentieth century, that we would all become unpersons at the mercy of Big Brother. A...

Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Harry Kessler.(Review)
November 1, 2000... Charles Kessler, editor and translator Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Harry Kessler. Grove Press, 560 pages, $35 Germany, let's face it, did not have a good century. To start one war and lose it might be misfortune: to do the same thing...

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach.(Review)
November 1, 2000... Alice Kaplan The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. University of Chicago Press, 308 pages, $25 In England, where Fascism never took hold, many of the leading modern writers --Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Pound, and...

The Knox Brothers.(Review)
November 1, 2000... Penelope Fitzgerald The Knox Brothers. Counterpoint, 288 pages, $26 This is a welcome reissue, with a new brief preface, of a book first published in 1977, which rapidly became a classic in the genre of composite biography. Penelope...

Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton.(Review)
November 1, 2000... David Gergen Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton. Simon & Schuster, 382 pages, $26 Since full disclosure is all the rage these days, I should disclose fully. I first met David Gergen almost a decade ago when I...

"The order passion yields": i.m. Edgar Bowers, 1924--2000.
November 1, 2000... I carry one small memory of his form Aslant at his clavier, with careful ease, To bring one last enigma to the norm, Intelligence perfecting the mute keys. --"From J. Haydn to Constanze Mozart (1791)" How will a generation know its...