New Criterion articles from November 2001

New Criterion archives from November 2001

Notes & comments: November 2001.
November 1, 2001... A burst of clarity Did the Swedish Academy have a fit of conscience? A sudden access of common sense? A literary metanoia? Whatever happened, we were both pleased and astonished at the news that this year's Nobel Prize in literature was to...

The felicific calculus of modern medicine: the survival of culture: III.
November 1, 2001... In May of this year, one of Britain's most wanted criminals, a man called Ronald Biggs, returned to Britain after thirty years of exile in Brazil. Now aged seventy-one, he was arrested on arrival and taken straight to prison. Biggs was one of...

Charles Peguy.(Critical Essay)
November 1, 2001... A great philosophy is not that which passes final judgments, which takes a seat in final truth. It is that which introduces uneasiness, which opens the door to commotion. --Charles Peguy, "Note on M. Bergson" Truth's pedagogue, braving...

We are waging a just war.
November 1, 2001... The terrorist attack on the United States in September will have grave repercussions over the whole world for years to come. The purpose behind the attack was to separate America and its allies from everyone else, and the Muslim world in...

Dwight Macdonald: sunburned by ideas.
November 1, 2001... At a 1980 symposium at Skidmore College set in motion by a normally portentous essay by George Steiner about the death of culture in America, Dwight Macdonald, long established as a slashing critic of popular culture and politics, sitting on a...

The hunt. (Poems).(Poem)
November 1, 2001... Each vowel black and white with silver sound, each consonant, a coil of golden fleece that's hunted over russet-colored ground-- chorale by Bach and painting by Matisse-- this language, life.... Those hunting horns resound...

Intruder. (Poems).(Poem)
November 1, 2001... He broke in, picking the lock, or having stolen a key, and he knew the code to disarm the alarm, some homeless guy, a crazy street-person, harmless you'd think, but you're wrong: he likes it here, and he stays. He...

Letters from minor loves. (Poems).(Poem)
November 1, 2001... Perhaps we thought their authors incomplete: dimwitted, slightly dull, undignified. They might have laughed too loud, appeared too sweet; it's harder to be loved than vilified. Whatever words became love's epitaph, ...

A Serb on a black mountain. (Poems).(Poem)
November 1, 2001... Splitting, inarticulate rock: Roots feeling out the silt in the cracks. Stunted, arthritic trees thrash The blue wind, which is pulling at twigs. A maelstrom of white voices brews. Ancestral voices woo. They ask me...

Another painful lesson. (London journal).
November 1, 2001... You start thinking you can't be surprised anymore--not when it comes to left-wing opinion-makers, at least--but you end up being surprised nonetheless. Most of their reactions are predictable in broad outline; but reality has a way of going one...

Eilshemius rediscovered again. (Art).
November 1, 2001... For sheer peculiarity, the exhibition "Louis M. Eilshemius: An Independent Spirit" at the National Academy of Design, will probably set a standard for a long time to come. (1) Eilshemius is one of the oddest of American painters, a genuinely...

Gallery chronicle. (Art).
November 1, 2001... A month ago in these pages I fretted over how contemporary audiences and artists might respond to the fervent seriousness embodied in Clyfford Still's paintings. Animated by irony, allusiveness, and free-floating cosmopolitanism, our governing...

Gold-standard cycling. (Music).
November 1, 2001... In the October 2000 issue of The New Criterion, I reviewed the first two operas of the Seattle Opera's new Ring cycle. This year saw the completion of the tetralogy with three complete cycles, of which I saw the first (August 5-10). The...

Cranks & cliches. (The media).
November 1, 2001... "Language failed this week," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times as the dramatic first paragraph of her two-cents' worth about the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was itself an example of what she...

On the hysterical playground. (Fiction chronicle).
November 1, 2001... Why can't you ever write a plain sentence like "He finished his drink, left the pub and went home?" --Kingsley Amis to Martin Amis Some very good books have been written by misanthropes. One certainly can't accuse Dawn Powell of being...

Democracy & pugnacity. (Books).(Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic)(Review)
November 1, 2001... More than two hundred years ago, when the republic was young and republicanism itself was still an untried experiment, American political culture had yet to come to grips with the idea of a loyal opposition. Dissent was confused with...

Stanley fish. (Elusive stances).(How Milton Works)(Review)
November 1, 2001... Stanley Fish How Milton Works. Harvard University Press, 616 pages, $35 In Book VII of Paradise Lost Milton wrote: Forthwith the Sounds and Seas, each Creek and Bay With Fry innumerable swarm, and Shoals Of Fish that...

Peter Raby. (A folklorish giant).(Review)
November 1, 2001... Peter Raby Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life. Princeton University Press, 340 pages, $29.95 Alfred Russel Wallace, heroic naturalist, anthropologist, and evolutionary theorist, began his ninety years in a Welsh cottage as so unpromising a...