New Criterion articles from November 2002

New Criterion archives from November 2002

Notes & comments: November 2002.
November 1, 2002... Academic freedom me but not for thee How quickly time passes! It seems only yesterday that we were reporting in this space on Annie Sprinkle's performance at The Kitchen, the supertrendy performance venue in downtown Manhattan. In fact, it...

Failures of nerve.
November 1, 2002... However tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. --Mary Beard, about September 11 ... the greatest source of terrorism on earth. --Harold Pinter, about the United States The real matter is the extinction of...

The European project.
November 1, 2002... It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Europe's anti-American vocation asserted itself from the start of the European Union. Had it done so, America would presumably have noticed. Instead of indulging the European infant, it might...

The politics of envy.
November 1, 2002... Until recently, anti-Americanism attracted little serious attention among social scientists and intellectuals. Apparently it was not considered worthy of study or close scrutiny, because it was rarely seen as a pathology that required better...

Retreats into fantasy.
November 1, 2002... Returning home from a journey to Arabia in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the explorer and historian Carsten Niebuhr put in at Alexandria. Once ashore, he used an instrument for surveying the landscape. Some intrigued Egyptians...

Yearning to be liked.
November 1, 2002... Let me begin with a story, a true story-the story of my one appearance on a lecture stage with Dr. Henry Kissinger. This happened, or rather failed to happen, in the month of September, 2001. The U.S. State Department runs a Foreign...

Dubious moralisms.(anti-globalization movement)
November 1, 2002... The democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 were heralded as marking the unambiguous triumph of both the capitalist system and bourgeois liberal democracy. Francis Fukuyama famously argued...

Johnson, Boswell & the biographer's quest.(Samuel Johnson, James Boswell)
November 1, 2002... Samuel Johnson noted the fascination of gossip, "the delight the mind feds in the investigation of secrets" and famously declared: "the biographical part of literature is what I love best." His penetrating intuition and insight into the lives...

Nights. (New Poems).(Poem)
November 1, 2002... Nights Drunk and weeping. It's another night at the live-in opera, and I figure it's going to turn out badly for me. The dead next door accept their salutations, their salted notes, the drawn-out wailing. It's we...

Vessel. (New Poems).(Poem)
November 1, 2002... Vessel To be colored in metallic salt, dipped in cobalt blue, raku's flame-tamed hue's equatorial smoke and wintry water. To reside in luster: illicit god's chamber-quarantined gold. To be the...

Erebus. (New Poems).(Poem)
November 1, 2002... Erebus "The region of the underworld through which the dead must pass" I dreamt I sung out of a mouth of fin and death kissed my mouth of tin with death's own mouth which was as verdigris, as soft solder on my...

"Erotic prudery"? (Art).
November 1, 2002... If you were to choose among Francois Boucher (1703-1770), Jean-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806), and Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), Greuze is certainly the big eighteenth-century French painter who got away. He...

Exhibition note. (Art).
November 1, 2002... "Stuart Davis: Art and Theory, 1920-1931" at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. September 10-December 15, 2002 Anyone familiar with the paintings of Stuart Davis (1892-1964) knows that he had a sense of humor. It's there to see in his...

Concert notes. (Music).
November 1, 2002... Galileo Galilei, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. Philip Glass is unsure of how many operas he has written, though it is upwards of eighteen. This doesn't quite put him into the Donizetti sphere, but it does distinguish him among...

The scandal lobby. (The media).
November 1, 2002... Is it, or ought it to be, a legitimate plea in defense of rude or boorish or insulting behavior that it is what the rude or boorish or insulting person "really thinks"? Not many years since, I fancy, no one would seriously have maintained that...

Suffer the children. (Fiction chronicle).
November 1, 2002... In 1996, Granta published the "Best of Young American Novelists" issue, and this list has been famous ever since. The Twenty under Forty have had varying degrees of success, and everyone thinks that someone was left off, and none of that...

Dismantling the law.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... A man who had been blind from birth would be most unfortunate if he suddenly gained sight while standing before distorting mirrors in a carnival funhouse. The version suddenly revealed to him--men and women with grotesquely bloated bodies,...

Devouring egomania.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... John Leggett A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan. Alfred A. Knopf, 496 pages, $30 The promising and, in the end, horrifying career of William Saroyan is a case study in the limits of raw talent. Talent Saroyan undoubtedly...

A ramshackle polemic.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... Joseph E. Stiglitz Globalization and its Discontents Norton, 282 pages, $24.95 Waves of globalization--of increased interaction between formerly separate societies and economies--have occurred since the dawn of civilization. These waves...

Perfection at a price.(Book Review)
November 1, 2002... N. John Hall Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life. Yale University Press, 284 pages, $24.95 Ten years ago N. John Hall published his first biography, a life of Anthony Trollope. Now he has brought out a biography of Max Beerbohm. At first sight...