New Criterion articles from November 2003

New Criterion archives from November 2003

Notes & comments: November 2003.(Editorial)
November 1, 2003... "The power of self-criticism" Among the many instructive and edifying passages in the Book of Common Prayer is a section describing "The Consecrating of Bishops." It is a stirring ritual, solemn, confident, uplifting. Of course, not just...

The art of war: Lengthened shadows: III.
November 1, 2003... The American military today may be in the best position of any military in history. Its victories over Iraq and Afghanistan have transformed not merely the way the U.S. thinks about and conducts war, but the way the entire world sees violent...

Friends of humanity?
November 1, 2003... Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy,...

Carl Jung: the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy.(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... It goes without saying, almost, that the unexamined life is not worth living, but the question biographers need to ask themselves is whether the minutely examined life is worth reading. And the answer to this question, taken in the abstract, is...

Writing for antiquity: the ironies of D. J. Enright.
November 1, 2003... If the name and work of D. J. Enright, who died on New Year's Eve, 2002 at the age of eighty-two, are little known in the United States, that is not surprising; the same is true in his native England. The circumstances of his life and the cast...

Wind.(New poems)(Poem)
November 1, 2003... Wind He's married to an autumn wind that roars through clashing branches of the sycamores and scatters their last leaves across the sky. And like the wind among the sycamore boughs, a roaring wife can strain a...

Stars.(New poems)(Poem)
November 1, 2003... Stars Except in that near-equinoctial light of an autumn evening or late afternoon when we might see the zodiacal arc of stars and planets, sun and crescent moon, we cannot see the stars until the night is all...

Fever.(New poems)(Poem)
November 1, 2003... Fever I want to compose without this fever. I hope one day I shall. --To George and Georgiana Keats, September 1819 Fever was fervour. It was no disease of mind but that condition--sure, perplexed--of falling...

Forest Sculpture.(New poems)(Poem)
November 1, 2003... Forest Sculpture (Goose Creek, S.C.) Horns locked into blue air, head posed to tear a patch of forest out of its repose, this form was hurled down by Capricorn to match a remembered self. Earth reshaped what...

The modernism of El Greco.(Art)
November 1, 2003... "The most modern of Old Masters" declares a text panel at the beginning of this fall's stunning El Greco retrospective at the Metropolitan. Hyperbole, maybe, but it's easy to agree when we become engaged by this enigmatic artist's moody,...

The culture of mistrust.(The Media)
November 1, 2003... It was a fantastic laboratory test, done as if to order. On Monday, Howard Kurtz wrote in The Washington Post, in an article headed "For 'Gotcha' Reporting the Getting's Not So Good" that scandal-mania in the media was not being successfully...

Tickling your catastrophe.
November 1, 2003... I'd like to dispense straightaway with what I like about Martin Amis and move on to the meatier stuff. His secondary life's project--his primary one being himself--can be seen as an attempt to write out how harassing the daily details of life...

The art of art history.(Books)(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... The modern sensibility recoils against the "great man" model of history: history as the account of decisive events, shaped by the autonomous actions of kings, princes, and generals. This is history as Shakespeare viewed it, where the great...

Reasonable science.(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... Susan Haack Defending Science--Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism. Prometheus Books, 396 pages, $28 There are, Susan Haack says, two opposing schools of thought about science: the New Cynics, as she calls them, who believe...

Hope without feathers.(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... Gustaw Herling The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories, translated by Bill Johnston. New Directions, 282 pages, $25.95 Gustaw Herling faced more suffering and depravity in two years than many men encounter in a lifetime. Yet he never lost...

Cultural horticulture.(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... Karel Capek The Gardener's Year. The Claridge Press, 208 pages, 12.99m [pound sterling] There are several categories of books on gardens and gardening: ancient texts such as Virgil's Georgics and Pliny the Younger's Letters describing his...

Homer & the power of men that have chests.(Notebook)
November 1, 2003... One of the many things I love about St. John's College is that everyone must begin with Homer--and not only Homer, but the Iliad. It's not just that this happens to have been my favorite book for most of my life. Homer is arguably both the...