New Criterion articles from November 2004

New Criterion archives from November 2004

Notes & comments: November 2004.(Obituary)(Biography)
November 1, 2004... Derrida declawed When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida died last month at seventy-four, the response was loud, passionate, and predictably divided according to demographic origin. If the response came from outside the academy, it...

Saintly institutions? Notes on a modern prejudice.
November 1, 2004... Sometimes I think all the trouble in the world is caused by intellectuals who have an "idea." --David Hare, Stuff Happens Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent, though the tests that have to be applied to them are...

Capote reconsidered.
November 1, 2004... When Truman Capote died in 1984, just before his sixtieth birthday, his life had been in a shambles for years. The phenomenal success of In Cold Blood (1966) fulfilled all his dreams, but at that moment he began inexplicably to implode. His...

The lessons of "Lonelyhearts".
November 1, 2004... The social significance of an idea is not necessarily proportional to its truth, its coherence, or even its comprehensibility. In his introduction to a new edition of Warrant for Genocide, which is the history of the concoction of The Protocols...

The memory of Donald Justice.
November 1, 2004... The greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory--the individual human memory.... The memory is a living thing--it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives--the old and the young,...

Mezzo cammin.(New Poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Mezzo cammin Today, as I jogged down the center line of a closed-off, rain-glossed road, lost in a rhythm, the memory of a boy returned: fifteen or so, barefoot in faded cut-off jeans, sprinting past neighbors'...

Ovid old.(New Poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Ovid old As a pale gauze rose over Asia, he awoke surrounded by, not Rome, but huts, hanging like tattered effigies of home from threads of cedar smoke; Europe was dark. The woman...

Weighing light.(New Poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Weighing light Often the slightest gesture is most telling, as when he reaches tenderly in passing to pluck the yellow leaf from the dark fall of her hair, or even the absence of all gesture: the way she doesn't...

Though angelless.(New Poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Though angelless I once glanced up at a tree and found it full of angels singing praises to God. --Blake If I'm to take this visionary quote As something of a challenge (not a bad Way of taking everything he...

Missing it.(New poems)(Brief Article)(Poem)
November 1, 2004... Missing it The thing about the old one about The tree in the forest and nobody's around And how it falls maybe with a sound, Maybe not, is you throw the part out About what there isn't or there is, And the part of...

Outraged intellectuals.(The media)(Column)
November 1, 2004... On the morning of the second presidential "debate" between President Bush and Senator Kerry, I woke up to the sounds of Bob Schieffer exulting on the radio. This debate, the one in town hall format from St. Louis, wasn't even the one he was to...

Among gods and kings.(Art)(Critical Essay)
November 1, 2004... An affectionate couple, carved out of ivory, is the first thing you see upon entering Asia Society's eclectic, idiosyncratic, and utterly absorbing exhibition "In the Realm of Gods and Kings: Arts of India: Selections from the Polsky...

Gallery chronicle.(art exhibitions )(Column)
November 1, 2004... Like Dior, fondu, and the permanent wave, painting is back, they say. Get your paintings out of the closets, ladies, and hang them with pride. But is painting merely a fashion statement? Several new shows raise the question. One artist who...

Opera note.(Music)(Don Giovanni, Simon Boccanegra, Beatrice and Benedict, Agrippina and La Sonnambula)(Opera Review)
November 1, 2004... Don Giovanni, Simon Boccanegra, Beatrice and Benedict, Agrippina & La Sonnambula at the Santa Fe Opera. The Santa Fe Opera had modest beginnings in the late 1950s: open-air seating, a reflecting pool behind the orchestra pit, and the...

World literature in 1928.(Reflections)(Column)
November 1, 2004... How all seventeen volumes of an early twentieth-century edition of the Columbia University Course in Literature came to Africa, eventually to appear in a Cape Town thrift shop, might be an interesting story in itself. But I have no room in my...

Worse yet, real life.(Fiction chronicle)(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... In the metaphysics of early computing, after the vacuum tubes, while the world was searching for the mouse, there came briefly to light an interesting cosmological problem. Graphical space can be described in two ways, either as a mapped set of...

A song and a mistake.(Books)(Metamorphoses)(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Just what was Ovid's crime? What offense did he commit that prompted Augustus, in 8 A.D., to banish him, for the rest of his life, to Tomis on the Black Sea? Ovid himself alludes to the cause, remarking that it was due to carmen et error, "a...

Ein' feste Burg.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Steven Ozment A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People. HarperCollins, 416 pages, $26.95 The aftermath of the Iraq War, which occasioned an unprecedented bout of transatlantic vituperation, may seem an unpropitious moment to...

A quintessential general.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Josiah Bunting III Ulysses S. Grant. Times Books (Henry Holt), 166 pages, $20 What are we to make of Ulysses S. Grant? At thirty-nine he was seen as a wash-out--no job, no money, forced resignation from the U.S. military after occasional...

Authenticity blues.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Stanley Crouch The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity. Basic Civitas, 244 pages, $24 Stanley Crouch's essays on race, masculinity, authenticity and the arts are generally sober and robust. They are also shot through with jarring...

An impossible dream.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... T. R. Reid The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. The Penguin Press, 320 pages, $9.95 On May 1st 2004, ten countries with a combined population of 74 million became members of the European Union,...

Walker Evans: Many Are Called.(Shorter notices)(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Walker Evans Many Are Called, introduction by James Agee, foreword by Luc Sante, afterword by Jeff L. Rosenheim. Yale University Press, 208 pages, $40 It has been said that the past is a foreign country, where things were done differently....

Russell Kirk: Ancestral Shadows: an Anthology of Ghostly Tales.(Shorter notices)(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Russell Kirk Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, introduction by Vigen Guroian. Eerdmans, 406 pages, $25 Russell Kirk, patriarch of conservative thought, believed in ghosts. (Surprised? But what could be more...

Jewel Spears Brooker, editor: T. S. Eliot: the Contemporary Reviews.(Shorter notices)(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Jewel Spears Brooker, editor T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge University Press, 600 pages, $110 This is the tenth volume in The American Critical Archive series, a splendid scholarly project of the old school, by which I do...

Thom Gunn, 1929-2004.(Notebook)(Obituary)
November 1, 2004... Leaving aside the fact that there will always be some who disapprove of Thom Gunn on principle, it would be easy to read his life and career as a cautionary tale: the young poet of prodigious assurance and power, a modern Metaphysical, who...