New Criterion articles from October 1999

New Criterion archives from October 1999

Notes & Comments: October 1999.
October 1, 1999... Boycott the SAT We have often had occasion to note how egalitarianism turns out to be the enemy of genuine fairness. The latest example is a new program developed by the Educational Testing Service, the folks that bring us the Scholastic...

Remembering Milovan Djilas.(Yugoslavian political figure)
October 1, 1999... In the spring of 1967, I took a train from Ceausescu's Romania to Tito's Yugoslavia. Travel in Communist countries switched the imagination into overdrive. The books of Walter Krivitsky, Anton Ciliga, Victor Serge, George Orwell came menacingly...

Abstraction in America: the first generation.
October 1, 1999... A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Nature (1849) Let us look at this American artist first. How did he ever get to America, to start with? Why isn't he a European still, like his father...

A craving for reality: T.S. Eliot today.(American 20th-century poet)
October 1, 1999... It is not to ring the bell backward Nor is it an incantation To summon the spectre of a Rose We cannot revive old policies Or follow an antique drum --T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding (194-2) For the immediate future, and perhaps for a long...

Women & politics: Madame Roland.(figure in French Revolution)
October 1, 1999... I should need a Madame Roland as my reader. --Stendhal That unpunished vice, reading. --Valery Larbaud If anyone helps to overturn conventional notions about the role of women in politics in eighteenth-century France it is...

A universal region: the fiction of Eudora Welty.
October 1, 1999... "As you have seen," wrote Eudora Welty in the final paragraph of her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings 0984), "I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."...

The New Parnassians.(Poem)
October 1, 1999... for Herb Leibowitz That this is the way it's always been done-- the old devolving to the callow young the gold of their experience, the green gleaning off the seasoned their maturity-- subtracts but little from...

The Civil Wars.(Poem)
October 1, 1999... Of all the insurrections that the day attempts to marshal into something like a commonwealth, which of them--the quick euphorias, the brave rushes giving way so cravenly again to lassitude, and that, in turn, to...

Tempocide.(Poem)
October 1, 1999... I tried to kill time but it would not die. No sooner had I whacked its weeds than they sprang tauntingly back up, revivified by some artesian strength inside the day. Its past I stabbed, then laced with cyanide the...

Untitled.(Poem)
October 1, 1999... Rothko, no. 116, 1969 Flecks of white, like floaters in an inverse eye or stars in the blacker sky of another world, mark an inconsolable landscape that all but consoled a dying man: pale foreground stretching like a...

Stunts & consequences.
October 1, 1999... The culture wars proceed apace--or do they? To talk about fighting a war is in some respects a cheering metaphor; it presupposes at least the possibility of victory. But there are days when one feels that the whole thing is really over, and...

Stupidity at work.
October 1, 1999... Oh dear. The news out of Washington is that Congress is going to investigate the state of our tastes and morals and specifically, according to Mark Preston in Roll Call, "the decline of America's culture" as evidenced by "the recent acts of...

Puritans & destiny.(Review)
October 1, 1999... The thesis of Kevin Phillips's enormously ambitious, in some ways beguiling, but fatally flawed book The Cousins' Wars(1) is that there are strong cultural connections between the English Civil War of 1640-1649, the American War of Independence...

From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Matthew Spender From a High Place: A life of Arshile Gorky. Alfred A. Knopf, 417 pages, $35 Arshile Gorky is just as troublesome a personality today, some fifty-one years after his suicide, as he was to his "loves" his friends, and his...

Americans Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Michael Warner, editor American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr. The Library of America, 939 pages, $40 After Edward VI's coronation in 1547, the radical group of English reformers known as the Puritans took every...

Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. Clarkson N. Potter, 382. pages, $30 Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times, was once known as "Edward Weston's mistress and model during his...

Tina Modotti: A Life.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Pino Cacucci, Tina Modotti: A Life. Translated by Patricia J. Duncan. St. Martin's Press, 224 pages, 24.95 Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times, was once known as "Edward Weston's mistress and model during...

The Nothing That Is.(Review)
October 1, 1999... Robert Kaplan The Nothing That Is. Oxford University Press, 256 pages, $22 Suppose I ask you to step into the next room, count the people in there, and report the answer back to me. What is the smallest number you can report? Obviously the...

The triumph of Nirad Chaudhuri.(Indian author)
October 1, 1999... Nirad Chaudhuri loved aphorisms. He reveled in their combination of wit, moral rigor, and compactness of expression; in what he called their "intolerance of commonplaceness"; in their ability to shock one into instant argument with their author...

Letters.
October 1, 1999... Ezra Pound To the Editors: "It is wrong from beginning to end." These words of the Caterpillar, from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, kept ringing in my head after reading Donald Lyons's essay on Ezra Pound in your June issue. Mr....