New Criterion articles from October 2002

New Criterion archives from October 2002

Notes & comments: October 2002.(academic environment)
October 1, 2002... Campus "diversity" What quality above all others do college administrations and teachers strive to nurture on campus these days? Intellectual rigor? Not likely. That presupposes maintaining high standards, and, as we have been repeatedly...

The ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz.(book on philosophy)(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... From its origins in classical thought and Christianity, Western culture has always had a strong tendency towards universalism. This principle has long been expressed in the idea of the unity of human kind and the belief that all human beings...

Undressing the Victorians.
October 1, 2002... Manners are of more importance than law.... The law touches us but here and there and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform and insensible...

Albert Speer: the good Nazi?
October 1, 2002... Albert Speer was Adolf Hitler's intimate and trusted friend. Throughout the Thirties, the two met on an almost daily basis in Berlin or Munich. When relaxing in the Berchtesgaden mountains, they went by themselves on afternoon walks, rejoicing...

Victor Hugo: the ghost in the pantheon.
October 1, 2002... Victor Hugo was born two hundred years ago this year and his countrymen have been trying ever since to contain him. They resorted first to the tried-and-true: ostracism and outrage at his brazen Romanticism followed by acclaim and fervid...

Dubai, Havana & choosing between evils.
October 1, 2002... Whenever I enter someone's house, I feel myself irresistibly (perhaps unresistingly would be a more honest way of putting it) drawn to his bookshelves. All flesh is grass, of course, but since Gutenberg at least, all mind is print. And absences...

Like water. (New poems).(Poem)
October 1, 2002... Like water It hadn't been three months since he had died when we sat together in your living room, a green world going on outside, the June wind blowing hot and hard, bending each leaf and branch, while inside all was...

Back again. (New poems).(Poem)
October 1, 2002... Back again I didn't belong there anymore--the city made that clear. The stones excluded me. Even the rain laid no welcoming hand on my shoulder. The hotel in Dominick Street alone had any clear notion ...

Concordances. (New poems).(Poem)
October 1, 2002... Concordances You see a lightning bug and think Shooting star! Trout rise to cadmium-yellow sprawls of bug-body and gossamer wing hatching at NBA playoff time as they do every year, and slurp them...

As long I have these saddlebags. (New poems).(Poem)
October 1, 2002... As long as I have these saddlebags As long as I have these saddlebags I think I will be all right. The sun in their weave, their wool stained like a stained glass window, their scorpion shapes and stylized camels ...

"Don't draw the bug!" (Art).(exhibition of installations based on the work of Franz Kafka)
October 1, 2002... Kafka is a great surprise, but one we have gotten used to. The surprise is that an obscure writer from Central Europe who published little during his lifetime and never finished his most ambitious works, the three novels; a difficult...

Gallery chronicle. (Art).(paintings at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries)
October 1, 2002... Apostate from abstraction; doubter of heroic "American-type" painting in the fifties and sixties; anti-progressivist champion of underdog artists from Andre Derain and Balthus to Jean Helion and Alberto Giacometti: the American painter Leland...

Concert notes. (Music).
October 1, 2002... The 2002 Season at the Tanglewood Music Center, Lenox, Massachusetts Tanglewood, in western Massachusetts, has long been known as the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it has been the model for a number of other summer...

Debating Iraq. (The media).
October 1, 2002... If the United States goes to war with Iraq it may be the most debated and talked-about war in history. And if there is no war, it will certainly be the most debated and talked-about non-war in history. In the old days, of course, there were...

The chastened liberal. (Books).(book about 20th-century history)
October 1, 2002... The short twentieth century, beginning with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in July 1914 and culminating in the collapse of communist totalitarianism in the annus mirabilis 1989, is now behind us even if...

The gypsy balladeer.(collection of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca)
October 1, 2002... Federico Garcia Lorca Collected Poems, Edited by Christopher Maurer. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 960 pages, $50 The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was once asked which were the best and worst language vehicles for his poetry in translation. After...

Big Ben.(book on Benjamin Franklin)
October 1, 2002... Edmund Sears Morgan Benjamin Franklin. Yale University Press, 368 pages, $24.95 There is only one member of the Founding Generation who, even if he had never turned his hand to statecraft, would be known to posterity as more than a...

A brighter, clearer light.(book on popular German book reviewer)
October 1, 2002... Marcel Reich-Ranicki, The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, translated by Barbara Bray. Princeton University Press, 404 pages, $35 There is no American counterpart to Germany's critical impresario, Marcel Reich-Ranicki....

Profound perplexity.(The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European and American Writings, 1750-1940)(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... Isabelle Frank, editor The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European & American Writings, 1750-1940. Yale University Press, 424 pages, $22.50 (paper) "What are the decorative arts?" That is the first sentence of Isabelle Frank's...

The apotheosis of Stephen Jay Gould. (Notebook).
October 1, 2002... When, in May of 2002, Stephen Jay Gould died at age sixty, a torrent of eulogy issued from the presses. Gould was a paleontologist and a writer of popular science. Some readers who were neither consumers of popular science nor adepts of left...