New Criterion articles from October 2003

New Criterion archives from October 2003

O Canada?(Notes & Comments: October 2003)(criticism of newspaper column by Paul Lewis)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... "Humor," is not a word that leaps to mind when we think of the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. "Ponderous," perhaps; "instinct with liberal cliches," undoubtedly; but funny? We didn't think it was possible, either. But we were wrong....

Modernism & its institutions.(Lengthened shadows: II)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... I couldn't portray a woman in all her natural loveliness. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty...

The anti-American obsession.(cultural diversity and cultural exceptionalism in France and Europe)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... "Cultural diversity" has replaced "cultural exceptionalism" in the French-inspired, European rhetoric. But in actuality, the two terms cover the same kind of cultural protectionism. The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by...

The poet of the Reich.(German poets Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... German-language poetry from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, produced three superstars: Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan George. Among them, they accomplished almost everything modern German...

Orwell on writing.(George Orwell)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... George Orwell, whose books have sold a phenomenal forty million copies in more than sixty languages, was the most influential prose stylist of the twentieth century. Kingsley Amis observed that "no modern writer has his air of passionately...

Taxi to stonehenge.(Brief Article)(Poem)
October 1, 2003... Taxi to Stonehenge I passed a window full of televisions as gray as British bankers, though imported. And there in England I saw the twin towers of its former colony crumble like toys made of fire and...

Chekhov for children.(Brief Article)(Poem)
October 1, 2003... Chekhov for children She was in mourning for her life, Masha loved to announce, borrowing a line from another play. With a swirl of black skirt, she'd hurl herself into the arms of an overstuffed chair in the...

The work of the sun.(Brief Article)(Poem)
October 1, 2003... The work of the sun Verlaine said the poem slowly rises like the sun, Spreads over the landscape, a bird that hovers, Moves on to find and bless a pair of lovers: The work of the sun is never done. It loves the...

History by other means.(Letter from Cambodia)
October 1, 2003... When a graceful, smiling Cambodian waitress expresses the hope, in the imperative mood, that you enjoy your breakfast, you can't help wondering what she means by it, if anything at all. Can it really matter very much in a country with a recent...

Whither the psychodramas?(Art)
October 1, 2003... On March 17, 1960, the artist Jean Tinguely nearly set New York's Museum of Modern Art on fire. By all accounts it was a fabulous affair. The governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, was in attendance, as was the rest of the city's elite, a...

The wages of spin.(The media)
October 1, 2003... Like the legendary people who have lived beneath a roaring waterfall for so long that they can no longer hear it, media folk are by now so much accustomed to "spin," the language that they themselves have forced politicians to speak, that they...

His secret life.(James Thurber)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... James Thurber has been unlucky in his biographers, who have tended to like him overmuch or not or all. Their task might have been easier had the story had more drama, or had Thurber been born at a different time. He was too young for the...

The best good book.(God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Adam Nicolson God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. HarperCollins, 281 pages, $24.95 Adam Nicolson has had the ill-luck--or the temerity--to write in the wake of two excellent books on his subject, both of which appeared...

A return to BEA.(Elspeth Huxley: A Biography)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... C. S. Nicholls Elspeth Huxley: A Biography. St. Martin's Press, 528 pages, $35 Possibly because the men were all outdoors shooting animals and clearing land, the best-known chroniclers of the romantic, improbable lives led by white...

Two visions of paradise.(El Paralso en la otra esquina)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Mario Vargas Llosa El Paralso en la otra esquina. Ediciones Alfaguara, 485 pages, $19.95 In Peru in the 1950S when he was a student, Matio Vargas Llosa read Flora Tristan's selfrevealing Peregrinations d'une paria (1838), with its vivid...

Literary leftovers.(Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Alan M. Wald Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. University of North Carolina Press, 432 pages, $19.95 Notwithstanding its presentation and publication by a leading academic press, this is a...

Settling the score.(Do I Owe You Something? A Memoir of the Literary Life)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Michael Mewshaw Do I Owe You Something? A Memoir of the Literary Life. Louisiana State University Press, 226 pages, $29.95 If you are a pipe-fitter, you hang out with other pipe-fitters, and this is true of writers, too. Writers may not be...

The victory of Posidippus.(Notebook)(the poetry of Posidippus of Pella)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2003... In 1992 a mummy of suitably mysterious, not to say suspicious, provcnance was brought to the attention of several classicists at the University of Milan. The chest-covering of the mummy, who has since disappeared, was made of papier-mache...