New Criterion articles from October 2004

New Criterion archives from October 2004

No Lapham matter.(Notes & comments: October 2004)(Lewis H. Lapham's essay )
October 1, 2004... As we write, the great entertainment afforded by Dan Rather, the celebrity news reader, is still unfolding. How solemn Mr. Rather looked a few weeks ago as he unveiled, on 60 Minutes II, those incriminating memoranda. Mr. Rather has basically...

Gulliver's travails: the U.S. in the post-Cold-War world.
October 1, 2004... Towards the close of the twentieth century a metaphor entered circulation that compared the United States to Lemuel Gulliver at the start of his visit to Lilliput. Gulliver in Swift's satire was, you recall, an English sea doctor who, having...

Assoluta.(a review of American ballet dancing)
October 1, 2004... Divas are a dime a dozen. Pop singers are divas, actresses are divas, models, anchor ladies, female CEOS, even women who snap at cabbies are divas. The term "diva" has its most revered usage at the opera, where it is enshrined in a spectral...

The real Che.
October 1, 2004... In the Prologue to his recent history of Cuba, Richard Gott, a British journalist of pronounced left-wing sympathies, remembers Ernesto Guevara's arrival at a reception at the Soviet Embassy in Havana in 1963, at which he too was present:...

In search of Don Quixote.
October 1, 2004... 0 celebrated Author! O fortunate Don Quixote! 0 famous Dulcinea! O comical Sancho Panza! Together and separately may you live an infinite number of years, bringing pleasure and widespread diversion to the living.--Cervantes, Don Quixote, II, 40...

Entasis.(New poems)(Poem)
October 1, 2004... Entasis The slightest outward curve is entasis, employed in ancient buildings by the Greeks for reasons lost to us. The emphasis was optical, explained Vitruvius, but this does not account for the technique: ...

The North Wind's daughter.(New poems)(Poem)
October 1, 2004... The North Wind's daughter They should pity her, banished from her shelter. She has never seen a thing destroyed. Risen now, scrambling in the fierce air dealt her, She faints into those years of noise outside. Where...

On my refusal to attend a poet's protest against the war.(New poems)(Poem)
October 1, 2004... On my refusal to attend a poet's protest against the war Because I work with words, and you do too, you ask me to come stand with you today, thinking the words that bind us--and they do--have brought us close enough for...

The self-made Scot.(Reconsiderations)
October 1, 2004... John Buchan opens the door to the world one's being seeks--a world of thickets refreshed by rain showers, of streams tinkling over boulders smoothed by uncountable winter floods, of the sharp cry of an unseen bird in a bush, of peat smoke...

Gallery chronicle.(Art)
October 1, 2004... In the art world, "democracy" means wearing a t-shirt that says "The only Bush I trust is my own" It means pinning a button to your shirt that reads "I only sleep with Democrats" or "Dykes for Bush" It also means dancing around to a punk band...

Rhetorical recklessness.(a review of the veteran dishonour remarks in presidential elections)(Column)
October 1, 2004... When I was American editor of the Times Literary Supplement during the Clinton era, the paper published an article by the philosopher Thomas Nagel on the Monica Lewinsky affair that was much cited by Clinton's apologists at the time. It was a...

The insider's insider.(Books)(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Joseph Duveen was born over his parents' shop in the back streets of Hull in October 1869. He ended his days in London in 1939 as a member of the House of Lords, an ever-dexterous pillar of the art trade and a key figure in the evolution of the...

Theory of everything.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Roger Penrose The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide" to the Laws of the Universe. Jonathan Cape, 1094 pages, 30 [pounds sterling] The mathematical physicist and cosmologist Roger Penrose, now professor emeritus at Oxford University, is best...

The usual suspects.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... S. J. Hamrick Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess. Yale University Press, 320 pages, $29.95 Rufina Philby The Private Life of Kim Philby. St. Ermin's Press, 449 pages, $14.95 The Soviet Union is no...

Rock rage.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Nicola Shulman A Rage for Rock Gardening: The story of Reginald Farrer. Beacon Press, 209 pages, $23 Reviewers of books do not normally begin by praising the publisher, but in this case David R. Godine's commitment to bringing out a line...

The world's first story.(Poem)
October 1, 2004... Derrek Hines, translator Gilgamesh. Anchor Books, 66 pages, $9.95 Stephen Mitchell, translator Gilgamesh: A New English Version. The Free Press, 290 pages, $24.00 About a century and a half ago, the name "Gilgamesh" meant nothing to...

John Saumarez Smith, editor: the Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill.(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... John Saumarez Smith, editor The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street: Letters between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, 1952-73. Frances Lincoln, 191 pages, 12.99 [pounds sterling] "When a man is tired of London," Dr. Johnson observed, "he is tired...

Art Spiegelman: In the Shadow of No Towers.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2004... Art Spiegelman In the Shadow of No Towers. Pantheon Books, 42 pages, $19.95 Art Spiegelman is conversant in large-scale tragedy. His comic book Maus, which earned him a Pulitzer in 1992, painstakingly and painfully recounts his father's...

The "memory" of Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004.(Notebook)
October 1, 2004... I think that I am here, on this earth, To present a report on it, but to whom I don't know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place Has meaning because it changes into memory. --Czeslaw Milosz, "Consciousness" Among the...