New Criterion articles from October 2005

New Criterion archives from October 2005

Mao & the Maoists.(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... In the summer of 1936, the American journalist Edgar Snow left Peking for China's northwest to visit the new territory taken over by the Chinese Communist Party. There he conducted a number of lengthy interviews with the party leader Mao...

Roth reconsidered.(Philip Roth)(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2005... To be published by the Library of America officially establishes an author as a classic: it is an honor almost akin to winning the Nobel Prize. Of eighty-seven authors currently published in the Library of America series, all but one is dead....

From Moses to Musa.(influence of Bible in literature)
October 1, 2005... In a brutal antithesis, worthy of some ancient Gnostic, Franz Kafka wrote, "The Bible, sanctum; the world, sputum." In this formulation, the world is something spewed out, a vile off-scouring--quite literally, a "shit-hole" (Scheisstum)--a...

Out of the past.(Bolshoi Ballet )
October 1, 2005... The Bolshoi Ballet used to come through this country like a bulldozer pushing huge passions and vast landscapes into mountainous, murderous panoramas the dancers had to negotiate onstage. "Bolshoi" means "big" the previews always said. Bolshoi...

"The death of Winckelmann".(Poem)
October 1, 2005... "The death of Winckelmann" Trieste 1768 I. The Abbe Winckelmann was at his desk in the hotel, when his new friend Francesco returned, ostensibly in search of his dropped handkerchief. He asked to see, once...

Atget in Philadelphia.(phtography exhibition)
October 1, 2005... Some exhibitions confirm your view of an artist. Others enlarge or alter what you thought you knew. And still others make you question what once seemed to be perfectly sound opinions. "Looking at Atget" the modest but notably thoughtful...

Exhibition note.(Art)
October 1, 2005... "The Art of Richard Tuttle" San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. July 2-October 16, 2005 Back in the 1970s, Richard Tuttle's installations were apt to shock. Not many people were used to considering cloth octagons laid on the gallery floor,...

Gallery chronicle.(165 Charles Street by Richard Meier, New York)
October 1, 2005... It was at 10:46 on Friday, September 16, 2005 that New York bid adieu to conceptual art. Your intrepid gallery chronicler was there for this historic art event. The catering was quite good, I am happy to report. The location was Pier 4-6,...

All McKinneys now.(The media)
October 1, 2005... At a dinner party early this past summer, some friends and I got to talking about why it was that the media, and especially the tabloid newspapers and the cable television news channels, were so obsessively interested in some stories but not in...

Thalatta! Thalatta!(The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand)("The Sea! The Sea!": The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination)(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... In spring 401 B.C., amid the detritus of the recently ended twenty-seven-year-long war between Athens and Sparta, about 13,000 Greek mercenary soldiers marched eastward in the pay of the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger. The Greeks weren't...

Rediscovering Matisse.(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... Hilary Spurling Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954. Knopf, 544 pages, $40 Even those of us who have loved Matisse's work since we began to look at paintings as a serious interest could not have...

Hotel Infinity.(The Pea and the Sun: A Mathematical Paradox)(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... Leonard M. Wapner The Pea and the Sun: A Mathematical Paradox. A. K. Peters, 218 pages, $34. There is a big difference between what mathematicians call a fallacy and what they call a paradox. A fallacy is a flawed proof, such as the...

Man of letters.(Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature)(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... Lewis M. Dabney Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 656 pages, $35 Edmund Wilson's review of T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land" appeared in The Dial one month after the poem was published. His first reading of the poem...

Missed opportunities.(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... Jonathan Kozol The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Crown, 388 pages, $25 Early in this survey of inequities in the public school system, Jonathan Kozol reveals why he went into the field of education....

Saens and sensibilite.(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... Jean-Michel Nectoux, editor The Correspondence of Camille Saint-Saens & Gabriel Faure: Sixty Years of Friendship, translated by J. Barrie Jones. Ashgate, 153 pages, $94.95 Sixty years of friendship: can any heading in English more quickly...

The roots of spirit in matter.(Brief Article)(Excerpt)
October 1, 2005... If man were a static or intelligible being, such as angels are thought to be, his life would have a single guiding interest, under which all other interests would be subsumed. His acts would explain themselves without looking beyond his given...