New Criterion articles from October 2006

New Criterion archives from October 2006

Hope at Hamilton College.(Note & Comments: October 2006)
October 1, 2006... Regular readers will recall that over the years we have had some reasonably tart things to say about Hamilton College, the elite liberal arts institution in Clinton, New York. Back in 2002, there was the affair of Annie Sprinkle, the...

The higher destruction.(What Good Are the Arts?)(Book review)
October 1, 2006... The ballroom dance that I should most like to have mastered is the tango. For me this dance conjures a mental picture, no doubt highly romanticized, of torrid nights on the docks of Buenos Aires, where once upon a time tough and intelligent...

What time is it in Russia?
October 1, 2006... Moscow is now the most expensive city in the world, at least according to a recent, widely publicized report. Teenagers walk down Tverskaya Boulevard with stylish new cell phones pressed to their ears; they stop before shop windows that could...

Last of the whigs: Churchill as historian.(Winston Churchill)
October 1, 2006... "Very seldom have great statesmen and warriors also been great writers. One thinks of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, and even Napoleon, whose letters to Josephine during the first Italian campaign certainly have passion and splendor" So began...

Dryden in his time & ours.(John Dryden)(Critical essay)
October 1, 2006... The passionate intellect really is passionate. It is the only point at which ecstasy can enter. I do not know whether we can be saved by the intellect, but I do know that I can be saved by nothing else. --Dorothy L. Sayers The Whig...

Layed out.(New poems)(Poem)
October 1, 2006... Layed out Here lie the Captain's still remains, who chose, When the great storm (but not share prices) rose, Not to sink with the ship but to leap off it. Inscribe his tombstone: For what does it profit...? ...

A good list.(New poems)(Poem)
October 1, 2006... A good list hommage to Lorenz Hart Some nights, can't sleep, I draw up a list, Of everything I've never done wrong. To look at me now, you might insist My list could hardly be long, But I've stolen no...

The auctioneer.(New poems)(Poem)
October 1, 2006... The auctioneer Evening, ladies; evening, gents; salute you by the dozen, embrace you by the score; we've got things here worth fifteen cents and others worth a million more. Get your numbers, don't miss a chance...

Streep tease.(Theater)(Meryl Streep)(Theater review)
October 1, 2006... The mess onstage at the Delacorte Theater this August is almost as imposing as the mess of the Thirty Years' War it depicts, or the mess of the Middle Eastern war to which it refers a little too explicitly. Mother Courage may or may not be the...

Cold pastoral.(Dance)(Critical essay)
October 1, 2006... No choreographer working today has been more blessed than Mark Morris. He was championed right from the start by the most powerful dance critic of the 1980s, Arlene Croce, who then passed the pompoms to her coterie of younger critics--pompoms...

Americans in Italy.(Art)("Italia! Muse to American Artists, 1830-2005," National Academy Museum )
October 1, 2006... As early as the Renaissance, ambitious artists began to think that a sojourn in Italy was essential to their education--if they had the misfortune to be born elsewhere. Albrecht Durer made the journey south from his native Germany twice, around...

Bellini and the East" at the National Gallery, London.(Exhibition notes)
October 1, 2006... "Bellini and the East" at the National Gallery, London. April 12, 2006-June 25, 2006 The thirty-five year period from 1453 to 1489, beginning with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and culminating in a remarkable portrait of Mehmet II...

"Raphael at the Metropolitan: The 'Colonna Altarpiece'" The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.(Exhibition notes)
October 1, 2006... "Raphael at the Metropolitan: The 'Colonna Altarpiece'" The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. August 30, 2006-December 16, 2006 Quick. What other prominent Italian Renaissance artist, besides Raphael, has enjoyed the posthumous...

"The Spiritual Landscapes of Adrienne Farb, 1980-2006" Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts.(Exhibition notes)
October 1, 2006... "The Spiritual Landscapes of Adrienne Farb, 1980-2006" Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts. August 30, 200-December 16, 2006 After a century in which it was first hailed as the art of the future, then as...

Gallery chronicle.
October 1, 2006... For a short time in the 1850S, the center of the New York art world was located in North Conway, New Hampshire. Yes, before there was SoHo, there was NoCo. The rage for all things Conway can be traced to 1839. In that year, Thomas Cole,...

Versions of the truth.(The media)
October 1, 2006... Here, in this little Bay, Full of tumultuous life and great repose, Where, twice a day, The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes, Under high cliff, and far from the huge town, I sit me down. For want of me the world's course will not...

Doubting Thomas.(Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations)(Book review)
October 1, 2006... There is a passage, laid down by Thomas Paine in the first installment of his 1776 political tract The American Crisis, that--in its precision, its intensity, its moral clarity--is a piece of unmitigated, coruscating beauty: Tyranny,...

Snark watch.(The Annotated Hunting of the Snark)(Book review)
October 1, 2006... Lewis Carroll The Annotated Hunting of the Snark, edited by Martin Gardner. W. W. Norton, 192 pages, $27.95 Nonsense may well be the most misunderstood of literary genres. Many have mistaken it for mere loony and meandering piffle--fun, but...

Into the whirlwind.(From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States)(Book review)
October 1, 2006... Paul Hollander, editor From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States. ISI Books, 750 pages, $35 Paul Hollander once asked a class of three hundred students at the...

Mr. Empath.(Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher)(Mr. Sampath: the Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma)(Book review)
October 1, 2006... R. K. Narayan Swami & Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher. Everyman's Library, 668 pages, $25 R. K. Narayan Mr. Sampath--The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma. Everyman's...

A trackless waste.(The Road)(Book review)
October 1, 2006... Cormac McCarthy The Road. Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pages, $24 When our civilization ends, be it with a bang or a whimper, what will follow? The prospect of a post-apocalyptic wasteland ought to be fertile ground for any writer, but very few...

Medic alert.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 1, 2006... To the Editors: I don't usually respond to reviews, but there were so many inaccuracies and misrepresentations of my book in Theodore Dalrymple's piece ("Forced smiles" September 2006) that I feel compelled to do so. He says that I am...

Jeff Reese.
October 1, 2006... To substitute the society of ideas for that of things is simply to live in the mind; it is to survey the world of existences in its truth and beauty rather than in its personal perspectives, or with practical urgency. It is the sole path to...