New Criterion articles from September 1999

New Criterion archives from September 1999

Notes & Comments: September 1999.
September 1, 1999... The Pew's five-year plan for bureaucratizing the arts Is the United States in urgent need of a national cultural policy? Is it likely to improve the quality of American cultural life if the Federal government establishes something like a...

Literary victimhood.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 1999... On August 22, 1993, it was announced that a novel entitled The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Demidenko had won the annual Vogel Prize for a hitherto unpublished manuscript by an Australian author under the age of thirty-five. The award...

Letters by Dawn Powell to Edmund Wilson.
September 1, 1999... Dawn Powell and Edmund Wilson enjoyed a long and comfortable friendship from the early 1930s until Powell's death in 1965. It remains unclear how and when they met --perhaps at the Brooklyn Heights home of Powell's patron, Margaret De Silver...

Tchaikovsky at the millennium.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 1999... The overture to Swan Lake begins with a high F-sharp held out over a void. The tone is plaintive, isolated--a long sigh. It is on this same high, held note that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky begins his famous "swan theme," though by the time we...

Derek Mahon: exile & stranger.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 1999... Ireland over the past few decades has been the breeding ground for a dozen or so notable poets. One of them, Seamus Heaney, has become world-renowned, and rightly so. But equally worthy of attention is Derek Mahon, born in 1941, tWO years later...

Moses.(Poem)
September 1, 1999... If Moses could not enter, which of us can presume? His offense was striking the rock? But where does it say that to strike a rock is forbidden? And what harm did he do to the rock, that, anyway, gave the precious water? ...

Those who stay.(Poem)
September 1, 1999... Umberto Boccioni Inside the strictures of dark green movement is inclined to turn and rise away from what precedes, a world constructed by those who pray to be something like the bystander, those in the...

Marco Polo.(Poem)
September 1, 1999... a game of hide-and-seek Stunned by the blindfold he is lost in this front yard suddenly fragrant, fraught with dark, the bark-hiding moth deep in alfalfa roiled with gnats, the hesitations that coil in bats,...

Sculpture in the Tuileries.(France)
September 1, 1999... Last winter, a surprising group of sculptures appeared in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, most of them in the grass plots on either side of the "triumphal way" that runs down the center of the vast pleasure garden, with a few set near the...

Summer in the city's museums.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 1999... "Why on earth," a colleague asked, "would you want to write about Gustave Moreau?" The answer, I think, is plain to anyone interested in the byways of twentieth-century art; Moreau (1826-1898) is an obligatory footnote in art history texts...

Valhalla by the Bay.(Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen, San Francisco Opera)(Review)
September 1, 1999... Richard Wagner assumed that his Ring des Nibelungen would become merely a memory after his death, for he could not conceive of anyone else taming his tetralogy's sprawl or tending to its complex mythology. But the composer's wife, Cosima, was...

Schlock Talk.(Talk magazine)(Critical Essay)
September 1, 1999... "You know" says Hillary Clinton in the premiere issue of Tina Brown's Talk magazine, apropos of her husband's fornications with Monica Lewinsky, "in Christian theology there are sins of weakness and sins of malice, and this was a sin of...

Supporting the indispensable.(Review)
September 1, 1999... I sat in on only one meeting of the board of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, the uneasy successor to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had collapsed in 1967 amid the disclosure that the CIA had been funding its...

Anglomania.(Review)
September 1, 1999... Ian Buruma Anglomania. Random House, 304-pages, $25.95 During the course of reading Ian Buruma's Anglomania, I left it lying on the kitchen table where a friend picked it up and looked it over. This friend is a writer in his late thirties,...

True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir.(Review)
September 1, 1999... Ernest Hemingway True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir. Edited with an introduction by Patrick Hemingway, Scribner, 320 pages, $26 In 1953 Hemingway and his fourth wife returned to the scene of his safari with his second wife in 1933....

The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse.(Review)
September 1, 1999... Neil Philip, editor The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Oxford University Press, 371 pages, $30 These days when children, if not blasting one another with shotguns in schoolyards, are glued to the television where every type of adult...

Sub specie aeternitatis: J. F. Powers, 1917-1999.(Critical Essay)
September 1, 1999... I was actually reading one of J. F. Powers's books when I heard the news of his death in June. I imagine there are very few people who can make the same claim: Powers's modest body of work (two novels, three short-story collections) has been...

Letters.
September 1, 1999... Paul Verlaine To the Editors: Regarding John Simon's recent review of my One Hundred and One Poems of Paul Verlaine (June 1999), I will begin by stating the obvious: few are the readers or authors who take him or his arrogant...