New Criterion articles from September 2000

New Criterion archives from September 2000

Notes & Comments: September 2000.
September 1, 2000... We Now Know Some myths die hard. One of the most recalcitrant in recent times has been the myth of McCarthyism--the myth that America in the late 1940s and early 1950s was in the grip of a fearsome, paranoid "witch-hunt" against supposed...

The difficulty with Hegel.(Review)
September 1, 2000... Philosophy need not trouble itself about ordinary ideas. --G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe. --George Santayana, on Hegel ...

Clement Greenberg.
September 1, 2000... Most of us can remember, or imagine, the occasions when one took a hasty or otherwise unsatisfactory essay to a demanding tutor. I did not have too much trouble of this sort at Balliol, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where I was a...

Looking backward at Edward Bellamy's utopia.
September 1, 2000... No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave. --Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward...

The river grows muddied: the evolution of English prose.(Review)
September 1, 2000... Modern English prose is usually dated from the Restoration of the Smarts in 1660. However, so large a generalization requires qualification. Before the seventeenth century had well begun, Bacon for one was writing in a plain (even if highly...

Registering bliss.(Poem)
September 1, 2000... As dessert follows the carved roast, the appliances of love are ready to follow love, inevitable as laundry. Every good play surely transcends the backstage machinery, the paint and porcelain mocked up as stone, but...

December in Florida.(Poem)
September 1, 2000

The splendid Chardin.
September 1, 2000... Every time I walked through the splendid Chardin exhibition at the Metropolitan(1) this summer, I was struck by how impossible it was to imagine how this eighteenth-century master's paintings looked to his contemporaries. Not that there's a...

Two princes & a mock Tudor.
September 1, 2000... Neither American Ballet Theatre nor the New York City Ballet did anything millennial for their Spring 2000 seasons at Lincoln Center, and that's a blessing, because neither American Ballet Theatre nor the New York City Ballet is in a position...

The other Rota.
September 1, 2000... For some, he merely wrote the score of The Godfather. For the slightly more knowledgeable, he composed all the best Fellini scores. For the still better informed, he also provided many other directors with scores, and was one of our finest film...

Starry skies above.
September 1, 2000... Summer offers myriad pleasures, but perhaps none as diverting as the music festival. The ubiquity and variety of these events only further their appeal, and the best-known of them--Bayreuth, Salzburg, and Glyndebourne in Europe, and Marlboro,...

The politics of posturing.
September 1, 2000... One of the most piquant moments in a summer dominated by what is being called, without apparent irony, "reality TV," came when it was announced that on the Wednesday night of the Republican convention, the exiguous network coverage of the event...

Posthumous impresario.
September 1, 2000... "Man has created death," Yeats wrote, and his last collection of poems with its stark title represents the poet's increasingly baffled attempt not only to create his own death but also to stage-manage his memorial from beyond the tomb. The...

My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative.(Review)
September 1, 2000... Patriotism of the heart Norman Podhoretz My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative. Free Press, 248 pages, $25 Why, I wonder, does Norman Podhoretz subtitle the latest installment of his impresssive...

Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius.(Review)
September 1, 2000... A stereopticon Kurt Johnson & Steve Coates, Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius. Zoland Books, 372 pages, $27 When Alfred Russel Wallace, who postulated the theory of natural selection neck and neck with...

Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings.(Review)
September 1, 2000... A stereopticon Brian Boyd & Robert Michael Pyle, editors Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings. Beacon Press, 782 pages, $45 When Alfred Russel Wallace, who postulated the theory of natural selection neck and...

Crudity beyond belief.
September 1, 2000... It is possible that there are uglier towns in the world than Walsall, but if so I do not know them: and I consider myself better than averagely traveled. But while Walsall undoubtedly exists, it is difficult to know where precisely it begins...

Letters.
September 1, 2000... Kuhn's irrationalism To the Editors: I would like to respond to a point raised by James Franklin in his insightful critique of my book, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times in your June issue. I do not deny his central...