New Criterion articles from September 2001

New Criterion archives from September 2001

Notes & Comments: September 2001.
September 1, 2001... "The New Criterion" at twenty With this issue, The New Criterion begins its twentieth year of publication as a monthly review of culture and the arts. This is a significant accomplishment for any highbrow monthly; for one that has been as...

The new Epicureans.
September 1, 2001... In a famous passage at the beginning of Book II of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius talks of the pleasure of watching other people endure dangerous situations. As Dryden rendered the passage: `Tis pleasant, safely to behold from shore The...

What did Kierkegaard want?(philosopher Soren Kierkegaard)
September 1, 2001... Unfortunately, my life is far too subjunctive; would to God I had some indicative power. --Journals, 1837 I sit and listen to the sounds in my inner being, the happy intimations of music, the deep, earnestness of the organ. ...

The exemplar: Ignazio Silone.(author)
September 1, 2001... Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy. --Heinrich Heine, June 20, 1842 Ignazio Silone liked to...

The accomplishment of Edith Wharton.(author)
September 1, 2001... Edith Wharton counted her friendship with Henry James as the crown jewel of her career, but it just might have been a curse. During her lifetime she was labeled, inaccurately, as a disciple of James, an apprentice who inevitably fell short of...

The fabrication of Aboriginal history.
September 1, 2001... As a preview to the Sydney Olympic Games last September, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about the great issue it said was dividing the Australian nation, the treatment of its Aboriginal people. The two journalists who wrote the...

Louis Sullivan after functionalism.(architect)
September 1, 2001... [W]hat is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty.... It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting...

The historiographical earthquake.(the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939)
September 1, 2001... The Spanish Civil War: the continuing controversy: I Only recently, with the virtual passing of an entire generation, has the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) ceased to be a subject of passionate historical and ideological debate. Even so, the...

Rewriting George Orwell.(political critic)
September 1, 2001... The Spanish Civil War: the continuing controversy: II Recent scholarly and literary discussion of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939--mainly occasioned by the publication of Spain Betrayed--has inadvertently shed light on a previously...

The violence of Allen Tate.(writer)
September 1, 2001... Allen Tate displayed all the romantic qualities of a great artist: intellectual precocity, heavy drinking, prodigious libido, volatility in friendship, difficult views, and enough self-interest to bind the lot together. What he lacked was great...

Recollections of Japan.(Poem)
September 1, 2001... 1. The garden in the hills shadowy still at dawn shows no trace of footprints. And yet, spring has arrived: the snow is melting patchily. 2. Wild blossoms on the river banks sway yellow in the rising...

The dream.(Poem)
September 1, 2001... I found myself in James's Great Good Place or Cambridge, perhaps, a hundred years ago: long days of Spring, tall elms, unhurried youths, huge halls of soft stone aging in the sun. I tried to understand how I had come here....

Pasiphae.(Poem)
September 1, 2001... When fair Pasiphae craved the bull she took heroic measures-- engaged the famed artificer to guarantee her pleasures. He built a comely cow of wood covered in soft cow-hide, politely showed the queen...

"Beyond the easel": the rise of the decorateur.
September 1, 2001... For English-speakers, the word "decoration" has a pejorative flavor when it's used in relation to art, so much so that it's often qualified with a dismissive "mere." Yet the French term decoration has no such negative connotation; it simply...

Chandraology.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2001... The philosophical question confronting us today, class, is this: Is the stupidity of the media compulsory? Now, before you answer a resounding and optimistic "No!" let us consider, like good philosophers, all the reasons why the answer might be...

Edna St. Vincent Millay's doubly burning candles.
September 1, 2001... For a long while, the case of Edna St. Vincent Millay has seemed a doleful one. In 1911 it was her fate to ignite a sensation with her first collection, Renascence; in 1923, to be the first woman poet to win a Pulitzer Prize; throughout the...

Making Patriots.(Review)
September 1, 2001... Walter Berns Making Patriots. The University of Chicago Press, 150 pages, $20 This (too) short book grew out of an essay written by the distinguished political philosopher Walter Berns for The Public Interest. What it does is to probe into...

Little Saint.(Review)
September 1, 2001... Hannah Green Little Saint. Random House, 352 pages, $24.95 Although she had been writing and publishing for more than forty years, Hannah Green left behind her an extremely small body of work when she died in 1996 shortly before her...

In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations.(Review)
September 1, 2001... Elie Kedourie In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations, 1914-1939. Frank Cass, 350 pages, $28.50 paper This book was originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1976. It was...

The poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition.(Review)
September 1, 2001... Michael Rudick, editor The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition. The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 239 pages, $25 This radically revisionist edition, as Michael Rudick himself admits, would...

Pietro Mascagni: A Bio-Bibliography.(Review)
September 1, 2001... Roger Flury Pietro Mascagni: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Publishing Group, 440 pages, $90 To be a one-hit wonder is painful enough; to have posterity forever yoke one's hit with the hit of another one-hit wonder suggests a torment...

Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller.(Review)
September 1, 2001... Jackie Wullschlager Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. Alfred A. Knopf, 496 pages, $30 More than a hundred years after his death, Hans Christian Andersen can still lay claim to being a world-famous writer, but the...

The Politics of Sex and Other Essays: On Conservatism, Culture, and Imagination.(Review)
September 1, 2001... Robert Grant The Politics of Sex and Other Essays: On Conservatism, Culture, and Imagination. Palgrave, 240 pages, $55 Cultural conservatives are always at a rhetorical disadvantage to utopians and ideologues: they do not have a...

Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood.(Review)
September 1, 2001... Nancy Schoenberger Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood. Doubleday, 377 pages, $27.50 Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931-96) was a descendant of the playwright Sheridan; great-granddaughter of the Viceroy of India who annexed...