New Criterion articles from September 2002

New Criterion archives from September 2002

Notes & comments: September 2002.
September 1, 2002... Deja-vu I How many readers remember Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam? First published in 1972, the book was a sensation. It scooped up numerous awards, including a Pulitzer and the National...

The power of James Burnham.
September 1, 2002... The common-place critic... believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong. --William Hazlitt, "On Common-Place Critics" Americans have not yet learned the tragic lesson that the most powerful cannot be...

How good is the Kirov?
September 1, 2002... The Kirov Ballet is the company that the choreographer George Balanchine left behind when he sailed from Russia in 1924. It is the company from which Rudolf Nureyev defected in 1961, followed by Natalia Makarova in 1970, and Mikhail Baryshnikov...

The myth of "premature antifascism".(Americans fighting in the Spanish Civil War)
September 1, 2002... In 1984, George Orwell gave the Ministry of Truth the task of rewriting history. Under the slogan "who controls the past controls the future," an army of scribes modified documents, changed textbooks, and rewrote old newspapers to ensure that...

American sublime.(Hudson River school of landscape painting)
September 1, 2002... Is there a notion less American than "art for art's sake"? When we invoke the doctrine, we usually mean the exact opposite. In nine cases out often, when an American speaks of the essential role of art he means that it can be made to do...

Thomas Hardy & the warriors.
September 1, 2002... The Great War in Europe devastated towns and villages, obliterated irreplaceable architecture, and destroyed an entire generation of young men. The survivors were conscious of living in a shattered civilization, and felt a collective lack of...

The patient lookers. (New poems).(Poem)
September 1, 2002... The patient lookers Praise to the patient lookers: they Who find the repetitious play Of sunlight on a bale of hay Enough of being to amaze, To fix the self-forgetting gaze That makes of pure attention praise:...

Indecision. (New poems).(Poem)
September 1, 2002... Indecision What more on a summer afternoon Could I require? Light without heat, my work-week done, A free desire, And the world from my balcony composed Like a Renaissance Picture, the elements disposed ...

42 up. (New poems).(Poem)
September 1, 2002... 42 up The girl who knew at twenty-one She was too strong and pure for marriage Is pregnant, and hoping for a son To join the girl in the baby-carriage; The seven-year-old who in the drab East End dreamed of the...

Waking. (New poems).(Poem)
September 1, 2002... Waking Waking, he finds his arm Still sore from having pressed Her unresisting form Tightly below the breast. (Something said in a dream Unconscious made him fear She would not stay the same For long,...

Summer at the Met. (Art).(Metropolitan Museum if Art, New York, New York)
September 1, 2002... Anyone who thought that the Metropolitan Museum's tandem summer offerings, "Gauguin In New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic" and "The Age of Impressionism: European Painting from the Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen," (1) would be...

The aristocracy of feelings. (The media).
September 1, 2002... At what point in the history of the American republic, I wonder, did it become incumbent on its leaders to talk about their feelings in public--presumably as a way of signifying authenticity? In The New York Times last month we read that, in...

Who's he?(book on snobbery)
September 1, 2002... Joseph Epstein's new book about snobbery (1) ends up being a book about Joseph Epstein, which is perfectly okay--provided one is Joseph Epstein. Another's book about snobbery, displaying the author's biography, his likes and dislikes,...

The sweetness of things.(memoir)
September 1, 2002... Victor Brombert Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth. W. W. Norton, 320 pages, $25.95 How faraway and long ago Europe's great past now seems. There were injustices and inequalities, to be sure, but also diversity, character,...

The Baroness Munchausen of sex.(autobiography of a prostitute)
September 1, 2002... Catherine Millet The Sexual Life Of Catherine M. Translated by Adriana Hunter. Grove Books, 224 pages, $23 On street corners a couple of hundred yards from where I write this, prostitutes stand in the hope, and no doubt the expectation, of...

Intellectual decadence.
September 1, 2002... Paul Hollander Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist. Transaction, 395 pages, $39.95 Twenty years ago, I made a brief study of the Acknowledgments sections of cook books. Even the great and otherwise restrained Elizabeth David could...

Two 'berds in the hand.(books by Hugh Massingberd)
September 1, 2002... Hugh Massingberd, editor The Very Best of The Daily Telegraph Books of Obituaries. Pan Books, 407 pages, 9.99 [pounds sterling] Hugh Massingberd Daydream Believer. Macmillan, 310 pages, 16.99 [pounds sterling] "Are you familiar with...