New Criterion articles from September 2003

New Criterion archives from September 2003

Notes & comments: September 2003.
September 1, 2003... Lengthened shadows "An institution," Emerson proclaimed in "Self-Reliance," "is the lengthened shadow of one man." Like much that Emerson wrote, "Self-Reliance" is longer on attitude than argument. Its mode is hortatory. But Emerson's mot...

The burdens of empire.(Lengthened shadows: I)
September 1, 2003... On September 2, 1898 at Omdurman on the banks of the Nile just south of Khartoum, an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of General Herbert Horatio Kitchener faced a Sudanese army led by the Khalifa, the local leader of the fundamentalist...

"Realism coloured by poetry": rereading John Buchan.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her. --Dr. Johnson, quoted by John Buchan The life of reason is our heritage and exists only through tradition. Now the misfortune of...

Is Max Beckmann likeable?
September 1, 2003... Fresh from a press preview of the Max Beckmann retrospective at MOMA, Queens, (1) I was extolling the virtues of the show to a friend I am very fond of, someone whose fierce intelligence and astonishingly well-furnished mind always delight me....

The "born Schulmeister".
September 1, 2003... In September 1923, two studious young German Jews traveled from Frankfurt and Berlin to Trieste where they took ship for Jerusalem. They were emigrating and leaving their homeland forever. Their names were Shlomo Dov Goitein, known to his...

In Lincoln.(A new poem)
September 1, 2003... In Lincoln Passing the south side, His years turning heavier, He did not need the cathedral To warn him of the Last Judgment. Nor was his room In the hospitable college Where he would speak the next day ...

That is to say: nowhere.(Art)
September 1, 2003... After S. Mallarme after Verlaine, after G. Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.--William Butler Yeats "Despite the late hour, I have...

Scandalous scandal-culture.(The media)
September 1, 2003... "Suffering News Burnout? The Rest of America Is, Too." Or so The New York Times headed a story by Jim Rutenberg last month which purported to show that Americans were weary of serious news stories because they were tuning out the network news...

S.O.B. story.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... The photographers were waiting like assassin. outside the door on the cold slate street. John O'Hara, the millionaire hermit novelist, sort of staggered down the churchsteps in front of me; his legs buckled as he reached the final step. He...

His father's son.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Adam Bellow In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History. Doubleday, 576 pages, $30 Nepotism has a bad name. No modern politician who openly avowed his nepotistic inclinations would stand much of a chance of election. "I intend to give as many...

Too many universes.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Martin Gardner Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? W. W. Norton, 287 pages, $25.95 "When I was a freshman at the University of Chicago in 1932," Martin Gardner writes in Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?, "I intended to become...

No laughing matter.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... F. H. Buckley The Morality of Laughter. University of Michigan Press, 240 pages, $29.95 Frank Buckley is a professor of law at George Mason University. He has a theory about how laughter works. So let's have a joke to try it out. Any joke...

Spreading the big lie.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Diane Ravitch The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn. Knopf, 255 pages, $24 At the 2001 convention of the Modern Language Association in New Orleans, a resolution was submitted to the Delegate Assembly...

Stanford education.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Paul J. Rodmell Charles Villiers Stanford. Ashgate Publishing, +94 pages, $99.95 Posterity has not so much neglected Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) as derived malicious satisfaction from ostentatiously yawning in his face. Late...

Priez pour lui.(Notebook)(Marie Trintignant)
September 1, 2003... Seldom does life imitate art, or at least pretensions to art, with such fidelity as in the death of the French actress Marie Trintignant. She died recently of the head injury that she suffered in a Vilnius hotel room, after a quarrel with her...