New Criterion articles from September 2004

New Criterion archives from September 2004

"Exceptionally tasteful"?(Notes & Comments: September 2004)(review of "Disparities & Deformations" in Santa Fe, New Mexico)
September 1, 2004... When we look around the contemporary art world, especially at those precincts that are hailed as "cutting-edge" by the Art Establishment, we are often reminded of two passages from Robert Musil's great novel The Man Without Qualities, set in...

Meanwhile, in the ivory tower.(Notes & Comments: September 2004; gambling as curriculum)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... One of the things middle-class parents worry most about is saving enough money to pay for Junior's education. We won't even mention how much it costs to go to private college because by the time you read this the figure will be out of date. It...

Ave et vale.(Notes & Comments: September 2004)(New Criterion, appointments)
September 1, 2004... Attentive readers will note some staff changes at The New Criterion. We would like to bid farewell and thanks to Robert Richman, who stepped down as Poetry Editor this summer, and welcome David Yezzi and Stefan Beck. David will be familiar to...

Donald Justice, 1925-2004.(Notes & Comments: September 2004)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
September 1, 2004... It is with great sadness that we report the passing of the poet Donald Justice, who died at seventy-eight on August 6 after a long illness. Justice was a quiet yet vibrant presence in the world of poetry, much respected for the excellence of...

Does shame have a future?(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... No society can do without intolerance, indignation, and disgust. --Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals [A] liberal society has particular reasons to inhibit shame and protect its citizens from shaming. --Martha C. Nussbaum,...

The unauthorized Anthony Powell.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... The question of "authorized" versus "unauthorized" biographies has always been a troubled one. Authorized lives, on the one hand, tend to be too polite, too considerate of the feelings of the subject and his family--necessarily so since these...

Petrarch: a splendid excess.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... This year marks the seventh centenary of Petrarch's birth, on July 20, 1304, in the town of Arezzo. The son of an exile--his father Petracco was of Dante's generation and exiled from Florence in the same wave--Petrarch was to spend his life in...

Mr. Hyde & the epidemiology of evil.
September 1, 2004... No one feels called upon to explain, or explain away, his good deeds or qualities, which are taken to arise from his essential being as naturally and irresistibly as a river from its source, but most people feel the necessity when it comes to...

Cedar Key after storm.(Poem)
September 1, 2004... Cedar Key after storm for Donald Justice, 1925-2004 The fish shacks turned an oystery glow, the drowned light more intense. Along the blank sky low clouds learned from experience. A bridge leapt over the...

Lightning bugs.(Poem)
September 1, 2004... Lightning bugs We used to keep our lightning bugs in jars with holes punched through the lids so they'd have air. They'd creep along the sides, their yellow stars dimming to green in protest of our care. To woo dark...

Etc.(Poem)
September 1, 2004... Etc. for L. E. M. We give no compensation, The earth is ours today, And if we lose on arable, Then bungalows will pay. All concrete sheds... etc. --John Betjeman, "Harvest Hymn" ...

The phobia of phobias.(London journal)
September 1, 2004... London recently underwent a visit from Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi. A celebrated Muslim cleric, born in Egypt but based in Qatar, he had accepted an invitation to address a conference organized by the Muslim Association of Britain. Dr....

"Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!".(Art)(art exhibition review)
September 1, 2004... Some time ago, I was introduced to a very interesting and engaging man, a sort of modern-day Lorenzo de' Medici, who, like his distinguished Florentine predecessor, is an accomplished (and published) poet, a major supporter of poetry, a force...

Seurat's "Sunday" painting.(Art)(Georges Seurat)(A Sunday on the Grande Jatte)
September 1, 2004... The career of the nineteenth-century French painter Georges Seurat was lamentably short; he died in 1891 at the age of thirty-one, five years after completing his most celebrated achievement--A Sunday on the Grande Jatte (1884-1886). Yet he...

Smug self-righteousness.(the media's opinion of presidential candidates)(Column)
September 1, 2004... In this election year, to be a voter watching the conversation between the media and the politicians--or, now that there are six times as many reporters as there are delegates at the party conventions, between the media and the media--is a bit...

WFB: Against the prevailing winds.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Perhaps the only realistic element in the persona of Blackford Oakes, the protagonist of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s spy novels, is that he's a Yalie. So far as I am aware, even James Bond did not manage to bed the Queen. As for the...

A disgraceful career.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Peter Collier & David Horowitz, editors The Anti-Chomsky Reader. Encounter Books, 260 pages, $17.95 (paper) One of the main reasons Noam Chomsky's political views are taken seriously in universities and the media is because he has an...

Faking it.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Ronald D. Spencer, editor The Expert versus the Object: Judging Fakes & False Attributions in the Visual Arts. Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $35 What a difference a century can make! In 1897, Bernard Berenson concluded the preface to...

A literary river.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Victor Serge The Case of Comrade Tulayev, translated by Willard R. Trask, introduction by Susan Sontag. New York Review Books, 368 pages, $14.95 Victor Serge was, and remains, unique: the only novelist to describe successfully, from the...

Why the long face?(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Barbara Feinberg Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up. Beacon Press, 209 pages, $23.00 In the seventh grade, at my small public middle school, I grumbled persistently about the books my English...

Literature v. trivia.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Dubravka Ugresic Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, translated by Celia Hawkesworth & Damion Searles. Dalkey Archive, 225 pages, $13.95 In 1988, the Yugoslavian writer Dubravka Ugresic published her first novel, Fording...

Great Scott.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Sir Waiter Scott Reliquiae Trotcosienses. Edinburgh University Press, 168 pages, $64.00 Sir Walter Scott's fall from literary heights to his current obscurity is one of the great nosedives of all time. Major shifts in popular taste and...

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Multitude.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Multitude. Penguin, 4-27 pages, $27.95 They're back. In 2001, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published Empire, a long, hermetic neo-Marxist tract hailing the advent of "a new paradigm of...

Jean-Paul Sartre Critique of Dialectical Reason.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Jean-Paul Sartre Critique of Dialectical Reason, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, Forward by Fredric Jameson. Verso, 836 pages, $25 (paper) By one of those coincidences that reinforces one's faith in Providence, this new edition of...

Adam Gopnik, editor Americans in Paris: a Literary Anthology.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Adam Gopnik, editor Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology. The Library of America, 656 pages, $40 Perhaps the only trope more tired than the American in Paris is the American writer in Paris. For years, Adam Gopnik, the last expatriate...

Ludwig Bemelmans Hotel Bemelmans.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Ludwig Bemelmans Hotel Bemelmans. Overlook, 302 pages, $24.95 Lugwig Bemelmans is best known for his Madeline books. But he is also a dazzling writer on the demimonde. Bemelmans was the sort of expatriate who never let reality get in the...

Kermit Swiler Champa, 1939-2004.(Notebook)(Obituary)
September 1, 2004... No pedagogic considerations are necessary to make us do justice to the great men who led the classic movement. The furious strife between Realism and Classicism is at an end. We have dropped our battle-cries and have learnt to see something...