New Criterion articles from September 2006

New Criterion archives from September 2006

"The New Criterion" at 25.(Notes & Comments: September 2006)
September 1, 2006... With this issue, The New Criterion embarks on its twenty-fifth anniversary season. Twenty-five years--a quarter century: yes, it is a long time, but how quickly the years have passed! A lot has changed since September 1982. Back then, there was...

The consequences of Richard Weaver.
September 1, 2006... The past shows unvaryingly that when a people's freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by...

A conversation with Philippe de Montebello.(Interview)
September 1, 2006... THE NEW CRITERION: You are coming up on your thirtieth anniversary as director of the Metropolitan Museum. Clearly, the museum world has changed dramatically during your tenure. What would you say is the most pronounced difference between when...

Written to last.(logevity of writings)
September 1, 2006... When some years ago I was the editor of an intellectual quarterly, I had in the hopper an essay by my friend Edward Shils on Karl Mannheim that, owing to its length, I could not run, as I had hoped to do, in what was to be our next issue. I...

Should he have spoken?(Enoch Powell)
September 1, 2006... In 1968 the products of the postwar baby boom decided to seize the European future and to jettison the European past. In that same year Enoch Powell delivered to the Birmingham Conservatives the speech known forever after as "Rivers of Blood":...

Treasons of the heart.(political cause)
September 1, 2006... The modern age is clogged with--or more descriptively, cursed by--political causes. Every such cause trumpets peaceful and progressive virtues but, in practice, each is a turbulence of violence. The worst of them--Communism, Nazism,...

Delousing the soul.(The Life of J.-K. Huysmans)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... According to Baudelaire, the devil's best trick was to convince us that he doesn't exist. But for Joris-Karl Huysmans, though he doubted the existence of God, belief in the devil was never a problem. For him the devil may not have been...

Rational control, or, life without virtue.
September 1, 2006... In the brand new building where I work, the lights go on and off, the shades go up and down, and the toilets flush, automatically, without your having to turn a switch or push a handle. Rational control has replaced individual virtue, which is...

Sylvan historian.(Frederick Ashton, ballet)
September 1, 2006... The more one loves ballet, the more one loves Ashton. There he was in South America, a thirteen-year-old boy struck in the heart by Anna Pavlova's arrow, a flash of fire through a snow flurry of pirouettes. So many of us struck by the same...

The rise & fall of the intellectual.(Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... In his landmark study The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), John Gross sketched out the lives and careers of the various writers who shaped literary opinion in England from the late eighteenth century through the Victorian era and...

Charles Kingsley: divine love, divine order.
September 1, 2006... My mother, when vexed by some family misfortune, was wont to console herself by murmuring: "Men must work, and women must weep, and the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep." It never occurred to me, until I was fully grown, to seek out the...

The new juristocracy.
September 1, 2006... From the Founding right up until the still-quaking bombshell of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, issued at the end of the Supreme Court's term in late June, the primary imperative of national government was to protect the security of the governed from...

Meeting a friend again after thirty years.(Poem)
September 1, 2006... Meeting a friend again after thirty years Take off that mask. I know it's you. Those wrinkles, sunken chin, And goggled eyes can't quite disguise Your wry familiar grin. This is our mutual Halloween. As though...

Finding the tintype.(Poem)
September 1, 2006... Finding the tintype Those boughs stay green from which began Garlands of flesh: my Gran, who spread Twelve babies in her double bed As one might open a fan, While constant in baptismal black, Of every...

City album: a wet afternoon.(Poem)
September 1, 2006... City album: a wet afternoon I. Dorm Room Theirs is that special condition of plenty available only to those with nothing on or between them. It's as if they'd been out in the downpour, bodies wet as that--but...

Thrown.(Poem)
September 1, 2006... Thrown I've only started stabbing at the snow That chokes my driveway when I hear the rumble Of the pickup: it comes around the corner From the hidden end of this dead-end street. Its wub-wub-wub-wub seems a kind of...

McKim, Mead & White's architectural citizenship.(Architecture)
September 1, 2006... Ernest Hemingway once declared that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," a claim so provocative that Lionel Trilling based an essay on it. Was it indeed possible that Twain's picaresque...

Waugh's postcolonial studies.(Evelyn Waugh)
September 1, 2006... Most Americans know of the British novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)--if they know him at all--from the television series based on his Brideshead Revisited, a country house fantasy which held public television viewers in the United States in...

Summer offerings.(New York theater)
September 1, 2006... Eight-and-a-half hours is a very long time to occupy a theater seat; it requires courage and stamina on the part of the audience member and a certain bravura arrogance from the producer and director: whatever is asking so much from paying...

Maverick modernists.(Art)
September 1, 2006... In today's superheated art market, art historical research is typically driven by a combination of intellectual curiosity and Mammon. It's difficult to say who toils more assiduously--aspiring Ph.Ds seeking dissertation topics, established...

"Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris".(Exhibition note)
September 1, 2006... "Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris" National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. July 16, 2006-October 15, 2006 Henri Rousseau, whose enchanting yet untutored painting produced some of the most imaginative works of the early years...

Gentile's gold.(Art)
September 1, 2006... The year 2006, as with wines, was also a banner vintage in Italy for the visual arts. Florence alone was host to four small but significant exhibitions. Proceeding southward, the fortunate traveler would have found, in the refurbished stables...

The new old school.(Art)
September 1, 2006... An actual "battle of styles," as for instance between realism and abstraction, is desirable only to those who thrive on a feeling of partisanship. Both directions are valid and useful--and freedom to produce them and enjoy them should be...

Learning from tools.(children's books)(Recommended readings)
September 1, 2006... If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the War, it's Workshop.--Kingsley Amis, Jake's Thing (1978) The required reading list of an American high school student usually includes, along with works by Remarque,...

The silly season.(The media)
September 1, 2006... In Britain, journalists call August "the silly season" because, with Parliament in recess and its members retired to their constituencies or the grouse moor, political stories tend to be trivial or comical, preferably both. But in America the...

Con man.(The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... I should first confess that I cannot approach this book with perfect detachment. I am personally acquainted not only with its author, Damon Linker, but with Richard John Neuhaus and the rest of the so-called "theocons," and I have cause to feel...

Boon companion.(Friendship: An Expos)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... Joseph Epstein Friendship: An Expos& Houghton Mifflin, 288 pages, $24 A magazine I used to read once ran a competition for creative misprints. The prize went to a reader who transformed a stanza in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner...

An American paradox.(Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution)(In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... Simon Schama Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution. Ecco, 4-96 pages, $29.95 Francois Furstenberg In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation. Penguin Press, 352 pages,...

Forced smiles.(Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... Ronald W. Dworkin Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class. Carroll & Graf, 336 pages, $24.95 The word "unhappy" has almost been banished from our vocabulary. It has been replaced by the word "depressed." For...

Backpedaling.(All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ and Its American Masters)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... Craig R. Whitney All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ & Its American Masters. Perseus Books, 321 pages, $17.95 Craig R. Whitney, The New York Times's assistant managing editor, proves to be a fully-fledged organist and organ expert. His...

A splendid failure?(Disraeli's Disciple : The Scandalous Life of George Smythe)(Book review)
September 1, 2006... Mary S. Millar Disraeli's Disciple: The Scandalous Life of George Smythe. University of Toronto, 440 pages, $75 "It is a captivating and enthralling biography that will change the way we view Victorian England." The second...

Kids' stuff?(childrens' poetry)
September 1, 2006... Jaques de Boys, ruminating in Arden on the seven ages of man, describes second childishness as a melancholy affair--toothless, sightless, flavorless--with mere oblivion crowning (and, one hopes, softening) the humiliations of old age. But what...