New Criterion back issues from April 2007:
Eyes on Hanover.(Notes & Comments: April 2007)(Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire)
Apr 01, 2007 ... Anyone who cares about the state of higher education in this country should cast a wary eye upon what is happening just now at Dartmouth College. Since the late nineteenth century, the college has turned to its alumni for nearly half of its board of trustees. This is a democratic ...
Wise words from Bernard Lewis.(Notes & Comments: April 2007)
Apr 01, 2007 ... Last month, the great scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis gave the Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Mr. Lewis's subject was Islam and Europe, and we thought it worth sharing some central bits of his sober assessment. Noting the many troubling signs ...
Talleyrand: the old fraud.(book by Robin Harris entitled "Talleyrand: Betrayer and Saviour of France")(Book review)
Apr 01, 2007; ... Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, has been very well served by biographers. Alfred Duff Cooper's 1932 life of the long-serving French politician and diplomat is an ornament of English letters, and since then four other impressive works have been written on the same subject ....
Frost's "Road" & "Woods" redux.(Robert Frost)
Apr 01, 2007; ... Much of the recent talk about "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost's famous poem of 1916, centers on whether the speaker's choice of road really makes "all the difference." The going view is not just that is doesn't, but that it couldn't. The poem's diverging roads are worn "about the ...
Robert Bridges's new cadence.
Apr 01, 2007; ... Robert Bridges (1844-1930) is perhaps the most conspicuous example of that faintly alarming figure, the happy poet. His strenuously archaic diction, his eccentric devotion to syllabic and quantitative measures, his bizarre attempts to simplify English spelling, as well as his unvaryingly ...
The enduring specter of E.A. Robinson.
Apr 01, 2007; ... It has been a long while--seventy-two years, to be exact--since Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) was hailed in his obituaries as America's foremost poet. In recent times, his work has been tacitly dismissed as old hat. Few current candidates for MFA degrees in creative writing, I ...
The three Ms of German poetry.(Music, metaphor, and meaning)("Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology" by Michael Hofmann)(Book review)
Apr 01, 2007; ... Verse translators come in three varieties: Those who get almost nothing right; those (the majority) who get some things right; and those rare birds who get everything, or at least almost everything, right. By everything I mean the three Ms: Music, Metaphor, and Meaning. By music ...
The Amis country.
Apr 01, 2007; ... First of all: that's Kingsley not Martin, the author of Lucky Jim not Yellow Dog, which may strike some readers as atavistic (and even a little quaint), given how fully Amis the Second has deposed Amis the First in the literary press. Still, Zachary Leader's new biography, The Life of ...
The tin balls that the Planetarium.(New poems)(Poem)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2007; ... <Pre>The tin balls that the PlanetariumDesigned to demonstrate the powers of tenRange from the pebbly fraction of an atomTo a hot air balloon that means the sun,Indicting cosmologically provincialHabits they can't help but reinforceBy tailoring their ...
Domestic Cappadocia.(New poems)(Poem)
Apr 01, 2007; ... <Pre> Domestic Cappadocia I They seemed content enough, the married pairwho owned my charming cave hotel,and ran the place commendably well,solicitous yet casual, always there when needed yet never hovering,and often snatching (where they could) ...
Deus ex machina.(New Poems)(Poem)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2007; ... <Pre> Deus ex machina Because we were good at entanglements, but notResolution, and made a mess of plot,Because there was no other way to fulfilThe ancient prophesy, because the willOf the gods demanded punishment, becauseNeither recognized who the other was, ...
Summer in the high purpose of clouds.(Poem)(Brief article)
Apr 01, 2007; ... <Pre> Summer in the high purpose of clouds From the porthole, a few fan-handed raysstaggered across the night's mezzotint,as if they concealed a single unpleasant thing.In medias res--a whole life passed through its middles: below lay unnatural clumps and ...
The haunting.(Jerome Robbins)
Apr 01, 2007; ... "But I was happy so puzzled it interests me." No, it's not a line from E. E. Cummings. It comes from a letter the dance critic and poet Edwin Denby sent to Jerome Robbins after the 1974 premiere of his ballet Dybbuk. Denby was no longer reviewing dance, but he had seen the ...
No place.(Theater)
Apr 01, 2007; ... Americans are not comfortable with abstract ideas. Neither, for that matter, are the English, and a theater of ideas has never prospered in London or New York, despite the anomalous success of George Bernard Shaw. Continental Europe's passion for political and aesthetic philosophizing, ...
Remembrance of things past.(Art)("High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975")
Apr 01, 2007; ... If the path to hell is really paved with good intentions, as my father always maintained, then the organizers of the raucous survey "High Times/Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" at the National Academy Museum, should prepare themselves for an uncomfortable afterlife. (1) That this ...
"Hogarth": Tate Britain, London.(Exhibition notes)(William Hogarth)
Apr 01, 2007; ... "Hogarth" Tate Britain, London. February 7, 2007-April 29, 2007 It is clear from the major new exhibition in London's Tate Britain that the artist William Hogarth was seriously politically incorrect. His famous satirical series of pictures and prints such as A Harlots Progress ...
"George Stubbs: A Celebration": The Frick Collection, New York.(Exhibition notes)
Apr 01, 2007; ... "George Stubbs: A Celebration" The Frick Collection, New York. February 21, 2007-May 27, 2007 When George Stubbs arrived in London from the north, about 1759, he was already thirty-five and had been a practicing artist for at least fifteen years. But he was an unknown. What he ...
"Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot!" International Center of Photography, New York.(Exhibition notes)
Apr 01, 2007; ... "Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot!" International Center of Photography, New York. January 19, 2007-April 29, 2007 In the early 1930S, the photographer Martin Munkacsi (the family name was Mermelstein) rescued the genre of fashion photography from the prevailing preference ...
"Victorian Bestsellers": Morgan Library & Museum, New York.(Exhibition notes)
Apr 01, 2007; ... "Victorian Bestsellers" Morgan Library & Museum, New York. January 26-May 6, 2007 "Bestseller" is a relatively recent coinage. It doesn't even appear in the first edition of the OED. The Supplement's first citation is from 1911, given an American origin, and pejorative: "His ...
The New York fairs.("The Armory Show: The International Fair of New Art" and "The Art Show")
Apr 01, 2007; ... A sea change is taking place in American taste. This thought occurred to me as I worked a table of hors d'oeuvre at a Chicago dinner party a few years ago. The apartment in which I stood was decidedly Gold Coast. In New York, we might call it "pre-war"; in Chicago, they call it "old." It ...
Mr. Libby to you.
Apr 01, 2007; ... "There will be a great deal written and said in coming days about the frustrations of the Scooter Libby verdict ...." So read the opening clause of the thoughtful editorial by The New York Times on the subject, which itself went on to be every bit as predictable as the volume of comment ...
Academimic.(book by Craig Raine entitled "T. S. Eliot")(Book review)
Apr 01, 2007; ... I heard Craig Raine interviewed on the radio about this book. (1) Didn't he feel, he was asked, that his often abrasive dismissals of fellow critics ("execrable," "stupid") lowered the standards of academic writing? His answer was contemptuous: "Yeah, but who reads academic writing, for ...
Hypocrite lecteur.("Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?" by Pierre Bayard)(Book review)
Apr 01, 2007; ... Pierre Bayard Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus. Editions de Minuit, 198 pages, 15 [euro] One of the great intellectual enterprises of the last century has been the destruction of boundaries. It is as if the triumphant bourgeoisie--from which, of course, the vast ...
A passion for the future.("Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali)(Book review)
Apr 01, 2007; ... Ayaan Hirsi Ali Infidel. Free Press, 368 pages, $26 Ayaan Hirsi Ali has attracted many notable enemies in her life: not only the Muslim terrorists and wannabe-terrorists who threaten to kill her and who did kill her collaborator on the film Submission, Theo van Gogh, but also a ...
In their youth.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2007; ... Adam Sisman The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Viking, 480 pages, $27.95 Writers, craving praise and hating criticism, are unusually contentious. Their personal quarrels, which spill into print, are notorious: Pope and Colley Cibber, Johnson and Lord Chesterfield, Ruskin ...
M is for messy.(Book review)
Apr 01, 2007; ... Lee Smolin The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Houghton Mifflin, 392 pages, $26 Peter Woit Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. Basic Books, 291 pages, $26.95 ...
Revisiting "Catalonia" again.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Apr 01, 2007; ... To the Editors: I write as an occasional contributor to The New Criterion and recognized authority on Catalonia in the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939. I was coauthor with the Catalan historian Victor Alba of the 1988 book Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism, the only volume in ...