The New Criterion

Posted: Apr 02, 2003 01:41 PM

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Was Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova “well within the limits of academic discourse” when he called for the death of American troops? His graduate students certainly think so.

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by James Panero

Posted: Mar 29, 2003 03:56 PM

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THE NEW CRITERION’S PRECIS FOR APRIL, 2003:

The New Criterion has always taken a keen interest in contemporary poetry. We have published scores of essays on the work of contemporary poets and, since the spring of 1984, have published new poems or translations of poems in every issue. It is our judgment that the art of poetry is enjoying a vibrant renaissance. It seemed an opportune moment, then, to commemorate the life of contemporary verse. We asked David Yezzi, a former associate editor of The New Criterion, and now the director of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York, to edit a special section on poetry. He has put together a splendid selection of essays and poems for the April issue.

Mr. Yezzi has also written a lead essay called "The Place of Poetry" for the section, an advance copy of which we have placed at a special section on our website.

There is much to lament in contemporary culture. David reminds us that, in the world of poetry, there is also much to celebrate. Eric Ormsby, Dick Davis, and Adam Kirsch contribute essays to this special section. Gyln Maxwell, David Barber, A. E. Stallings and Ben Downing present new poems.

CONTENTS:

* "Notes & Comments" (page 1). "Junk Mailer" on the naked and the dead: Norman Mailer and THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS; "Politics and Pedagogy" on protesting for extra credit; "Poets on poetry" on the special April section.

* "Lessons from Juvenal" (page 4). Roger Kimball finds honey in the vinegar of the great Roman Satirist:

"Kierkegaard observed that satire, to be useful, must emerge from a consistent view of life. In some respects, Juvenal is the least consistent of writers. As Peter Green noted, "if we try to pin down any coherent philosophy in Juvenal’s work, we soon find ourselves forced to admit defeat." Nevertheless, Juvenal does exhibit a consistency of attitude. At the center of this attitude are two things: courage and an allergy to euphemism."

* "Who was Simon Raven?" (page 9): Brooke Allen tracks down the late English novelist, journalist, television writer, and cult figure Simon Raven, who rejected "both enthusiasms and faiths, if only because of the ridiculous postures, whether mental or physical, which they require."

"I’ve always written for a small audience consisting of people like myself," he remarked, "who are well-educated, worldly, skeptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad). And who believe that nothing and nobody is special."

* "Poets on poetry: a special section":

-- "The place of poetry" by David Yezzi (page 17).

We have placed an advance, full-text PDF file of David’s article at a special address on our website. We invite you to download it now [270K-case sensitive]: http://www.newcriterion.com/yezzi.pdf

--"Shadow language" by Eric Ormsby (page 22)

"Is there such a phenomenon in poetry as a ’shadow language,’ that is, a concealed or tacit foreign language which exerts a strong and sometimes fruitful pressure on the native tongue of a poet?"

--"Poetry: a prognosis" by Dick Davis (page 28)

"Poetry has always been difficult--for the poet; a degree of difficulty is inherent in the mastery of any craft, and traditionally the poet did as Horace and Yeats both recommended, that is to hide the difficulty as well as he or she could. But now poetry is meant to be difficult for the reader. I think a contributory, and perhaps the primary, reason for this--although it’s obviously not the one Eliot was thinking of--is the appropriation of poetry by the academy."

--"Winters’s curse" by Adam Kirsch (page 32)

"Winters’s best criticism--it is collected in the volume IN DEFENSE OF REASON-- traces the effects of this Romantic error on modern American literature, that: ’Literature [has] become a form of what is popularly known as self-expression. It is not the business of man to understand and improve himself, for such an effort is superfluous: he is good as he is, if he will only let himself alone, or, as we might say, let himself go.’ . . . Control [rather] is the key word in Winters’s aesthetics"

* New poems by Glyn Maxwell, David Barber, A.E. Stallings & Ben Downing (page 37).

* Letter from Paris "Anglo-saxon attitudes" (page 44). "France is not the land of the airport novel," laments Theodore Dalrymple, and "one of the questions that always crosses my mind when I visit Paris is, What do unintelligent or uneducated people read there?"

* Theater: "Luck of the Irish?" (page 48). Irish independence has been a disaster for Irish drama, remarks Mark Steyn, and two current New York productions make the point with alarming clarity: the Pearl Theatre Company’s HEARTBREAK HOUSE by George Bernard Show and Lincoln Center’s OBSERVE THE SONS OF ULSTER MARCHING TOWARDS THE SOMME by Frank McGuinness.

* Art: Karen Wilkin reports on the sublime matchup of "Manet/Vel?quez" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (page 53):

* Art: "Gallery chronicle" (page 60). James Panero reclaims William Bailey from THE NEW YORKER, takes flight in the "Last Paintings" of Paul Georges, delights in the New Mexico landscapes of Marsden Hartley, and drains the riverscapes of Wayne Thiebaud.

* Music: "New York chronicle" (page 64). Jay Nordlinger reviews the Emerson String Quartet at Carnegie Hall, Ensemble Wien-Berlin at Alice Tully Hall, and the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie, and notes the anniversaries of Hugo Wolf, Hertor Berlioz, and Ned Rorem. "Concert note" (Page 68). Patrick J. Smith reviews David Robertson with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall.

* The media: "Rather not" (page 69). James Bowman records the unreality of Dan Rather’s interview with Saddam Hussein.

* Books: Donald Kagan THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR reviewed by Victor Davis Hanson (page 74);

--Keith Windschuttle THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY reviewed Geoffrey Blainey (page 79);

--John Derbyshire PRIME OBSESSION reviewed by James Franklin (page 82);

--Robert J. Stove THE UNSLEEPING EYE reviewed by Anthony Daniels (page 84).

* Letters (page 87). Peter Hitchens takes issue with John Gross’s "Two Tonies"; B. H Fairchild belabors William Logan’s review of EARLY OCCULT MEMORY SYSTEMS OF THE LOWER MIDWEST.

FORTHCOMING IN THE NEW CRITERION:

The fantasies of Noam Chomsky, by Keith Windschuttle; The achievement of Stephan George, by John Simon; The vocal recital today, by Patrick J. Smith; How good was Theodore Dreiser? by Jeffrey Hart; Fiction chronicle by Max Watman.

NEWS:

* Please join The New Criterion for a special Poetry Reading and Reception in recognition of National Poetry Month and "Poets on Poetry: a special section" from the April 2003 issue. Guest readers include David Barber, Ben Downing, Adam Kirsch, Eric Ormsby, and David Yezzi.

WHEN: April 17, 2003.

WHERE: The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture; 8 West 8th Street (Between 5th and 6th Avenues). New York, New York.

DETAILS: Cocktails at 6:30, reading begins at 7:00. RSVP: Dawn Steeves; Email: Steeves@newcriterion.com; Phone: (212) 247-6980.

* Read Bernard Chapin’s interview with Roger Kimball from the website enterstageright.com.

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0303/030 3kimball.htm

* "Art in The New Criterion" from our December issue is now available in a special 52-page reprint. Copies of this important re-publication may be purchased directly through the website for $3 (+$2 S+H). Follow this link for an order form:

http://www.newcriterion.com/constant/art.htm

* For a free digital look at portions of the April issue, please do not forget to visit the website at http://www.newcriterion.com. The issue will post on the first of the month.

by James Panero

Posted: Mar 24, 2003 01:55 PM

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An interview with Roger Kimball.

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by James Panero

Posted: Mar 12, 2003 01:57 PM

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“The New Criterion on art” from our December 2002 issue is now available in a special 52-page reprint. Copies of this important re-publication may be purchased directly through the website for $3 (+$2 S+H). Click here for the order form and additional information.

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by James Panero

Posted: Mar 12, 2003 01:56 PM

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Roger Kimball speaks with PBS’s NewsHour on “Poets Against the War.” Click for Realaudio or Realvideo.

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by James Panero

Posted: Mar 03, 2003 01:58 PM

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Music special: Jay Nordlinger’s criticism for The New Criterion is now online.

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by James Panero

Posted: Mar 02, 2003 02:00 PM

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First Tom Paulin, now him. Are anti-Semitic poets the trend in higher education? With the appearance of Amiri Baraka, “it has been an unpleasant week to be Jewish at Yale.” . . . Also.

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by James Panero

Posted: Feb 27, 2003 02:55 PM

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THE NEW CRITERION’S PRECIS FOR MARCH, 2003:

While we at The New Criterion always seek to offer you a broad range of essays on culture, politics, and the arts, it often happens--by accident, it seems--that certain leitmotifs appear throughout a single issue. Quite different articles by different authors will "rhyme" with each other, senendipitously dwelling on certain themes or figures. The March number of the magazine is one occasion where we focus on a single period that has long fascinated us.

Something remarkable happened in the years surrounding 1900. Part Symbolist and part spiritualist, the arts (for a time) followed a path that remains to this day mysterious, inviting, and largely unknown. With the overtones of Mallarmï¿½ and Debussy, this month The New Criterion take on some of the major artists of the age with essays on Paul Valï¿½ry and Marsden Hartley at one end, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso at the other. Roger Kimball begins with an appraisal of the painter Eduard Vuillard, now enjoying a major revival in a new exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington. (For details on how to download an advance PDF of this article, "Vuillard’s mysteries" see below.) We hope you will join us in enjoying this rich number.

CONTENTS:

* "Notes & Comments" (page 1). "Squeals from the nursery" on the bad behavior of bad-boy poets; "If they holler . . . " on the latest lawsuit over a treacherous nursery rhyme; "Oleo olio" on the oleaginous artist Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

* "Vuillard’s mysteries" (page 5). Roger Kimball looks into the depth of this enigmatic painter:

"We come to Vuillard as we come to his pictures, askew, missing part of the plot. His pictures tend to occupy that capacious, half-lit storeroom of feeling where pre-eminence is guaranteed more by affection than by dispassionate evaluation. They are part of the family: somehow OUR family, once-removed."

(We have placed an advance, full-text PDF file of Roger Kimball’s article at a special address on our website. We invite you to download it now [420K-case sensitive]: http://www.newcriterion.com/vuillard.pdf)

* "RABBIT-PROOF FENCE: a ’true story’?" (page 12): Keith Windschuttle tracks down the holes in Phillip Noyce’s current film RABBIT-PROOF FENCE.

"RABBIT-PROOF FENCE is ostensibly an adventure story of female bravery and ingenuity in which three Aboriginal girls escape from an oppressive institution in Western Australia and make a fifteen-hundred-mile journey back to their home. In reality it is a work every bit as politically committed as Graham Greene’s. If anything, the anti-Australianism of the latter film outdoes the anti-Americanism of THE QUIET AMERICAN."

* "The intimate abstraction of Paul Valï¿½ry" (page 17). Upon the publication of an English-language version of Valï¿½ry’s CAHIERS/NOTEBOOKS, Joseph Epstein praises the late Symbolist’s evanescent touch.

"The name Paul Valï¿½ry carries its own music. For those who know something of what lies behind it, the music deepens, is suggestive, and always richly complex. ’Complex,’ said Ravel, about his own artistic aims, ’never complicated.’) To know Valï¿½ry only from his melodious but difficult poems--’Le Cimitiere marin,’ ’La Jeune Parque,’ and others--turns out to be to know him scarcely at all."

* "Peter Taylor today" (page 26). Upon the publication of two critical works, Richard Tillinghast weigh the achievement of this twentieth century novelist.

"The territory Peter Taylor staked out for himself may be summed up easily and neatly enough. His characters are primarily upper-middle-class and upper-class people from the upper, as opposed to the ’deep,’ south, living in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Just as William Faulkner made the state of Mississippi his theater of conflict and revelation, Peter Taylor focused on Tennessee, with its three distinct regions: west, middle, and east. Taylor had roots in all three provinces and in his writings the state becomes a ’paysage moralis.’"

* New poems by Andrew Frisardi & Justine Cook (page 33).

* "London journal: A tale of two Tonies" (page 36). John Gross takes little comfort in the difficulties facing Tony Blair, from his international policy for the war against Iraq, to internal problems including immigration, trade unions, and the soft economy.

* Theater: "Aging youth & a meatless sandwich" (page 39). Mark Steyn reviews "Kimberly Akimbo" at the Manhattan Theatre Club and "Shanghai Moon," produced by the Drama Dept. at the Greenwich House theater.

* Art: Karen Wilkin reports ringside from the "Matisse Picasso" bout at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (page 44):

"The show is essentially an expansion of that tantalizing epilogue to the Matisse retrospective--the core of the exhibition is once again the pairing of LES DEMOUSELLES and BATHERS WITH A TURTLE--extended to span the period between the two young artists’ initial awareness of each other’s work, in the first years of the twentieth century, and 1954, the year of Matisse’s death."

* Art: James Panero goes native at the Marsden Hartley survey in Hartford, Connecticut (page 49):

" No painter has come to embody better the brooding vigor and new, native spirit of American modernism at the turn of the century as Marsden Hartley (1877-1943). In mind as well as action and body, the painter from Lewiston, Maine, a woebegone member of the Stieglitz 291 circle, came to epitomize the dark mysteries and contradictions of his literary antecedents: . . . Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe."

* Music: "New York Chronicle" (page 53). In another busy month Jay Nordlinger reviews the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and several talented artists: the British soprano Jane Eaglen and the pianists Arcadi Volodos, Radu Lupu, and Garrick Ohlsson. He also enjoys a rare tenor recital and takes two trips to the Met for a new production of Janacek’s JENUFA and Mozart’s "Turkish" opera THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO.

Opera note: Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes! James F. Penrose fears Greeks even bearing gifts at Berlioz’s LES TROYENS at the Met (page 57).

* The media: "Himalayan self-righteousness" (page 59). James Bowman laments the smugness of the media, the protesters, and the poets in opposing the war against Iraq.

* Books: Peter Wood DIVERSITY: THE INVENTION OF A CONCEPT reviewed by John Derbyshire (page 64);

--Hermann Kurzke THOMAS MANN: LIFE AS A WORK OF ART: A BIOGRAPHY reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers (page 68);

--Doris Lessing THE SWEETEST DREAM reviewed by Paul Hollander (page 71);

--Christie Davies THE MIRTH OF NATIONS reviewed by Kenneth Minogue (page 74).

* Notebook: "Cliquez ici for Alexandria" (page 77). Theodore Dalrymple explores Alexandria’s library and the city itself, hometown of Cavafy.

FORTHCOMING IN THE NEW CRITERION:

In April, a very special section on poetry, including essays by David Barber, Dick Davis, Adam Kirsch, Eric Ormsby, & David Yezzi; The achievement of Stephan George, by John Simon; The Peloponnesian war, by Victor Davis Hanson; Simon Raven, by Brooke Allen; The vocal recital today, by Patrick J. Smith; Theodore Dreiser by Jeffrey Hart.

NEWS:

* "Art in The New Criterion" from our December issue is now available in a special 36-page reprint. Copies of this important re-publication may be purchased directly through the website for $3 (+$2 S+H). Follow this link for an order form:

http://www.newcriterion.com/constant/art.htm

* TNC AUDIO: On December 9, 2002, Hilton Kramer delivered a speech in New York on his career as an art critic. The speech was recorded on audio track. This is a reminder that we are now giving our supporters and recipients of The New Criterion mailing list an exclusive chance to listen to ten clips from this talk. We have placed a special audio start page at a non-public address on our website. The address is:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/audio/audio.htm

We invite you to open this start page. Please bear in mind that due to the size of the audio files, a high-speed internet connection is recommended. Files are offered in Windows Media format (.wav). On the start page, we include information on how to download the free Windows Media player to your computer.

* A thank you to everyone who has contributed already to The New Criterion annual fundraising drive. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, The New Criterion relies on your extra support to publish each month. If you have yet to receive our fundraising letter, please email us at office@newcriterion.com.

* The Editors of The New Criterion are pleased to announce that Charles Tomlinson is the winner of the third annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. His book SKY-WRITING AND OTHER POEMS will be published by Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, in the fall of 2003.

* For a free digital look at portions of the March issue, please do not forget to visit the website at http://www.newcriterion.com. The issue will post on the first of the month.

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