The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

May 2004 Volume 22, Number 9  

Notes & Comments

A victory for memory

If you pander, they won't come


Features

Olympians on the march: the courts & the culture wars
by Robert Bork
On the “liberal transformation” of the judiciary in America.

Giovanni Verga's verismo
by Martin Greenberg
On an obscure but brilliant Italian novelist, “one of the great European realists.”


Art

Milton Avery: then & now
by James Panero
On the unpresumptuous Milton Avery whose “quiet harmonies of color and line” continue to resonate.


Poems

Traveler
by Eric Ormsby

My grandfather's pocket watch
by Eric Ormsby

The Tide Pool
by William Logan


Letters

Borrowed time in the botellón
by Michael Carlin
On the sentiments of the Madrileños before, during, and after their national tragedy. What does this tell us about the weakening resolve of the West?


Theater

From “Embedded” to “in bed with”
by Mark Steyn
On Tim Robbins’s expert self-parody & A. R. Gurney’s new play, Mrs. Farnsworth.


Art

The ancient Greeks: were they like us at all?
by Victor Davis Hanson
On “Coming of Age in Ancient Greece,” an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Were the lives of the Greeks anything like our own?


Music

New York chronicle
by Jay Nordlinger
On the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall, a violin recital presented by Maxim Vengerov, with Fazil Say at the piano & Salome at the Metropolitan Opera.


The Media

Obligations to “spin”
by James Bowman
On the “monumental self-conceit” of Howell Raines and Richard Clarke & “the media’s interest in buying into self-promotion.”


Fiction Chronicle

Not to comment, but to illustrate
by Max Watman
A review of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer; The Dew Breaker, by Edwidge Danticat; Bandbox: A Novel, by Thomas Mallon; Little Children: A Novel, by Tom Perrotta; I Dream of Microwaves, by Imad Rahman & I Sailed with Magellan, by Stuart Dybeck.


Books

Why we won
by Marc M. Arkin
A review of Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer.

Farrell's achievement
by Carl Rollyson
A review of An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, by Robert K. Landers.

Beyond faeryland
by John Simon
A review of W. B. Yeats: A Life Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939, by R. F. Foster.


Notebook

The strangest travel book ever written
by John Derbyshire
On a little-known travelogue/memoir, An African in Greenland.