12.31.2002
[Posted 11:40 AM by James Panero]
THE NEW CRITERION’S PRECIS FOR JANUARY, 2003:
He is an intellectual has-been, a radical historian, an unrepentant Communist in post-Cold-War Europe. Yet for his new memoir INTERESTING TIMES, Eric Hobsbawm has received near unanimous acclaim across the pond. One might wonder why.
In the January issue of The New Criterion, David Pryce-Jones exposes the Continent’s latest folly. (For details on how to download an advance PDF of this important article, “Eric Hobsbawm: lying to the credulous,” see below.) Contributors to the January number also include Brooke Allen on Samuel Pepys, Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton and the West, Jeffrey Meyers on Lionel Trilling, Hilton Kramer on H. L. Mencken, Anthony Daniels on Ivan Illich? and much, much more. Read on!
CONTENTS:
* “Notes & Comments” (page 1): “Annals of transgression,” on the case of a suicide mistaken for performance art; “Brave new world watch” on gender-benders and the latest front in identity politics; “Stuck in the 1960s” on the “Borking” of Henry Kissinger.
* “Why the West?” (page 4): Upon the publication of Roger Scruton’s THE WEST AND THE REST, Roger Kimball discusses the recent horrors of Nigeria’s Miss World Pageant, the clash of civilizations, and the pleonasm of enraged Muslims: “Of course, this seems like–indeed, it is–business as usual these days. Rampaging Muslims, fatwas, and denunciations of the West as ’the Great Satan’ aare a familiar fact of life. They have been at least since the late 1980s when the Ayatollah Khomeini ventured into literary criticism and pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie because someone told him that THE SATANIC VERSES was blasphemous. What is odd, what is significant, is how normal this deeply abnormal state of affairs seems to us now.”
(On a different note, from today’s WALL STREET JOURNAL, we include at the bottom of this post a copy of Roger’s article on Christo’s papering of New York’s Central Park?)
* “Eric Hobsbawm: lying to the credulous” (page 9). David Pryce-Jones explains the history behind the historian: “Eric Hobsbawm is no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian. Unfortunately, lifelong devotion to Communism destroyed him as a thinker or interpreter of events. Such original work as he did concerned bandits and outlaws. But even here there is bias, for he rescued them from obscurity not for their own sake but as precursors of Communist revolution.”
(We have placed an advance, full-text PDF file of David Pryce-Jones’s article at a special address on our website. We invite you to download it now [315K-case sensitive]: https://www.newcriterion.com/HOBSBAWM.pdf)
* “The irrepressible Samuel Pepys” (page 14). Following the lead of Claire Tomalin’s new book SAMUEL PEPYS: THE UNEQUALLED SELF, in this charming article Brooke Allen rescues the culture’s primogenitor memoirist (Pepys’s DIARY was written between 1660 and 1669) from the dustbins of postmodern history: “What prompted this obscure but rising young clerk to undertake this odd project? Why did he write, and for whom? For himself alone? For posterity? Though he wrote it in shorthand and kept its existence a secret during his lifetime, he must have believed that the DIARY would be read after his death, for he didn’t destroy it, as he did many other papers and documents; indeed he took good care of its six volumes, binding them expensively and leaving them, along with his other books, to Magdalen College, Cambridge.”
* “Lionel Trilling & the crisis at Columbia” (page 23). Drawing from
an unpublished interview made with Trilling in the heady days of May 1968, Jeffrey Meyers redeems Lionel in the ashes of the Columbia riots and the riotous fulminations of his wife Diana: “During the most important political engagement of his life, he tested his ideas in the cauldron of reality. Diana Trilling, in her long account of the crisis called ’On the Steps of Low Library’ (1968), focused on her own reaction, ignored Lionel’s role in these events, and said:’my husband was still at the University, doing whatever it was that the faculty was then doing, or trying to do.’ The unpublished Oral History interview explains what he did.”
* A new poem by Mary Jo Salter (page 29).
* Theater: “Running on empty” (page 35). Mark Steyn goes to Caryl Churchill’s FAR AWAY (“Is Miss Churchill the first absurdist with ADHD?”) and visits the revival of OUR TOWN.
* Art: Karen Wilkin jets between Barcelona and New York and finds greatness in the late work of Anthony Caro (page 40).
* Music: “New York Chronicle” (page 46). Jay Nordlinger is variously
astonished by the performances of three violinists: Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Maxim Vengerov, and Hilary Hahn. Then he’s off to the Met’s AIDA. “Concert Notes” (page 50). Patrick J. Smith takes a look at the San Francisco Opera’s performance of Messiaen’s SAINT FRANCOIS D’ASSISE and at Osvaldo Golijob’s PASION SEGUN SAN MARCO.
* The media: “`Media bias’ revisited” (page 54). James Bowman casts an amused glance on institutional claims of unbiased reporting of the Augusta Nationals, and then some.
* Books: Terry Teachout THE SKEPTIC: A LIFE OF H. L. MENCKEN reviewed by Hilton Kramer (page 59);
–Norman Podhoretz THE PROPHETS reviewed by Hadley Arkes (page 62);
–Charles Baudelaire COMPLETE POEMS reviewed by Eric Ormsby (page 67);
–Niklas Holzberg OVID: THE POET AND HIS WORK reviewed by Gerald J. Russello (page 71);
–Stephen Wolfram A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE reviewed by James Franklin (page 73);
–Wilfred Blunt LINNAEUS: THE COMPLEAT NATURALIST reviewed by Guy Davenport (page 76).
* Notebook: Anthony Daniels remembers the life and work of Ivan Illich (1926-2002) (page 78).
FORTHCOMING IN THE NEW CRITERION:
Why I became a conservative, by Roger Scruton; The achievement of Aldous Huxley, by John Derbyshire; Stephan George, by John Simon; “Matisse Picasso” at MOMA, by Karen Wilkin; Simon Raven, by Brooke Allen; and new poems by Daniel Mark Epstein.
NEWS:
* A thank you to everyone who has contributed already to The New Criterion end-of-year fundraising drive. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, The New Criterion relies on your support. If you have yet to receive our fundraising letter, please email us at [email protected].
* 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.
* The New Criterion collection SURVIVAL OF CULTURE (Ivan R. Dee) is now available. Orders for the book and the accompanying video may be placed online at www.newcriterion.com.
* For a free digital look at portions of the January issue, please do not forget to visit the website at https://www.newcriterion.com. The January issue will post on the first of the month.
* As Charles Dickens writes in “Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions”: “My best wishes for your merry Christmases and your happy New Years, your long lives and your true prosperities. Worth twenty pound good if they are delivered as I send them. Remember? Here’s a final prescription added, ’To be taken for life.’ ” Might we offer another prescription? How about a year’s subscription to The New Criterion! The magazine makes a great gift. Subscription orders and gift orders can now be placed on the website at www.newcriterion.com/constant/scrib.htm
* And… from today’s WALL STREET JOURNAL:
**********************
“It’s a Wrap: Husband And Wife Bamboozle NYC”
By ROGER KIMBALL
In some ways, Christo Javacheff is the ideal artist for the Christmas season. At least, he is the ideal artist for the Christmas season in the postmodern age. The fellow wraps things, you see. It’s almost as if he were presenting a gift (the Christmas part), but it always turns out that the gift is a joke — a joke on the viewer (the postmodern part).
It’s nice work if you can get it. Christo (like certain pop figures, he is known by a single name) started off in the heyday of pop art wrapping bottles and other small objects. That was in the 1960s. By the 1980s, he had graduated to wrapping bridges, buildings, even stretches of coastline.
Any Joe can wrap a couple of bottles, trot down to Chelsea, and find a gullible, or avaricious, art dealer willing to hawk ’em as art. It takes a kind of genius to wrap the Pont Neuf in Paris or the Reichstag in Berlin — not artistic genius, but genius nonetheless.
That is where Christo’s wife and partner Jeanne-Claude comes in. She is the entrepreneurial and organizational brains of the team that identifies itself as “Christo and Jeanne-Claude.” Her great triumph has been in getting her own activities baptized as an integral part of the artistic process. She haggles with French bureaucrats, it’s art; she negotiates with German politicians, it’s art; she pays a bill, it’s art. It’s one thing to tell a mere manager or businessman that his latest scheme is pure banana oil, completely ridiculous, in fact, and a public nuisance to boot. Who wants to be caught talking to an artist that way?
Christo and Jeanne-Claude make quite a team. They claim to have been born on the same day in June 1935. They live in New York now, but they met in Paris, he a refugee from Bulgaria, she “the socialite daughter of a French general,” as their press releases invariably put it.
I am told that about two million people will read this newspaper. The fact that most readers will know who Christo is, will know that he wrapped the Pont Neuf and the Reichstag, is a testimony to the effectiveness of Jeanne-Claude’s public-relations machine. It is formidable. One of Christo’s projects involved placing thousands of 20-foot-tall umbrellas in a picturesque spot in California. When a strong wind uprooted one and it smashed into a tourist and killed her, the artist’s grief at the news was somehow woven into the artwork, absolving him, in the sophisticated precincts of elite opinion, of any taint or responsibility.
Back in the early 1980s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude approached New York with the idea of planting along the walkways of Central Park some 15,000 metal gates, each with a swath of translucent saffron-colored fabric.
After a long and bitter fight, “The Gates” was defeated. The original budget for the scheme was about $5 million. Xto and J-C (the artists’ logo) pay for their projects themselves, recouping the costs, and then some, through the sale of Christo’s drawings and models. Still, some observers thought it obscene that the project would cost about $1 million more than the entire maintenance budget for Central Park. And why, after all, should the pair be allowed to capitalize on a public space for private profit? Then there were the environmental concerns: What would all that material do to the trees and landscaping of the park? And what about the public? Perhaps it wanted to be able to enjoy Central Park straight, unmolested by the massive intrusion of Christo’s “statement.”
Good luck. In 1981, when “The Gates” looked dead, Christo said “The park is not going anywhere. . . . I intend to do this project.” He knows how to bide his time. None of the original objections have really been answered. Nonetheless, earlier this month a scaled-down version of “The Gates” — 7,500 gates instead of 15,000 — was approved by the Central Park Conservancy. The project awaits approval by the parks deppartment, but that is considered a done deal since Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, is keen on the idea. Mr. Bloomberg does not want you to smoke. He wants another hefty chunk of your income in taxes. But he plans to compensate with lots of public art. It’s a 21st-century version of “Let them eat cake.”
So look for Christo’s latest extravaganza come February. You won’t have to look hard: 7,500 saffron-colored banners will be hard to miss. The good news is that “The Gates” will be littering Central Park for only two weeks. Andy Warhol once remarked that “Art is what you can get away with.” Christo shows how right he was.