George Core (Editor of the Sewanee Review) Talks With George Garrett About the Quarterlies Shortly following his appearance on a panel about book reviewing at the annual Miami Book Fair, this interview with George Core took place in a 15th-story hotel room high above downtown Miami, its boarded-up storefronts and decay, its winos and druggies...

The “Common-Sense Sociology Test” made its first appearance in the mid-1960’s. The test is now a familiar fixture in introductory sociology courses and textbooks, but in the beginning its exciting novelty instantly captured the hearts and minds of graduate students and young professors facing their first lecture halls—lecture halls filled with a student skepticism that...

Henry and June Screenplay by Philip Kaufman and Rose Kaufman Directed and produced by Philip Kaufman Released by Miramax Tune in Tomorrow Screenplay by William Boyd Directed by Jon Amiel Produced by John Feidler and Mark Tarlov Released by Cinecom Entertainment Reversal of Fortune Screenplay by Nicholas Kazan Directed by Barbet Schroeder Produced by Edward...

The great Yellowstone caldera, home to Old Faithful and Mammoth Hot Springs, last exploded some 600,000 years ago. With a power more than one thousand times greater than Mt. St. Helen’s, it threw boulders the size of Greyhound buses nearly to Kansas. Pressure is building up again. The Yellowstone caldera is bulging in preparation for...

Many people are concerned about the problems that face our nation today, and the good folks at the Missouri Department of Education are no exception. In an attempt to reverse the decline in enrollment and the high dropout rate, and to win back parental favor for the public school system, Missouri launched an experimental parenting...

Not much more than 24 hours ago, one of many of you who could get away with it asked me to speak to you on Class Day. It hit me that for a tutor who insists on students meeting deadlines, the situation has the best of comic myth: you got yours back, and at the...

There was much discussion last autumn of the charge of “anti-Semitism” made against syndicated columnist and conservative spokesman Patrick Buchanan by New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal. What sparked the attack was a statement made by Buchanan on the television program The McLaughlin Group, in which he said, “There are only two groups that are...

Dreams Produced by Hisao Kurosawa and Mike Y. Inoue Written and directed by Akira Kurosawa Released by Warner Brothers Man Without Pigs Produced and directed by Chris Owen The Women Who Smile Produced and directed by Joanne Head The plan was terrific—as many plans are. I’d go up to New York to see selected films...

“When he was young, Coba was very fond of hunting, but not with a rifle, he preferred traps,” wrote Leon Trotsky in his essay in 1939. And who could know it better than Trotsky, for whom Coba (a.k.a. Joseph Stalin), his former comrade-in-arms and a close associate at the Politburo, was setting traps all over...

“We are Cavaliers,” novelist William Caruthers boasted, “that generous, fox-hunting, winedrinking, dueling and reckless race of men which gives so distinct a character to Virginians wherever they may be found.” If we look closely at the Cavalier, will we find the quintessential Virginian? “Cavalier” was originally an English term signifying political affiliation, not social status....

Let Vermont State Senator John McClaughry describe himself (with what he calls “a notorious Ozark accent”): “I am a 1700’s Virginia republican, an 1800 Tertium Quid, an 1830’s Loco Foco, an 1850’s Republican, an 1890’s Western progressive, a 1930’s agrarian distributist, and today a plain old decentralist agrarian Reaganaut.” It makes perfect sense. Alas, no...

Nathaniel Macon (Dec. 17, 1758- June 29, 1837), “Old Republican” statesman, the foremost public man of North Carolina in the early 19th century, was the sixth child of Gideon and Priscilla (Jones) Macon and was born at his father’s plantation on Shocco Creek in what later became Warren County. The Macons were French Huguenots in...

Perhaps you heard that Roseanne Barr recently sang the national anthem at a Padres-Reds game in San Diego. If not, then you’re one of maybe three people in America who missed it, so let me fill you in. Looking like she had just rushed over from an all-day garage cleaning, Barr took the field in...

Nearly every film using Europe as a backdrop for international intrigue, especially those featuring Nazis in black leather trench coats, employs a scene in which the hero is crossing transnational borders on a slow-moving train. As he nervously exhales a cloud of blue smoke from an unfiltered cigarette, the authorities move from berth to berth...

Country music has never been shirked in the pages of Chronicles, as any faithful reader knows. John Reed’s June column concerning the Far East’s fascination with country music, however, left out one pertinent mention: the story of Torn Mitsui. Mr. Mitsui is a fifty-year-old professor of English at Kanazawa University; he is also Japan’s foremost...

At the moment the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to enact parental consultation abortion statutes, the abortion-advocacy organizations went into high gear. The Hodgson v. Minnesota and Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health decisions “endangered teens,” they claimed, and NOW President Molly Yard charged that the Court had “thrown down the...

I had just finished delivering the keynote address at the Hesburgh Public Policy Colloquium on “Housing and Homelessness” at the University of Notre Dame, and the questioning had begun. After a number of questions of the kind that every audience asks—and rightfully so—about my experiences posing as a homeless man, someone asked the question. Now...

I wanted to check out Dick Tracy mostly because the Disney stock had gone down four points and a fraction on the Monday after its first weekend’s disappointing grosses of only $22.5 million. That news was not encouraging to investors, but I saw it as an indication that perhaps some of those enthusiastic reviews I’d...

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Produced by Kees Kasander Written and directed by Peter Greenaway Released by Miramax Films The Plot Against Harry Produced by Michael Roemer and Robert Young Written and directed by Michael Roemer Released by King Screen Lust, greed, betrayal, murder, and revenge are not at all unusual...

Women’s studies has emerged and, in large measure, won its place in the academy as an unabashedly political undertaking. “Teaching,” according to Florence Howe, a path breaker in women’s studies, “is a political act.” “Education,” Deborah Rosenfelt adds, “is the kind of political act that controls destinies.” In effect, they insist that education as we...

What Joseph’s coat of many colors is to a London Fog raincoat Ontario’s Stratford Shakespearean Festival is to all other summer drama festivals. It was founded in 1953 by Tom Patterson, a Stratford journalist. Patterson’s motives were varied but one is obvious. If God had not intended a Canadian Shakespeare festival, why had He named...

Several Nazi concentration camps, as I explained in a recent Chronicles article called “Buchenwald’s Second Life” (July 1989), were used by the Soviet occupying authorities in East Germany for some five years after the war, and for their original purpose. That was once a secret, but we are now in a wholly new age. Some...

I know three people (and if I alone know three, there must be more of them out there) who think “This Land Is Your Land” is a country song—and one of the three sings it to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine.” Now, it’s a fact that Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs once recorded...

Until this year, acid rain was rarely front-page material in Canada, though a Parliamentary Special Committee on Acid Rain did solid work both on identifying the sources and proposing remedies. As a newsmaker, however, it was overshadowed by such Canadian staples as the whopping national debt, constitutional wrangles between Ottawa and the provinces, and Quebec’s...

Now, when world food supplies are more uncertain than they have been for more than a century, the United States badly needs a national agricultural policy. While Congress and its agricultural committees are putting the finishing touches on another farm bill to replace the one expiring, it is not likely that we’ll get what we...

Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, now in its 14th year, has had its up and downs. But some local grumblings notwithstanding, this year’s festival was much better than last, with two excellent plays and only one real miss. Promised works from Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz and novelist...

The United States has bestowed upon 3.1 million persons the new designation of “lawful” in place of “illegal aliens,” which is what they were called when they arrived in our midst. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 attempts to right our mutual difficulty by putting these immigrants in line to become permanent resident...

In his 1935 essay “Religion and Literature,” T.S. Eliot argued that modern literature had become progressively secularized. In response he proposed that “literary criticism should be complemented by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint.” Eliot introduced his arguments with the famous statement, “The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards;...

The distinguished documentaries of Frederick Wiseman presuppose two things. First of all, there are the technical advances in film and cameras that allow him to shoot with less cumbersome equipment than would have been possible a generation ago and to do so in available light. Second, and rather more important, is Wiseman’s discovery of one...

When he was younger, my son would pipe up from time to time with what he called “Scott’s rules to live by,” his distinctly personal little life guides. My all-time favorite, arrived at when he was seven, was “Never get your hair cut by a man named Buster.” But the tidbit I would ponder most...

Political scientists are now grumpy. Instead of waxing enthusiastic about the 40 days that shook the world—let us say from the crumbling of the Berlin Wall to Ceausescu’s execution—they resent the brutal intrusion of reality on their slumber. It used to be so comfortable to think in terms of superpower pseudo-polarity, and global democratization is...

Lies can’t live forever, as we have seen recently in Eastern Europe. One result of the American invasion of Panama may be that, despite the best efforts of the United States Army, Americans will finally learn the truth about women in the military. It didn’t take long for the truth to come out of Panama,...

It was 1979 and the Carter administration was coming to a close when Larry Brady, the Commerce Department’s deputy director for export administration, testified before the Ichord Subcommittee of the House Armed Services panel. Run by conservative Democrat Richard Ichord, the subcommittee was trying to determine whether the Kama River Truck plant, which was built...

Montaigne in his Essays called it ignorance doctorale (1.54). Four hundred years later an American journalist called it “educated incompetence.” It means the sort of nonknowledge, or anti-knowledge, that can follow upon higher learning, especially when theorizing about politics, morality, and the arts. That, in the first age of mass higher education in human history,...

One afternoon last winter, I was trying on jackets in a department store dressing room when a woman with a child entered the compartment next to mine. The child was cranky; the woman was chatty. Choosing hope over reality, as mothers in chancy situations often do, the woman said, “Be a good boy, Jeffrey. This’ll...

When my grandmother was 89 she became a mild celebrity as a painter. Another Grandma Moses. Only better, at least I thought so. She began painting in her late 60’s, after her husband died, to fill the void and loneliness. Then, quite unexpectedly, two famous artists stumbled upon her work while she was exhibiting at...

In January 1989, 55 members of the Rocky Mountain Humane Society made a five-mile trek to the Denver Livestock Exchange Building. At that center of agricultural enterprise they held a memorial service for the unfortunate victims of humankind’s “flesh eating addiction.” In 1987, the University of California Veterinary Diagnostic Research Laboratory in Davis suffered $4.3...

How the Bush and Reagan Administrations Subverted the ‘Choice in Education’ Movement In Chicago, councils dominated by parents have been elected to govern each public school. In Minnesota, parents can send their children to any public school in the district. In Charlottesville, President Bush met with the nation’s governors to discuss education, and the most-talked...

Art patronage has had a long, uneven, and agitated history, and ideas about it appear to have long ago been settled: we call “great ages” those with intellectual and artistic brilliance, and we also add that these achievements were largely public, since taste and splendor were manifested first of all in buildings, churches, town halls,...

The Case of Louis Harris and Associates The most important principle underlying democracy is that the majority should rule. But until relatively recently, Americans have been poorly equipped to communicate their wishes to elected representatives. The principal means for doing so has always been elections. But elections occur relatively infrequently, and they provide no means...

The cost of producing on Broadway has risen sharply, particularly in the last ten to fifteen years, and this has taken its toll on American productions. Inflation, higher priced labor and materials, theatrical union wage increases, featherbedding, and the enormous cost of advertising—a full page ad in The New York Times is upwards of $10,000,...

Illegal aliens will be counted in the 1990 census—that’s right, illegal aliens. As a result, one or more states with a disproportionately large number of illegal residents will gain seats in the House of Representatives at the expense of states with few illegal immigrants. According to calculations by the Congressional Research Service, the inclusion of...

Why does serious 20th-century music attract so few listeners? This unpopularity is not due to a lack of interest in serious music itself, since classical music is a formidable industry that regularly draws vast numbers of listeners worldwide. These people flock to listen to the works of an earlier era, however—music of the 17th, 18th,...

Euphron: Why is it, Socrates, that so many of our young, and even we ourselves, know so little, when we are being taught so much? Socrates: The truth is that most citizens know much more than they are aware of Euphron: How can that be, when there are prizes for displaying knowledge, which are forfeited...

The two most elemental questions raised by the Pete Rose gambling scandal were: do actions have consequences? and do the rules mean anything? With Rose’s suspension from major league baseball, in keeping with the rules of major league baseball, came one answer to both questions: yes. But the affair raised other questions whose answers weren’t...

The resurgence of campus racism has been a big topic in the news for nearly a year now. According to the often-cited National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence in Baltimore, the number grows all the time. By mid-1989, the institute had reported “racist incidents” on 175 different campuses within the last three years. I live...

John Lofton Interviews Allen Ginsberg Lofton: In the first section of your poem “Howl” you wrote: “I saw the best young minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Did this also apply to you? Ginsberg: That’s not an accurate quotation. I said the “best minds,” not “the best young minds.” This is what is called...

Man may be dying out, but patriarchy—men’s oppression of women—lives on. If only we were more controlled by women, or at least by the feminine aspect of our natures, life would be much better: kinder, gentler, and more “caring.” It is patriarchy, after all, that makes America so aggressive; it is patriarchy that makes American...

Reflections on the 1989 Whitney Biennial of American Art “Among the Neo-Minimalists Liz Larner makes a strangely regular tapestry out of human eyelashes. The team of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler compares bottles of powdered pigment. Meg Webster makes a big low-lying circle out of nothing but dirt; a second sculpture populates soil with plants,...