virtue of being syntheses of the world," says Barzun. To dissect them "scientifically," trying to pry loose their component parts, is to misunderstand them. Works of art are meant to be regarded whole and to nurture mind and spirit.
Barzun perceives a mood of futility in the academic "kingdom of analysis, criticalness, and theory ." Sooner or later, he believes, the "forces of fatigue and boredom" will bring scholars' dominion over cul- ture to an end.
"Freud...
Dale Harris, in Degas9Ã? Da~cms Ballet News (Nov. 1984), 1865 Broadway,
New York, N.Y. 10023.
The "ballet boom" of recent years has made Edgar Degas's (1834-1917) paintings of ballerinas as familiar as the Mona Lisa and Whistler's Mother. But neither ballet nor the art of Degas was always viewed so fa- vorably, recalls Harris, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
In Degas's late-19th-century Paris, ballerinas stood barely a cut above dance-hall girls in the social pecking order....
PERIODICALS
cheesecake. In a famous incident during the 1861 Paris premiere of Wagner's opera Tannhauser, a group of wealthy young men who ar- rived too late for the "titillating" ballet portion howled the opera down. Degas apparently shared the general low public regard for bal- let: In many of his famous canvases, he lavished as much attention on the spectators and their social doings as on the dancers.
Degas's 1,500 ballet pieces earned him a reputation for misogyny in his own day....
Abimael Guzman, a professor at a provincial uni- versity in Ayacucho, high in the Andes, the Shining Path took up arms in 1980. Its leaders scorn both the Soviet Union and China, and receive no aid from either. The group is responsible for some 2,500 terrorist at- tacks nationwide-on factories, power plants, embassies-and 615 deaths. It enjoys growing popularity in the mountains around Ayacu- cho; the number of active terrorists has jumped from just two or three hundred in 1980 to perhaps 3,000...
The Philippines's David A. Rosenberg, in Problems of corn- munism (Sept.-Oct. 1984), Superinten- New Communists dent of Documents, U.S. Government
Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.
In 1981, President Ferdinand Marcos ended 10 years of martial law in the Philippines. During that decade, argues Rosenberg, a Middlebury College political scientist, Marcos managed through incompetence and bad judgment to rub old scars raw.
Marcos's iron-handed rule (he retains extraordinary powers) has str...
Jacob Ja-ither the vits, in Foreign Affairs (Fall 1985), Council
on Foreign Relations, 58 East 68th St.,
New York, N.Y. 10021.
In November 1973, the U.S. Congress-reacting to America's recent troubles in an undeclared war in Indochina-sought to tighten its grip on future U.S. military commitments. The legislators passed the War Powers Act. It required the president to consult with Congress before introducing armed forces "into situations where imminent involve- ment in hostilities is clearly...
Sidney Ulmer, in
The Supreme Court? The Journal of Politics (Aug. 1985), The University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla. 32611.
For at least 25 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has been accused of playing favoritesin civil liberties cases (involving issues of free speech, religion, privacy). Many legal scholars have claimed that in those cases posing a governmental litigant against an "underdog," the government side usually wins.
Are those who wage civil liberties battles against the U.S....
greed and self-interest, and his own national community, "a family where we care for each other."
"Progressive Liberalism and American
'Community'" William A. Schambra,
in The public ~nierest (Summer 1985). 10
mail Republics East 53rd St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
When Walter Mondale went down to defeat in the 1984 election, many political pundits (and Democrats) portrayed the voters' rejection of his campaign themeÃ?â??1'Le us be a community . . .knit together...
Kirsten Amundsen, in The
In Scandinavia Washington Quarterly (Summer 1985), 1800 K St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006.
On October 27, 1981, a Soviet submarine ran aground near a Swedish naval base in the Karlskrona archipelago. The incident provided undeni- able evidence of Soviet underwater incursions in the Baltic Sea-unau- thorized "visits" that the Swedes had observed since the late 1960s.
Amundsen, a Norwegian journalist and Visiting Fellow at the Atlan- tic Council, sees a complex...
Western journalists), Stockholm has reported some 300 incursions "foreign" submarines.
working. The Swedes now treat such probes as "routine" and no longer openly protest to Moscow.
Norway and Sweden-with their long coastlines-are difficult to de- fend against invasion. Many Western strategists, Amundsen observes, regard the "Norwegian-Soviet border [as] . . . perhaps the weakest link in [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's] defense lines in Europe." In case...