American Scholar articles from January 1998

American Scholar archives from January 1998

A.J. Liebling, a writist at work: old days at The New Yorker.
January 1, 1998... Old Days at The New Yorker A few months after I began working at The New Yorker, in the winter of 1949, I was asked by Leo Hofeller, who had administrative duties in the editorial department, if I'd like to work for Mr. Liebling. Without...

The gardener. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Since the phlox are dying, and the daisies with their bright bodies have shattered in the wind, I go out among these last dancers, cutting to the ground the withered asters, the spent stalks of the lilies, the black rose; and see them as...

The naturalist. (poem)
January 1, 1998... To what end our passions might have hurried Had it not been for some envious matrons Who encircled the Cherokee virgins Harvesting wild strawberries, bathing Their limbs in the cold fleeting streams, staining The waters with their rich fruit and...

Album of Giles. (author Giles Playfair)
January 1, 1998... I am a member of the Garrick Club in London. This came about because, in 1944, I met Giles Playfair in New York. Laura and I, lately married, were part of a small informal group of people interested in theater history. One of the group knew...

To Nancy. (poem)
January 1, 1998... For twenty years or more, dear friend, you've known the worst and not complained but held to your calm chosen ways with elegance and grace. Courage as a state of mind is tending to small things at hand and this you've done so skilfully you've...

The friend. (poem)
January 1, 1998... I think of you this winter noon sun glinting from our icy streets and wonder at life's chances, how each day renews the pangs of loss for those, like you, who year by year, while others fawned and bent the knee, held to a difficult true course,...

The purse. (poem)
January 1, 1998... As if everything she needed to save herself were within her reach and all she had to do was piece together the clues inside her purse, she hovers over the kitchen table like some necromancer, hour by hour removing combs and loose coins, a set of...

Teaching American history.
January 1, 1998... The heated debate over the National History Standards has highlighted the larger question of What history should our children learn? Should this history feature the patriotism, heroism, and ideals of the nation? Or should it feature the...

Gertrude Stein: woman is a woman is.
January 1, 1998... Gertrude Stein is one of those renowned American authors about whom, it's commonly supposed, everything is known - and not just because she's a veritable household name in households that have never read her. A woman who fixed her eye firmly on...

Caesarean. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Startled from ancient sleep in a dark house By crashing walls, harsh torches, strangers Dragging him naked through his mother's blood, No hero would stand up to the invaders With such intrinsic dignity as you showed This morning, the first day of...

Family portrait. (poem)
January 1, 1998... I am the one in that picture there looking earnest at four, squinting into the sun. I am the one with one foot forward and Papa's hands on my shoulders holding me back. I am the one with one ear different, I heard what whistled the dog. I am the...

The paternal imperative.
January 1, 1998... I used to think of myself as a rebellious son; but now this essay is in defense of the traditional father - the responsible, authoritative paterfamilias. I hold that, while strong fathers can be a real pain, difficult, sometimes even oppressive...

The mandolin and the tenor. (poem)
January 1, 1998... Winter nights when animal breath hung frozen in the barn you gathered wife and six children around the woodstove in the old farmhouse, picked a delicate, haunting tune on that most American of instruments, the mandolin, and lifted your tenor...

Road to Santipur. (poem)
January 1, 1998... You could leave the kitchen where you've knelt in homage to burnt toast. Close the dusty drapes. Light is mute, wrote Dante. Leave the washroom where your father's voice lives in each stain. Fill your suitcase with palette knives, fresh tubes...

Jewish fathers and sons and daughters.
January 1, 1998... In his recent memoir, Messages from My Father, Calvin Trillin records a relative's favorite Jewish joke: A struggling young Jewish actor announces to his parents one day that he finally got a part in a legitimate production. He is to play a...

In quest of Graham Hough. (writer)
January 1, 1998... There are writers one strongly suspects that are not "great" but of whose works one cannot get enough. I'm not thinking of so-called guilty pleasures, such as those of the classics scholar who reads Anne Rice novels or the theologian who loves...

The prosaic Willa Cather. (writer)
January 1, 1998... In Willa Cather's fiction, friendship nourishes and protects while romantic love leads to disillusion or death. Jim Burden of My Antonia cares for Antonia Shimerda all his life because when he was young he dreamed about Lena Lingard, not Antonia....

Rediscovering Mina Loy. (actress)
January 1, 1998... Say the name Mina Loy and people still hear the name of a dead movie star, though with the help of this first biography and a new edition of poems Mina Loy is again re-establishing her originality and place in the history of modernism. Mina Loy's...

Brussels sprouts. (poem)
January 1, 1998... In drag-foot March, and fastening my coat against a churlish wind, as I arrive at the greengrocer's stall I have in mind Bermuda onions, chard, asparagus, red peppers, corn - a salad for the eye - and long-stemmed hothouse marvels hastening the...

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Lectures on Symmetry, Relativity, and Space-Time.
January 1, 1998... In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was writing long profiles of scientists for The New Yorker, it was frequently suggested to me that I do a profile of Richard Feynman. While Feynman was not then widely known outside the metier of physics, he was...

Injured Brains of Medical Minds: Views From Within.
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by EDISON MIYAWAKI This "archival" collection of doctors' accounts of personal brain injury and brain disease derives from the premise that the "perspective of the healer who now needs to be healed" is qualitatively different from...

The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction.
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by JONATHAN ELUKIN David Weiss Halivni, a prominent professor of rabbinic literature at Columbia University, has written a unique memoir that carries the reader from the small town of Sigher in the Carpathian Mountains to Auschwitz...

A Life of Matthew Arnold.
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD "My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind...

Milton in America.
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by MORRIS FREEDMAN John Milton's place in the pantheon of world literature has not been firm or unassailable. John Dryden, his younger contemporary, took Milton much at his own evaluation, as belonging in the company of Euripides and...

Sporting with Amaryllis.
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by MORRIS FREEDMAN John Milton's place in the pantheon of world literature has not been firm or unassailable. John Dryden, his younger contemporary, took Milton much at his own evaluation, as belonging in the company of Euripides and...

Inventions of the March Hare: Poems, 1909-1917.
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN In his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, the late poet laureate Sir John Betjeman recounted an incident from his school days circa 1915: And so I bound my verse into a book The Best of Betjeman, and handed...

W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre.(.)
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by ALEXANDRA MULLEN In 1927, the Gershwin brothers, George Kaufman, and Morrie Ryskind were trying out their musical comedy Strike Up the Band in Philadelphia. It looked like a flop. Abandoning the almost completely empty theater, the...

The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan.
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by ALEXANDRA MULLEN In 1927, the Gershwin brothers, George Kaufman, and Morrie Ryskind were trying out their musical comedy Strike Up the Band in Philadelphia. It looked like a flop. Abandoning the almost completely empty theater, the...

Charles Ives, A Life with Music.
January 1, 1998... Reviewed by ROBERT C. JONES In an article about Charles Ives and his music published in the November 1946 issue of Listen, Lou Harrison wrote: I suspect that the works of Ives are a great city, with public and private places for all, and...

I'm history. (essay about the American Scholar journal's column 'Life and Letters')
January 1, 1998... This is, I believe, my ninety-second Aristides essay, and my final one. I should have liked to have rounded the number off at an even hundred, but it was not to be. The first such essay, titled "A Literary Mafia?," ran in the Spring 1975 issue....

The historical roots of racism.
January 1, 1998... In the state of nature, among wild creatures or primitive humans, a stranger, he who is "not one of us" or like us, is viewed at least with suspicion and more likely with hostility. He may be seen as a predator to be fled or as prey to be seized;...

A.J. Leibling, a writist at work: old days at The New Yorker.
January 1, 1998... Old Days at The New Yorker A few months after I began working at The New Yorker, in the winter of 1949, I was asked by Leo Hofeller, who had administrative duties in the editorial department, if I'd like to work for Mr. Liebling. Without...

Of paradoxes and tautologies.
January 1, 1998... In Plato's dialogue Parmenides maintains that "Everything is relative to every other thing in the following way: either it is the same, or different, or, if it is neither the same nor different, it is part relative to whole or whole relative to...