American Scholar articles from January 2000

American Scholar archives from January 2000

AT LARGE AND AT SMALL.(a daughter recalls her father's love of mail)
January 1, 2000... Mail Some years ago, my parents lived at the top of a steep hill. My father kept a pair of binoculars on his desk with which, like a pirate captain hoisting his spyglass to scan the horizon for treasure ships, he periodically inspected the...

COMMONPLACE BOOK.(observations and quotations on childbirth)
January 1, 2000... Birth Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. --ANDY WARHOL, From A to B and Back Again, 1975 The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards...

The Artist as Prophet and Jester.(the development and impact of modernism in literature, poetry and art)
January 1, 2000... Whether or not we need the term Postmodernism to mark our recent sense of cultural change, we are now far enough away from the rise and dominance of Modernism itself for a calm estimate of its effects on society and the individual. This does...

Ray Brown: "If You Don't Force It".(Poem)
January 1, 2000... He's talking about interpolations riffs that come in in the midst of action, responding to the line, accommodating the blues and not neglecting the melody refusing to smother beauty with too many chords...

RELEASE: Kind of Blue.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... 8.17.59 Miles (being ahead) came in early with the sketches he did not mention Japanese visual art though Bill Evans did his liner notes stretching each brush stroke as metaphor for...

O'Keeffe's Barn with Snow.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Start with the clean foundation, blocks of stone, here on the right forming an underwall where the foreground slopes suddenly away, the threshold and the anchor of the scene. Two drifted sills relieve the wash of grays ...

My Supermarket.(a professor who chooses to shop at the supermarket every day describes the experience)
January 1, 2000... I shop every day. Most people don't. The service manager at the supermarket is worried about me. Whenever she looks up, there I am. "We're going to have to get you a job here," she says. "You're here enough." I didn't use to shop every...

Lord Acton and the Lost Cause.(the English hisotrian Lord Acton was an outspoken supporter of the Confederacy during America's Civil War)
January 1, 2000... Photographs of John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton, show a severe, imposing man dressed in black, with a beard that was extravagant even for a Victorian sage: an incurably dusty figure who would speak to us today, if at all, in...

Alone with the Cat.(learning to appreciate the social aspects of the cat)
January 1, 2000... The cat was of no interest to me: I am not now and never was a cat lover. When cat lovers' cats made their advances, I sat in frozen courtesy. But for reasons also of no interest, I had to spend four months with the cat, and I determined, on...

Morality Plays.(moralists and economists interested in moral economy)
January 1, 2000... "Leave those vain moralists, my friend," Rousseau advised, "and return to the depth of your soul." His great contemporary Edmund Burke lamented that "the age of chivalry is gone; that of... economists... has succeeded." One can only imagine,...

The Billion Heartbeats of the Mammal.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... "Feel this," my father says, guiding my hand To the simple braille of his pacemaker. "Sixty," he tells me, "over and over Like a clock," and I mention the billion heartbeats of the mammal, how the lifespan Can be...

Egret.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... The slick head has seamed the bay and trusted in. True rhythm is that water, sunken ripple underseen. Molly McQuade's collection of poetry, Barbarism, will be published this year. Stealing Glimpses, her book of essays...

On Not Seeing Venice.
January 1, 2000... I have never been to Venice and have no wish to go. People say, you must go to Venice, you'll love it. But they said the same about another vision on water, New York, and I did go to New York and found nothing except giant sculpture....

Lines on Discovering the Result of Barry McGuigan's Championship Fight While Pausing at a Hotel in Wicklow for Tea.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... O it was a terrible blow, The face of the proprietress crumpling As she told me the news, As if Barry himself had jabbed it, Which he hadn't Which was exactly the problem During the bout, Said her husband the...

Glass Flowers.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms, but it is not so. We have tact. --Leopold Blaschka, maker of the glass flowers at Harvard's Peabody Museum Even the blue...

Millennial Sideshow.('Left Behind' series of books)
January 1, 2000... The Millennium turned, and that was that: no trumpets, no plagues, no famines. This must have been a crushing disappointment to the born-again broadcasters, writers, preachers, and volunteer zealots who had been training their flocks to believe...

Get Up to Dance.(Poem)
January 1, 2000... For Milton Miller If I cannot write to you now I can write of you then. A man coming out of a wall by the front door of a four-stoW brick apartment house in Brighton Beach Brooklyn, opening on a mid-30s New Year's Eve...

THE UNCERTAIN ART.(acupuncture)
January 1, 2000... Acupuncture and Science When last heard from, "The Uncertain Art" had just wandered into a whereabout far beyond even the vaguely defined boundaries within which it usually makes its way. The subject of the most recent column was...

JOURNAL: A Bookman's Year.(a writer and book lover's one-year journal of his book activities)
January 1, 2000... A Bookman's Year For anyone who likes books and can at least tolerate people, the bookselling business cannot be beaten. Each day is an adventure; as in libraries, one never knows what the next approach will bring, what inquiry or request...

ROARING CAMP: THE SOCIAL WORLD OF THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH.
January 1, 2000... ROARING CAMP: THE SOCIAL WORLD OF THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH By Susan Lee Johnson. Norton. $27-95. For a very long time, the persistent popular version of the California Gold Rush of 1849 held that it consisted largely of a flood of young...

ALMOST EVERYONE'S GUIDE TO SCIENCE.
January 1, 2000... ALMOST EVERYONE'S GUIDE TO SCIENCE By John Gribbin. Yale. $24.95. Bernstein's first law of book reviewing is that every book is innocent until found guilty, with the corollary that prior convictions should probably be disclosed. In this...

MORE MATTER: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM.
January 1, 2000... MORE MATTER: ESSAYS AND CRITICISM By John Updike. Knopf. $35. John Updike's sensibilities were formed by small-town America and the 1950s. The combination ought to have sunk his chances to become a serious writer, but he knew, earlier than...

SPEAKING INTO THE AIR: A HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF COMMUNICATION.
January 1, 2000... SPEAKING INTO THE AiR: A HISTORY OF THE IDEA COMMUNICATION By John Dunham Peters. Chicago. $26. The history of an idea we never knew had a history has its charms and its risks. On one level, it may seem a work of supererogation to tell a...

READING RILKE: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION.
January 1, 2000... READING RILKE: REFLECTIONS ON THE PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATION By William H. Gass. Knopf. $25. The devotee of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) who reads little or no German is inevitably faced with a dilemma when it comes to choosing among...

THE READER REPLIES.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2000... GOING UP TO OXFORD Thank you for another wonderful issue. I particularly enjoyed Renee Fox's essay on her year as Eastman Professor at Balliol College. She described Oxford from an American point of view, but with a generous amount of...

Sidewise.(creative storytelling)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... I often tell people that I do not come from a long line of literary women, but I do come from a long line of creative ones. The difference is that instead of taking the form of a book neatly shelved, their creations were promptly devoured, or...