American Scholar articles from January 2003

American Scholar archives from January 2003

Vanilla and chocolate. (Letter From The Editor).(personal essays)(Editorial)
January 1, 2003... "To call oneself a born personal essayist," writes Emily Fox Gordon in "Book of Days," this issue's lead essay, "is like calling oneself a born dowager or a born eminence grise." Nonetheless, few of its readers are likely to deny that Gordon...

The Arctic Hedonist. (At Large And At Small).(arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson)
January 1, 2003... My father was an insomniac. He used to while away the small hours of the night with mental games, of which his favorite was called I Shook Hands with Shakespeare. He had shaken hands with the actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, who had in turn...

Dreaming. (Commonplace Book).
January 1, 2003... All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it...

Book of days.(writing personal essays versus memoirs)
January 1, 2003... I am a passive woman. I am a gormless woman. My life has been characterized by an extreme and pervasive failure of agency. When I look back at my fifty-four years, I'm appalled at the proportion of my time I've passed lying on couches, smoking,...

First Lesson: The Anatomist Explains the Primacy of Imagination.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... First Lesson The Anatomist Explains the Primacy of Imagination These fontanelles of your skull won't close for eighteen months; until then the bones remain as separate plates--frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal,...

Paperweight.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Paperweight Brought home from the museum giftshop in the long darkness that ended when I opened my eyes to this world, mock scarab of metal nicked and pitted to make it look like what we think it should resemble,...

Opening exercises.(Pledge of Allegiance)
January 1, 2003... When three federal judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled a week before July 4, 2002, that the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag could no longer be recited in the public schools within its jurisdiction because of the words "under...

Rimbaud rules.(Arthur Rimbaud)
January 1, 2003... Sometimes it seems as if anyone who has ever aspired to hipness has laid claim to the nineteenth-century poete maudit and Ur-Bad Boy Arthur Rimbaud. He was born to be wild, a room-trashing rock star with a passion for drugs, drink, and...

Improvised justice: constitution vs. reality in South Africa.
January 1, 2003... Section 9. (1) Everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law. Section 10. Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected a nd protected. Section 12. (1)...

The Caliph of Fonthill.(author William Beckford)
January 1, 2003... When people talk about books that changed their lives, they usually mean books with high-powered ideas that altered their way of thinking, such as the Bible, or The Prince, or Emerson s essays. In my case it was a much less exalted sort of...

Madonnas.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Madonnas Fair Mary, caught mid-task (one hand raised to fend off the kneeling angel's words), your face is stilled by news you never expected. How dare a mortal compare herself to you? And yet is this what the...

Bad.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Bad for Carolyn Kizer, who once told me this story She had been bad, very, bad at dinner, and was told If she didn't stop being bad Downstairs, she would have to go upstairs And be bad all by herself, and if she didn't...

"How nice to meet you, Mr. Dickey".(author James Dickey)
January 1, 2003... You don't always meet the authors you admire under the best possible circumstances. Human encounters--like most other natural phenomena--occur in random patterns that range from best to worst. In 1987 I met James Dickey under very uncomfortable...

Cinna the poet in London.(encounters with anti-Semitism)
January 1, 2003... In 1950, when I was twenty-one, I went to Europe for the first time, telling myself I was going to study art but in fact following a young woman. We lived together in Rome and Paris, but it did not work out between us. She went home alone; I...

Mentors.(graduate studies in English literature at Harvard, 1943-1945)
January 1, 2003... From 1943 to 1945 I was a graduate student at Harvard. (In those days it was Harvard-Radcliffe, since the women's college had a separate existence as well as a name of its own.) It was during World War II, and the graduate-student population...

Tattoo.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Tattoo When the sensible, blunt-spoken woman who cuts my hair bends down to plug in the blow-dryer, a dragon slithers at the top of her left buttock like a jazzy vein, giving me a whole new ...

Sunday Night.(Poem)
January 1, 2003... Sunday Night The upstairs bathroom is cold, but I can lie stretched out, full length, at fourteen, still shy three inches of the tub's six feet, square bones of my knees poking just above the water, drops spangling my...

Reference works.
January 1, 2003... Cincinnati was settled in 1788, Cleveland in 1796, and Columbus in 1797. Cleveland/Ahron is the sixteenth largest Combined Metropolitan Statistical Area in the country. Ohio is seventh among the states in population. In 2000 Ohio's unemployment...

Morocco, May 2002. (Journal).
January 1, 2003... April. I have heard it from dozens of alumni, but privately insisted that it would be different for me. Still, by about the eighth month after university, I am forced to concede that the mystery that hung beyond the horizon of graduation has...

On being human. (Rereading).(Christopher Morley's Human Being)
January 1, 2003... In 1936, I read Christopher Morley's Human Being, a book that is, at least for its time, unusual. It's a literary hybrid, the result of a coupling between a pair of more conventional forms--the novel and the essay. I was moved enough by that...

The 2002 American Scholar Awards.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... The Editorial Board and staff are pleased to announce the fifth annual AMERICAN SCHOLAR Awards, honoring the best writing that appeared in our pages during the past year. "Teacher: Eleven Notes" by LIONEL BASNEY Winter Best...

Duking it out.(Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... RENAISSANCE RIVALS: MICHELANGELO, LEONARDO, RAPHAEL, TITIAN By Rona Goffen. Yale University Press. $39.95. When Thomas More set out to write his Utopia, he imagined a world that would transform all of the negative energies he observed...

Bildung and breakdown.(The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... THE PITY OF IT ALL: A HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN GERMANY, 1743-1933 By Amos Elon. Metropolitan. $30. Of all the persecuted minorities in Western culture, Jews are most often associated with self-hatred. And of all the Jews around the world,...

The red frontier.(Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... MAPPING MARS: SCIENCE, IMAGINATION, AND THE BIRTH OF A WORLD By Oliver Morton. Picador. $30. A quick glance at its glossy picture section reveals that Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World is not a technical...

Dress codes.(Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear )(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... UNIFORMS: WHY WE ARE WHAT WE WEAR By Paul Fussell. Houghton Mifflin. $22. As of several years ago, Paul Fussell's 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System was still being passed around among the students of at least...

How Stanley Fish works.(How Milton Works)(Book Review)
January 1, 2003... HOW MILTON WORKS By Stanley Fish. Belknap/Harvard. $35. Stanley Fish has long been among the better known if more narrowly focused American students of John Milton and, with his "reader's response" formulations, among those critics...

Bugs. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2003... The almost always illuminating "Commonplace Book" of related quotations selected by Andre Bernard is a regular pleasure of the SCHOLAR. However, "Bugs" (Autumn 2002) surprisingly omitted any selection from Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize-winning...

A distinctly bluesy condition. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2003... Carlo Rotella's piercing essay on Buddy Guy and the startling American cultural phenomenon that is Chicago blues (a form invented by the children of slaves in steaming fields in Mississippi and then electrified and translated and bent by them...

The legend of Columbus. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2003... In "The Legend of Christopher Columbus," by Grace Marmor Spruch, the account of the experiment from which Eratosthenes determined the circumference of the earth was amusingly garbled. The article stated: At noon on the summer solstice,...

The treasure of the Sierra Madre. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2003... Robert Emmett Ginna, Jr.'s "In Search of The Treasure of Sierra Madre" is an engaging essay, but surely the role of the little beggar boy as played by a very young Robert Blake deserved mention. The portrayal might qualify as the briefest of...

The years with Kolatch. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2003... As a frequent contributor to The New Leader during the last decade, I very much enjoyed "The Years with Kolatch." Ben Yagoda's portrait of the magazine and its somewhat eccentric ways of operating is more than recognizable. I too have dined in...

Statement of ownership, management, and circulation.
January 1, 2003... (Act of August 12, 1970; Section 3685, Title 99, United States Code) 1. Title, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR; 2. Publication Number, 0231-60; 3. Filing Date, October 2002; 4. Frequency, Quarterly--March, June, September, December; 5. Number of...

Take that, Mrs Trollope. (The Podium).(American etiquette)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2003... When that very unpleasant Fanny Trollope--by the way, I adore her son, and there's very little evidence that she did--sailed to the United States in 1827, she had the usual motivations: idealism and the hope of making a fast buck. She failed,...