American Scholar articles from January 2004

American Scholar archives from January 2004

Lost in America?(Letter from the Editor)(Editorial)
January 1, 2004... In "Against the Grain," this issue's lead article, Richard Manning asks what has happened to America's farms. Industrial agriculture has happened: the replacement of diverse crops on small farms by grain monoculture--corn, soybeans, wheat, and...

Coffee.(At Large And At Small)
January 1, 2004... When I was a sophomore in college, I drank coffee nearly every evening with my friends Peter and Alex. Even though the coffee was canned; even though the milk was stolen from the dining hall and refrigerated on the windowsill of my friends'...

Music.(Commonplace Book)
January 1, 2004... Then came Wagner's "Introduction to the Opera Lohengrin." I heard its opening movement at the rehearsal of a fortnight ago, supposed it was Hector Berlioz's Carnival Overture, and inferred that hector berlioz [sic] was experimenting on a new...

Through.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Through Where are the dead? The blackened fish, the roux, the manic Television chef's delight In what we'll never know-Now this is good. Grab a spoon,t-Makes me think of you. You're not among, ...

Nothing Getting Past.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Nothing Getting Past If life is a thin film sandwiched between twin immensities of nothing, you get the best taste of this out West in the open country where a keen could mean the ...

Talk.
January 1, 2004... A friend and I were going out for martinis, which affect me with subtle specificity. "What are you like when you drink them?" he asked. "I'm the same," I said, "except I talk more." I paused for him to compute that, and said, "Does that help...

Invisible Mending.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Invisible Mending I used to save them up For you. A heap On the bedroom floor In a corner. The sordid details Of my life. Saturday afternoons. "Bless me, Father," And they looked like sins, A...

Old Movies.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Old Movies Wasting a few more hours of my mortal stint, I watch for the half dozenth time a comedy From the 1930s in which people walk Into swinging doors, flirt, and trade wisecracks That even then were considered...

A Pigeon in Piketon.
January 1, 2004... It happened here in Piketon, Ohio, on just about the last day of the last winter of the nineteenth century--a day when the air was sweet with centennium spring and the creeks were full from freshets of snowmelt and a lone silver-blue passenger...

Roma Ineffabile: a visual essay.
January 1, 2004... Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past--an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of...

Her Hands.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Her Hands One's thumb worries the rosary of the other's knuckles, round and round, then absently begins to trace the metacarpals rooted in the wrist, the phalanges flared like rays of a halo, the fingernail's...

In the courtyard of the iguana brothers.
January 1, 2004... As above, so below.--Paracelsus Among the mysteries in Mexico that remained unsolved for me--along with how to distinguish the gecko from the iguana, swallow peyote, and repel the advances of men--was the true reason our landlord, Antonio,...

First Word.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2004... First Word At Bowdoin I began to know the bleak stone Upjohn church and isolating snow on my black morning tramps down to the Greek diner for breakfast. I was young to know puddles of sorrow; at sixteen and raw, I...

Deeper water.
January 1, 2004... The best songwriter you never heard of has recorded fifteen albums of his work, sold a million records, and played live for two million people. Perhaps thirty million have savored his songs around the world. He has toured Europe, Australia,...

My Florida.
January 1, 2004... Sartorially speaking, my father was a man of almost spectacular dullness. During the later decades of his working life in New York, he bought two suits a year, one navy and one brown. He never went to work in anything but a white shirt so...

The man or he moment?(The Scientific Method)
January 1, 2004... In a recent letter to the editor of The New York Review of Books, the eminent physicist and author Freeman Dyson was taken to task for his essay on a new biography of Isaac Newton. "Dyson unfortunately shows how little versed he is in...

Notes from a diary.(Journal)
January 1, 2004... 1 What, does music mean? I've been living with music all my life and still don't know the answer. Surely music's the most immediately persuasive of the seven arts--can any of the others make us weep, or fall in love, or recall the past?...

Flaubert's Anatomy.
January 1, 2004... I first read Madame Bovary in July of 1971, in a bunkhouse in Deer Lodge, Montana. I was nineteen years old and had gotten myself a summer job that gratified all my fan tasies about meeting the "authentic" face to face. An all-purpose "hand" on...

Once upon a time in the west.(One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis And Clark)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... ONE VAST WINTER COUNT: THE NATIVE AMERICAN WEST BEFORE LEWIS AND CLARK By Colin G. Calloway. University of Nebraska Press. $39.95. "Acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world," declared the famous requerimiento of...

Electrified Pate.(Everything And More: A Compact History Of)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... EVERYTHING AND MORE: A COMPACT HISTORY OF By David Foster Wallace. W. W. Norton and James Atlas Books. $23.95. In his oxymoronically titled Everything and More, David Foster Wallace sketches the history of humanity's attempts to understand...

One of nature's rebels.(Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr: Letters From The Civil Rights Years)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... FREEDOM WRITER: VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR: LETTERS FROM THE CIVIL RIGHTS YEARS Edited by Patricia Sullivan. Routledge. $29.95 In December 1962, Virginia Foster Durr wrote to a friend about her life as a white liberal in Montgomery, Alabama: "It...

Toying with Boutonnieres.(Design For Living: Alfred Lunt And Lynne Fontanne, A Biography)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... DESIGN FOR LIVING: ALFRED LUNT AND LYNNE FONTANNE, A BIOGRAPHY By Margot Peters. Alfred A. Knopf. $30. In Henry James's short story "The Real Thing," a painter, intent on creating an image of extreme refinement, hires two impecunious...

String.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... Having just watched three Nova episodes on string theory, I expected Nicholson Baker's "String" ("At Large and At Small," Autumn 2003) to be about current ideas in physics. No. It was about string--the ordinary and yet not so ordinary string of...

How Kipling Taught Me To Write.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... Thank you for Clara Claiborne Park's instructive essay "How Kipling Taught Me to Write." We learn so much whenever Park picks up her pen. NANCY JAMES Landenberg, Pennsylvania

An Army of One.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... At sixty-one, I am among those whose lives "conscription bedeviled." As a high school dropout, I volunteered in order to avoid the draft, never got the special training that was promised, and ended up serving as a para-trooper in places I never...

Exploding the Dog.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... Andrew Hudgins's "Exploding the Dog" was memorable. Knowing, as a writer, the time lapse between acceptance and publication, I fear that Rosie now runs with the immortals. God's speed, Rosie: he too is the giver of runs. I will not forget you....

The Podium: James the flaneur.
January 1, 2004... When William James was between the formative ages of six and thirteen, his family occupied one of NewYork City's new brownstones, on West Fourteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. His father believed that firsthand observation was the...