American Scholar articles from January 2007

American Scholar archives from January 2007

A walk around the block.(Editorial)
January 1, 2007... TO LOOK BACK AT THE 75-year history of this magazine is, for me as its editor, to flirt with paralysis. I knew from the moment I took the job two years ago not to take up a Greek nom de plume and compete as an essayist with my two distinguished...

The group.(Letter from Istanbul)(teaching Turkish students)
January 1, 2007... "You are an American soldier. You have one mission and one mission only: To protect your country and to fight against the enemy." Gozde reads the opening lines of her story to the creative-writing workshop I teach at Koc University. I am the...

Celebrations.(Commonplace Book)
January 1, 2007... We were now at the end of the last long march of the upward journey. Yet with the Pole actually in sight I was too weary to take the last few steps. The accumulated weariness of all those days and nights of forced marches and insufficient...

Secrets of Gothic masons.(Works in Progress)
January 1, 2007... The stoneworkers who built Gothic cathedrals didn't record their methods or designs. Eventually their guilds vanished, and with them went many details of cathedral construction. Only the buildings remain. Today a team of engineers at the...

Higher powers that be.(Works in Progress)(the relationship between religion and the government in USA)
January 1, 2007... The Founding Fathers thought they had solved the church-state problem by protecting liberty of conscience and prohibiting a national religion. Did they? Noah Feldman, the author of Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem and What We...

He gets you, under your skin.(Works in Progress)(George Stetten's Sonic Flashlight )(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... A bioengineer at the University of Pittsburgh has invented a device to give doctors access to a kind of "augmented reality" during operations. Using real-time tomographic reflection, George Stetten's so-called Sonic Flashlight combines the...

One small step for humankind.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... The convention of using masculine pronouns to describe both genders has long been a thorn in the side of feminists. Grammarians, meanwhile, also are troubled by the lack of an epicene, or gender-neutral, third-person-singular pronoun in modern...

Say what?(Works in Progress)(David Yager's photography)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... In his laboratory at the University of Maryland, David Yager photographs the sensory structures of insects: the single ear of the praying mantis, for instance, mounted in the center of its underbelly. Experiments confirm that mantises hear only...

Sound advice.(Works in Progress)(Tom Moon's 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... People have evaluated recordings ever since the day in December 1877 when the Wizard of Menlo Park leaned toward a horn, recited "Mary had a little lamb," and, on a piece of tinfoil, first captured sounds. Thomas Edison's raspy voice will not,...

Here's looking at you.(Works in Progress)(invasion of privacy)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... A tall man raises a homemade placard that asks "Who am I?" to a surveillance camera on a New York City subway platform. His message: you are being watched. He is one of an anonymous troupe that performs brief, silent skits from original texts...

An educated guess: who knew that mixing the intelligent and the idiosyncratic would yield a long life for a certain small quarterly?
January 1, 2007... I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. Emerson, "The American Scholar" PROLEGOMENON "Prologue" seems too ordinary a word for a magazine as weighty as...

Postcards from the past: pressing questions and a persistent vitality.(Amercan Scholar magazine)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... Surprise is the natural companion of research. Like Ted Widmer, I have also recently read through seven decades of the SCHOLAR and along the way made a series of unanticipated discoveries. The first was that, in almost any volume one chooses to...

Not compassionate, not conservative: a political traditionalist critiques our pseudo-conservative president.
January 1, 2007... In 1954 the celebrated American historian Richard Hofstadter offered his explanation for McCarthyism in an essay he contributed to THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR rifled "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt." Looking back on his essay 11 years later,...

Scooter and me: professing liberal doubt in an age of fundamentalist fervor.(Lewis "Scooter" Libby)
January 1, 2007... When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles...

Conflict and culture.(Poetry)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2007... Art is always produced during the "meanwhile" that begins Peter Filkins's poem "Water Lilies." In one sinuous sentence, its ideas and images suspended like floating flowers, Filkins meditates on the fact that Monet painted his late masterpiece...

Water Lilies.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Water Lilies Claude Monet, 1917 Meanwhile he painted them--water lilies floating on the surface of a pond he'd constructed "for the pleasure of the eye and motifs to paint" at the century's end, the new one begun...

Nine Times Nine, on Awe.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Nine Times Nine, on Awe 1. An architecture of inequity designs the lower floors of history, the unchanged, uncountable crypts of misery where the living and the dead are distinguished by their smell --one...

Netsuke.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Netsuke I walk on thin soles this dense season. No wind lifts the leaves, the thickened stream shakes no reeds. I spread my fan, hide half my wan face, pale with lead, pale with the shit...

Forgetting.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Forgetting The forgetting I notice most as I get older is really a form of memory: The undergrowth of things unknown to the young, that I have forgotten. Memory of so much crap, jumbled with so much that seems to...

Fear of falling: working in the mop-and-bucket brigade in college created the perspectives of a lifetime.
January 1, 2007... Like most college graduates, I am fond of my alma mater, though it exists only in historical records and the memories of those who attended it. In 1939, when I entered Cleveland College on a working scholarship, it seemed solid enough to last...

Glorious dust: the posthumous masterwork of an influential black historian tells how slavery itself undermined the Confederacy.(Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865 by Armstead L. Robinson)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... In the spring of 2005, when Bitter Fruits of Bondage, a brilliant, cogent, relatively short new book on the Civil War, saw publication, its author, Armstead L. Robinson, had been dead for 10 years. Formerly an associate professor of history at...

Fired: can a friendship really end for no good reason?
January 1, 2007... On a Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m., Beverly and I planned a trip to Long Island, just us girls, to celebrate my upcoming marriage. By that evening, Beverly and I were no longer friends. But I didn't know that yet. At 7:00 p.m. I was sure there...

Wheeling.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... On Friday I went to the doctor's office and was weighed for the second time in four days. "You weighed me on Tuesday," I said to the nurse, who had azalea-pink cheeks and half-carat diamond studs in her earlobes. "Weight and blood pressure...

Cowboys and Indians.(Short story)
January 1, 2007... Lord knows when I met Harry Livingston. Probably during my first winter in New York, right after college. In any case it was because of him that, a few years later, in 1962 or 1963, I enrolled in Niko's gym, an establishment then located on the...

The ballad in the street: listening for the muffled strains of a national culture.(Arts)(Excerpt)
January 1, 2007... Certain forms of culture or collective consciousness put questions to those who live within them, questions whose answers are normally taken for granted at a level of behavior so deep that we are hardly aware of the enigmas buried in them. To...

The Edgy Optimist: at 76, saxist Sonny Rollins is still on top of his game.(Jazz)(Theodore Walter Rollins)
January 1, 2007... "I've got to remember I'm on the wrong side of 40," 76-year-old Sonny Rollins says ruefully. He s in bed on his 120-acre farm in upstate New York. Two years after his wife Lucille's death and five years after the terrorist attack on the World...

When maestros were maestros: innovator, mentor, tyrant, Leopold Stokowski brought real joy to music making.(Classical Music)
January 1, 2007... The National Symphony Orchestra, where I've played cello for many years, is searching for a new music director-as are the orchestras in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Nashville, Dallas, and Detroit. This has led me to think about what makes a good leader...

The historical present: Robert Fagles's bold solutions to the problems of Virgil.(The Aeneid)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... THE AENEID By Virgil Translated by Robert Fagles Viking | $40 Thomas Jefferson's assertion that "every generation needs a new revolution" has long been adopted by translators; it is a commonplace that every generation needs a new Homer, a...

Pleasure out of desperation: Thomas Eakins, yearning for the ideal in a materialistic age.(Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... PORTRAIT The Life of Thomas Eakirts By William S. McFeely W. W. Norton $26.95 In the spring of 1887 Thomas Eakins, 42 years old, met Walt Whitman face-to-face at the Good Gray Poet's home in Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware...

Organized violence: in the last century, where did warfare end and genocide begin?(The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... THE WAR OF THE WORLD Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West By Niall Ferguson Penguin Press | $32.95 How did it come to pass that the 20th century gave us such murderous wars, so many of them, on so grand a scale, inflicting...

Poised between the ancient and the new.(Isaac B. Singer: A Life)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... ISAAC B. SINGER: A Life. By Florence Noiville, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23 Isaac Bashevis Singer, the last great Yiddish writer, used a dying language of exile to recreate a lost world. A...

What if nature had been thrifty?(The Best of All Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS: Mathematics and Destiny. By Ivar Ekeland, University of Chicago Press, $25 History has not been kind to Pierre-Louis Maupertuis. Voltaire ruined his reputation among his 18th-century contemporaries by...

Going native: when American literature became good enough for Americans, what happened to the literary canon?(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? --Sydney Smith, 1820 For the longest time American writers got little respect from condescending arbiters of taste abroad or even from literary scholars at home. Professors...

Getting it all wrong.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... Congratulations for printing in the Autumn 2006 issue of the SCHOLAR Brian Boyd's magisterial argument, which will, I believe, enjoy a long and influential life. JASON EPSTEIN New York City It takes chutzpah to write an essay on a...

Saratoga bill.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... I was quite disturbed to read the profile of Bill Reuben in the Autumn issue of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. It was certainly well written and charming but it profiled and praised a man who was a historical ignoramus and liar. It left the false...

My mother's body.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... I must confess that I was horrified by Mary Gordon's graphic descriptions of her mother's demise (Autumn 2006). She writes of rot and stench and revulsion, and as I read her memoir, I found myself praying that none of my children would ever so...

The man who loved languages.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... In "The Man Who Loved Languages" by Richard B. Woodward (Autumn 2006), the romance of searching for the Ursprache is highlighted, but the methodological difficulties of the Swadish/Greenberg/Starostin approach are underplayed. If I make a list...

Findings: bearing gifts.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... The brief article by Anne Matthews in the Autumn issue titled "Bearing Gifts" was a charming bow to the idea of gifts. My note here, though, concerns the illustration used for the article. It is a detail of a mosaic in the sixth-century church...

Let the parties begin.(Thomas Jefferson's speech)
January 1, 2007... At noon on March 4, 1801, in the Senate chamber of the Capitol, Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as the nation's third president. The occasion is best remembered, perhaps, for the lasting reverberation of Jefferson's First Inaugural...