American Scholar articles from January 2008

American Scholar archives from January 2008

Balancing acts.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
January 1, 2008... As of yesterday, the president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had declared emergency rule and his rival, Benazir Bhutto, had urged her followers to take to the streets. The president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, had declared a state of...

Wonder bread.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... I assume that the writers condescended to by Melvin Jules Bukiet in "Wonder Bread" (Autumn 2007) are capable of defending themselves and their "Brooklyn Books of Wonder," though I would be willing to argue his point that "the only thing...

Oops.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... I was stunned to find this in the Brooklyn writers piece: "disdain lays beneath the surface." It doesn't lay, it lies. KELLY CHERRY Halifax, Virginia

Unto Caesar.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... I enjoyed Ethan Fishman's article in the Autumn 2007 issue. But he is wrong to blame only the Bush administration for policies that favor churches. The Democrats are also responsible. In 2006 Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Orrin G. Hatch...

The Trojan War.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... William Nichols in his essay "The Trojan War" does an excellent job of articulating the kind of irrational myopic thinking that may some day doom our planet. Nichols fails to consider the alternative to nuclear energy, which is to burn coal....

Poetry Stand.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... Douglas Goetsch's "Poetry Stand," about precocious high school students writing poetry on demand for passersby, is one of the most charming pieces I've ever read in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Never mind that in my high school days more than a half a...

Lady of the Lake.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... I was pleased to discover Alice Kaplan's article on Brenda Ueland in your Autumn issue and would like to add a brief addendum to the story. In 2002, when Brenda's daughter, Gabby, was in her 80s, she was moved to a nursing home. The...

Apologies all around.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... Most issues of the SCHOLAR have something of high interest for me, and every now and again, there's something I have to copy and keep. Every few years there's something so outstanding that I feel the need to write to you about it. So it is with...

Death on the installment plan.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... A magazine that thinks of itself as intellectual devotes several thousand words to something as irrelevant as a group of pop musicians? The Rolling Stones won't be cared about or remembered once the last baby boomer gasps his final breath. ...

Red-pen patriots.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... Larry J. Sabato's call for a Constitutional Convention ("Works in Progress") is fraught with danger. Once such a convention becomes a reality, it could put at risk the Constitution's most treasured provisions. The freedoms provided by the Bill...

Atonality and beyond.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... Sudip Bose in his review of The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross contends that the history of Western music is a progression from tonality to atonality. There is no historical evidence for this. Western music was at its most atonal and dissonant,...

Trapped in a golden age.(Letter from Vienna)
January 1, 2008... Fin-de-siecle Vienna may have flowered and faded more than a century ago, but the era remains a ubiquitous presence in the city today. Even if you do not visit the Belvedere Palace to see Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, simulacrums of that embrace...

Works in progress.
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BRIDGING THE BALKANS Built in the late 16th century, the Old Bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, was destroyed in 1993 during ethnic warfare. Its original stones, recovered from the Neretva River, were used in its...

Sign language: at their best, pictograms tell us clearly where to go and what to do; at their worst, things can get interesting.(Tuning Up)
January 1, 2008... Consider the pictogram. You have to, because pictograms are everywhere and often are your only guidance. Think of these elementary signs as a primitive art form sharing an ancestor with alphabets--hieroglyphs--but also as a sophisticated effort...

Who cares about executive supremacy? The scope of presidential power is the most urgent--and fundamentally ignored--legal and political issue of our time.(Exhortation)
January 1, 2008... For more than a generation, the Watergate-tapes case stood for the principle that the Supreme Court has the last word in defining the reach of presidential power: Richard Nixon claimed that his power was unlimited, especially when it came to...

Moral principle vs. military necessity: the first code of conduct during warfare, created by a Civil War-era Prussian immigrant, reflected ambiguities we struggle with to this day.('Lieber's Code')
January 1, 2008... During the hot and desperate summer of 1862, a senior American commander found himself consumed with the question of insurgents. Major General Henry Halleck had become general-in-chief of the Union armies in July of that year, and he soon...

Dreaming of a Democratic Russia: memories of a year in Moscow promoting a post-Soviet political process, an undertaking that now seems futile.(Short story)
January 1, 2008... It's election season in Russia again. At least in theory. In reality, political competition has been replaced by the personage of Vladimir Putin. Russian politics appears more neo-Soviet with each passing day--as minions applaud the advancement...

Politics.(TWO POEMS)(Poem)
January 1, 2008... Politics According to Aristotle, it's the nature of nature to do nothing uselessly and the nature of desire not to be satisfied, so after the election, narrowest nail biter or humiliating landslide,...

Under the Auspices.(TWO POEMS)(Poem)
January 1, 2008... Under the Auspices Five common crows harassing a hawk, broad-winged red-tail coasting updrafts above a field of cedar cut and piled high for winter burning, drive him to evasive action, sudden nosedives, steep...

The Long Hall.(Poem)
January 1, 2008... The Long Hall The past goes down and disappears, The present stumbles home to bed, The future stretches out in years That no one knows, and you'll be dead. --Weldon Kees, "The Speakers" Working inward,...

Windy Ode.(Poem)
January 1, 2008... Windy Ode Wind, you haven't changed. Remember that desert town you did your best to level? Trapped in a classroom, I tried to fashion a W that didn't wobble, one that would puff its sails and cross the blank...

The daily miracle: life with the mavericks and oddballs at the Herald Tribune.(Short story)
January 1, 2008... I did my first writing as an adult in North Africa and Italy during World War II. That's where I learned that writers can write anywhere. As a boy I had taught myself to type because I wanted to grow up to be a newspaperman, preferably on the...

Cuss time: by limiting freedom of expression, we take away thoughts and ideas before they have the opportunity to hatch.(Short story)
January 1, 2008... My dad often told a story from his days as a mail carrier where he confronted a little boy no more than five perched up in a tree in a yard severely marked by poverty and neglect. The kid looked down with dirty face and clothes and said,...

Alone at the movies: my days in the dark with Robert Altman and Woody Allen.(Short story)
January 1, 2008... For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early 20s then, working off and on, driving a cab, setting up the stage at rock shows, writing occasional pieces for The Village Voice. But there were...

Balanchine's cabinet: a young woman wins a drawing and learns to give and to receive.(Short story)
January 1, 2008... My fingertips run over the cabinet's coffee bean-colored finish. The carvings--gods, devils, and angels dancing along the edge in high relief--suggest a Hieronymus Bosch painting. My hand stops before reaching the cabinet's center, the spot...

Confluences: as a beloved uncle makes his final journey in the wilderness, a new life begins.(Short story)
January 1, 2008... (for my father) For the first 12 hours after my father returned--wearing clothes that were three days old, his body still wrinkled from time spent immersed in water--he faced investigation for the murder of his brother. I imagine it was...

The Leap.(Fiction)(Short story)
January 1, 2008... Going upstairs near midnight, the house below her now dark, the thought came to her that afterwards she would be alone at night. This house would be empty around her, and she would be alone, too, in the apartment, in the city. Anne had...

Moonbow.(Fiction)(Short story)
January 1, 2008... People are getting away with murder, but I can't get away with having a glass of water in bed. I trade sides with my dog, who won't feel what I spilled anyway. From this side of the bed, I see the moon through the window. It's a full moon...

On the road to nowhere: Tom Stoppard's Russian intellectuals take a wrong turn with Hegel, just as Edmund Wilson once did with Marx.(Theater)
January 1, 2008... When a playwright uses the stage to dramatize the past, the audience can only be expected to be moved more by theatrical effects than by historical depth. Tom Stoppard's trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, which follows a group of Russian...

The quiet sideman: tenor saxist 'Chu' Berry emerged from the pack at the end of his short life.(Jazz)(Biography)
January 1, 2008... Near the end of his eight years as a recording-session musician, tenor saxophonist Leon "Chu" Berry landed a short-lived spot with Count Basie's orchestra. Standing in for one of the Basle band's two tenor giants, Herschel Evans, who had...

Souls hungering after meaning: in Aegypt, John Crowley's just-completed four-book masterwork, ordinary people bear a faint symbolic glow through real and mythological realms.(Essay)
January 1, 2008... Books Considered in This Essay AEGYPT By John Crowley Bantam, 1987 reissued as THE SOLITUDES Overlook Press | $15.95 LOVE & SLEEP Bantam, 1994 DAEMONOMANIA Bantam, 2000 ENDLESS THINGS Small Beer Press, 2007 ...

The work of death: how the Civil War changed forever Americans' relationship with mortality.(The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: death and the American Civil War By Drew Gilpin Faust Knopf | $27.95 On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, my great-grandfather, Robert Ferguson of the 53rd Virginia, and my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Upchurch...

Subjectivity is all: using a lifetime of colorful examples to define the undefinable.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... MODERNISM The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond By Peter Gay Norton | $35 The difficulty of summing up the meaning of the word modernism has always been exemplified for me by the following paradox. T. S. Eliot's The...

The casserole inquisition: chronicles from America's culinary transformation.(Excerpt)
January 1, 2008... THE TENTH MUSE My Life in Food By Judith Jones Knopf | $24.95 The time: 1955. The place: the dining room of Balch II, a women s dormitory at Cornell University. Ten of us are at one of the big round tables where the art of gracious...

Wry eye on the bard: sorting through the little we know about the best we've got.(Book review)
January 1, 2008... SHAKESPEARE The World as Stage By Bill Bryson Harper Collins, Atlas Books | $19.95 For those who admire Bill Bryson, an Iowa-bred humorist whose home base has alternated between England and New England since 1973 (but who has also enjoyed...

Latin's eminent career: is the language of empire, the church, scholarship, and Europe nearing retirement?(Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... AD INFINITUM A Biography of Latin By Nicholas Ostler Walker | $27.95 Latin, like contemporary poetry, is subject to a certain amount of boosterism. True, there is no National Latin Month or Latin Teacher Laureate, but anyone with an...

A long walk in the new world: of 300 settlers sent by Spain to Florida, only four survived.(A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... A LAND SO STRANGE The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca By Andres Resendez Basic Books | $26.95 A generation after Columbus landed in the New World, a party set off from Seville to claim a vast strip of North America stretching from the...

Correction.(Correction notice)
January 1, 2008... A review in the Autumn 2007 issue of the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks incorrectly listed his publisher. The correct publisher is Knopf. We regret the error.

Gratitude.(COMMONPLACE BOOK)(Excerpt)
January 1, 2008... When the atom bombs were dropped... when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced...

For Jacques Barzun on his centennial.(Findings)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.--JACQUES BARZUN We salute Professor Barzun on his birthday for his many contributions to American education, scholarship, and letters. His...