American Scholar articles from June 1998

American Scholar archives from June 1998

The unfuzzy Lamb. (Charles Lamb)
June 22, 1998... His name is surely part of the problem. Had he been Charles Tiger, he might not have to drag behind him, like a tattered baby blanket, his undeserved reputation for being namby-pamby and fuddy-duddy. He didn't think he was lamblike. After his...

Brancusi's fish as a figure of thought. (poem)
June 22, 1998... He spent so many hours just polishing its surfaces: two flanks of mirror vastly dimmed by Istrian refusal: the clenched fist, averted glance of marble. But smoothing made it more percipient: the studio walls,...

Listening to a tidepool: curiosity and the unfamiliarity.
June 22, 1998... There is nothing like the exhilaration of arriving in a new place with the expectation of coming across something unexpected. All the senses are primed, straining to take in signals from all sides. As a scientist deeply rooted in natural...

Orphans. (poem)
June 22, 1998... The field mouse in his little gray cape has been walking the night playground beside me as I gaze upward at stars puzzling this way and that. The long day at last has come to a close; the darkness rising from the...

Night Words. (poem)
June 22, 1998... A child wakens in a cold apartment. The windows are frosted. Outside he hears words rising from the streets, words he cannot understand, and then the semis gear down for the traffic light on Houston. He sleeps again...

The king's lobbyists. (King Leopold II)
June 22, 1998... In the last few years, as accusations of influence buying by Asian businessmen have swirled around Washington, politicians and editorial writers have indignantly denounced foreign meddling in American politics. From their tone, you might think...

All That Did Not Fall. (poem)
June 22, 1998... You might consider while planting rhododendron what it is Eden requires, a space between trees, a dose of innocence, the stars of heaven close by, though almost all now are scattering as quickly as they can. And while you...

Portrait of a pseudonym.
June 22, 1998... In the morning's mail, the card below: IT IS WITH GREAT PLEASURE THAT THE MEMBERSHIP COMMITTEE OF THE AUTHORS GUILD EXTENDS THIS INVITATION TO Jack Fenno TO BECOME A MEMBER OF THE AUTHORS GUILD AND OF THE AUTHORS...

They Might Have Bothered. (poem)
June 22, 1998... I've hit bottom, nearly homeless and penniless. This fatal city, Antioch, ate up all my money, this fatal city, with its prodigal life. Still, I'm a young man in perfect health. I have astonishing command of Greek...

To Abide. (poem)
June 22, 1998... It was sometime near one at night, or one-thirty. In a corner of the wineshop; behind the wooden screen. Except for the two of us the shop completely empty. An oil lamp cast its small light. In the doorway the...

Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot.
June 22, 1998... As early as his first published book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, T. S. Eliot made a habit of mocking Matthew Arnold. "Cousin Nancy," a humorous poem about the rebellious, cigarette-smoking "Nancy Ellicott," contrasts her...

After Roofing. (poem)
June 22, 1998... This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game. Truly. So here I am, straddling the peak of a ten-twelve roof, thinking about that as I slap on the last of the caps in the rain. Why hate the poems coming to nothing? ...

Being mugged.
June 22, 1998... The television weatherman described the day--Saturday, July 19, 1997--as outstanding: warm, breezy, low humidity. I met my old friend Matthew for dinner in Battery Park City in lower Manhattan to celebrate a new job. After dinner, we decided...

John Buchan: a life at the margins.
June 22, 1998... John Buchan, the author of Prester John, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, and John Macnab, was raised to the British peerage as Lord Tweedsmuir of Elsfield in 1935. He was the first male novelist this century to be thus ennobled, and there...

First Rain. (poem)
June 22, 1998... It is a dress to be worn by a free woman in the black before dawn, liquid cool and open down the back, scented with the smell of heat rising from stones. It is silk in shifting patterns, floor-length,...

Extrapolating Shakespeare: let Will enough alone. (William Shakespeare)
June 22, 1998... During the Regency period, William Hazlitt devoted much of his career to reviewing the theaters of London, which, then as now, frequently produced Shakespeare. Ably as he handled the job, he came to take a dim view of it. The more he read and...

Voices of science. (attitudes about science)
June 22, 1998... It is one of the paradoxes of our time that as science has penetrated deeper and deeper into our lives, we have come, more and more, to fear and distrust it. Science seems to stand for the chill dehumanization of our modern world; its...

The meteorites. (camp counseling)
June 22, 1998... The summer I was eighteen, hardly more than a child myself, I found myself ministering to a mob of boys, age four to six, who ran like deer, cried like infants, fought like cats, and cursed like stevedores. My first day as their camp counselor...

The whole law of medicine. (Hippocrates)
June 22, 1998... Life is short, and the Art is long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and the externals,...

Kipling, now and then. (Rudyard Kipling)
June 22, 1998... The summer I was nineteen, I got a job as rodman on a government survey party in the Rocky Mountains. No skill required. My chief duty was to carry heavy equipment for the real surveyors. But what about my chief entertainment? For me that...

You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles.
June 22, 1998... You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles By Millicent Dillon, University of California Press. $27.50 "You have but two subjects," growled Samuel Johnson at James Boswell, "yourself and me. I am sick of both." The first great modern...

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence.
June 22, 1998... Out of Share Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence By Geoff Dyer. North Point Press. $23. "You have but two subjects," growled Samuel Johnson at James Boswell, "yourself and me. I am sick of both." The first great modern biography, Boswell's...

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
June 22, 1998... Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge By Edward O. Wilson. Alfred A. Knopf. $26. Isaiah Berlin, cribbing from Archilochus, once suggested that thinking persons might be sorted into two categories: foxes and hedgehogs. "The fox knows many...

History as Fiction, Fiction as History: A Thread of Years.
June 22, 1998... A Thread of Years By John Lukacs. Yale University Press. $30. In 1918, the Westminster Kennel Club excludes dachshunds from its annual dog show in Madison Square Garden; in 1924, German shepherds are the favorite dogs shown, outnumbering...

Birthday Letters.
June 22, 1998... Birthday Letters By Ted Hughes, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20. Just when every literary critic and Sylvia Plath devotee thought that she had sorted out the truth about Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, along came Birthday Letters, a...

Letters of Heinrich and Thomas.
June 22, 1998... Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-1949 Edited by Hans Wysling. Translated by Don Reneau. University of California Press. $50. Heinrich and Thomas Mann were--with William and Henry James, Aldous and Julian Huxley--the most...