American Scholar articles from June 1999

American Scholar archives from June 1999

Procrustes and the Culture Wars.
June 22, 1999... Of all the serial killers who plied their trade in ancient Attica, Procrustes exercised the highest degree of professional ingenuity. "This man," wrote Diodorus Siculus, "used to take passing travelers and throw them upon a certain bed. When...

Flight.
June 22, 1999... It is time now for the great act. A transversal cleft makes its appearance on the forehead, at the bottom of the perforating diadem; a second, but longitudinal slit divides the skull in two and extends down the thorax. Through this cross-shaped...

My Faulkner.
June 22, 1999... Over my desk there hangs a portrait of a little boy and a little girl seated on a blue velvet sofa. The boy is wearing short pants and a blue striped necktie; the girl has bangs and what appear to be far too many tiny teeth. It isn't a terrible...

Lines Beginning with an Anacreontic Fragment.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... for Eleanor Mattern For she seems to hear if one only wishes to speak, sang an ancient Greek, a young man, garlanded at the symposion, saluting the dancer at whose feet he had just tossed a coin for luck; and I,...

Wind.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 1999... through bluestone walls steadied by skims & chinks, the wind, divider & joiner, bringing in what was far away, clarifying & confusing, wind, the first idea, impulse informing all flesh & non-flesh that makes it...

Contemporary Memoirs.(male critics often dislike female autobiographies)
June 22, 1999... Or, Who Cares Who Did What to Whom? As a culture, we are given these days to remembering. We write and publish memoirs, as we call the current form of autobiography, and as the memoirs proliferate, so do the complaints. Disaffected readers...

Back to the Pillory?(how to punish criminals)
June 22, 1999... Should young drug dealers, the first time they are caught peddling, be sent home with their heads shaved and without their pants instead of being jailed? When I cautiously floated this suggestion in a conversation over dinner with some liberal...

You're an Egg.(an English professor tries to get physically active again)
June 22, 1999... When I was eighteen I worked for a while in the garment district of New York, cutting fabric, making deliveries, and occasionally doing some heavy lifting. One of my co-workers was a fiftyish, wiry Latino man with a motormouth and an...

Practice Without Principle.(literary critics)
June 22, 1999... The Two Cultures, Out of Step The scientists I know--genome mappers, Alzheimer's busters--are happy intellectuals. Not for them the humanist's anomie. The gardens they cultivate give forth publicly approved fruits, and whatever ethical...

Corn.(Poem)
June 22, 1999... The teeth of the dragon are fat and yellow. To sow them is to grow an army: rows of soldiers with straight loose hair. One wants order, simplicity, but the truest path runs crooked. How many patterns yearn ...

The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand.(reinterpreting author H.G. Wells' book "Invisible Man")
June 22, 1999... H. G. Wells's Critique of Capitalism When H. G. Wells died in 1946, his place in the history of twentieth-century literature seemed assured. At his funeral, J. B. Priestley referred to him as the "great prophet of our time." Shortly...

Writers Afoot.(essays and essayists)
June 22, 1999... Essayists as Infantry Essays are how we speak to one another in print--caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter. You...

Immanuel's Ground.(a man remembers religious meetings in his town)
June 22, 1999... When I was a boy, there was a camp meeting in my town. Since then it has become a Summer Family Conference and convenes in the facilities of the local college. But in those days it was a genuine holiness meeting, such as used to be common in...

Pumping Iron.(beneficial effect of exercise on life expectancy)
June 22, 1999... The Roman satirist Juvenal counseled his readers that the labors of Hercules are to be preferred to soft cushions and great feasts. One should pray for mens sana in corpore sano, he advised, rather than for a life of indolence. A millennium and...

New York Notebooks.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1999... A great new phrase to enter the vocabulary in the wake of computerized subway admission cards that misfire: PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN. (Encouraging thievery, it would seem.) The last thing maids at the Waldorf do when cleaning the room is to back...

Marginal Notes on Franny and Zooey.
June 22, 1999... No one becomes a reader except in answer to some baffling inner necessity, of the kind that leads people to turn cartwheels outside the 7-Eleven, jump headlong through a plate-glass window, join the circus, or buy a low-end foreign car when the...

A LADY'S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.(Review)
June 22, 1999... A LADY'S LIFE IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS By Isabella Lucy Bird. University of Oklahoma Press. $29-95. "I abhor civilisation," exclaimed Isabella Bird, late in life and after her best-selling travel books had made her the talk of London. She...

THE FIRST WORLD WAR.(Review)
June 22, 1999... THE FIRST WORLD WAR By John Keegan. Knopf. $35. "The First World War," writes military historian John Keegan, "was a tragic and unnecessary conflict." That, one might observe, is the understatement of the year. The mass slaughter that...

The BROKEN ESTATE: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE AND BELIEF.(Review)
June 22, 1999... The BROKEN ESTATE: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE AND BELIEF James Wood. Random House. $24. James Wood concludes a review-essay focusing on Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon with these in-your-face words: "Pynchon uses allegory to hide truth, and in so...

A CLEARING IN THE DISTANCE: FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED AND AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.(Review)
June 22, 1999... A CLEARING IN THE DISTANCE: FREDERICIK LAW OLMSTED AND AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY By Witold Rybczynski. Scribner: $28. On March 25, 1893, five weeks before the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a remarkable...

IN PLATO'S CAVE.(Review)
June 22, 1999... IN PLATO'S CAVE By Alvin Kernan. Yale University Press. $25. The title of Alvin Kernan's memoir is deeply ironic, but you have to expect that from someone trained in New Criticism who has witnessed at close range the transformation of the...

THE READER REPLIES.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 1999... Having just read James Trilling's essay about his father, Lionel Trilling, in the Spring 1099 issue of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, and a sampling of both the laudatory and the scornful reactions it has provoked in the press, I want to thank him...

Is the Universe Designed?(Brief Article)
June 22, 1999... It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful capabilities of living things seemed to point to a creator with a...