American Scholar articles from June 2001

American Scholar archives from June 2001

The Seanachie.
June 22, 2001... I learned recently that Brian Doyle's great-great-grandfather was a seanachie, or storyteller, in Glendalough, a lush vale in County Wicklow. This lineage will come as no surprise to anyone who reads Doyle's essay on Van Morrison--or his...

Water.(literary excerpts)(Excerpt)
June 22, 2001... The smile of the sea was a positive simper. Such a glittering and twinkling, such a softness and blueness, such tiny little pinpoints of foam, and such delicate little wrinkles of waves--all this made the ocean look like a flattered portrait....

The Mass in Spanish.
June 22, 2001... Words and the Word A blaze with the spirit, days divided neatly. A cock's crow addled me in a gray light. By 6:30 every morning I had put on a thin pair of gum-soled canvas sneakers and left the house, trotting up the Via Nicotera toward...

Rorschach's Rejected Blot.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... He'd laid them on a table in the study and one startled like thunder, a cumulonimbus like a peony, monsoon-worthy and fractured with electricity. The first seven he felt sure of ranged from black to gray, ...

How To Do.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... It embarrasses my niece to think of her mother Walking the streets with a cart Picking up empties For their deposits, But my sister knows how to do, Which was all our mother asked of us. She's learned how to...

John Henry's Hammer.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... From that last spark, I flew, a little, then landed, Hard, still ringing from his grip, followed by The rest of him. Our dust cooled The afternoon heat. For a moment, we Lay, larger than bets or bosses. Then a...

Ohio States.
June 22, 2001... When I was little, one of my favorite toys was an Ohio road map that my father picked up at a gas station. It was huge when spread out on the living room floor, large enough to nap on--though I would never have done that for fear of ripping...

Bags.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Older, our bodies bigger, burdened. On every trip souvenirs squeeze aboard: just a brooch, coffee mug, one small painting, a bentwood rocking chair. What's a house for? but to swallow our money after it's changed states ...

The God Within.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... Metamorphosis need not denote (these days, for me) a drastic transformation-- lover, beloved to tree or animal. Change inheres chiefly in divinity domesticated in a mask of flesh (divinity must live within herself) ...

Three Men and a Book.(book clubs)
June 22, 2001... The book club is not a twentieth-century invention, unless turning a thing upside down is inventiveness. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, small groups of people clubbed together to buy books because they were expensive. In colonial...

The Great Dissident Cuban Poet Dies in Exile at Auburn University.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... in memory of Heberto Padilla What was it about the oak shadows cast against the walls of your apartment that afternoon? Their playfulness? Cats on the banister, tails hooked like question marks in the rays of light. What...

Van.(Van Morrison)
June 22, 2001... Tell me the facts real straight Don't make me older --"One Irish Rover" There was a boy named George Ivan Morrison. He was born in summer. He was an only child. His father was quiet and his mother was exuberant. The big river nearby was...

The Musicians Play Basketball.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... There are movements so grand you want the mover frozen rampant-- stunned in that skin, in the impossible soar down on the rim. In that sweet slam will the backboard and we not sense the sublime ...

Trio.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... They weren't beautiful. They weren't even sweet-tempered, those three skinny women with gray marcels. Old standbys in the church, they filled in for the choir in August on Sunday mornings. Always they...

The Case of Thomas Carlyle.
June 22, 2001... Published Letters, Private Life, and the Limits of Knowledge "The feeling against telling the whole truth has reached a pitch which borders on hysteria," observed a writer in the American journal Forum in 1891. "Cries of `violated...

Felinus.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... A sleepy Nina plunks down, curls up inches from my face, purring fervently until her very bones vibrate, as does my chest. Ninotchka, please, I say with difficulty, but her half-eyes conceal themselves behind their...

The Come As You Are Not Party.
June 22, 2001... My first neighbor and I were wheeled together into the maternity ward nursery on a cold October night in 1957. She was the daughter of the thirteen-year-old who shared my mother's hospital room, and when I was growing up, my mother would talk...

Selling the Old Piano.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... It cost me $150 then, twenty-five years ago, and I was a woman of means. At midnight in my low-rent apartment, I kept company with all that mahogany polished to a hard shine. Those carved vines luxuriating beneath the...

Rattlesnake Country.(Poem)
June 22, 2001... for Todd Lieber Tombs in a wilderness valley, thousands of tombs with crosses on graves from all the wars since Custer's wipeout. On the battle ridge the scope is epic: Chanting of war and death songs, wailing of the 7th...

Troping Through Proverbia.(proverbs)
June 22, 2001... Proverbia is a land of laws and regulations based on the wisdom of its forefathers, so much so that the speech of Proverbians is strangely ornamented with their matter and in conversation the Proverbians often seem to be practicing law rather...

A House in Bali.
June 22, 2001... Over the past few years I've been spending more and more of my time in Indonesia: I like the way they do things here. After twenty-odd years of being in a hurry in New York City, I find no pleasure greater than to wake up in the morning and...

Mind, Body, and the Doctor.(use of placebos)
June 22, 2001... It was known by every charlatan who sold bottles of foul-tasting green elixir from the back of a horse-drawn wagon; it was known by Anton Mesmer and all the other poseurs who invented one or another of the mystical therapies based on the...

Diary of a Poem.
June 22, 2001... La pensee est un excrement que l'on thesaurise. --Anonymous January 18. "No poet would ever write an ode on the intestine." Lying in bed last night, trying to sleep, I suddenly remembered that sentence, which was quoted in a review in...

THE SHADOW OF THE SUN.(Review)
June 22, 2001... THE SHADOW OF THE SUN by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska. Knopf. $25. A mystery has always hovered over the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski, and around this mystery a kind of cult has formed. AS the Polish...

THE GANG: COLERIDGE, THE HUTCHINSONS & THE WORDSWORTHS IN 1802.(Review)
June 22, 2001... THE GANG: COLERIDGE, THE HUTCHINSONS & THE WORDSWORTHS IN 1802 By John Worthen. Yale University Press. $30. William Wordsworth was not a man to doubt his own merits. "He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if...

THE SHATTERED SELF: THE END OF NATURAL EVOLUTION.(Review)
June 22, 2001... THE SHATTERED SELF: THE END OF NATURAL EVOLUTION By Pierre Baldi. MIT Press. $24.95. In psychoanalysis, the deepest truths about a patient may be revealed by what he most vehemently denies. Strangely, the same principle seems to apply to...

THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A STORY OF IDEAS IN AMERICA.(Review)
June 22, 2001... THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB: A STORY OF IDEAS IN AMERICA By Louis Menand. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27. After Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., died in 1935--three years after his retirement from the Supreme Court and two days short of his...

LIVING WITH MUSIC: RALPH ELLISON'S JAZZ WRITINGS.(Review)
June 22, 2001... LIVING WITH MUSIC: RALPH ELLISON'S JAZZ WRITINGS Edited by Robert G. O'Meally. Modern Library, $25. Record companies are surely the masters of commodification through creative assemblage. Once it's recorded and archived on tape (or digital...

THE READER REPLIES.
June 22, 2001... THE ROW TO ZANZIBAR Waves of nostalgia passed over me as I read Thomas Mallon's article on the Illustrated Home Library Encyclopedia ("At Large and At Small," Spring), as I was an avid boyhood reader of its clone, the Illustrated World...

In Praise of Indolence.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2001... It's always good to be in the company of smart people, and of their parents, who gave them their good looks, and who also instilled in them the conscience that will protect the rest of us from them when they come into their full powers. I'm not...