American Scholar articles from June 2004

American Scholar archives from June 2004

Clasped hands.(Letter From the Editor)(Editorial)
June 22, 2004... Whenever I read the SCHOLAR, some pieces seem to interconnect with such resonance that I feel their writers are invisibly linking hands through the pages. This issue contains so many manual liaisons that a diagram would resemble the web of an...

The Forest Dweller and the Beggar.(At Large And At Small)
June 22, 2004... When I turned sixty, about a minute before you began reading this essay, I wanted to mark the occasion with a ritual I'd learned about from a friend whose background is Indian. In Hindu tradition sixty marks the transition between two ashrama,...

Loafing.(Commonplace Book)
June 22, 2004... I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner--let him on a certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect upon it, and bring home to it, and...

Re: re: re: re: re: Joyce: a private summerlong Bloomsday.
June 22, 2004... I. JOYCEXPERIENCE One dubiously sunny Irish summer day in Dublin I was walking along the city's eastern beach-rim when my friend told me that this wasn't just any eastern beach-rim--the kind of place in, say, Barcelona or Sydney where you...

Live Lobster Sashimi.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Live Lobster Sashimi For Joe Flores It's your neighborhood place, we've been here before. You order sake; I nurse a beer so bitter I have to swallow hard. We've asked for seaweed and salted beans, towers of slick...

Tom's timing.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Tom's Timing Self's not all, today. The bee-man's dourly at it at the edge of Tom's lifted paper. A child's cry splits his deckchair somnolence: he twists sharp right to look down where the quiet road parts two mute houses...

Hawaiki.(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... A letter has come from my friend Henry. Strictly speaking, Henry is my parents' friend. They all grew up together in the thirties in southern California; I have a picture of the three of them as teenagers, standing shoulder to shoulder on the...

El Gesto Patriacal.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... El Gesto Patriarcal My father sat at the kitchen table, elbows on the embroidered cloth cover, eyes still as two nesting quails. He held his hands in front of him and opened them into a web of five scarred ...

Houston and history.
June 22, 2004... South of downtown Houston lies one of the oldest areas of the city, a long rectangle with few notable features. Its latest promoters, trying to cash in on its perfect location and its odd abandonment, have christened it "Midtown." But it has...

The Sublime.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... The Sublime "Beautiful" is an adjective still in use, But "sublime" seems to have been retired As far too fancy, like court attire In the reign of Catherine the Great or Napoleon. No philosopher now proclaims with Kant...

Turning Sixty-Five on Hardscrabble.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Turning Sixty-Five on Hardscrabble More, the body roars, the heart begs more, the only adjective worth saving. Muscles sag no matter how many hours a week I jog. I can't stop hiking canyons to see what's west. My...

Comedy, cruelty, and tourism: Thoreau's Cape Cod.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2004... Henry David Thoreau's last book, the posthumously published Cape Cod, is a sardonic, maniacally various work. Thoreau's barbed, twisty, and contrary nature, his defiantly indecorous comedy, his rage at hypocrisy are clear enough in all his...

Heavy meta.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2004... The high point of my freshman-year English literature survey course, taught by that sweet man and Emily Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall, came early in the fall. Struggling through the Middle English of The Canterbury Tales, I arrived at the...

Headstones.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Headstones Twin tidelines of shells gleam on wet sand like outsize tire tracks: fluted white chips, cracked blues, a purple comma, shards of whelks the Montauks whittled down to beads and strung as wampum, shining...

Hot Weather.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Hot Weather So much begins in hot weather, clothes all over the hallway, the river down the long green lawn glittering, cut by the far off silhouette of a canoe. So much unsaid, disagreement not forgotten so much...

Unriddling.
June 22, 2004... I am an archivist by trade, and this means I am on intimate terms with the dead. They have left things: letters, diaries, receipts for hats, lists, bad poetry, notes scrawled on backs of envelopes, tiny keys. Sometimes they leave doodles: a...

Exquisite plague.(The Scientific Method)
June 22, 2004... On the railway platform in Udaipur, Rajasthan, several large families recline among their possessions, shaded from the fierce desert sun by a tin awning. The women tend to infants. The men sleep or pass cigarettes, which they never put directly...

Mostly New York 1992-2004.(Journal)(Short Story)
June 22, 2004... At the World's Fair in 1939, sat in a little gondola seemingly suspended 20,000 feet above a three-dimensional representation of city and country. I was shown what America in 1960 would look like: ribbons of eight-lane highways,...

A companion of the prophet.(Rereading)
June 22, 2004... On New Year's Eve, 1973, I sat on my bed in my room in my parents' house in New Jersey, bawling like an infant. I hadn't cried so hard in years, probably not since turning twelve, when I had made a pact with myself never to cry again. Now I was...

Iron, coal, burgers, and beer.(Leonardo To The Internet: Technology And Culture From The Renaissance To The Present)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... LEONARDO TO THE INTERNET: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE PRESENT By Thomas J. Misa. Johns Hopkins University Press. $19.95. It is a truth universally acknowledged that every aspect of today's world is influenced by...

Alas! Poor Hackman!(A Sentimental Murder: Love And Madness In The Eighteenth Century)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... A SENTIMENTAL MURDER: Love AND MADNESS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY By John Brewer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $23. A little before midnight on April 7, 1779, Martha Ray--the long-term mistress of Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty, the...

The age of the art film.(Revolution! The Explosion Of World Cinema In The Sixties)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... REVOLUTION! THE EXPLOSION OF WORLD CINEMA IN THE SIXTIES By Peter Cowie. Faber & Faber. $25. A few years ago, while researching Iran's remarkable cinema, I spent a summer in Tehran. My rented apartment came equipped with a former tenant's...

The Good Critic.(Critical Essays)(War Prose)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... CRITICAL ESSAYS By Ford Madax Ford. Edited and introduced by Max Saunders and Richard Stung. New York University Press. $45. WAR PROSE By Ford Madax Ford. Edited and introduced by Max Saunders. New York University Press. $40. "I love...

Americans in Paris.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2004... I saw Paris in the late 1940s and '50s, but not as one of Adam Gopnik's crusaders "with the fat dollar and a debt of gratitude to be repaid" ("Americans in Paris," Spring 2004). I view that entrancing city as the mistress of all who come to...

The bioterrorism scare.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2004... Philip Alcabes has done a service by reviewing past epidemics and by stressing the success of conventional means for containing them. However, as he also points out, the future will be different and unpredictable. That deserves special...

My God problem--and theirs.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2004... In her "Scientific Method" column, "My God Problem--and Theirs," Natalie Angier points out that U.S. scientists are overwhelmingly atheistic, but rarely do they attack religion (as she does in her essay). Why not? She suggests that they would...

Corrigendum.(Correction Notice)
June 22, 2004... Because of an editing error, a passage in-Oliver Morton's "Moonshine and Glue" (Spring 2004) stated that "in a vacuum, the speed of light is about 300 million meters a second. So in a billionth of a second--one nanosecond--light travels about...

iPod, therefore I am.(The Podium)
June 22, 2004... I am a pod person of some six months standing. I filled up the twenty gigabytes on my first iPod within three weeks and now have two iPods and fifty-nine days of uninterrupted sound, should I ever require them. And like every iPod user I've...