American Scholar articles from March 1998

American Scholar archives from March 1998

Collecting nature.
March 22, 1998... The net was green. The handle was wood, and the grip was uncomfortably thick, like that of a tennis racket borrowed from an older player. The mesh bag was long enough that if we caught a tiger swallowtail--or a spicebush swallowtail, or a...

The art city our fathers built. (museums)
March 22, 1998... A city is a place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do with his life. --Louis Kahn I was once that small boy. From my earliest encounters with its art--art that was to...

The afterlife: remembering matches. (poem)
March 22, 1998... Once when I was an old poet and was visiting An even older poet, he dropped a box Of matches that scattered every whichway At our feet, and although he asked me not to, I stooped to help him retrieve them and restore them...

Exiting nirvana. (autistic children)
March 22, 1998... We are at the island post office. It's midsummer, and the parking lot is full. I will park at the curb and rush inside while my daughter stays in the car. She doesn't like that. "We could ask someone to move so we can park," she says....

Now, now. (poem)
March 22, 1998... I A sentence of death, my love, as if we were destined to squint into the glint of a firing party, going down on one knee the better to see their hearts a-flutter with swatches of lint. II Seeing,...

The Talmud and the Internet.
March 22, 1998... Turn it and turn it for everything is in it. --Babylonian Talmud Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying. I'd made diskette copies of everything else on my computer--many...

The subtextual reincarnation of Voltaire and Rousseau. (Francois-Marie Arouet, Theodore Rousseau)
March 22, 1998... Editors are notoriously the humblest underlaborers among scholars, their lives' work--discreetly camouflaged in prefaces, footnotes, and appendices--more often consulted than read, and virtually ignored by the general public. Editors of...

The legacy of a lynching.
March 22, 1998... In March 1996, a black rapper known as Wise Intelligent produced a CD titled "Killin' U For Fun." On the back cover there was a photograph of a charred body collapsed over a mound of coals, with a group of white men and boys in the background,...

Etymological dirge. (poem)
March 22, 1998... 'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear . . . Calm comes from burning. Tall comes from fast. Comely doesn't come from come. Person comes from mask. The kin of charity is whore, the root of charity is dear. ...

Lightning and the lightning bug: the craft of the essay.
March 22, 1998... In 1956, when I was twenty-two, I graduated from Pomona College, in California, and went up to Oxford. There I started working for a second bachelor's degree, for in those days the best way to take full advantage of what Oxford offered and to...

Mathematics forty years after Sputnik.
March 22, 1998... When I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1950s, the question of whether anything that was taught or studied in the mathematics department had any practical applications could not even be asked, let alone discussed. This was not...

Shura and Shaya: an afternoon with Sir Isaiah Berlin.
March 22, 1998... My late grandfather, Alexander "Shura" Gerschenkron, the Russian-born economist, historian, linguist, translator, essayist, conversationalist, and "Harvard's scholarly model"--as The New York Times once referred to him--didn't feel close to...

Eureka! A Limey geologist in Nevada. (Eureka, Nevada)
March 22, 1998... Eureka, Nevada, has erected a notice near the town boundary informing the traveler that it is "the loneliest town on the loneliest road in North America." The claim may even be true. Eureka's nearest neighbors lie hours away along the sparse...

Mud season. (poem)
March 22, 1998... Alone in a white room, and then to venture out. Late winter. Watery glow of melt and shining thaw a second source of light. Days lengthening. Me too. Do not say young or old. Do not say early, late. ...

Mad cow mysteries.
March 22, 1998... Two years ago, when mad cow disease arrived in the British headlines to stay, not everyone was shocked. Faithful listeners to Farming Today, which airs just after six o'clock every morning on BBC Radio 4, already understood that the spread of...

Compression wood. (interpretation of a poem)
March 22, 1998... I teach English in Maine, and I come from Conway, South Carolina. When I was young, an old lady introduced me to the facts of life. "Up north," she said, "all they want to know is `What do you do?' Down south, all they care about is `Where do...

Prooemium. (medical practice)
March 22, 1998... There is a wisdom in the acceptance of uncertainty. Well used, it can make a philosopher of an ordinary man. To the intuitive mind of the twenty-two-year-old John Keats, that precious insight appeared in a flash of understanding one day in...

H.C. Witwer and me.
March 22, 1998... H. C. Witwer's 1920 novel The Leather Pushers went for a song at the auction of boxing books and ephemera at New York's Swann Galleries in January 1997. One of six books in Lot 51, which included Budd Schulberg's The Harder They Fall and...

M. F. K. Fisher, a Life in Letters: Correspondence, 1929-1991.
March 22, 1998... Selected by Norah K. Barr, Marsha Moran, and Patrick Moran. Counterpoint. $35. "I am as obviously a letter writer as some people are alcoholics or Benzedrine boys," M. F. K. Fisher wrote at the age of forty. The wry, self-deprecatory tone...

The Footnote: A Curious History.
March 22, 1998... By Anthony Grafton. Harvard University Press. $25. In a recent review of a book of my own, the critic alleged that the author had been "deceitful." The text, she complained, read like a novel but then, at story's end, confronted her with 470...

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories, vol. 1.
March 22, 1998... Edited by Toni Morrison. Library of America. $35 each. The Library of America has issued a two-volume set of the works of James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison. Their appearance makes clear a fact little understood: Baldwin, as a social...

James Baldwin: Collected Essays, vol. 2.
March 22, 1998... Edited by Toni Morrison. Library of America. $35 each. The Library of America has issued a two-volume set of the works of James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison. Their appearance makes clear a fact little understood: Baldwin, as a social...

A Director Calls: Stephen Daldry and the Theatre.
March 22, 1998... By Wendy Lesser. University of California Press. $40. Paper, $14.95. "It rains onstage--and the house falls apart." That was the advance word on British director Stephen Daldry's production of J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls...

Pleasure Wars.
March 22, 1998... By Peter Gay. Norton. $29.95. On the jacket of this fifth and final volume of Peter Gay's The Bourgeois Experience: From Victoria to Freud, the publisher assures us that: "No one reading this concluding volume of Peter Gay's magnificent...