American Scholar articles from March 1999

American Scholar archives from March 1999

AT LARGE AND AT SMALL.(knowledge and literacy)
March 22, 1999... What Do You Know? Emerging from the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House one evening, I overheard one middle-aged operagoer ask another, "Have you heard of a writer named Tolstoy, he was Russian?" I didn't catch the reply because I had...

COMMONPLACE BOOK.
March 22, 1999... Prayer School prayer... bears about as much resemblance to real spiritual experience as that freeze-dried astronaut food bears to a nice standing rib roast. -- ANNA QUINDLEN The New York Times, December 7, 1994 I laid down in...

My Father and the Weak-Eyed Devils.(recounting a father's life)
March 22, 1999... My father, Lionel Trilling, never told the story of his life. He waited too long, not guessing how little time he had left. Cancer drained away his physical and mental strength, and only a few jottings testify to the memoir he longed to write....

To a Skylark.(poem)(Brief Article)
March 22, 1999... Upon the lonely links, above the abundant rough, you mount with ragged, insistent song heavenward, far heavenward, then fall, by staged descent, seeking a level of air that sets your spirit off to best advantage--a ...

Marine Hotel, North Berwick, Scotland, May 1998.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1999... On the hotel-room telly, Bing and Grace and Frank--all dead, yet here so young--in High Society, a parable of how the rich are truly better. "True Love" makes me cry. Around me, dampness, golfing togs all soaked, ...

Midway Through a Now Familiar Passage.(poem)(Brief Article)
March 22, 1999... Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus. --Virgil Midway through a now familiar passage in a poem read carelessly before, you find yourself reading the words aloud for a moment, quietly startled that such...

The Lions of Venice.(lion statues in Venice)
March 22, 1999... Wherever you turn in Venice, there are lions: strutting or lurking, colossal or miniature, placid or menacing. Entering the city as diplomats did in the Renaissance, you pass between two high columns on the Piazzetta by the Doges' Palace. One...

Eurydice.(poem)(Brief Article)
March 22, 1999... If the dead could speak, I'd entreat you Not to blame yourself for losing me near the exit. I was gone before you turned to glimpse me. Your hope I would follow you into the light-- That was only a poet's faith in the power...

When Germs Travel.(diseases and epidemics)
March 22, 1999... History teaches us that society has no shortage of means available to dehumanize "undesirable" groups. The grave risks of this process are magnified when combined with the threat of infectious disease. At such moments, rhetorical scapegoating...

A Verb from the Earth.(poem)
March 22, 1999... It's not sting of cilantro or bite of fresh mint but basil that makes tomatoes sing. No need for lemon, anise, cinnamon, dark opal, or purple ruffle to show your sophistication. Plain old sweet basil will do. History...

Deputy Finds Dean's Tombstone on Highway.(poem)
March 22, 1999... --St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 18, 1998 Over forty years ago, I saw you in my mirror mornings before the slow days dawned. Working the hoot-owl shift miles above Bohemia and in love with smiles anyone gave, I was you...

The Plastic Pink Flamingo.
March 22, 1999... A Natural History Five years ago, I visited the Union Products factory, the birthplace of the plastic pink flamingo. It nestles among a flock of plastics factories in Leominster, Massachusetts, on Route 117 west of Boston. I have come to...

Jane Austen Changes Her Mind.
March 22, 1999... It is a truth universally acknowledged, that in the last few years Jane Austen has become nearly everyone's favorite pre-twentieth-century novelist. How much Hollywood and the BBC should be credited for this turn of events is hard to say--cause...

My Aunt Faith.(poem)
March 22, 1999... A mechanical hospital bed has a little woman on it. She is 104, apparently, at long last, getting ready. The mechanical bed hums and unfolds, and it seems to blossom with blankets and mattresses, and the last mattress is a...

Half-Answered Prayers.
March 22, 1999... When I was a child, I longed to hear the voice of God. I prayed and prayed, begging to be heard, begging to be answered. I prayed not to die. I prayed that I wouldn't be whipped for kicking my brother. And I prayed to get things I wanted. A...

After the Flood.(relationship between man and nature)
March 22, 1999... Water is very much on my mind this late-spring day, after what the meteorologists called a "train" of thick black clouds formed to the southwest and settled over New Orleans and the rest of south Louisiana this past Monday, dumping its load and...

THE UNCERTAIN ART.(medical education)
March 22, 1999... The True Healers Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensitive lawyers or physicians. What professional...

JOURNAL.(college teaching narrative)
March 22, 1999... Flatlands At twenty-six, midway through the "malaise" of Jimmy Carter's presidency, I took my first teaching job, as a visiting assistant professor of English at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Given the state of the academic market, I...

REREADING: A Small Note About Big Red.
March 22, 1999... A Small Note About Big Red It was 1966, and I was ten years old, when I read the boys' novel Big Red for the first time. A much-publicized new edition of the book had come out that year, twenty-one years after the first edition, and five...

HOW TO READ A POEM AND FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY.(Review)
March 22, 1999... HOW TO READ A POEM AND FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY By Edward Hirsch. Harcourt, Brace. $23. Do too few people read poetry? Judging by the mood in the small world of American poetry today, it appears that the answer is yes: maybe never before...

THE SOUNDS OF POETRY: A BRIEF GUIDE.(Review)
March 22, 1999... THE SOUNDS OF POETRY: A BRIEF GUIDE By Robert Pinsky. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16. Do too few people read poetry? Judging by the mood in the small world of American poetry today, it appears that the answer is yes: maybe never before has...

OF FLIES, MICE, AND MEN.(Review)
March 22, 1999... OF FLIES, MICE, AND MEN By Francois Jacob. Translated by Giselle Weiss. Harvard University Press. $24. In June of 1953, at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium where Jim Watson described his discoveries about the structure of DNA, Francois...

COLE PORTER: A BIOGRAPHY.(Review)
March 22, 1999... COLE PORTER: A BIOGRAPHY By William McBrien. Knopf. $30. Movie magazines of the 1930s carried backpage advertisements offering a fifteen-dollar correspondence course on writing "hit popular songs." The financial returns that the ad implied...

THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER: ORIGINS OF AN ANTIMODERNIST IMAGE.(Review)
March 22, 1999... THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER: ORIGINS OF AN ANTIMODERNIST IMAGE By Theodore Ziolkowski. Princeton University Press. $29.95. Not long into The View from the Tower Theodore Ziolkowski posits a working definition of his subject: "The tower stands...

ISAIAH BERLIN: A LIFE.(Review)
March 22, 1999... ISAIAH BERLIN: A LIFE By Michael Ignatieff. Metropolitan Books. $30. This fine biography of Isaiah Berlin, who died in 1997 at the venerable age of eighty-eight, is the work of a political theorist and journalist who interviewed Berlin...

Riding Uphill Through the Jungle.
March 22, 1999... I have written a couple of books and several hundred reviews, but the truth is that for more than fifteen years, I've made most of my living as an editor. What is an editor? As a first witness, let's call Henry Adams, who briefly edited the...