American Scholar articles from March 2000

American Scholar archives from March 2000

AT LARGE AND AT SMALL.(prose and poetry)
March 22, 2000... On Not Being a Poet Last year a novelist friend of mine mentioned that he'd soon be coming to New York to recite a poem of his choosing at a Town Hall program marking National Poetry Month. "I'll give you a hundred dollars if you do...

COMMONPLACE BOOK.(quotations on money)
March 22, 2000... Money People who inherit fortunes are lucky; I call them members of the lucky sperm club. -- #8 ("Be Lucky") of DONALD TRUMP's Top Ten Comeback Tips, in The Art of the Comeback, 1997 Try, if you can, to have an only son, to care...

England in Jamaica.
March 22, 2000... Memories from a Colonial Boyhood I was raised in the British colony that nearly broke Marcus Garvey's heart, not long after he began the career that would make him the most famous black nationalist leader in the world. In 1914, when...

Spring Peepers, April, Wassergass.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... They leap, big as baby rabbits from the pond's edge as I swerve in with the tractor's deck to whack the weeds already grown too high, early April, their astoundingly plump bodies suspended a split-second...

The Mystery of Max Schmitt.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Champion Single Sculls (1871) by Thomas Eakins Metropolitan Museum of Art In a few years, money will corrupt even sculling, the bets and scandals sink industrial America's first public sport--the rower as hero, the...

The True Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent.(Gilbert and Sullivan)
March 22, 2000... The Strange Adventure of Gilbert and Sullivan On December 8, 1889, the day after the triumphant premiere of The Gondoliers, their last successful collaboration, W. S. Gilbert wrote to Sir Arthur Sullivan, in the generous tone so often...

Ears.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... All drummers suffer hearing loss, my hearing doctor yells. But don't quit if you live that way, or if you love it. Bells of bass horns, trumpets, flugelhorns, slide and valve trombones close to you impair your...

The Poet's Voice.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... love, light, loss, liberty, lunacy and laceration --Gwendolyn Brooks Too much made of birth in Topeka too little made of Chicago Defender contributor at sixteen, the odd job solo moments of community gloss ...

Cut Time.(boxing)
March 22, 2000... Four-Handed Etudes for Boxers Russell, a pleasant young man who split his time between the college on the hill (where I taught) and the boxing gym down below, came up at the end of class one day to tell me that a card of fights would be...

Traveling.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... There's a new roundabout on the way to the nursing home, brick circle with a square of earth left in the center. I'd plant a dogwood there-- long pleasure in those petals-- dun to cream to flat white chalk... White as my ...

Life Painting.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Three days of laundry wait for her at home. Her neck is stiff from posing. Twice minimum wage is what she's earning, and the class is mixed. Her nipples harden in the cold. She itches where she'd never scratch...

Asleep with the Dog.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Curled into my side, --tight, part of me--she whimpers, twitches, growls, and in her unbroken dream, and my broken one, we bull through saw grass, blast through burning bramble, murderously fixed on rabbit--not the tossed ball...

Annotating Mr. Fitzgerald.(F. Scott Fitzgerald)
March 22, 2000... Anyone who has written historical notes for a scholarly edition has learned to spot "glossable" references in contemporary texts. Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound, for example, will someday need annotations about the quiz-show scandals of the...

Biography of a Rented Space.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... Little tumbleweeds of dust roll past us on the floor. The sun pours through the open window as it always does this hour in the early afternoon. We've come for the few last things: the goldfish in his gleaming bowl;...

Straw Men.(hate-filled e-mail responses to homophobic incident at Colorado State University)
March 22, 2000... An Exercise in Virtual Unreality On October 7, 1998, a mountain biker in the sagebrush hills east of Laramie, Wyoming, spotted what he thought was a scarecrow lashed to a buck-rail fence. As he drew closer, he saw blood. Not long afterward,...

Let Me Count the Ways.(literary acknowledgments)
March 22, 2000... During my youth, which lasted forty years or so, I devoured books; I had them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Inevitably, I had a fix on bookshops as well. In Great Britain, my Grand Tour was Bertman Rota's in London, Heffers's in Cambridge,...

Americanophilia.
March 22, 2000... To be an Americanophile is to love America--its literature, its music, its films--without belonging to it. Americans are largely unaware of Americanophilia as a European state of mind. In fact, they seem reluctant even to contemplate it; and...

THE UNCERTAIN ART.(medical technology forecasts)
March 22, 2000... THE UNCERTAIN ART The Misty Crystal Ball SHERWIN B. NULAND While watching that huge ball drop at midnight on New Year's Eve, I realized that I, too, had dropped the ball. For months, I had been pontificating to anyone who sought medical...

JOURNAL.
March 22, 2000... JOURNAL Manhattan/New Paltz Winter 2000 MARY GORDON January 12. My love for my children is overwhelming. Sometimes I simply have to sit down until the wave of it crashes over me. When they were small and I was overwhelmed like this, I could...

REREADING.(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
March 22, 2000... REREADING Indestructible Alice ANNE BERNAYS and JUSTIN KAPLAN What explains the perennial appeal of certain "children's books" to readers who are no longer young? A distinguished literary couple compares notes on the admixture of...

AMERICAN MODERNS: BOHEMIAN NEW YORK AND THE CREATION OF A NEW CENTURY.(Review)
March 22, 2000... AMERICAN MODERNS: BOHEMIAN NEW YORK AND THE CREATION OF A NEW CENTURY By Christine Stansell. Metropolitan Books. $30. For a few short years before World War I, Greenwich Village was home to a thriving bohemia. The dream of revolution was...

GENOME: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SPECIES IN 23 CHAPTERS.(Review)
March 22, 2000... GENOME: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SPECIES IN 23 CHAPTERS By Matt Ridley. HarperCollins. $26. Sigmund Freud once wrote that three momentous discoveries had displaced man from his privileged place in the universe. Copernicus expelled him from...

SHANGHAI, 1842-1949: THE RISE AND FALL OF A DECADENT CITY.(Review)
March 22, 2000... SHANGHAI, 1842-1949: THE RISE AND FALL OF A DECADENT CITY By Stella Dong. William Morrow. $26. Many otherwise intelligent people, misled by gaudy fiction [think Shanghai] an eerie place, peopled with sinister Orientals... and pointed...

MARCEL PROUST: A LIFE.(Review)
March 22, 2000... MARCEL PROUST: A LIFE By William C. Carter. Yale University Press. $35. The most wicked pleasure that biography can provide is the threat of its subject's failure. Somewhere between the sepia image of birth and the final tableau of the...

THE READER REPLIES.(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2000... OUT OF JOINT I am astonished at your decision, revealed in the Winter issue's "Letter From the Editor," to greet the year 2000 as the start of the twenty-first century. Surely all of your readers are savvy and literate enough to know that...

Ultimately Inexplicable.(Graham Greene)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Graham Greene was born in England in 1904. He died in Switzerland in 1991. At his death, there was scarcely anyone in the English-reading world unaware of his literary and strangely personal yet private presence. He was one of those autonomous,...