American Scholar articles from March 2002

American Scholar archives from March 2002

Letter from the editor. (Bookshelves).(Editorial)
March 22, 2002... In 1974, in his first contribution to the SCHOLAR, Richard Rodriguez, who was then a graduate student in English Renaissance literature, wrote: A few months ago, my dissertation nearly complete, I came upon my father looking...

The mourning paper. (At Large and At Small).
March 22, 2002... For the past seventeen years, I have had an apartment in New York, just a few hundred yards from the United Nations. I spend a night or two each week there, and in the months after September 11, I required an alarm clock as I never had before....

Dining. (Commonplace Book).
March 22, 2002... I dined at the Chaplain's table upon a roasted Tongue and Udder. N.B. I shall not dine on a roasted Tongue and Udder again soon. -- REV. JAMES WOODFORDE, The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802 February 17, 1763 When they have...

The Flood Gives a Millworker a Holiday.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... The Flood Gives a Millworker a Holiday When the flood came it sounded like all the clocks in the world whirring. My grandfather used to yell at us a lot to get to work but his bellow was nothing like the roar ...

Key West.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Key West Dawn begins in my skull, flits from right to left, back to front as if searching for an exit. I open my eyes. Dawn builds a bedroom instantly to house itself, walls able to absorb light, a...

Bearing arms.
March 22, 2002... Every time I walk through the big front doors of the public library in Arlington, Texas, ready to work my way across the national parks with Nevada Barr or down Sue Grafton's alphabet, I read this text painted on the glass: Pursuant to...

Delivering eggs to the girls' dorm.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorm For me it was the cherry blossoms flooding Olive Street and softening the dawn, the windows flung open in a yawn, billowing curtains pregnant with the breeze, the sounds of Procol...

Reading Balzac.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Reading Balzac Croissants and cafe au lait left at the door in the morning. Hot baths down the hall, hot water Henri later paid for. Well-off, tightfisted, intimidated by the hauteur of Parisian waiters, Henri insisted...

Optilenz.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... My father is scowling into the screen of Optilenz, his swollen hands gripping its platform as if it were the steering wheel of a car in a downpour. Optilenz, a machine designed to help people with macular degeneration to read, looks much like a...

Accent.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... "Stanost," says Stan Ost, introducing himself in his office at Speech Remodelers, Inc., in Summit, New Jersey, where he helps sign up foreign English speakers for accent-reduction therapy. A New Jerseyite via Brooklyn, Ost hasn't quite made his...

On never ending with a preposition.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... On Never Ending with a Preposition An axe works mostly by its own sufficient Force, on your aim much more dependent Than on your arm. Select a grain in a log, Place two blows as if they were twin brothers, And...

On not psychoanalyzing Virginia Woolf.
March 22, 2002... Of all modern novelists, Virginia Woolf has long been the one most susceptible to psychoanalytic prying. No wonder: the evidence she has left to posterity--her thousands of brilliant letters, her copious and revealing diaries, her posthumous...

Prayer.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Prayer Yes, let this feeling settle upon me, softly as a slow, windless snowfall, gently as a parent's gaze on a sleeping child, this feeling I've had once before, as I woke from a dream I could...

In the gallery.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... In the Gallery Another Dutch landscape-- this one a low plain, sea water seeping through the grass. And the flat sky behind it--indigo--but first the mahogany-red farmhouse, the windmill's wings turning ...

Neckties.
March 22, 2002... Although loose cravats became popular in Europe only during the seventeenth century, we have worn things around our necks for millennia, from cowls to feather boas, from diamond chokers to ruffled flea-catchers. Ancient Chinese civilizations...

The tramp of a fly's footstep or, the shriek, rattle, and roar of a Victorian sound track.
March 22, 2002... In an 1827 article titled "Experiments on Audition," Charles Wheatstone, the King's College physics professor and co-signer of the 1837 patent on the electric telegraph, described with little fanfare a rudimentary, non-electric amplifier of...

Grizzled minstrels of angst: Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, forever old.
March 22, 2002... Youth's careless raptures don't age gracefully, for reasons that careless youth doesn't care about and age knows all too well. So the thought of an aging rock star sounds instantly oxymoronic, or, perhaps worse, fodder for a predictable,...

John Muir's Alaskan rhapsody.
March 22, 2002... John Muir (1838-1914), being diligent first and a dreamer second, wore many hats. So although he was a visionary--a founder of the Sierra Club and savior of Yosemite National Park--we do have quite a wonderfully meticulous record of the...

Seed.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... Seed from inside the steel box a white arm reaches round, fingers fumbling for the bolts, someone inside squirming like a magician to slip straps, strip down to a different surrender that once free will push like...

Inferno.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... I wake at 5:30 A.M. The digital clock radio, still an hour from its warbling static eruption, lances the darkness with an eerie gray-green light. But I do not need to look at the clock to guess the time. I awaken between five and six each...

A lesson in narrative time.(Poem)
March 22, 2002... A Lesson in Narrative Time Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. --Rumi In the empty classroom you call roll without speaking and the missing stir in vacant chairs (here--still here) until the...

The pallbearers' knees.(appreciation of writers and writing)
March 22, 2002... Fiddling with the hairs on an elephant's nose is indecent when the elephant happens to be standing on the baby. --John Gardner, On Moral Fiction Writing, as I do here, about certain authorial indecencies and false moves to which John...

Lightning on my mind. (The Uncertain Art).(the author chronicles electroshock therapy administered at a psychiatric clinic)
March 22, 2002... Plus fa change, plus c'est la meme chose. Or perhaps not. Some things do change, and in unexpected ways. Even though I'd prepared myself for what I was going to see on that recent morning, it was still disturbing to come face to face with...

Book tour. (Journal).(journal excerpts from the author's book tour promoting Peace Like a River)
March 22, 2002... October 2, 2001. Boston. Next trip I'll bring fewer clothes. Then the suitcase will have more room for books, which have relentlessly joined me along the way: books about animals, books about acoustic blues, books about romantic or...

My life with a field guide. (Rereading).
March 22, 2002... I was seventeen when it started. My family was on vacation in Maine, and one day we went on a nature walk led by a young man a few years older than I. Probably I wanted to get his attention--I'm sure I did--so I pointed to a flower and asked,...

The 2001 phi beta kappa book awards.
March 22, 2002... The Christian Gauss Award TRANSCENDENTAL WORDPLAY: AMERICA'S ROMANTIC PUNSTERS & THE SEARCH FOR THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE. By Michael West. Ohio University Press. Citation: West examines nineteenth-century American attitudes toward...

Homme, hombre, omul.(THE POWER OF BABEL: A NATURAL HISTORY OF LANGUAGE )
March 22, 2002... THE POWER OF BABEL: A NATURAL HISTORY OF LANGUAGE by John McWhorter. W. H. Freeman. $26. Many years ago, while vacationing in Rome, I got into an argument with a professor of Italian from Notre Dame over which was the better language,...

Consider us men.(A GENTLEMAN OF COLOR: THE LIFE OF JAMES FORTEN)
March 22, 2002... A GENTLEMAN OF COLOR: THE LIFE OF JAMES FORTEN By Julie Winch. Oxford University Press. $35. When James Forten, aged seventy-six, died in February of 1842, Philadelphians white and black mourned his passing in an outpouring of tributes not...

Boneyard Earth.(TIME TRAVELER: IN SEARCH OF DINOSAURS AND OTHER FOSSILS FROM MONTANA TO MONGOLIA )
March 22, 2002... TIME TRAVELER: IN SEARCH OF DINOSAURS AND OTHER FOSSILS FROM MONTANA TO MONGOLIA By Michael Novacek. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26. Paleontological fieldwork, Michael Novacek's mentor tells him in this engaging memoir and introduction to...

Persian pleasure trip.
March 22, 2002... SEARCHING FOR HASSAN: AN AMERICAN FAMILY'S JOURNEY HOME TO IRAN By Terence Ward. Houghton Mifflin. $ 25. If Iranian society is a carefully designed, meticulously tended garden, then most of the Americans who lived in Iran before the Islamic...

9.11.01. (The Reader Replies).
March 22, 2002... As it must be with a national tragedy such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, almost everyone is touched. Probably no Americans closed their eyes on the evening of that dark Tuesday without feeling the heavy weight of death, destruction,...

A Piece of Cotton. (The Reader Replies).
March 22, 2002... "Philonoe" states in "A Piece of Cotton" that the flag in her front yard, which she and her family flew for the first time after the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., "meant We are sad. And we're sorry we've never done...

Godly religions. (The Reader Replies).
March 22, 2002... Now that we know from Professor Ali S. Asani ("Pluralism, Intolerance, and the Qur'an") that Islam tolerates worshipers of other gods, where do we atheists and other infidels go for asylum? To Jonathan Rosen's religion ("Grace, Punishment, and...

Leap. (The Reader Replies).
March 22, 2002... I initially put off reading the Winter issue of the SCHOLAR for a few days--I tend to pace myself on September 11 writings. Like all New Yorkers, I go through weeks when I want to read essays, poetry, or ruminations, and feel a need to talk,...

Solecism. (The Reader Replies).
March 22, 2002... As a careful reader of the SCHOLAR, I could not help noticing a surprising grammatical lapse that made me wonder whether the copy editor had been nodding when the article in question was before her/him. In "The Nomads of Language," Ariel...

Mechanic. (The Reader Replies).
March 22, 2002... One reference that John Lukacs overlooked in his nicely turned essay on the meanings of mechanic is to the 1972 film The Mechanic, starring Jan-Michael Vincent and Charles Bronson. The latter plays a ruthlessly efficient professional killer--a...

Childfree in toyland. (The Reader Replies).
March 22, 2002... I appreciated Christopher Clausen's thoughtful essay on the subject of choosing to be childless. A few days before reading it, I was standing in line at the grocery store, observing a father shamelessly ridiculing his young son. The...

The depths of feeling. (The Reader Replies).
March 22, 2002... No doubt you've been inundated with e-mails regarding the missing text at the end of Mark Kingwell's review (titled "The Depths of Feeling") of Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. If it's only a case of a...