American Scholar articles from March 2003

American Scholar archives from March 2003

Gold. (Letter From The Editor).(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2003... There's nothing like working your sleepy way through a stack of unsolicited manuscripts, each of which uses the phrase "hegemonic discourse" seventeen times, and suddenly coming across a fresh and rousing piece by a writer you've never heard...

At Large and At Small: postmaster generals.
March 22, 2003... For the modern citizen-reader in search of clues to the presidential character, diaries are usually thin gruel. George Washington's is more about miles traveled and appointments kept than about any personal revelation. The obscure...

Commonplace book: ruins.
March 22, 2003... But in so far as beauty of structure is beauty of line and curve, balance and harmony of masses and dimensions, I have seldom relished it as deeply as on the grassy nave of some crumbling church, before lonely columns and empty windows where...

Bright union years: a graduate student's ambivalent journey.
March 22, 2003... In the spring of 1995, graduate students at Yale, working as teaching assistants and organized under the banner of their union, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, began a "grade strike," vowing to withhold their students' marks...

Recall Notice.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Recall Notice If you can place my name, you'll be surprised, Rebecca Brice, to see who's writing, The teacher in the Shakespeare class you attended In the spring of '77, which for all I know Is for you barely a blur...

Chapel in the Air.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Chapel in the Air On Friday nights the minister began to write the sermon he would deliver live and tape-record for use on radio, The Wireless Tabernacle, his own half hour. All this was maybe fifty years ago in a...

Cholla.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Cholla The cholla cactus, rarely alone, desires its own kin as company: here's a small army of them, straggly, ragtag, to be sure, crossing the range, with camp-- followers of greasewood and mesquite. This year, the...

The old West.(reflections on Western intervention, particularly in Islamic countries)
March 22, 2003... In the fall of 1981, when I was teaching in the MIT Writing Program, I organized several readings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by V. S. Naipaul, whose book about the Islamic Revolution, Among the Believers, had just been published. One of the...

Tree of Life.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Tree of Life The rug's reds would have been clearer then, closer to blood, the green grassier, more redolent of spring, the blue more like a northern summer's sky. The pattern would have been easier to trace from...

The Compact.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... The Compact The short steep ride in the red bus uphill from the Girls' School to the Boys' School left time to whip our Compacts out and powder cheeks, noses. What for? For the boys? Well, yes, we might have answered...

Starting to ride at sixty-five.
March 22, 2003... I'm cantering now. I started riding a little less than a year ago--at age sixty-five--so it isn't that I have just gotten under a wire, met a pressing deadline, or reached some lofty goal. There's been no urgency. Starting this late, I am going...

Ruskin's power.
March 22, 2003... John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century British writer with the most wide-ranging influence on contemporary thought, has gone unread for a long time. His ideas have lived through the words of other writers while his own works are ignored. Their...

Hedonism.(Poem)
March 22, 2003... Hedonism Nothing under the black walnut. Nor where our three hydrangeas share a mild shadow. Nothing beside the limestone ridge, dry creek, nor where cuttings from last year's fallen pine --split in half by...

Sweet mayhem.
March 22, 2003... Gary Hall is tired all the time now, but since he swims for hours each day at the Phoenix Swim Club, he ascribes his fatigue to his workouts. His episodic shakes in the pool he imputes to the burning of too many calories, so when they strike he...

Unlisted.
March 22, 2003... I used to teach a course on the twentieth-century American novel. Writing a description of it for the college catalogue one year, I decided to skip the usual pomposities and truthfully describe one of the course's limitations. So I wrote, "Of...

Reading the paper.
March 22, 2003... Five days before my father died, the Greenwich High School chorus performed at a convention of music educators in Atlantic City. Their repertoire, ranging from Haydn's Missa Brevis in B flat Major to Aaron Copland's Stomp Your Foot, so...

Do straw men have DNA? (The Scientific Method).(essay on whether creativity is genetic)
March 22, 2003... Not long ago I was a panelist at a seminar with the chirpy title of "Imagination Conversation" and an equally nebulous charge to explore, in three hours without so much as a bathroom break, the Nature of Imagination and How We Use It in Our...

Epiros, July 2002. (Journal).
March 22, 2003... I spent last year overseeing the rebuilding of my late grandparents' house in Lia, the tiny village in Epiros, Greece, where my father was born. I kept a journal in the form of e-mails sent to friends back home in the U.S. This was my eighth...

Treasure and vengeance. (Rereading).(reading "The Count of Monte Cristo")(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2003... Even the happiest children occasionally enjoy fantasies about some terrible injustice they imagine they've suffered, and they sob themselves to sleep. Motherless from the age of seven, I was far from the happiest of children, and I became adept...

The 2002 Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... The Christian Gauss Award POETRY AND THE FATE OF THE SENSES. By Susan Stewart. University of Chicago Press. Citation: Susan Stewart's study of the representation of the senses in and by poetry is a splendid piece of work. Stewart has...

Cold war poet.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... RANDALL JARRELL AND HIS AGE By Stephen Burt. Columbia University Press. $29.50. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is a treacherous critical tool. Several summers ago, it was turned on Randall Jarrell by a handful of...

California Dreaming.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... RIVER OF SHADOWS: EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL WILD WEST By Rebecca Solnit. Viking. $29.95. It was in 1872 that Edward Muybridge famously stopped time, with a camera that relied on wet plate-glass negatives, a clever technique...

Toolmaker, Brain Builder.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... BEHIND BIG BLUE: BUILDING THE COMPUTER THAT DEFEATED THE WORLD CHESS CHAMPION By Feng-Hsiung Hsu. Princeton University Press. $27.95. When the inscrutable silicon behemoth known as "Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a...

Golden Rules.(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... BEING GOOD: WOMEN'S MORAL VALUES IN EARLY AMERICA By Martha Saxion. Hill and Wang. $30. What constitutes a moral life for women? How do women themselves think about being good? Were there, once upon a time, universally agreed-upon...

Arctic Hedonist. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2003... A footnote to Philonoe's "The Arctic Hedonist" ("At Large and At Small," Winter 2003): when I was twelve, my father took me to a lecture by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. I don't recall much that he said, but two things I do remember vividly. First,...

"How nice to meet you, Mr. Dickey". (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2003... Dana Gioia's account of his run-in with James Dickey provides but one more example of the tendency to criticize Dickey's personality rather than to examine the work he produced. Indeed, after reading and rereading Gioia's essay, I am not at all...

Tennis with the net down. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2003... THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR is, of its kind, one of the finest periodicals in the land, paralleled perhaps only by The New Criterion. (Some of what I say in this letter could apply, mutatis mutandis, to that publication as well.) But I must protest!...

Corrigendum.(Correction Notice)
March 22, 2003... In James McConkey's "On Being Human" ("Rereading," Winter 2003), the omission of a line of type at the foot of page 135 made a hash of one sentence. It should have read: Flint was in a tumultuous period in its history, for the...