American Scholar articles from March 2004

American Scholar archives from March 2004

Maple syrup.(Letter from the Editor)(Editorial)
March 22, 2004... Ah, the perks of the editor's life! Expense-account lunches at Lespinasse, four-star press junkets, invitations to glittering literary soirees.... Alas, I rarely enjoyed such luxe even when I lived in New York City, though I did consume some...

A house in Foggy Bottom.(At Large and at Small)
March 22, 2004... Because I often write about history, real and fictional, friends used to find it odd that my home had so little of it. During seven years in Westport, Connecticut, my partner and I lived in a small condominium that had been built in 1988. Its...

Failure.(Commonplace Book)
March 22, 2004... We went to bed, and, she in my arms and I in hers, we spent more than an hour without moving but without accomplishing anything. Though she became aware of the reason, politeness prevented Veronica from telling me what it was, as modesty kept...

Looking Up from the Page, I Am Reminded of This Mortal Coil.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Looking Up From the page, I Am Reminded of This Mortal Coil Mercurial ribbon licking the cut lip of the Blue Ridge-- daybreak or end, I can't tell as long as I ignore the body's marching orders, as long as ...

Potnia.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Potnia Another gray morning. I wander through my neglected house, papers and books stacked two feet deep on every table and chair. Without thought, I fall into five thick, dark-blue volumes on the archaeology...

The Way Things Look in Slides.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The Way Things Look in Slides As though pierced through with light, the living hearts in the extinguished room, an exotic jungle of green in each leaf-- the faces, even the faces of the very old, of those who have...

The bioterrorism scare.
March 22, 2004... Since the fall of 2001, when America embarked on a "war on terrorism" and federal officials started warning us about the next plague, here are some events that have not happened: a U.S. epidemic of sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a...

China: Ancient Technology Exhibition.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The young interpreter Says she recognizes me, As we stand watching A man make paper From strained bamboo pulp; His face tells a story I cannot read. I have never met Either of them before, But...

A First British Casualty, 1775.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... That all that day I was Ammi, as I was Ammi to the housemaid & cat; that everything was familiar-- readying the horse for my master, chopping wood behind the house-- that the shooting started on the other side of...

Keeping time.
March 22, 2004... A sharp bit cuts a clean hole. Each year as winter slides toward spring, I head into my family's woods in northern Wisconsin with the best drill bits I can find. I am the fourth generation of my father's family to tap our sugar bush, a hillside...

Etruscans, losing their edge.
March 22, 2004... Of Etruscan civilization, we have mostly bronze funerary statuettes. Florida photographer Carol Munder hunts them up. She finds them neglected in Mediterranean villages' glass cases. We do not know, and never did, what manner of folk made them,...

Diurnal.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Some days, there is a lake's wholeness. No one organ wanders off or worries. Other days, the stack of sorted papers topples into uncommitted piles. That the dog won't play is enough to cause a heart to break ...

To Gravel: An Assay.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... In you, as in a life, the part cannot stand for the whole. One chip of you bites the hand like a word scissored out of its sentence, without power to help or to harm. Aggregation is not mathematics--a crowd not the...

"Of": An Assay.
March 22, 2004... Its chain links can be delicate or massive. In the human realm, directional: though one thing also connects to another through "and," this is not the same. Consider: "Science and elephants." "The science of elephants." "The elephants of...

The Woodpecker Keeps Returning.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... The woodpecker keeps returning to drill the house wall. Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another. There is nothing good to eat there: he has found in the house a resonant billboard to post his intentions,...

"And here she is ... your Betty Crocker!".
March 22, 2004... In the 1940s and 1950s, Betty Crocker was one of many women widely known for their culinary expertise who did not in fact exist. There were some who did exist, of course, but it was often hard to tell the difference. When Irma Rombauer...

Stars in the Heart of Haleakala, Maui.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Driving 'Oma'opio Road at night, through darkened fields and darker houses, the car crests another crack in the land, and I see the lights of my destination, a small cluster of white and gold sparks far below the...

Clearance.
March 22, 2004... I learned that I had Highland blood at an appropriate time. I was twelve or so and growing tired of playing knights with a friend, sinking a wooden sword into his parents' haymow and swearing noble oaths. So when my father told me we were real...

To the Fatherland.
March 22, 2004... Though he has been gone almost ten years, I can still conjure him up with little effort. Today the memory I choose to retrieve has historic implications, both globally and personally. It is December of 1991, and my father and I are driving a...

My God problem--and theirs.(The Scientific Method)
March 22, 2004... In the course of reporting a book on the scientific canon, and pestering hundreds of researchers at the nation's great universities about what they see as the essential vitamins and minerals of literacy in their particular disciplines, I have...

Living with Goethe.(Journal)
March 22, 2004... November 4. Calgary, Alberta. I've decided to spend the next couple of weeks with Goethe's Elective Affinities. I read it the first time--twenty-five years ago at least--after a long conversation with the writer Hector Bianciotti on...

Pemberley Previsited.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2004... The first time I read Pride and Prejudice I was nine. I was a pert, excitable, giggly reader. My school librarian couldn't stand me. She had already spoken to me about saving books for when you were older, and suggested ominously that the novel...

Wild history.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... 1968: THE YEAR THAT ROCKED THE WORLD By Mark Kurlansky. Ballantine. $26.95. The rolling global thunderstorm of 1968 was enough to make a skeptic believe in the zeitgeist--indeed, the Zeitgeist in bright lights with a capital Z, as Hegel...

Stupid human tricks.(Open, No Skinner's Box: Great Psychologigal Experiments Of The Twentieth Century)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... OPEN,NO SKINNER'S BOX: GREAT PSYCHOLOGIGAL EXPERIMENTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY By Lauren Slater. W. W. Norton. $24.95 Even if you don't know the names of the scientists featured in Opening Skinner's Box, you've probably heard about their...

Sacred thread.(Hinduism: Past And Present)(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... HINDUISM: PAST AND PRESENT By Axel Michaels. Translated by Barbara Harshaw. Princeton University Press. $29.95. With Hinduism: Past and Present, Axel Michaels joins the long line of German Indologists who have contributed to a secular...

Poem of the end.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... THE DEATH OF A POET: THE LAST DAYS OF MARINA TSVETAEVA By Irma Kudrova. Translated by Mary Ann Szporluk. The Overlook Press. $29.95 Marina Tsvetaeva was one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, recognized as an equal by...

Against the Grain.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2004... Whether or not Richard Manning wants to admit it, commercial farming is a necessity if the world is to be fed ("Against the Grain," Winter 2004). About sixty years ago, my father attempted to feed his family off about two acres of fine farming...

My Florida.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2004... How glad I am that William E. Blundell titled his essay "My Florida." It may be his, but it's certainly not mine. I don't mean to imply that his article is not truthful. It is; older people do come here to enjoy their last years. They do...

Flaubert's Anatomy.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2004... In Sven Birkerts's rereading of Madame Bovary, the adage "character is destiny" is ascribed to Heraclitus. But George Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss, credits the German Romantic poet Novalis ("'Character,' says Novalis, in one of his...

Corrigenda.(The Reader Replies)(Correction Notice)
March 22, 2004... Editing errors led to two misstatements in Geoffrey Sea's "A Pigeon in Piketon" (Winter 2004). A sentence on page 68 stated that in 1978, the union for which the author was a consultant dispatched him to a meeting at "the plant at Oak Ridge,...

The lexicographical thesmothete.(The Podium)
March 22, 2004... The dictionaries of our age are the work of impersonal committees. The six-page masthead of the most recent American Heritage Dictionary, for example, sports a director of lexical publishing, nineteen editors, an editorial project director,...