American Scholar articles from March 2008

American Scholar archives from March 2008

Models.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
March 22, 2008... At one time in my life, not a brief time, I tried to write like James McConkey. I had written a few short stories and more than a few personal essays, and here was a writer who, it seemed to me, had combined the two forms to create something...

Moral principle vs. military necessity.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2008... I read with great interest and delight David Bosco's essay on Francis Lieber in the Winter 2008 AMERICAN SCHOLAR. It is an admirable piece of work, right on the mark in a number of crucial respects. Lieber is a famously difficult character to...

Cuss time.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2008... In an otherwise splendid issue (Winter 2008), perhaps the SCHOLAR was just trying to see if its readers were awake when it chose to run that chirpy little piece, "Cuss Time," in which Jill McCorkle implies that kids' self-expression will be...

Letter from Vienna.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2008... As a former resident of Austria myself, I agree wholeheartedly with Alexandra Starr's depiction of the country--or, at least, of its capital--as a thoroughly backward-glancing place (I don't blame them; there is a lot back there on which to...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction notice)
March 22, 2008... In "On the Road to Nowhere" in the Winter issue, there appears the statement that "Russia had a landed aristocracy and hundreds of millions of serfs." In 1861, the time of emancipation in Russia, the estimated total population of the country...

No end in sight.(Letter from Oaxaca)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... The replacement kindergarten teacher in suburban Oaxaca, Mexico, shouted "!A la chingada los profesores guevones!" as she rattled the locked gates of the school that had employed her for the previous four months. "Go to hell, you gutless...

Old fort, New Globe.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] During the Civil War, the eight-foot-thick, red sandstone wails of Castle Williams held an estimated 1,500 Confederate prisoners. If all goes as planned, those same walls will cradle a new playhouse inspired by the...

Islam's silent majority.(Works in Progress)
March 22, 2008... What Americans know or think they know about the world's 1.3 billion Muslims has been influenced by factors that don't apply to many of them: terrorist acts committed in the name of Islam, the Bush administration's global war on terror, and the...

Step in time.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Those seven-inch spike heels can get you in trouble in all sorts of ways. But a 2005 study by a doctor at the University of Virginia demonstrated that even moderately high heels can significantly increase knee...

Capturing kermit.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With as many as one-half of the world's 6,000 amphibian species threatened with extinction, a team of conservation groups called the Amphibian Ark has initiated a worldwide program of "captive management." The...

Between the lines.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... Fitting verses on a grain of rice does not impress S. S. Prasad, an engineer with Cypress Semiconductor Technology in Bangalore, India. Prasad inscribes what he calls nanopoems onto the unused spaces of microchips. He integrates his designs...

The view from on high.(Works in Progress)(Brief article)
March 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Glue Society, a creative collective based in Sydney and New York City, has depicted four biblical events in a series of photographs called "God's Eye View": Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, the...

Exit no exit: whatever happened to existentialism?(Tuning Up)
March 22, 2008... In postwar New York, existentialism was sexy, debonair, chic, and antiacademic. It was either a philosophy or something resembring one, a bundle of linked ideas and assumptions, largely imported from Europe, that attracted the herd of...

The broken balance: the poet Robinson Jeffers warned us nearly a century ago of the ravages to nature we now face.(Exhortation)
March 22, 2008... It can't go on, one thinks, whether visiting a swath of India, a bit of China, or central Africa, or simply a childhood neighborhood where new hometown development is scything the trees, snagging traffic, stilling the songbirds. Capsules of...

Passing the torch: why the eons-old truce between humans and fire has burst into an age of megafires, and what can be done about it.
March 22, 2008... The Olympics traditionally open with a fire ceremony. A torch kindled by natural sources (the sun reflects off a mirror onto the torch), and hence a pure fire, is passed from Olympia, the site of the ancient games, to wherever the modern games...

Boarding: Hemaris thysbe.(Poem)
March 22, 2008... Boarding: Hemaris thysbe Most large sphinxes pay quiet visits at night, but not the Hummingbird Clearwing. Black antennae clamped to its head like forceps, crawling undone from a bed of thorns, this flying hypodermic is not...

The liberal imagination of Frederick Douglass: honoring the emotions that give life to liberal principles.
March 22, 2008... On a steamy morning in June 1881, a federal cutter slowly makes its way up the Chesapeake Bay into the Wye River. In the bow stands Frederick Douglass, his eyes scanning the shore for the landmarks he once knew so well--signs that he is...

What kind of father am I? Looking back at a lifetime of parenting sons and being parented by them.(Personal account)
March 22, 2008... One evening--not long after my family moved to the old country farmhouse where my wife and I have lived for 45 years--our youngest son (my namesake, Jim, then three-year-old Jimmy) came into the woodshed, while I was there putting away some...

Maker and collector: Frank Bidart.
March 22, 2008... Collecting is essential to Frank Bidart's creativity. Like Ezra Pound, Bidart often makes poems out of translation, collage, and found texts: Vaslav Nijinksy s letters; a case study by the psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger; Ovid's tale of Myrrha,...

Collector.(Poem)
March 22, 2008... Collector As if these vessels by which the voices of the dead are alive again were something on which to dream, without which you cannot dream-- without which you cannot, hoarder, breathe. Tell yourself...

Under Julian, c362 A.D.(Poem)
March 22, 2008... Under Julian, c362 A.D. [ ] or full feeling return to my legs. My jealous, arrogant, offended by existence soul, as the body allowing you breath erodes under you, you are changed-- the fewer the gestures that...

Rome's gossip columnist: when the first-century poet Martial turned his stylus on you, you got the point.(Marcus Valerius Martialis)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... Martial--Marcus Valerius Martialis, c.40-c.102 C.E.--was a provincial, though from a province, Spain, rich in grains and in human talent. He came to the imperial center, Rome, to get fame and fortune by his art of ridicule. He won the fame, at...

Shipwrecked: like Robinson Crusoe after the storm, a daughter salvages what she can after her mother's death.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... This being within about a mile from the shore where I was, and the boat seeming to stand upright still, I wished myself on board, that, at least, I might save some necessary things for my use. --ROBINSON CRUSOE In the days immediately...

A slow devouring: banter, beer, and bar food smooth a disciplined but difficult passage through Finnegans Wake.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... In Somerville, Massachusetts, an unabridged, unapologetic dictionary lies on a pub table surrounded by lagers, pints of Guinness, burgers, chicken Caesar wraps, and Corona-bottles-turned-salt-and-pepper-shakers. It's a Tuesday night, and the...

Royal blue.(Fiction)(Short story)
March 22, 2008... After calling it quits with being a model and actor--his eyes were a bit too close together for the big time--Nicholas went into the business of acquiring and selling folk art. He and Daphne lived in Brooklyn, where she worked as a real estate...

Me and big foot.(Fiction)(Short story)
March 22, 2008... It is snowing, a freak blinding storm that likely will shut things down for days. Thank God. Just last night under a clear winter sky, I had wished for a sign, or at least some kind of divine intervention between me and the matchmakers of the...

Polymer persons: how can we gaze upon the skinned, displayed bodies of the dead and not be revolted and mesmerized?(Anatomy)
March 22, 2008... I come here to gaze upon the dead. I come to gaze upon their naked, dissected bodies. With trepidation, I enter the cavernous exhibition hall in downtown Seattle. This is the large, well-advertised human anatomy exhibition that is currently...

What the mind's eye sees: action painters were postwar exemplars of American individualism.(Painting)
March 22, 2008... The great leap of modern art in the early decades of the last century was the proposition that abstraction could be the highest form of artistic expression. A hundred years later, canvases marked only by paint splashes, slashes, drips, and...

The art of literature and the science of literature: the delight we get from detecting patterns in books, and in life, can be measured and understood.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... Stories can offer so much pleasure that studying them hardly seems like work. Literary scholars have often sought to allay unease at being paid to enjoy the frissons of fiction by investigating literature as a form of history or moral...

The art of doing: let's give our hands a great big hand.(The Craftsman)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... THE CRAFTSMAN By Richard Sennett Yale University Press $27.50 The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations was staged in London in 1851. Victorians went to the exhibit and marveled at inventions like the Singer sewing...

A dangerous weapon: the fault is not in the camera, but in ourselves.(The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... THE SOILING OF OLD GLORY: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America By Louis P. Masur Bloomsbury | $24. 95 Adobe Photoshop arrived in the early 1990s, concurrent with functional digital cameras, and since then critical debates about...

Drought and famine: what the past teaches us to fear most about global climage change.(The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... THE GREAT WARMING: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations By Brian Fagan Bloomsbury | $26.95 You can hear it under the breath of grudging half-converts now sighing about inconvenient truths. In response to reports from the...

Sleepless nights: getting cranky about the things that keep us awake.(Insomniac)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... INSOMNIAC By Gayle Greene University of California Press | $29.95 According to Gayle Greene's new book, Insomniac, the ancient Egyptians believed that one of the three living hells was "to be in bed and sleep not." Even the Pharaohs' tombs...

The case of the defective detective.(The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective By Kate Summerscale, Walker, $24.95 "His eyes, of a steely light grey, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if...

Enlightenment life.(A Blue Hand: The Beats in India)(Book review)
March 22, 2008... A BLUE HAND: The Beats in India By Deborah Baker, Penguin Press, $25.95 In the summer of 1948, Allen Ginsberg was a heartbroken, anxious 22-year-old living in Harlem, struggling to find his poetic voice. He was still beholden to Blake and...

Neglect.(Commonplace Book)
March 22, 2008... I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. --John Donne...

Novelist Allan Gurganus reflects on Portrait of Walt Whitman by Thomas Eakins.(Point of Departure)
March 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Walt Whitman, claiming to contain multitudes, trusted his first impressions. These tended to be generous. But Thomas Eakins, come to call at Whitman's simple Camden home, struck the poet as "careless, negligent,...