American Scholar articles from September 1998

American Scholar archives from September 1998

AT LARGE AND AT SMALL.(I Scream, You Scream)(ice cream history lore, etc.)
September 22, 1998... I Scream, You Scream I read last March that the town council of Stafford, New Jersey, had passed an ordinance stating: "At no time shall a vendor be permitted to use a sound device, mechanical bell, mechanical music, mechanical noise,...

COMMONPLACE BOOK.(The Spoken Word)(dozens of historic quotations on speech-making, stuttering, and similar topics)
September 22, 1998... The Spoken Word What is more essential for an orator than his voice? Nonetheless, no one who aspires to eloquence will, on my advice, become a slave to his voice, the way Greek actors do, who for years at a time practice declamation...

Atlanta-Dallas/Fort Worth, 11:10 P.M.(poem)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1998... The plane looked empty as I entered, but it slowly filled, even some middle seats. Who could be flying, so blearily late, From hub to hub, New South to New West? Then came a flood, ten minutes to departure, of...

Slum Lords.(poetry)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1998... The superrich make lousy neighbors-- they buy a house and tear it down and build another, twice as big, and leave. They're never there; they own so many other houses, each demands a visit. Entire neighborhoods called...

Losing It Again in Bozeman.(poem)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1998... Once, in Bozeman, we saw the truck coming, an army convoy, a block of cars stopped at the green light, state motorcycle cops in boots and helmets looking back, revving, ready to roar away. Then a flash of white in the...

The Gathering.(Kelley, Iowa)(poem)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1998... Kelley, Iowa Prairie is the best soil for burial, an acre or two away from town. There's no silence here not crowded with the sound of bees, cicadas, meadowlarks in summer and all year 'round the...

Did Moby Dick Break Boyle's Law?
September 22, 1998... I read Moby-Dick when I was in college and loved it. I took chemistry when I was in college and hated it. What made the two converge sometime later I don't know--I no longer remember the trigger-but come together they did, in a great puzzle...

"Only Connect ... ".(The Goals of a Liberal Education)
September 22, 1998... The Goals of a Liberal Education What does it mean to be a liberally educated person? It seems such a simple question, especially given the frequency with which colleges and universities genuflect toward this well-worn phrase as the central...

Fiction at The New Yorker.
September 22, 1998... Last July, when it was announced that David Remnick would succeed Tina Brown as editor of The New Yorker, my first thought was, "What will he do about fiction?" While my interest might seem unduly proprietary, it was not without some...

Apartment House at Evening.(poem)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1998... Something about a hundred windows lit up like a ship's upper decks, something about the weed trees tossing like water below and the cumulus steam from the boiler stacks billowing away and something, too,...

Suicide on My Mind, Britannica on My Table.
September 22, 1998... I think it is safe to say that ours is the only dining room in West Los Angeles on whose table--an eight-foot-long, two-hundred-pound behemoth on which I have taken my meals for many years--rest piles of photocopies of articles on suicide, all...

The Price of Privilege.("Civil Disobedience" at 150 )
September 22, 1998... "Civil Disobedience" at 150 One hundred and fifty years ago, in a revolutionary season, Henry David Thoreau lectured at the Concord Lyceum on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government." The philosopher and reformer...

Puzzlement.(jigsaw puzzles)
September 22, 1998... It is a terrible thing to admit, but I love jigsaw puzzles. It is a terrible thing to admit because I am a professor of English. I work in Texas, in the heartland, where I often get the impression that I am expected to be an ambassador from...

THE UNCERTAIN ART.(Narcissus Looks into the Laboratory)(humility and genetic researchers)
September 22, 1998... Narcissus Looks into the Laboratory Among the many ancient Greek medical writings that scholars of an earlier generation credited to Hippocrates, there is a particularly interesting essay that deals with the education of a physician....

JOURNAL.(Tours of Sicily)(short story)
September 22, 1998... Tours of Sicily May 3. Rome airport. Met our group. Flew on to Palermo. He wasn't as young as he used to be. His wife had died. He may have been a trifle depressed, although, being British, he didn't say so. "You need a change," said...

REREADING.(Revisiting Brideshead )(Brideshead Revisited)
September 22, 1998... Revisiting Brideshead On the flyleaf of my copy of Brideshead Revisited--a small blue Dell paperback, seventy-five cents--is written, in the flowery handwriting I thought elegant at age sixteen, "If I should die, think only this of me: /...

FORTUNE IS A RIVER: LEONARDO DA VINCI AND NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI'S MAGNIFICENT DREAM TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF FLORENTINE HISTORY.(Review)
September 22, 1998... FORTUNE IS A RIVER: LEONARDO DA VINCI AND NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI'S MAGNIFICENT DREAM TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF FLORENTINE HISTORY By Roger D. Masters. The Free Press. $24. Although there is a risk that I will sound like an old codger, it seems...

CHILDREN OF SILENCE.(Review)
September 22, 1998... CHILDREN OF SILENCE By Michael Wood. Columbia University Press. $22.95. When the inevitable conversation about the usefulness of art arises--often around the time the NEA awards its grants--the contestants routinely hunker down into their...

BADGE OF COURAGE: THE LIFE OF STEPHEN CRANE.(Review)
September 22, 1998... BADGE OF COURAGE: THE LIFE OF STEPHEN CRANE By Linda H. Davis. Houghton Mifflin. $35. Most readers, I suspect, know only two things for certain about Stephen Crane. The first is that he wrote one of the great war novels in American...

THINKING WITH HISTORY: EXPLORATIONS IN THE PASSAGE TO MODERNISM.(Review)
September 22, 1998... THINKING WITH HISTORY: EXPLORATIONS IN THE PASSAGE TO MODERNISM By Carl E. Schorske. Princeton University Press. $24.95. How can one do justice to essays that range through the medieval imagery in Disraeli's novels, the architectural and...

THE READER REPLIES.
September 22, 1998... THE SUMMER ISSUE The new AMERICAN SCHOLAR is a palimpsest of the old, casting a different shadow of concern. I say to its readers: hold out and you will be happily surprised. This second issue under a new editorial pen demonstrates this...

Dying Young.
September 22, 1998... As our section was moving back, I felt a burning pain through my neck and right shoulder and fell to the ground on my back, with blood spurting up like a fountain. My friend John came back with David, an Oxford man who had been a medical...