American Scholar articles from September 1999

American Scholar archives from September 1999

COMMONPLACE BOOK.(Quotations on the perception of time)
September 22, 1999... Time Time will bring to light whatever is hidden, and it will conceal and cover up what is now shining with the greatest splendor. --HORACE, Epistles, I, c. 5 B.C. (trans. D. Grene) We are weighed down, every moment, by the...

AT LARGE AND AT SMALL.(A biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
September 22, 1999... Coleridge the Runaway In 1779, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge was seven, he asked his mother to slice him some cheese for toasting: "no easy matter, it being a crumbly cheese." His older brother Frank, his great rival in the family, sneaked...

Bicycle Sprint.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... I crouch over the bare bones of speed, jacket snapping like silks, face against the wind's neck. My steps don't touch ground, and spokes sprinkle light like flint-strikes. Pavement blurs under me-and-machine....

Coolness.(the psychology of coolness)
September 22, 1999... At the end of Godard's Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo is trapped in a police dragnet and shot in the back as he runs down the street, staggering for nearly a block before he falls face first on the pavement, casually puffing a cigarette even as...

Remember This.(thoughts on memory)
September 22, 1999... In the fifth century B.C., at a banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos was invited to recite a lyric poem in honor of his host. Because Simonides also included a passage praising the gods Castor and...

Intermission.(poem)(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... You always saw them at intermission-- Carnegie Hall, Hunter College Auditorium, the 92nd Street Y-- groups of eight, maybe ten, their Wienerisch German so dissonant and foreign outside, so right, so at home in...

Starting Out.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... In the curtained living room the projector whirs and once again those pictures of Jasper, always good for a laugh. Each time the room, like a dark forest place revisited, changes a little. Trees larger, yes, with...

The Return of the Seagoing Cowboy.
September 22, 1999... Horses Afloat and Books Astray Expositors of chaos theory like to say that the flapping of a butterfly's wings over Kyoto is linked to an Atlantic hurricane three years later. What they mean is that hurricanes are impossible to predict far...

Yield.(poem)(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... She makes them still, recipes serving eight or ten or twelve. It's what she is, the Stroganoff, the lasagna. She herself now dislikes food, the empty table, nibbles crust while rearranging curdled quarts of milk, bronze...

Inside Science.(the path to professional notoriety in science is a long one)
September 22, 1999... It has become fashionable in recent times for scholars from the social sciences and other disciplines to visit the strange continent of Science and send back reports on the natives' behavior and rituals. The resulting dialogue has not always...

Going Up to Oxford.(sociology professor describes the experience of being invited, and serving, as a visiting professor at Oxford)
September 22, 1999... The letter was signed by the American Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust. It reached me during the second week of July 1994. "At the meeting of the board of Electors for the George Eastman Visiting Professorship at the University of...

Swan Songs.(an appreciation of the wisdom to be found in words of the dying)
September 22, 1999... When I was young, my fondest wish--beyond fleeting fantasies as cowboy, fireman, or center fielder--was to be old. Oh, to be as ancient and oracular as Norman Thomas, who, at seventy-nine, spoke to my high school history club! Annealed by...

THE UNCERTAIN ART.(an American physician observes, and comments upon, the use of acupuncture in China)
September 22, 1999... Acupuncture in the Operating Room Since 1985, I have made a series of journeys to China. Most were undertaken while I was the chairman of the Yale-China Association's medical committee, whose purpose is to oversee a long-standing...

JOURNAL.(a journal, written while being held prisoner for a week in Beijing, China)
September 22, 1999... Beijing 1988 In 1988, while in Beijing as an exchange professor of psychology, Deborah Golub was confined without explanation to her room for a week. During her confinement, which took place a year before the Tiananmen Square massacre, her...

REREADING.(D.H. Lawrence)
September 22, 1999... Growing up within the tightly guarded confines of a fifteenth-century English boarding school, my friends and I took as our tokens of accomplishment the somewhat recherche gray volumes known as Penguin Modern Classics. When I was in college, in...

NO OTHER BOOK: SELECTED ESSAYS.(Review)
September 22, 1999... NO OTHER BOOK: SELECTED ESSAYS Randall Jarrell. Edited and with an introduction by Brad Leithauser. HarperCollins. $27.50. "The critic, described in ideal perfection..." But of course nobody talks about critics like that: the real...

REMEMBERING RANDALL: A MEMOIR OF POET, CRITIC, AND TEACHER RANDALL JARRELL.(Review)
September 22, 1999... REMEMBERING RANDALL: A MEMOIR OF POET, CRITIC, AND TEACHER RANDALL JARRELL By Mary yon Schrader Jarrell. HarperCollins. $22. "The critic, described in ideal perfection..." But of course nobody talks about critics like that: the real...

Why Real the Classics?(Review)
September 22, 1999... WHY READ THE CLASSICS? By Italo Calvino. Translated by Martin McLaughlin. Pantheon. $26. Although I heard a National Public Radio commentator this very morning respectfully note that it was Derrida's sixty-ninth birthday, the prestige...

CRYING: THE NATURAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF TEARS.(Review)
September 22, 1999... CRYING: THE NATURAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF TEARS By Thomas Lutz. Norton. $29.95. A few years ago I chaired an open-mike forum at a business seminar in California. The audience was large, participation was lively, and it looked as if I...

AMERICAN CULTURE, AMERICAN TASTES: SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE 20TH CENTURY.(Review)
September 22, 1999... AMERICAN CULTURE, AMERICAN TASTES: SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE 20TH CENTURY By Michael Kammen. Knopf. $30. These are difficult times to be a professional culture watcher. For years, populist critics have repudiated the pessimism of Frankfurt...

FLESH AND SPIRIT: PRIVATE LIFE IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY.(Review)
September 22, 1999... FLESH AND SPIRIT: PRIVATE Lire IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY By Steven Ozment. Viking. $29.95. During the past two decades, Steven Ozment has written prolifically on two interrelated subjects: the German Reformation and the experiences of...

THE READER REPLIES.
September 22, 1999... PROCRUSTES AND THE CULTURE WARS We are engaged in a cultural civil war in which both sides are adamant that they are absolutely right, that the other side is absolutely wrong, and that the opposition must be exterminated. Feeling...

Millennial Relativity.(the coming new millennium is accompanied with prophecies of both doom and of bliss)(Brief Article)
September 22, 1999... Most forecasts fall into one of two categories: prophecies of doom and prophecies of bliss. Doom seems to be more common. Remember Chicken Little? Remember the prophet Jeremiah, who was so gloomy about mankind's prospects that he has a whole...