American Scholar articles from September 2000

American Scholar archives from September 2000

Commonplace Books.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2000... As the scholar and preacher Thomas Fuller wrote in 1642, "A common-place-book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field." In his day, every educated gentleman maintained such a garrison, a...

Sports and Games.
September 22, 2000... The man who wishes to achieve the longed-for victory in a race must as a boy have trained long and hard, have sweated and groaned, and abstained from wine and women. --CICERO, Ars Poetica, 412 A.D. The one nice thing about sports is...

The Last Island of the Savages.
September 22, 2000... The lumps of white coral shone round the dark mound like a chaplet of bleached skulls, and everything around was so quiet that when I stood still all sound and all movement in the world seemed to come to an end. It was a great peace, as if...

On the Street.(poem)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2000... The guy walking ahead, his boot flares up, yellow tulip tree leaf wet to one sole, briefly, so brilliant, then the boot's down again, then up to the world, leaf intact, and down to the dark, then back, bright ...

"Use Trouble".(poem)
September 22, 2000... for Jacob Armstead Lawrence 1917-2000, in memoriam You told this to the children when they confessed their works were incomplete your dignity grace a mapped space for trouble your migration series at 23 ...

Fire.
September 22, 2000... Like many little kids in New York City, I wanted to be a fireman. Their dating and flair in swerving those big, red, two-section, unmufflered ladder rigs around the crosstown corners with sirens wailing--and wearing black rubber slickers and...

Synagogues.
September 22, 2000... On Being a Believing Nonbeliever May the taste of honey linger Under the bitterest tongue. --Adrienne Rich, "At the Jewish New Year" I was born on May 25, 1933--as propitious a date as any future American essayist could hope for....

Transparent Stratagems.(poem)
September 22, 2000... (Based on an Article in Scientific American, "Transparent Animals," by Sonke Johnsen) To be unseen: a key to sea survival, within that boundless and unsolid mass where up is slightly brighter and down is cobalt deepening...

Boca Grande Sunset.(poem)
September 22, 2000... Big Mouth, FL, where all the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires--so goes the local joke. Sand is a dollar a grain. Still, the sunset comes flee, and clutter-flee, done with a circle and straight line. The Gulf ...

Life in Motion.
September 22, 2000... 1 Three years ago I took pictures of all the houses I've lived in. The houses impress not in beauty but in number--twelve houses before I turned thirteen. For me the moves had always resisted coherent explanation--no military reassignments...

Bittersweet.(poem)
September 22, 2000... When you reach for a branch it ropes forward, drags other branches with it. You've heard it's a nuisance vine, bittersweet, despite its old-gold berries, the deep coral red when the gold cracks open. You have this...

Fish, Flesh and Foul.
September 22, 2000... The Anti--Vegetarian Animus Giving up flesh is not nearly as traumatic as giving up the ghost. Although thousands have been martyred for their refusal to eat meat, vegetarians today suffer merely a species of social death. Stop eating what...

Nobel Tics.
September 22, 2000... Sins of Commission, Sins of Omission The Nobel Prize is usually meted out with deliberation and fairness-but not always. Consider its inception, a century ago this December. Alfred Nobel's will specified five prizes--in physics, chemistry,...

Berkeley's Right Angles.
September 22, 2000... A Social Science Ideal in Perpendicular Stucco When I moved into my office at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978, my colleague and former professor Bob Blauner said to me, "The best thing about having an office in Barrows Hall...

Looking for Farley.
September 22, 2000... And you do so often read about it as if it were there. --Gertrude Stein I'm looking at a current map of Minnesota. I place my finger on Minneapolis and move northwest about 250 miles to Bemidji, a town of about ten thousand, and then I...

Is there a Doctor in the House.
September 22, 2000... Al Capp invented a host of colorful minor characters for his acclaimed comic strip, "Li'l Abner." Whenever there is a cardiac emergency in a public place, I feel like one of them: a lugubrious little fellow over whose head a small black cloud...

Writing Class.
September 22, 2000... September 3. First classes always give me the jitters. Professors who have taught for decades tell me that even they feel butterflies before the first meeting. So I, with a mere handful of years of college teaching behind me, enter Room 1150...

Love with a Capital L.
September 22, 2000... When I was in my twenties, my friends and I read Colette as others read the Bible. She was our Book of Wisdom. We read her for solace, and for moral instruction. We read her to learn better who we were, and how, given the constraint of our...

THE KNOX BROTHERS.(Review)
September 22, 2000... THE KNOX BROTHERS By Penelope Fitzgerald. Counterpoint Press. $26. In the decade after the war, and long before Harry Potter, I learned what an English family was supposed to be from the books I found in the public children's library. There...

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA: THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF A CHEERFUL CONSERVATIVE.(Review)
September 22, 2000... MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA: THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF A CHEERFUL CONSERVATIVE By Norman Podhoretz. Free Press. $25. In the late 1940s, in one of those neat historical ironies once as common to New York City as Yiddish shop signs, Norman...

BLOOD OF THE LIBERALS.(Review)
September 22, 2000... BLOOD OF THE LIBERALS By George Packer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26. In the late 1940s, in one of those neat historical ironies once as common to New York City as Yiddish shop signs, Norman Podhoretz attended Columbia College alongside...

RUSKIN'S VENICE: THE STONES REVISITED.(Review)
September 22, 2000... RUSKIN'S VENICE: THE STONES REVISITED By Sarah Quill. Ashgate Publishing. $49.95. Ruskin's Venice is a book in search of a category. Is it a collection of photographs of Venetian architecture (Quill is a photographer) with passages from...

PROMISCUITY: AN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF SPERM COMPETITION AND SEXUAL CONFLICT.(Review)
September 22, 2000... PROMISCUITY: AN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY OF SPERM COMPETITION AND SEXUAL CONFLICT By T. R. Birkhead. Harvard. $24.95. Consider for a moment, as T. R. Birkhead asks us to do, the seminal fluid of the common housefly. It carries sperm, of course....

THE READER REPLIES.(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2000... THE WORK OF MOURNING The usefulness of juxtaposing Freud and Homer in Francine du Plessix Gray's column on mourning (Summer 2000) finds a vivid and moving confirmation in the figure of King Priam in the Iliad. Priam, father of innumerable...

The Dying Kiss.
September 22, 2000... After his close friend, Jim Noone, was killed in France in July of 1915, Lance Corporal D. H. Fenton wrote to Jim's mother, "I held him in my arms to the end, and when his soul had departed I kissed him twice where I knew you would have kissed...