American Scholar articles from September 2001

American Scholar archives from September 2001

The long view. (Letter From The Editor).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Two decades ago, when THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR turned fifty, its editors noted on this page that it had been born "during the bleakest days of the worst depression this country has ever known, and its founding, by Phi Beta Kappa, marks an act of...

Ritual. (Commonplace Book).
September 22, 2001... 5-8 A.M. Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness; contrive Day's Business and take the Resolution of the Day; prosecute the present study; and breakfast?-- 8-12 A.M. Work. 12-2 P.M. Read, or overlook my Accounts, and dine. 2-6...

Seventy years of the American scholar: a chrestomathy. (Cover Story).
September 22, 2001... Founded by the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa in September 1931, the SCHOLAR is now beginning its eighth decade. The excerpts on these pages are drawn from the thousands of essays, reviews, and forums we've published over the past seventy...

The return of the key.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... It was a drowsy summer afternoon, hot wind stirring the papers in the room and smoke slanting up from my cigarette as from a tiny factory that produced only smoke. I was reading William Carlos Williams, growing...

Big bard.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... O what a lark it must have been to be Shakespeare--to face no copyediting, to never blot a line, to spell a word the way you wished, or wish, just anyhow, without a spinsterish consistency, so future editors could spend a year and...

The public intellectual and the American University. (Cover Story).(Cover Story)
September 22, 2001... People keep telling me two stories about American intellectual life. I encounter them over and over again: in magazines, on the literary Web sites bookmarked on my computer, in the endless series of books and essays on the New York...

Happy trails to all. (Cover Story).(nature trails)
September 22, 2001... Aided by our children, Jean and I made a trail through our woods a long time ago. It begins in a long alley between two rows of black walnuts, crab apples, and other shrubby trees on our land, and crosses a seasonal creek (originally we bridged...

Boaz asleep.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... translated by Brooks Haxton Boaz, overcome with weariness, by torchlight made his pallet on the threshing floor where all day he had worked, and now he slept among the bushels of threshed wheat. The old man owned wheat fields and...

Why smart people believe in God.
September 22, 2001... Lately, I have been mulling over my relationship to God. Well, not mine exactly, but other people's. And, to be honest, I wouldn't be doing any mulling at all if these were not triple-creme-Brie, subtitled-films, PBS, New York Review of Books...

Getting and spending: Nostalgia for the old way of reading poetry. (Cover Story).(Cover Story)
September 22, 2001... One night, during a dinner Alison was giving for her friend Doris, we were discussing Internet shopping, when a line from a Wordsworth poem came into my mind and out of my mouth: "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers." Doris picked...

The diamonds of Neptune.
September 22, 2001... Not long ago, Laura Benedetti, a graduate student in physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Raymond Jeanloz, a Berkeley professor of geology and geophysics, attempted to re-create the atmosphere of the planet Neptune in their...

Socrates and I.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Faced with his decision after the assembly Votes against him and he's led back to his cell, I'd have listened to his friends' escape plan. Still I'm glad he refuses, glad that for him To fail in obedience to the Laws of Athens, Even...

The reader.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... It was the morning after the hundredth birthday of Geraldine--still quite in her right mind, a redhead now and (people said) still pretty- who hadn't wanted a party. Well, they had won, though she had stood her ground on no singing...

Winter wheat.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... I The plowboy was something his something as I nibbled the lobe of her right ear and something her blouse for the Empire-blotchy globe of her left breast on which there something a something louse. II Those something lice...

Getting to Roger.(baseball player Roger Maris)
September 22, 2001... For a couple of months in that splendid late summer of 1998, we all remembered the name of Roger Maris, as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa shattered his 1961 record of 61 home runs. The next year, however, when McGwire and Sosa surpassed the old...

The great books. (The uncertain art).
September 22, 2001... Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?" So the Duke of Gloucester is said to have exclaimed in 1781, when Edward Gibbon presented him with a copy of the second volume of The Decline and Fall of...

Santa Rosa Island, 1998 (Journal).
September 22, 2001... For two years, I "cowboyed" on Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands off Central California. Santa Rosa had been ranched by a single family for nearly a century, but after its acquisition by the National Park Service in the 1980s, a...

Love's Wound, Love's Salve. (Books: rereading.)(Cover Story).(Knut Hamsun's "Pan")(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... When I was growing up in Michigan, my mother was the great reader in my family, and my father, though deeply creative in his professional life, did not read at all. I worked out a big part of my Oedipal conflict, if that's what it was, by...

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. (Books: the next next thing).(Review)
September 22, 2001... EMERGENCE: THE CONNECTED LIVES OF ANTS, BRAINS, CITIES, AND SOFTWARE By Steven Johnson. Scribner. $25. Silicon Valley's boosters sometimes claim that the region is the imperial Rome or Victorian London of high technology, ground zero of a...

Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art. (Books: beauty myths).(Review)
September 22, 2001... VENUS IN EXILE: THE REJECTION OF BEAUTY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART by Wendy Steiner. Thy Free Press. $26. "Death is the mother of beauty," wrote Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning" (though the idea hardly originated with him), and, in the...

Richard Wright: The Life and Times. (Books: sorrow, rage, bitterness).(Review)
September 22, 2001... RICHARD WRIGHT: THE LIFE AND TIMES By Hazel Rowley. Henry Holt. $35. Speaking to his friend Anais Nin in the late 1940s, Richard Wright defended his rationale for exile: "I can only be useful as a writer... and as a writer [in America] I...

Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. (Books: the whisper of the day).(Review)
September 22, 2001... AFFAIRS OF HONOR: NATIONAL POLITICS IN THE NEW REPUBLIC By Joanne B. Freeman. Yale University Press. $29.95. A slew of popular historians have gone on tour in recent years with their speculative psychodramas about the American founders....

Loving and hating Simone Weil. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2001... After reading Francine du Plessix Gray's article (Summer 2001), I too did not find much to love about poor Simone Weil. One odd thing, however: the opinion that aroused the author's "deepest hostility" was the very one that I thought was...

Ohio States. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2001... As a Connecticut Yankee who has spent the last sixteen years in Ohio, I found Jeffrey Hammond's "Ohio States" disconcerting in that it confirmed all of my worst suspicions about my adopted home. The Ohio-born poet Paul Zimmer said it best...

Van. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2001... Early on in "Van," Brian Doyle lists some of those whose music electrified Morrison and his chums "down by the pylons" of their youth. Before there was Jerry Lee or Elvis--and well before Morrison's passionate journey--I regaled my buddies...

The come as you are not party. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2001... I was struck by Natalia Singer's account of one woman's struggle with the moral challenge of abortion. Apparently our narrator's decision to seek an abortion went smoothly until she arrived at the clinic, where she had an unexpected...

Troping through proverbia. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2001... I greatly enjoyed Bert O. States's article on proverbs. Nothing that follows detracts from my appreciation. First, "Easy come, easy go" is usually addressed to wastrels. "Waste not, want not" does not contradict it--it supplements the...

"Are you doing any poetry with them?" (The Podium).(teaching poetry in Belfast, Northern Ireland)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... I began teaching in the early 1960s in St. Thomas's School in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast, in front of a class of disaffected adolescent boys, many of whom would end up a decade later as active members of the Provisional IRA. There was...