American Scholar articles from September 2002

American Scholar archives from September 2002

Early listening. (Letter from the Editor).(Editorial)
September 22, 2002... "Music is a memory bank," wrote Bruce Chatwin. In this issue, two writers draw on musical accounts that have been accruing interest since their childhoods. Carlo Rotella, the author of "A Distinctly Bluesy Condition" (page 13), heard his...

Commonplace book: bugs.(quotations on insects)
September 22, 2002... Thence to Westminster to my barber, to have my periwig he lately made me cleansed of its nits; which vexed me cruelly, that he should have put such a thing in my hands. --SAMUEL PEPYS, Diary, July 18, 1662 Among the insected animals,...

On the Acropolis.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... On the Acropolis It doesn't seem as though we could die up here, does it? The Acropolis is so old that death on it seems superfluous. So we can afford to take some chances-- Leap off the wall! Bash statues with our heads!...

Sensitive.
September 22, 2002... I am high-strung. I have ants in my pants. I'm a jitterbug, a worrywart, a wiggle worm, a nervous Nellie, a princess-and-the-pea type. I am, according to my mother, sensitive--a term I kicked against for years because I thought it meant a value...

The Porch.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... The Porch The willow through whose leaves the full moon rose all summer stands at one end of the porch. At the other end, the lawn falls away to a wood where thrushes sang through the summer evenings. But now, on...

Thoreau Eats an Apple.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Thoreau Eats an Apple The first bite with its pungent spirit pierces his inner cheek where the root of the tongue and the jaw's hinge meet, an acid sting lingering and spreading through the working muscle a...

The Legend of Christopher Columbus.(flat vs round earth)
September 22, 2002... In elementary school, I was taught that everyone thought the world was flat until Columbus proved it was round. I'm sure you were told the same thing, and ten years ago it was still being taught. I know that because every year I ask my college...

In search of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
September 22, 2002... My quest for the true Treasure of the Sierra Madre began years ago, when I ordered a copy of the screenplay by John Huston from Hollywood's Script City. I was teaching a course in film-script analysis, and I wanted my students to study the film...

The Alien.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... The Alien I'm back again scrutinizing the Milky Way of your ultrasound, scanning the dark matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say is chockablock with quarks & squarks, gravitons & gravitini, photons & photinos....

The art of the obituary.
September 22, 2002... Some newspaper readers start their days with the sports section or the crossword puzzle. I start with the death notices. My favorite American paper is the New York Times, partly because it's the best at obituaries. I doubt I am alone in my...

Polonius, our pundit.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... I once worked with a man who reveled in his authority but was too shrewd to revel in it gloriously, exuberantly, or crassly. Although his power base was a local institution, he had been a part of some of the large events of his time. He had...

The years with Kolatch: life at America's most significant obscure magazine.(Myron Kolatch, New Leader)
September 22, 2002... My first job was as an assistant editor with the biweekly New Leader magazine. Then--1976--as now, The New Leader was not widely known. I was fresh out of college, and when I proudly told a former professor of mine about being hired, his...

The uncertain art: Hippocrates redux.(patient responsibility)
September 22, 2002... On June 24, 1889, a youth of twenty--forever after to be memorialized in the literature of medicine by his initials, G. H.--was punitively discharged from The Johns Hopkins Hospital eight days after an operation. Only the second patient to have...

Journal: police log, Lake Oswego, Oregon.
September 22, 2002... Our town newspaper's police report is comedy, tragedy, sociology, poetry, It is my town, my species, me. My summaries of some of the incidents it recounted this past year: SUMMER Naked man reported driving a copper-colored pickup truck...

Rereading: Sgt. Pepper's words. (Books).
September 22, 2002... In June of 1967, when I was nine, my brother and I were farmed out to summer camp in Vermont. In those days you went off with a fully packed trunk and spent more or less the whole summer far from home. You were not allowed to bring anything...

Dreaming of dunghills.(Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America)(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... LARDING THE LEAN EARTH: SOIL AND SOCIETY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA by Steven Stall. Hill and Wang. $30. In the days after my father's death, as I was organizing the affairs of our farm, where he'd been born eighty-five years before, I...

Eros unseated.(The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired)(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... THE LIVES OF THE MUSES: NINE WOMEN AND THE ARTISTS THEY INSPIRED By Francine Prose. HarperCollins. $25.95. It's a rotten time to be writing about muses. Muses--those liminally visible women who inspire art--have not aged well in Western...

The acute angler.(The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors)(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... THE FISH'S EYE: ESSAYS ABOUT ANGLING AND THE OUTDOORS By Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $20. In a posthumously published story called "On Writing," Hemingway's Nick Adams thinks two categorical thoughts: that he loves fishing more...

Liberte, egalite, bloodshed.(Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror)(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... CITIZENS & CANNIBALS: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, THE STRUGGLE FOR MODERNITY, AND THE ORIGINS OF IDEOLOGICAL TERROR By Eli Sagan. Romman and Littlefield. $35. Composed in the spring of 1792, as the French Revolution approached its fourth year...

The aesthetic imperative.(Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art)(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... THOMAS MANN: LIFE AS A WORK OF ART By Hermann Kurzke; translated from the German by Leslie Willson. Princeton University Press. $35. "I was forced to look within myself for everything. If I wanted true source material, feeling, or...

Pros and cons. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2002... In a negative world, there must be a few positive notes. THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR is one of them. I started subscribing three years ago after becoming completely disenchanted with most available magazines. Since then, I've known it's time for the...

Life in the margins. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2002... My chagrin was heartfelt when I read in Professor Kellman's "Life in the Margins" that "in Bulgaria, nodding one's head means no; shaking it means yes." For years, my favorite trivia question (second only to: "In baseball, if there are...

Scatological medicine. (The Reader Replies).(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2002... Sherwin B. Nuland's "Scatological Medicine" reminds us that, just as infallibility in faith and morals may make the Pope particularly fallible about everything else, so the practice of medicine is not made godlike by scientific methodology....

Keats the surgeon. (The Podium).
September 22, 2002... Because he lost both his parents by the time he was fifteen, John Keats had to make his own way in the world. Apprenticed to a local surgeon-apothecary, he shelved the medicine jars, made the bandages, rolled the pills, polished the knives and...