American Scholar articles from September 2003

American Scholar archives from September 2003

Place cards.(Letter From The Editor)(Editorial)
September 22, 2003... Deciding the sequence of the essays in one of our issues is like planning an old-fashioned dinner party: you shuffle the place cards until each pair of adjacent guests has enough in common to begin a conversation and enough differences to take...

Fish.(Commonplace Book)
September 22, 2003... One does not catch a salmon. One kills a salmon. The distinction resembles that preserved in English between the verbs "to murder" and "to assassinate": ordinary citizens are murdered, leaders are assassinated. So with the King of Fish. He is...

October Eternal.(Poem)
September 22, 2003... for Peter Woerner at sixty Today I lovingly think of a lithe young halfback. Four decades gone, I chased him down a field; this was the fall, suburban Philadelphia. He made me a fool. Damned if I loved him then. ...

Legerdemain.(Poem)
September 22, 2003... Some days one gets the in but not the out part of the rabbit/hat trick. And the longer a creature stays, the worse it sticks. Dispatch means so much, one remembers again. A thing can get ...

How Kipling taught me to write.
September 22, 2003... Kipling was the most conscious of writers (no, it wasn't Henry James). He thought about writing, and he wrote and wrote about it. Not about writers, mind you--he declined to critique his contemporaries, and though there are critics and...

An army of one.(draft)
September 22, 2003... A few years ago I received an odd letter from a stranger. He said that he had read my capsule biography in Contemporary Authors and noticed it made no mention of military service in the Vietnam War. I had been of the right age to serve. Why...

Downhill.(Poem)
September 22, 2003... Downhill Down through the firs, past tarweed fields and hunting shacks, my brother drives his prewar Pontiac. We've fished the stream we fished before he fought in Italy. He taps the pack of Camels on the dash,...

The Weeper.(Poem)
September 22, 2003... The Weeper The name his followers gave Ignatius, who wept While saying mass, or while listening to the coos Of a common dove. Ignatius never knew When his throat would tighten, a wave of sobs Breaking him open as he...

Exploding the dog.
September 22, 2003... In the last month, my German wirehaired pointer, Rosie, has twice had hematomas--blood pillows the size of elongated matchboxes--pop up on her right ear. Each time, the vet has charged me a hundred and forty bucks to slit them open and baste...

Lost causes and gallantry: Johnny Reb and the Shadow of Sir Walter.
September 22, 2003... No air conditioning or television in those days, just a little tobacco town in South Carolina and hot summer afternoons that punished exertion. So all through junior high school and high school we read and reread about those other hot summer...

Grandmothers.
September 22, 2003... Sometimes, from my desk here in Japan, I see boys in the park across from me, hitting and hitting a ball with a large blue baseball bat. Their grandmothers sit in the sun, on benches, the gold and russet leaves coming down around them like...

When It Lifts.(Poem)
September 22, 2003... When It Lifts At the zenith of rolling up the window shade there's a falling into place, a soft snap when the winding mechanism catches hold, pawl in ratchet, and the taut pull-string loosens in...

Rereading: Jim and I.(Lord Jim)
September 22, 2003... As I look down the mental shelf of books that formed my taste and thinking when I was a boy, I find a tame assortment of rifles almost entirely predictable by the year of my birth: in addition to such classics as Tom Sawyer and The Prince and...

The Snare of Rhetoric.(Poems and Translations by Ezra Pound)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS By Ezra Pound. Edited by Richard Sieburth. Library of America. $45. "The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation / Troubles my sleep," Ezra Pound wrote in one of his lighter...

Tooth and Claw.(Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... MONSTER OF GOD: THE MAN-EATING PREDATOR IN THE JUNGLES OF HISTORY AND THE MIND By David Quammen. Norton. $26.95 Last year the Ugandan Wildlife Authority began sending armed patrols to the shores of Lake Victoria, in the Bugiri region, to...

The Golden State.(Where I Was From by Joan Didion)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... WHERE I WAS FROM By Joan Didion. Knopf $23. Though she is a writer deeply associated with the personal, Joan Didion has given us almost nothing of herself in twenty years. Of her nonfiction, Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987) were reported...

Reading Abstract Art.(Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work)(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... ARSHILE GORKY: HIS LIFE AND WORK By Hayden Herrera. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $45. In 1943, the artist Arshile Gorky, his wife, and their young daughter spent part of the summer at a Virginia farm owned by Gorky's in-laws. One day, after...

Squaring the Circle.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2003... In "Squaring the Circle" (Summer 2003), Charles E Dunbar writes, "For whatever reason, the administration has not given the impression of being serious about nation-building." Dunbar should not so blithely dismiss the "whatever reason,"...

Doorways.(The Reader Replies)
September 22, 2003... The SCHOLAR'S first visual essay was great! I hope this new kind of feature gathers momentum and earns frequent appearances in your pages. ROY D. SCHICKEDANZ Glenwood, Illinois

Suds.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2003... I thoroughly enjoyed "Suds," Tim Morris's essay on doing the laundry. I am a widower and retiree who spends a lot of time at a laundromat. The dumbed-down conversations I overhear there leave me nostalgic for Brooklyn in the 1930s. And for nay...

The case of Julius Goebel.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2003... Fascinating article. However, please repeat after me ten times: "Indiana University, not University of Indiana." After reading what W. B. Carnochan had to say about David Starr Jordan, I now understand why Indiana doesn't make much of its...

Patriotism is sticky.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2003... Yesterday evening, while sitting in a local bookstore, I anxiously read Todd Gitlin's noble effort to weave his intellectual fingers around patriotism's mishmash of mixed emotions. As one of the cosmopolitan types he writes about, I've grappled...

What was Mr. Bennet doing in his library?(Pride and Prejudice)(The Podium)
September 22, 2003... As every reader of Pride and Prejudice knows, he was hiding from his family, particularly his wife. But what was he doing while he was hiding? Mr. Bennet habitually retreated to his library after breakfast and stayed there most of the day,...