American Scholar articles from September 2004

American Scholar archives from September 2004

The Thanksgiving table.(Letter from the Editor)
September 22, 2004... Last spring, when some of us learned that this was to be our last issue, we immediately started talking about what it should be like. It soon became clear that what each of us craved was not so much an all-star issue as an all-cousin issue: a...

Taking Leave.(Commonplace Book)
September 22, 2004... I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. --JOHN KEATS, letter to Charles Brown, November 30, 1820 It will not, I trust, be supposed by any reader that I have intended in this so-called...

Joyas volardores.
September 22, 2004... Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas volardores, flying jewels, the first...

Costanza Bonarelli.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Costanza Bonarelli A bust that looks just-kissed, from the blind intensity of her gaze, to the somewhat swollen parted lips, to the parting, above her rumpled chemise, of two soft breasts his hands lifted...

South of Ronda.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 2004... South of Ronda In the cold, clear winter air of Andalusia, walked a trail up through pig grass toward a distant abandoned farmhouse. No one could live here, I said aloud. The land was baked clay, the long...

Here's looking at you.
September 22, 2004... Men of genius are not quick "judges of character," observed Max Beerbohm. "Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up." You and I is right, Max. I'm always sizing people up on first...

Love in a box.
September 22, 2004... Every weekday morning at 5:30, I dragged myself out of sleep so I could eat breakfast with her as she worked. That's how smitten I was. As she talked, I loved to stare at her red hair and full red lips. I found it endearing how, if she got...

An oil on canvas.
September 22, 2004... This painting has been with me almost since my birth. It bears a date, 1933, one year after I was born, and it hung in my childhood home as our family's most conspicuous gesture toward the visual arts--our sole purchased, painted canvas. I seem...

Tucson Birthday.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Tucson Birthday Ocotillo leafs out beside the porch rail--saw-teeth of green assault the sky's blue. The cactus wrens chirp in the cholla's shade. Beyond, the tennis players call it quits. Downtown, miles stretch like...

Reaching point comfort.
September 22, 2004... On the night of May 23, 1861, barely a month after the outbreak of the Civil War, three young men made their way stealthily through the darkness toward the fort that guarded Hampton Roads, Virginia, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. When...

Un clown biologique.
September 22, 2004... When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1970s, a story persistently made the rounds in the usual way--it had happened to somebody twice removed from you, or somebody once removed from you had seen it happen--that a kid had cursed out Bozo the...

A Congo Funeral.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 2004... A Congo Funeral Once, when a good man died, his friends would dress him Like the king of a tribe no one had ever seen. In a forest clearing, in a room without walls, They would seat him in a chair, crown him with flowers,...

A skull in Varanasi, a head in Baghdad.
September 22, 2004... Varanasi--the British name was Benares, based on a mispronunciation--is not just any city of gods. Devout Hindus go there, alongside the sacred Ganges, the better to extricate themselves from the wheel of rebirth and climb the slippery ladder...

The founder of empires.
September 22, 2004... Abu al Hasan 'Ali ibn al-Husain ibn 'Ali ibn 'Abdullah al-Mas'udi, the Baghdad-born chronicler of Abbasid Islam and its peripheries, composed The Meadows of Gold in the fourth century after the Prophet's flight to Medina, or around the...

On the bus.
September 22, 2004... For many years I taught one semester a year in graduate writing programs, nearly all of them far from home. Some time ago I was offered a position at a state university two hundred miles from New York and, calculating quickly that I could...

Intermittences of the heart.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... Nineteen twenty-two was a banner year for Virginia Woolf. She was middle-aged. She had been writing for years--essays, reviews, lectures, letters, brilliant diary entries, even novels. But all her literary activity had been shadowed by an...

The Class Egotist.
September 22, 2004... After twenty-five years, I went back to college this May and discovered, to my surprise, that no one remembered my winning the prize for Class Egotist. This award, among others both serious and amusing, was handed out on Class Day, which takes...

Crossing over.
September 22, 2004... An afternoon trip to the post office is part of my normal round of errands, proof of my success in becoming a respectable person in keeping with the folkways of my native borough of Brooklyn. I have a wife, an apartment, pleasurable work,...

Numerologies.
September 22, 2004... The proposition that there is no greatest prime number first appears in literature as the twentieth of thirty-six propositions in the ninth of the thirteen books of Euclid's Elements. Because of its simplicity and because of the window it opens...

Moving on.
September 22, 2004... Love's blind at first sight. So we bought an old farmhouse, in decidedly suboptimal condition, at the end of a road. It stood on a low knoll in the middle of pastures, as open to every wind that howled as if it had been in North Dakota instead...

Virtue.
September 22, 2004... Long ago, when I taught in a community college, I had a student who didn't want to be there. Brilliant, disappointed, he made up for his disappointments by trying to shame his teachers. His method was to show familiarity with things they...

Tattoo.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Tattoo Though a simple rose under your skin I look up the bugle ritual of recall for sailors to regroup soldiers at parade rest and your sister who could not read as a child needing you for sustenance now you...

In praise of doodling.
September 22, 2004... Preliterate, primordial, the doodle is at once the most common and the most ignored art form. And yet for all its primitivity, and despite its surely universal occurrence among the literate peoples of the world, there was no English word for...

Why I don't live in America.
September 22, 2004... In 1999, at the age of forty-seven, I packed up and left New York City, where I had lived for more than twenty years, bound for Indonesia--a decision that changed my life profoundly. As you might expect, in a vast, poor tropical nation...

The celestial Rolodex.
September 22, 2004... Not long ago, I was looking for a telephone number in my Rolodex when I stumbled across my card for Leonard Michaels, an exceptionally talented and underappreciated short story writer and essayist. In 1985, when I was a graduate student in...

Out on the Island.
September 22, 2004... The Island seen from the Throgs Neck Bridge is always the Island seen for the first time. From the roadbed of the great bridge as it twists around in its haste to turn its back on the Bronx, you look down at opulent, sullen houses that turn...

The Beaver.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 2004... The Beaver sinks regenerating teeth. Clears trees. Plasters with her fiat scaled tail the dam that every night she bolsters until she undermines low woods with intricate waterworks, forcing the stream...

Nurture for the damn ego.
September 22, 2004... Three years ago, I wrote an autobiographical essay, "Happy Trails for All." For various personal reasons, many of them connected to my age--I was approaching my eightieth birthday--I thought my essay would be the last piece I would write, in...

Traveling without a camera.
September 22, 2004... I travel without a camera. There are things about traveling that are important beyond that constant, incontinent fiddling with our imaging. But I had to examine this prejudice after the pictures of Kyrgyzstan arrived by e-mail. Kyrgyzstan:...

Momigliano at the Warburg: the origins of a style.(Biography)
September 22, 2004... In 1973, when I arrived as a student at the Warburg Institute in London, eminences brushed shoulders in the dim corridors and mumbled over Jaffa cakes in the tearoom. The director, E. H. Gombrich, bestrode the lively and quarrelsome world of...

Against work.
September 22, 2004... A history of my suburban early ambitions would sound utterly conventional. At the age of six I wanted to be a cowboy. At twelve I decided instead to become a professional football player, which, for someone who would never weigh more than a...

I Was Asleep.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 2004... I Was Asleep I was asleep, then I woke up ashamed, dreaming I was under a bridge with a sailor. Deep shadow, blue middy, the arms gripping tightly... No words, the light on the grass beyond like sheets of...

Stable and salon.(authorship)
September 22, 2004... To write for one's life is to hide and then seek. You wander or scuttle away and, in hiding, you discover the frightening mysteries of honest language and necessary form. Then you aim for light; you demand it, however silently, and you are...

Vermont 2002-2004.(Journal)
September 22, 2004... I had my annual turtles-emerge-from-hibernation dream, which is always quite specific and timed appropriately. Then about seven A.M. saw a moose slowly crossing the field. Half an inch of snow had fallen overnight, but the hardwood trees have...

Unraveling Ariadne's Thread.(fiction writing)
September 22, 2004... Dreams, Graham Greene believed--his last major book, published after his death, was a record of his dreams--come to us as much from the future as from the past. They exist in some untapped place into which we fall, for a moment, before...

Modernism and mastery.(Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930)(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... AXEL'S CASTLE: A STUDY OF THE IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE OF 1870-1930 By Edmund Wilson. Introduction by Mary Gordon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $15. In the landscape of American letters, Edmund Wilson rears up like one of those monuments...

Something that was us.(The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death)(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... THE BURIED SOUL: HOW HUMANS INVENTED DEATH By Timothy Taylor. Beacon Press. $26. Until about 1950, when someone died in the Newfoundland fishing village of Witless Bay, the community took steps to avoid angering his irritable spirit....

Living it.(Why Read?)(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... WHY READ? By Mark Edmundson. Bloomsbury USA. $22.95. In "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life," Nietzsche distinguishes between two ways of looking at the past. Ideally, he argues, history--the great works and ideas that form our...

Being oversouls together.(Hawthorne In Concord)(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Hawthorne In Concord By Philip McFarland. Grove Press. $26. At five in the afternoon on July 9, 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his new bride, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, dismounted from a carriage in Concord, Massachusetts. They had been...

The forest dweller and the beggar.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2004... Phyllis Rose (Summer 2004) sees the adult stage of life as a time to "amass wealth and power... and experience all the sensual pleasures." Could there be a better description of the Bush family (or adder goal for a supposed intellectual)? To...

Houston and history.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2004... I wonder what kind of burr Benjamin Maser had under his saddle when he thundered through Houston looking neither left nor right and missed the great universities, the Texas Medical Center, and the Hispanic people and their culture. They were...

Comedy, cruelty, and tourism.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2004... In his essay on Thoreau's Cape Cod, Robert Pinsky quotes Thoreau's description of the bodies of those that died in the wreck of the brig St. John: "marble feet and matted heads... the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk... quite bloodless--merely...

Heavy meta.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2004... Ben Yagoda states that "It's De-Lovely" originated in the musical Anything Goes. This is incorrect. The song was written for Red, Hot and Blue, a 1936 show starring Ethel Merman, Bob Hope, and Jimmy Durante. ABRAM SAMUELS Allentown,...

Editorial departures.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2004... I was saddened to read in the New York Times about your editor's upcoming departure. The editorial content has greatly improved under her tenure. I hope she and Phi Beta Kappa can reconsider. LEE MORIWAKI Seattle, Washington I...

Corrigendum.(The Reader Replies)(Correction Notice)
September 22, 2004... Because of a printer's error, a line was dropped from Benjamin Moser's "Houston and History" (Summer 2004). The first three paragraphs below the line space on page 65 should read: On a recent visit to a bookstore, I asked the girl...