Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2016 i The American Scholar

THE PROBLEM IS NOT ONLY that the hordes of smartphone-gazing perambulators feign obliviousness as they threaten to bowl me over on the way to work each morning. It’s also their smug sense that they can walk and chew the social media fat at the same time. Here’s news: they can’t. They may not realize it, but the rest of us still exist, and our sense of mission in life goes beyond getting out of their way. My grumpiness about this admittedly minor matter establishes that I am of a certain age, but as I learn from James McWilliams in our cover story, my sense of mission also ages me. Apparently, spending every moment glued to Instagram has its downside. The more enveloping a person’s digital existence, the likelier he or…

MY MOTHER WASN’T prone to idealizing her childhood. She was born in 1928, the year before the great stock market crash, and she thought of herself as a child of the Depression. Most of her early memories were sad. The one that seemed strongest was of her dear and usually stoical father in tears, the day he lost his job. But there was one very bright memory that my mother brought up again and again: the day she saw The Wizard of Oz. She found the opening phase of the film slow enough, she told me. She did not much care for the black-and-white segment, set in dreary Kansas. But when the movie went to Oz and exploded in Technicolor, my mother was thrilled. She had never seen a color…

Mz N Nothing This is a taleabout nothingLet’s pretendwe have to establishthe scene & characters though moviesdo it so much betterto the despair of the novelizing tribeBut let’s saythe midafternoon sunis striking the leaves in the woodsvisible from a screened porchsuch that the maples liquefyinto a queer green flame.In the foregroundare ferns, a few daisies,a black-eyed Susanor two. Mz N regretswhat she drankalmost as much as what she said.And then there’s whatshe didn’t do—kissfor examplethe lithe lovelyin the purple sheath that hugged her asslike the plumskin the plum.She bitesthe plum in her luncha lunch someone elsemade. Further chapterswill unfold the full ecosystemof labor and eroticsthat structure the whole panoplyof exchangesthat make up “life” which is the contractI make with you readerhungry as we are for the fruitof the real Mz…

“KINDLY NERVOUS” WAS my father’s euphemistic term for the immense anguish he suffered periodically from bipolar illness, or “manic depression,” as it was then called. Unfortunately for him, the manic phase was no fun—no wild sprees, no elation. Instead, he just worked harder than ever at the dimestore, where he spent most of his time anyway. When Daddy’s mania increased to the point where he could no longer sleep, sometimes I accompanied him down to the store, sleeping on a pallet under his desk while he worked all night long, then going out with him into the chilly dawn to a greasy spoon for breakfast. How I loved those breakfasts! I got to order scrambled eggs and my own big white ceramic cup of sweet, milky coffee while sitting alongside…

If I set a new stylus on an oldrecord—my mother’s teenage single of Roy Head and the Traits,a second-hand Howlin’ Wolf, the B-side of Hey Jude I played until I couldn’t hear it—it’s the same catch,same scratch, same scratch again, same cloudsof static subsiding into soft focus. The first beatbrings it all back home, the dead singer’s voicealive like a recurring dream, or like a ritualas a ritual wishes it could be, unreeling perfectlyover rhythms cherished to the point of sanctity. Not so for poems. The blank before the wordshas no voice of its own, and when the verbsunfurl they change a little every time—not in errors of transcription but in changesof the throat the poem courses through:grown lazy, gruff, impatient through the years,or passing from your mouth to mine…

For all the infidelities it records, the correspondence contains an undercurrent of good faith, a belief that loving will uplift both lover and beloved. LIVING ON PAPER: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995 EDITED BY AVRIL HORNER AND ANNE ROWE Princeton University Press, 666 pp., $39.95 THE MORE THAN 700 letters in this handsome and well-edited volume of Iris Murdoch’s correspondence are only a sample of the thousands that she wrote, many of them at a desk once owned by J. R. R. Tolkien. But even this selection constitutes quite a saga—not of journeys to some equivalent of Middle Earth, perhaps, but instead of the numerous and varied voyages to Eros on which the novelist, dramatist, metaphysician, and academic continually embarked. Yet, despite Murdoch’s assertion that “sex is … nearly the…

The Perils of Spice I very much appreciated Philip Alcabes’s article “Medication Nation” (Winter 2016), which tackles a taboo topic through an unbiased modern perspective. However, I take issue with the way Alcabes flippantly characterizes adverse reactions to the synthetic cannabinoids K2 and Spice. During medical school, I spent quite a bit of time working with men and women in homeless shelters. These shelters prohibit marijuana and alcohol use under penalty of expulsion, so those who want to get high most commonly do so with “legal” K2 or Spice. These drugs produce a disproportionate incidence of acute onset psychosis—that is, psychosis that completely debilitates and requires hospitalization. Now, it is well understood that other psychoactive stimulants—such as meth and PCP—can beget comparable reactions. Alcohol withdrawal, in the form of the…

1. Most bridges can be classified as ordinary or signature. The first, which we encounter on most highways, are plain, simple, undistinguished, and generally quick, easy, and inexpensive to build. The second are fancy, complicated, unique, and more often than not politically contentious, behind schedule, and over budget. For instance, when the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake revealed weaknesses in the east span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, California officials were forced to decide whether to reinforce the workaday old structure or replace it with a signature span. Early estimates placed the cost of each option at about $1 billion, so the decision was made to build an elaborate new bridge. Yet it wasn’t completed until almost 25 years after the earthquake, at a cost of more than $6 billion.…

Prohibition may have failed, but in this century the abolition of drunk driving seems within reach. Within a decade, new tools that measure the concentration of alcohol in normally exhaled breath could be in every car. In a joint venture between 17 automakers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, two new devices—one similar to a Breathalyzer, one a laser—are being developed by two Massachusetts-based companies. Both devices use infrared sensors in a car’s steering wheel, ignition button, or shift stick to instantly calculate a driver’s blood alcohol level—and, if need be, to disable the car. Thanks to tougher laws, stricter enforcement, and more intense lobbying, the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities in America decreased from more than 25,000 in 1980 to a new low of 10,000 in 2014, according…

WHEN WE SEND OUR SOLDIERS, spies, and mercenaries into dangerous situations, we have and should have high expectations for how they will behave. Murder, rape, and pillage—the dark acts of soldiery in wartime—are heinous crimes even when our own soldiers commit them, and lesser acts of cruelty and destruction are also intolerable. Although it would be naïve to think that we prosecute more than a fraction of such crimes, that we prosecute them at all speaks to our values and to the standards we have for the behavior of our soldiers. Still, if we are honest about what war is and what can reasonably be expected of those we expose to the boredom, tension, and danger of combat, then we know that criminal acts are inevitable, and that when we…

FROM 1904 UNTIL HIS DEATH in 1957, the composer Jean Sibelius lived some 20 miles north of Helsinki, in a rural villa built of timber and stone on the shores of Lake Tuusula. He called the house Ainola, after his wife, Aino. Surrounded by fields and birch forests, it befitted the isolation of Sibelius’s later years, when Finland’s most revered musician became a withdrawn, reclusive figure. From about 1933 onward, he published no music of any significance, nothing but a few trifles and arrangements. Yet he continued to wage a turbulent artistic struggle with himself as he attempted, over the course of several years, to write his Eighth Symphony. Sometime in the 1940s, the struggle was seemingly lost. One day, Sibelius carried a laundry basket filled with his manuscripts into…

 AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFÉ: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others The upheavals of the 20th century destroyed cultural certainties and introduced bewilderment and anxiety. It was philosophy that came to the rescue. BY SARAH BAKEWELL Other Press, 448 pp., $25 “THERE ARE MORE things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” says Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a troubled dropout struggling with questions of responsibility, to his best friend. Even by the Elizabethan era, it seems, a discipline that had begun in classical times as a practical method for discerning how best to live life had devolved into something increasingly hermetic. Wind the clock forward, to the late 19th century, and philosophy had become an…

THE TIDES OF THE MIND: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness BY DAVID GELERNTER Liveright, 320 pp., $26.95 ON BEING HUMAN: Why Mind Matters BY JEROME KAGAN Yale University Press, 320 pp., $35 SOMETIMES IT TAKES an expert to recognize when expertise is not enough. In his preface to The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, explains how for years he tried to answer crucial questions about the nature of consciousness through computer modeling. But while computation can ape reasonably well our rational thought, he argues, what makes us human is our capacity to move up and down a spectrum of consciousness, from the crisp attention we feel when wide awake to the aimless associative states of drowsiness and daydreaming.…

Plutonium is a very dense metal. When you hold a lump of it in your hand, it feels warm, like a live rabbit. —Leona Marshall Libby, Manhattan Project physicist, The Uranium People, 1979 I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. When both the boys were away for Easter, I hardly did anything but work. Worked, slept, ate and went for short walks. But above all I worked. … No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes. —Kaethe Kollwitz, Diary and Letters, April 1910 There are things I remember that may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place. —Harold Pinter, Old Times, 1971 When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great…

IN 2012, PAUL MILLER, a 26-year-old journalist and former writer for The Verge, began to worry about the quality of his thinking. His ability to read difficult studies or to follow intricate arguments demanding sustained attention was lagging. He found himself easily distracted and, worse, irritable about it. His longtime touchstone—his smartphone—was starting to annoy him, making him feel insecure and anxious rather than grounded in the ideas that formerly had nourished him. “If I lost my phone,” he said, he’d feel “like I could never catch up.” He realized that his online habits weren’t helping him to work, much less to multitask. He was just switching his attention all over the place and, in the process, becoming a bit unhinged. Subtler discoveries ensued. As he continued to analyze his…

TO WRITE AUTOBIOGRAPHY is always to create a fictional character, even though the name of the character—“I”—disguises that fact. Conversely, creating a character, removed from the author by an invented name, can be a way of writing autobiography: fiction as a way of getting at the real. The history of the novel is full of examples. But poetry is another matter. Because the first person is the default option in lyric poems, it’s rare to see a poet write about herself under the cover of a fictional character. That’s what Maureen N. McLane is doing, however, when she names her character “Mz N” after her own middle initial. It’s as if Mz N were the private person hidden in McLane’s public identity, a self inside the poet’s self, like a…

Going down past rags and bones,past frost and roots, pastshark teeth, auricles of aurochs,teeth of megalodon, throughshells of murex, triton,whelk, down among the soul’slattices and ladders, purple sluicesand bones white as daisies, amongcorpuscles among clouds ofplankton and protozoa, winds thatmove trees like stags, gales whippingacross fens, rain pounding like bloodover steamy greenhouses with morphosand satyrines, toads and gangliastrung like lianas, leaves big as huts,languages of clicks and tonguesliquid as heartbeats, songs of stemsand mud, grubs and microbes,crystals and dung, and a pulsestrumming trellises of ribs, pullingit all together where is neithernight nor day, where fingersmove in blind voluptuousness,naked as earthworms, touchingnotes from everything, here wheremind leaves fresh prints on archives,whispers tracks onto slabs andbedrock to bloom again and again,here where is emptiness, the waya shrine is important for what’snot there,…

MARK ROTHKO: From the Inside Out BY CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO Yale University Press, 302 pp., $35 MARK ROTHKO (1902–1970), WHOSE paintings have mystified and entranced viewers for more than half a century, considered himself an extremely fortunate man. Now this good fortune includes a new book by his devoted son, whose collection of linked essays serves as a down-to-earth guide to (and guardian of ) his father’s oeuvre. Like father, like son: both want art to speak for itself through form and color rather than narrative content, to aspire to the emotional power of instrumental music, to directly communicate universal truths. Although Christopher Rothko is a practic-Rothko’s ambitions for art were devout and extreme, and he would no doubt despise today’s art world for its quasi-sociological ironies and market-driven strategies, though…

LAST ISSUE’S RESULTS { SHARPENING OLD SAWS } In the previous issue of the SCHOLAR, I called for updating old saws. More than one of you noted how obsolete “dial” is in phone-related expressions. I like the suggestion to replace “please hang up and dial again” with “please disconnect and reconnect at a later time,” a winner of this contest. Like rotary phones, pens came up, in traditional sayings based on that writing implement. One reader proposed replacing “the pen is mightier than the sword” with “the blog is mightier than the suicide bomb,” another winner. (Two readers suggested that we replace “pen pal” with “pixel pal,” a good suggestion, but a term that’s already in use.) Because tapping screens is more common than knocking on wood these days, the…