Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2017 i The American Scholar

IN A CORNER OF OUR OFFICE is a small cluster of gray metal filing boxes, artifacts of a predigital age when neatly typed note cards kept track of what writers had published in the SCHOLAR. The cards that follow the career of Brian Doyle show that his connection to us goes back to 1994. Between that date and 2010, when we presumably lost touch with anyone who could use a typewriter and thus keep the cards updated, Brian wrote for us 16 times, and in the years since then, other sources say, he has written another 10 times—poems, a remarkable essay about Edmund Burke, a tribute in our most recent issue to Errol Flynn, and much else that has done us proud. And in the post-filing-box era, Brian also wrote…

BORN IN NORTH AFRICA around 310 BCE, writing in Greek under the rule of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, Callimachus was a refined, cosmopolitan poet: allusive, self-conscious, and a master of verse technique. Coming at the end of a tradition dominated by Homer, he wrote against the dominance of the epic and praised what is small scale, subtle, and finely wrought. He was also known for his catalog—120 volumes!—of the works in the library at Alexandria. Bibliography, however, wasn’t merely his day job; as the classicist Wendell Clausen once put it, “Callimachus was not a poet and a scholar; he was a poet because he was a scholar, a grammatikós, a man whose business was literature.” The same may be said about Stephen Burt, a professor of English at Harvard, scholar and…

Understanding the Victors Although Amitai Etzioni’s article about understanding or even empathizing with Trump voters (“ ‘We Must Not Be Enemies,’ ” Winter 2017) has many good suggestions, it seems jejune to me in face of the adamant hostility of many Trump supporters. It addresses shortcomings of those on the left but bypasses increased and increasing hardness on the right. Trump’s portrayal of Hillary Clinton distorted reality in ways that touched a streak of righteous victimization and promoted a cruel, narrow atmosphere. If understanding and empathy are required for partnership, they are needed on both sides. MICHAEL EIGEN New York City Etzioni argues that progressives need a communitarian, diversity-within-unity approach to better understand Trump voters and to reach out to them—an assertion that implies that those voters would be amenable…

Rutgers University professor of Africana Studies and Human Ecology NAA OYO KWATE received a Smithsonian Institution Fellowship to research and write a scholarly history of the origins of fast food in urban African-American neighborhoods. The following is an excerpt from her book. On June 14, 1968, McDonald’s published, at what must have been considerable expense, a full-page, text-only ad in The New York Times and The Washington Post: PLEASE! All concerned Americans. We have worked together to help build a great and wonderful country. Let’s not allow anyone—no matter how misguided or misinformed—to tear it down and destroy it. Let’s stick together and keep America great. What did McDonald’s believe was putting America at risk? Whatever the threat, the ad’s rhetoric resonates today, after the 2016 election. McDonald’s enigmatic ad…

After Callimachus So reactionaries and radicals complainthat I have no proprietary mission,no project that’s all mine;instead, I am like a child flipping Pogsor building with Minecraft bricks, although I’m past forty.To them I say: keep rolling logsfor one another, but don’t waste my timeimposing your inappropriate ambition:marathon runners and shock jocks gainby going as far as they can, but the sublime,the useful and the beautiful in poetryare all inversely correlatedwith size: shorter means sweeter. I’ll be fine.When I first ratedmyself as a writer of some sort,wolf-killing, light-bearing Apollo came to meas a ferret. Stay off crowded trains, he said; never resortto volume where contrast will do. ImitateErik Satie, or Young Marble Giants. The remedy for anomielies in between the wing-slips of the cicada.If I can’t be weightless, or glide among…

UNWARRANTED: Policing Without Permission BY BARRY FRIEDMAN Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pp., $28 CRIMINAL JUSTICE is neither a puzzle to crack nor an engineering problem to solve but a negotiation—a process by which humans reach consensus about violent conflict. It cannot be ceded to robots and algorithms. The system requires human victims, human witnesses, and proceedings on a human scale. Real people must participate in the assignation of guilt—not because of a lack of means, but because human participation is the point. At its core, law is about discrete events, not conjectured risks. It asks: What can we agree happened? What’s to be done about it? That’s the problem inherent in technology-driven, predictive approaches to law enforcement. They may have their uses, but criminal justice is not one of…

ELIZABETH BISHOP: A Miracle for Breakfast BY MEGAN MARSHALL Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 365 pp., $30 MEGAN MARSHALL’S Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast is actually two books bound in the same cover. Both are interesting, but one is much better than the other. The first “book” is a compelling new biography of Bishop, who is now widely considered the most important American poet of the mid-20th century. Using a wealth of new material, including the poet’s letters to her lovers and psychoanalyst, Marshall has crafted the most intimate and accurate biography yet available. Anyone interested in Bishop’s life and work will need to read this moving and often revelatory new account. The second “book” consists of seven short memoirs by Marshall that surround each chapter of the formal biography. These…

THIS LONG PURSUIT: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer BY RICHARD HOLMES Pantheon, 368 pp., $30 AMONG MODERN BIOGRAPHERS, I can think of few rivals to Richard Holmes, especially among those who write about the Romantic era. When Shelley: The Pursuit first appeared, in 1974, I was in my final year of graduate school in Scotland, and I had ambitions of my own as a biographer. My sense of Shelley—I had read him obsessively for many years—was permanently altered by Holmes’s book. I had imagined him as an ethereal young man, rather distracted, a mind on fire but somehow not of its time and place. Holmes not only shifted my view, but also that of a generation of scholars and readers. The Shelley who emerged was earthy, vindictive, even calculating. He…

 IN SEVEN YEARS OF NEARLY continuous protests, this one was the most articulate. Some 400 speech therapists, occupational therapists, and child psychologists stood outside the Greek parliament in late January, calling on the government not to cut subsidies they receive from the national health system. The protesters—well dressed, middle class, and highly educated, many of them at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States—were not the sort who generally take to the streets. And yet, so angry were they with the government that they marched out into traffic, led by a stray dog that had instinctively placed itself at the head of the column, and paraded their banners and slogans across the center of town, from Syntagma Square to the doors of the Ministry of Health. Given the…

“Mr. Jagger explodes onstage with his characteristic kick-your-heels-against-the-moon brilliance, his abilities undiminished by time. (Full disclosure: I once dated one of Mr. Jagger’s daughters.) Mr. Richards, whose autobiography was reviewed earlier in this publication [ed. note: Nov. 4, 2010], might be considered Mr. Jagger’s mindful alter ego Catcher in the Rye, as Mr. Richards’s web of musical complexity spins out in ever wider, dreamcatcher-like constructions as years go by (that’s ‘years,’ not ‘tears’).” “Although Justice Thomas had no responsibility to meet with the Girl Scouts, Justice Sotomayor’s absence, due to a United Airlines delay (full disclosure: she and I once shared the same piano teacher), necessitated, he felt, a few minutes with the troop, sampling an assortment of cookies in chambers and posing for photographs.” “In our test kitchen, the…

IN OUR DIGITAL AGE OF E-READERS and same-day delivery, it’s worth remembering how much blood and sweat used to go into the distribution of the written word. Consider the journey of a book I’ve had the rare privilege to examine, a Catholic breviary published in 1697. A call-and-response worship device, bound with wooden boards and covered in tooled leather, it is printed in bold blacks and reds and features lush illustrations throughout. The massive tome measures 18 inches high, 12 inches wide, and six inches thick, and weighs in excess of 22 pounds. Not an easy book to carry around. Yet, not long after its publication, someone didcarry it—all the way from its publishing house in Antwerp, down the thousand miles through Europe and the Iberian Peninsula to the city…

The crooks at the opere pubbliche were sponsoring some new excavation close to our barracks—14 hours a day, rusty orange machines chomped at the paving stones so loud it rattled your skull—and snaggletooth ditches notched practically every calle, fondamenta, campo, and sotoportego. According to my bunkmate Putney, they were salvaging long-abandoned gas pipes, which had suddenly become a big thing on the commodities market. Of course, this made me think of my father’s tragic addiction to futures trading, how he’d eventually blown his brains out, sparing my mother the continued torment of living with him, but how, as fate would have it, she caught a vicious case of the Sky virus and spent six of her last seven years at the business end of a Magic-bed. Recalling my parents’…

TO HAVE BEEN BORN in another country and immigrated to the United States is both a blessing and a curse. For those who see America as the proverbial Promised Land, the move brings new opportunities, but it also triggers insecurities, a fractured identity, and an uncertain sense of self-worth. The newcomer not from an anglophone country has no choice but to enter into the strange process of acquiring English by translating himself for others while simultaneously translating his new home and friends into his native tongue. This process is full of static, of confusing innuendoes, of grating, accented sounds that heighten one’s sense of otherness. I don’t know any immigrant, including myself, who hasn’t experienced this type of cultural hazing. For those of us who feel less than secure in…

I am as American as April in Arizona. —Vladimir Nabokov, The Paris Review, 1967 I ought to have been large enough to endure [Charles Webster’s] vanities but I wasn’t. I am not always large enough to endure my own. … His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. —Samuel Clemens to William Dean Howells, letter, May 1906 Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail —the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. —Elizabeth Bishop, “Poem,” Geography III, 1976 Royalties? Rents? Commissions? Fees? If none, explain their absence, please. And let there be no legal flaw In Deductions…