Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2018 i The American Scholar

I ALMOST ALWAYS USE this space to bloviate about the cover story in the new issue. Permit me, please, to bloviate about something else this time, even though Sandra Gilbert’s cover story, a look at the #MeToo revolution, is an important essay that you really should read. In its initial phase, which shows no sign of coming to an end, #MeToo has deserved the full-throated support of all of us. But Gilbert, an esteemed literary critic with unassailable second-wave feminist credentials, is helping to open a new phase, it seems to me, in which women talk to women about where their revolution should go. A good time for men to keep quiet and listen. And so I will. A second piece in this issue looks back half a century at…

In this issue of the SCHOLAR, JEFFREY TAYLER, now a resident of Moscow, reflects on his career as a freelance writer traveling throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America (see page 56). During that time, the world has undergone profound changes in geopolitics, technology, and climate. To supplement his essay, we asked Tayler, who is the author of seven books, to pose four questions on the future of world travel. 1. As Francis Bacon writes, “Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.” Technology has made the world a smaller place, true. But Bacon’s ideas remain valid. For instance, he counsels that a traveler “must have some entrance into the language before he goeth” abroad. True education means interacting with others—for…

LARRY WOIWODE, the author of Beyond the Bedroom Wall and four other novels and two books of stories, is working on a series of brief essays for the SCHOLAR website called “How to Write a Novel.” What follows is an excerpt from his essay “Metaphor and Metamorphosis.” Watch for his series to begin in June at theamericanscholar.org/woiwode. Time is the element linking art to metaphor. Time is the primary element that writing, the compilation of metaphor, is measured against. The rhythms of language move through time, and timing, including the arrival of a detail at the moment that detail is needed, is a mark of enduring fiction. Hearts tick and thud in iambic endlessness until time deals the final shutdown, as it also deals limits on the body—the four-minute mile,…

A BIG FAT HAIRY MAN. A Boss-Beast. An Animal-God. Bluebeard? King Kong? No, more like the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth of Hollywood. Or perhaps, as the #MeToo movement implies, the Male Beast at the center of the labyrinth of patriarchal culture. The tale—not a myth!—is ancient. One lovely girl after another must sacrifice herself to a repellent, all-powerful Ruler, although a few among the bevy of beauties find ways to evade his advances, standing up to him with righteous passion or threatening him with the wrath of real or fictive knights-errant. From the beginning, the stories of #MeToo were horrific—and riveting. Riveting because they weren’t just now, they were always. One of the first and most resonant tales was told by Gwyneth Paltrow, who, at 22, won…

PHILIP LARKIN’S POEM “High Windows” ends with one of modern poetry’s indelible images. Brooding on how familiar “Bonds and gestures” have been “pushed to one side” by postwar society, leaving nothing to hold people together except a vague promise of happiness, Larkin points to the flash of light on “sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” The sun on those high windows (do they belong to corporate offices or to a 1960s tower block?) is an image of perfect emptiness. This is what heaven looks like without God in it. Think of Christian Wiman’s poem “Joy” as a reply to Larkin’s image and the sublime desolation it evokes. His deep blue air is crossed by a contrail…

Where from this feeling of being alone?This intoxication? The Canterbury hops’ attemptsto detach themselvesfrom what the world is,appears to be? Everyone is crazy aboutbeing alone, with their favourite drink. You ask, why this selfish cravingfor aloneness, this feeling ofnot being watched, ignored? It seems this is the only thingone needs in order to be happy. The only other being byputting oneself besidethe well-known mad-man-of-the-townpissing in the street. Bibhu Padhi is the author of 11 books of poetry. His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies throughout the English-speaking world. He lives in Bhubaneswar, India.…

AMERICAN EDEN: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic BY VICTORIA JOHNSON Liveright, 480 pp., $29.95 SOMETIME AROUND 1820, the U.S. Mint struck a medal designed by Moritz Fürst in honor of Dr. David Hosack, who is the subject of Victoria Johnson’s American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. On the obverse of the medal, Hosack is shown in profile. He’s a solid man, with a substantial curve of flesh joining his plump chin to his neck. He has pendulous earlobes and a curious coiffure that licks flamelike toward the top of the coin, perhaps as a sign of his energy, his industriousness, his irrepressible desire to set others afire with his plans and projects. Looking at that…

Call Me Cleon Your instructive, riveting, often hilarious, and terrifying ›Spring 2018 cover story (“A Vacuum at the Center,” W. Robert Connor) proves that the humanities—by providing context—offer critical insights in these chaotic and dangerous times. Published in the midst of the shocking revelations of Cambridge Analytica’s role in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Connor’s analysis illuminates that particular news cycle. In those news reports we’ve seen clips of the president gleefully telling donors that, during his campaign, he’d used phrases he neither understood nor liked—collections of words guaranteed by Cambridge Analytica’s manipulators to fire up his base. In the context of Connor’s article, Trump might as well have tweeted, “… but you can call me Cleon.” This article should be required reading for all thoughtful Americans. I’ve shared it widely…

People recovering from mental illnesses have been helping heal each other for a long time—at least since the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society formed in London in 1845—but not until recently have psychiatrists emphasized peer counseling in their treatment plans, recognizing the benefits of using survivors as coaches. Consider the first large randomized trial study of a peer-led intervention program—the Health and Recovery Peer (HARP) program in Atlanta, where participants and their peers talk about the best ways to manage chronic illness. The study included 400 participants, mostly female, African American, and poor. All had a psychiatric diagnosis, such as major depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, and also at least one chronic medical condition, such as hypertension, asthma, or diabetes. “People with mental illness have high rates of adverse behavior—particularly smoking,…

DURING THIS 50TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR, many people will be remembering 1968, its assassination shocks and the Vietnam War setting the national mood. The shooting of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. brought anguish and destruction, flames and troops to the streets. New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay said of the night of the assassination that he saw in the people of Harlem “great grief, emotion, very deep emotion, with people weeping, and frustrated and lonely. And terribly lost and let down.” Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s death only months later, less than five years after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, made heavier the burden of grief and civic despair. The once-unimaginable momentum to challenge a seated president, Lyndon Johnson, in the Democratic primary was halted by his decision not to…

My friend’s father is forgetting the worldbut he remembers sex.He will reach right out and caress the breast of a nurse.And one day instead of toast he demands cuntand forever after, that is what he smacks for breakfast. I for whom God is not entirely gone am moved to wonder once moreat the relation between chemistry and consciousness.This belated tomcat candor, this crazed venereal rage,was it, I wonder, during all those decades as a happy Catholic,Little League baseball coach, hedge-clipping citizen, loving husband,repressed? Or was there a short as in a storm the fuse box flashes sharplyand all the windows but one go dark?Is my friend’s father’s mind divided like a cocktail,one part grace and two parts loss, with a splash of wrath?God the tears as his granddaughter toddles happily…

For Franny Day Dougie Curtis did not want to sell Plum Point. The property on the Rhode Island coast—two acres on a promontory, a rickety yellow house with black shutters, ghostly pilings that showed where a dock had once reached out into the sound—had been in the family for decades. He hadn’t been aware it was for sale until his oldest brother, George, called him to say that he’d received an offer of $2.8 million. A particular kind of solemnity entered his deep voice whenever he spoke about money, as if others could not be trusted to grasp its significance. The yellow house had been built during the Great Depression by their grandfather and left to his two daughters, and as the family scattered and branched out, the ownership had…

THE PRISON LETTERS OF NELSON MANDELA EDITED BY SAHM VENTER Liveright, 640 pp., $35 “DEAR SIR, My colleagues have requested me to write,” the prisoner began, as if he and the minister of justice had decided to settle into a nice collegial chat over tea. This letter from Nelson Mandela, dated April 22, 1969, must rank as the most politely worded explanation of revolutionary intent in human history. The colleagues he mentioned were comrades in the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party dedicated to the overthrow of the white minority government the minister represented. The purpose of this letter? “[To] ask you to release us from prison and, pending your decision on the matter, to accord us the treatment due to political prisoners.” Mandela urged the…

THE CONSCIOUSNESS INSTINCT: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind BY MICHAEL S. GAZZANIGA Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $28 IN HIS ENGAGING and wide-ranging new book, The Consciousness Instinct, neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga explores a conundrum that has long baffled scientists: “Gazillions of electrical, chemical, and hormonal processes occur in our brain every moment, yet we experience everything as a smoothly running unified whole,” he writes. “What is the organization of our brain that generates conscious unity?” Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of numerous books on the brain, leads us through three possible approaches to answering this question. The first, and the one to which he devotes the…

Never again a nose like thiswill I among the living witness;nor the bulldog’s little orchid anusas he goes among the Winnebagosand Harleys sniffing pisslike a vintner; nor the chalkshocks and plaid slabsof all the topological atrocitiesslathered in booths;nor erstwhile, puerile truthsrising off the highway mindlike roadkill becoming its smell:Absolutely unmixed attentionis prayer; Hellis the inability to love;Never is composed of nows.Never again.Fifteen, sixteen maybe, and ensouled,no doubt, as any of us,but to all of us all proboscis,he orders, pays, and standsamong us with the sameunseeing acuity of great beauty, or fame,while we gobble our awe,and feel for him,and ponder the many ways of gracefor which we’ve been, till now, remiss.Or am I alone in this?…

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, especially when traveling, I kept a journal, filling in the pages of spiral-bound notebooks covered in blue-and-white or green-and-white cardboard. These proved a bounty when I began to write for a living. I could glean from them long-forgotten but useful (for writing purposes) details from trips I made 10, 20, and now I can say, with some bafflement, even more than 30 years ago. As time passed, I would occasionally pore over them in search of my former self—a naïve, romantic young man determined to set out abroad, script his own life, never submit to convention, and savor the now. A young man whose appetite for wonder would be difficult to sate. Could the world have once seemed so grand and surprising to me? I’ve now…

At last the water went down as our mother said it would. Lona and I went out into the dark street to catch and throw the lopsided ball we’d kept up high. After her fifth expert catch, Lona took on a far look and stretched out an arm and pointed. “Look there,” she said. “That lady.” I turned. A tall woman in green, buckled shoes. Her clothes were dry, and her waist-length, white hair was wet. “Just leave her alone,” I said, throwing the ball back at Lona. “She’s not hurting anybody.” “Well, she’s staring at me,” said Lona. I looked back to the lady, and Lona was not lying. I was three years older and there to protect her, though sometimes she did lie. “She’s not bothering you,” I…

IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein BY FIONA SAMPSON Pegasus, 304 pp., $28.95 WHEN MARY SHELLEY, having lost her adored and difficult husband and three of her children in Italy, at last returned to England in 1823, she chanced to ask an acquaintance for advice on choosing a school for her surviving son. “Oh, send him somewhere where they will teach him to think for himself!” her friend said. Mary replied heartily: “Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!” This year marks the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s classic cautionary tale of scientific hubris and recklessness. Therefore, we must needs have a new biography of the teenage author, who was inspired by ghost…

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in places where there was everything new to occupy the attention. So childish, I thought, always to be longing for the new in the old, and the old in the new. Yet just such sadness I felt, when I looked on the island, glittering in the sunset, canopied by the rainbow, and thought no friend would welcome me there; just such childish joy I felt, to see unexpectedly on the landing, the face of one whom I called friend. —Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, 1844…