Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2022 i The American Scholar

WHO CAN BLAME US, given the way things have been going on Earth, for casting our eyes heavenward, imploringly, or in exasperation, or to find solace in the deep blue of the sky or the reassuringly constant motion of the moon and the stars? Sorry, folks. What we are not seeing in the seemingly peaceful ocean of space above is nonetheless there: another realm in which to misgovern ourselves, another nest to foul, and the potential new battlefield that science fiction has long been exploring. In his cover story, nuclear arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis paints a discouraging picture of an orbital sphere increasingly crowded with the satellites of an increasing number of countries and companies. These satellites, on which all of us depend for things ranging from national security…

Carmen Giménez, a professor of English at Virginia Tech, is the author of six books, including Milk and Filth, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Be Recorder, which was short-listed for the National Book Award and PEN Open Book Award. This poem comes from a collection-in-progress called Nostalgia Has Such a Short Half-Life, which considers pop culture in conjunction with the end of the world. YOLO It’s the end of the world and I’m barely ready for that, though grateful I’m old enough to miss Miami going underwater and a 130-degree October day in Fraser, Colorado. Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world, which is why there’s a whole history of end-of-the-world cults, but now is truly the end of the world,…

“... the acute burden of being female” —Michelle Obama, Becoming SINCE I WAS INSOMNIAC in my early teens, I heard my parents quarreling at night. It took a while for me to puzzle out what was causing these arguments: my father Jack’s philandering ways. My mother, Mayno, I would later learn, had long been so tolerant of his ways that she offered to raise, along with my younger sister and me, one of his children from an unmarried woman. Nothing came of that, but I was up late one night when my father was absent on a hunting trip, and I heard my mother sobbing deeply during a long phone call. I finally went out to the living room, where the phone was, and I kept listening while she continued…

Personals The symbols are inoperative. Worry about the expanse of dark water The “done” button doesn’t work. The relentless march of cattails into northern lakes The blanket of cloud cover “Your response needed” A plaintive address to a phantom beloved I’m into nuance, quaver, half-notes. I am half-hearted, forked tongued. Glyphs 1 Something loves a glyph. We go where the sea gets more directional, where it seems to be coming in, then backslides leaving arcs of shine. I love the way it cross-talks in the shallows, how some rivulet will traipse sideways as if it were free. Clouds appearing on the wet sand. 2 What if force fields are math that solves itself, while particles are glitches, blips? Beyond I like small white lights on bare trees in winter. An…

I The first time Anna saw Salvatore, he asked if he could borrow her goggles. She was doing a few stretches on the pool deck, still wearing those goggles, when he approached. Something had fallen out of his swimsuit pocket, he said, and he needed to dive in to retrieve it. He would just be a minute. Would that be okay? She noticed how tall he was, observed his lean, muscled body and how his dark hair fell in curls on his forehead. “Of course,” she said and gave him the goggles, following him to the edge of the pool. As he dived down through the water of the deep end, she watched anxiously from the edge, leaning over and holding her breath. He seemed to stay down there for…

LIFE BETWEEN THE TIDES BY ADAM NICOLSON Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $30 ON AN EARLY DECEMBER night last year, my husband, my two daughters, and I suited up in all of our warmest clothes, grabbed headlamps, and drove to the beach. With temperatures in the single digits, it might have been nice to stay home and light a fire in the wood stove. But we felt pulled to the shore. There was to be an extreme low tide that night—minus five feet—one of the lowest of the year. On these sorts of tides, three stories of water flush in and out of Kachemak Bay in south-central Alaska twice a day. As the water ebbs, the retreating tide exposes an enormous expanse of sea floor, revealing an otherwise hidden…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, a long-ago conversation with a friend came to mind as I tried to bring some order to my bookshelves. My friend was not yet of a certain age, but he had, he confessed, crossed a line: he had made a transition from the curating stage of life to the editing stage. He was no longer collecting; he was deaccessioning. I lack his wisdom and maturity, and rather than editing as I sorted, I instead paused to thumb through and scan. And then I came across a book that made me stop and reread: The City & the City (2009), by the British writer China Miéville. It is a police procedural novel with a background environment that recalls Philip K. Dick. A crime needs to be solved…

“THE FACT WHICH INTERESTS us most,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, having paddled a pair of rivers and pondered countless facts on a week’s canoe trip, “is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical.” Writing in the 1840s, he would have meant the American naturalist of the hundred-odd years just past: the lone and footloose observer, the collector, the explorer who set out to catalog the wild contents of the new continent. A soloist, let’s say, in the symphonic exertions of science, without whose work we could not today have known what too soon was gone, wiped out, from that primal world. A scientist first, the naturalist emerges also as a romantic figure, contending with heat and cold, hunger, claw and venom—not to mention, early on, encountering…

AT OUR RURAL COUNTY’S historical society, the past lives loosely in bulletins, news clippings, plat books, and handwritten index cards. It’s pieced together by pale, gray-haired women who sit at oak tables and pore over old photos. Western sun filters in, half-lighting the women as they name who’s pictured, who has passed on. Other volunteers gossip and cut obituaries from local newspapers. I was sent here by hearsay. For years, my neighbor has claimed that the old cemetery in the low-lying field on my Wisconsin property contains more bodies than the scant number of tombstones indicates. The epic flood of 1978 washed away the markers of the nameless—Civil War soldiers, he says. I want to know who the dead were in life. After many walks through the cemetery, I’m familiar…

Masks have always had a rich role. Function varies widely, but the urge to transfer or hide our identity, to alter our face to the world, seems global. MY FATHER’S GENERATION endured worldwide depression and war, one catastrophe after another, and in consistently predicting further disaster, he attempted to toughen my tender skin in anticipation. But I was young, my new president was boyishly handsome and funny, and violence and privation were invisibly elsewhere—things I had only read about. Sitting in an eighth-grade class one day, I heard the announcement over the loudspeaker that the president had been shot. I assumed he would recover: there’s no way, thought I, that Lyndon Baines Johnson would be president. History wasn’t that arbitrary and capricious. By the time I was in high school…

THE NINETIES: A Book BY CHUCK KLOSTERMAN Penguin Press, 384 pp., $28 AT A GLANCE, nothing much happened in the ’90s, and even when it did, there were few repercussions. Sandwiched between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the intervening decade—give or take a year or two on either side—seemed like a time when America took a breath, brushed itself off, and went back to the refrigerator for another beer. Chuck Klosterman doesn’t buy that version. In The Nineties, he makes a sustained and often persuasive case that a lot was going on, that a lot of what happened had consequences that we still struggle to comprehend, and that many of those Gen X slackers who trashed overt ambition were more like Bezos than Beavis…

INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age BY DENNIS DUNCAN Norton, 352 pp., $30 TO UNDERSTAND WHAT an index is, it may help to begin with what it is not. An index is not a table of contents—such a table would feed multitudes—but it does lay out in more granular form all of the contents of a book. An index is not a concordance, strictly speaking, although they are cousins. A concordance reverentially locates every instance of every significant word of a text—the Bible, originally. Many readers may regard the index as a highly technical, or boringly meticulous, appendix to a narrative enjoyed perfectly well without one. Dennis Duncan’s winningly titled book begs to differ: an index is a work of art,…

STEVEN ANDERSON ANN BEATTIE & LINCOLN PERRY THOMAS BETHELL ALLISON BLAKELY FRED H. CATE LINCOLN CAPLAN & SUSAN L. CARNEY BRAD EDMONDSON LUCY FERRISS WERNER GUNDERSHEIMER EWA HRYNIEWICZYARBROUGH ANN HULBERT DONALD S. LAMM ANDREW LEVY LOUIS P. MASUR RICHARD MOE MICHAEL O’DONOVAN RAYMOND SACHS DOUGLAS STEARNS SUSAN TROCCOLO CHARLES TRUEHEART JAMES VANOOSTING NATALIE WEXLER ROBERT WILSON, in memory of Mike Rose BRENDA WINEAPPLE…

POEMS MAKE YOU HEAR something that is inaudible in most prose: the white space of the page. This is the space you hear in a line break and between stanzas; it is the silence in which poems sign off and disappear. The sound of innuendo, not inflection; not the blackbird whistling, but “just after,” as Wallace Stevens put it. Rae Armantrout’s poems accentuate this fundamental property of verse. Her lines tend to be very short, about half the length of the 10-syllable norm of English poetic tradition. Her enjambments create disjunctions from which multiple meanings radiate. There is in her poems a sense of language being inspected, proposed and tested, held up to scrutiny against that white space. Her loose ends reverberate in it. In our age of shouting social…

CONSTRUCTING A NERVOUS SYSTEM: A Memoir BY MARGO JEFFERSON Pantheon, 208 pp., $26 IN NEGROLAnD (2015), her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning memoir about her upbringing among the Black upper class in Chicago, Margo Jefferson blends a wry personal narrative with an expansive range of historical, critical, and self-critical perspectives. Now comes Constructing a Nervous System, another kind of memoir, one in which an exploration of the self becomes an act of inhabiting and examining various lives—writers, musicians, athletes, members of her family. If Negroland stretches and challenges the conventions of the genre, Constructing a Nervous System breaks those conventions apart: figuratively, in the frequent eclipse of the remembering “I” by a roving and interrogating eye, and literally, in the reliance on the fragment as the dominant form. The result…

KEATS: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph BY LUCASTA MILLER Knopf, 368 pp., $32.50 THERE IS SOMETHING irresistible about John Keats’s poignantly brief life and his outsize greatness as an artist. That such a wealth of material about him exists—his own astonishing letters as well as reminiscences and diaries of his friends—means that there has never been a shortage of biographies. Vignettes began appearing soon after Keats’s death in 1821, with the first full biography, by Richard Monckton Milnes (a Victorian politician, failed suitor of Florence Nightingale, and avid collector of erotica), appearing in 1848. More recent lives of the poet include works by Amy Lowell (1924), Robert Gittings (1968), Andrew Motion (1997), and Nicholas Roe (2012), to name a few. Now the English literary journalist and…