Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2023 i The American Scholar

Steve Yarbrough's heartfelt essay about his lifelong love affair with the guitar (see page 64) accompanies a gallery of photographs and paintings depicting the importance of that instrument in the cultural life of our country. Reading the essay, I kept thinking of James Szalapski's 1970s documentary Heartwom Highways. The film profiles some of country music's socalled outlaws—Guy Clark, David Allan Coe, Rodney Crowell, Townes Van Zandt, and others—through recording sessions, conversations, and performances held in a wide range of venues. It's intimate and raw and revelatory, and deeply affecting in parts, particularly the scene in Van Zandt's kitchen, with the singer-songwriter interviewing his friend Seymour Washington. After Washington, the son of slaves and nearly 80 years old, reveals the secret to living a proper life (moderation in food and whiskey…

It would be nice to be a doctor, I've sometimes thought. If you began to feel something go wrong, you could diagnose yourself. You'd know what you were in for. There'd be no surprises, and all pain and discomfort would be mitigated by an awareness of the path ahead, the forks you'd come to, and the choices to be made. I don't think being a doctor would make your stomach hurt less, or your head or your leg not ache, or your heart not break. But surely, with a fund of knowledge about symptoms, causes, effects, and—yes—pain, you would be better prepared. If not to cure your troubles, then at least to face them. This, anyway, was my feeling as I awoke one morning to what promised to be another…

At the beginning of 2022, I decided to travel the world and be a nomadic writer. I didn't want an itinerary; I just wanted to be free. But the problem with that plan arose right away: I didn't know where to start. A few years before, on a visit to Florence, I had fallen so deeply in love with that city that I almost stayed for four months to study painting. (I don't paint.) I briefly contemplated a return to Florence before discovering that rental rates there had skyrocketed. Because of the pandemic, prices for all sorts of things had spiked around the world, but still, the cost of living in Florence seemed particularly high. Instead, I decided to start my journey in Málaga, in the Andalusian south of Spain.…

Patricia Hampl is the author of numerous books, including The Florist's Daughter, A Romantic Education, I Could Tell You Stories, and The Art of the Wasted Day. She stands where she was instructed to wait, a bouquet of iris wrapped in butcher paper in one arm, tape recorder bulking up her backpack, as he comes (surely this is the man who had answered her letters) down the overgrown cow path. Three cows mooching along, heads lowered, as he weaves around them to get past. On his neat, smallish head, a stiff straw boater. Is there a ribbon? Faded black grosgrain, yes. But her nerves! Butterflies beating within—the two letters between them having been their only link until this moment, and she in no way a professional, never mind the tape…

STEVE YARBROUGH is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, and Prisoners of War, which was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner award. His most recent novel is Stay Gone Days. He teaches at Emerson College. Some years ago, I found myself standing beside the famed luthier Dana Bourgeois while he prepared the top of a Brazilian rosewood dreadnought guitar that he was building in his Lewiston, Maine, shop. Bourgeois is one of the most respected contemporary acoustic guitar builders, with dealers all over the world, and the list of musicians who have played his instruments includes the likes of Doc Watson, Bryan Sutton, Luke Bryan, and Natalie Maines. I had read a good bit about Bourgeois before I met him,…

I first heard of Bruno Schulz as a high school student in Ostróda in northern Poland, when the well-known literary critic, writer, and translator Artur Sandauer visited the literature club I belonged to. He spoke of writers I was familiar with and then, at the end, mentioned Schulz. Sandauer told us that Schulz had been bom in Drohobych, now in Ukraine, and died there in 1942. Yet he failed to mention that both he and Schulz were Jewish—and with good reason. It was the spring of 1969, in the aftermath of a brutal anti-Semitic campaign, sponsored by the Communist Party, that ultimately led to the exodus from Poland of some 20,000 Jews. Sandauer, I learned later, had grown up in Sambor, a town close to Drohobych, and he and Schulz…

Jeff Sharlet's new book, The Undertow, plunged me into a vertiginous fever-dream. It induced a physiological response similar to the one I experienced while reading Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Both books are mood-altering, mindaltering odysseys; both set forth visions of a weird and roiling body politic. Didion's title invokes an earlier account of disintegration, W. B. Yeats's “The Second Coming,” to frame its anatomy of American chaos in the 1960s. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” Yeats wrote in 1919. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,” he wonders in the poem's final lines, “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” This is the question hovering behind Sharlet's essay collection, which spans a period of approximately 10 years, ending in…

You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she will always hurry back. —Horace, Epistle 1.10, 20 B.C. ‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.’ —George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1874 The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right … —Learned Hand, “I Am an American Day” speech, May 21, 1944 We ate the sandwiches and drank the Chablis and watched the country out of the window. The grain was just beginning to ripen and the fields were full of poppies. The pastureland was green, and there were…

Who is the G.O.A.T., the greatest of all time? Tennis fans and pundits alike will consider that question anew now that Roger Federer has retired and Serena Williams has decided to “evolve” away from the sport. Chances are, if you're a tennis fan, you already have strong opinions on the matter. Perhaps you believe that Federer, who elevated the game to a quasimystical level (David Foster Wallace famously likened watching him play to a religious experience), and Williams, who transformed the sport in her own way, are indeed the G.O.A.T.s. Maybe you harbor strong opinions about the G.O.A.T.s in other sports, too: Michael or LeBron, Tiger or Jack, Marta or Mia Hamm, Brady or Montana, Taurasi or Swoopes. How would LeBron James have fared in Michael Jordan's bare-knuckle NBA? Would…

Fifty-one years ago, to be exact. I met a blond angel at a health food store on the Upper West Side. The angel smiled at me. I smiled back. She was a dancer, a soloist at George Balanchine's New York City Ballet. She was startled when I recognized her stage name, Deborah Flomine. She was even more startled when I talked about my favorite dancers—Allegra Kent, Jacques d'Amboise, Eddie Villella, and Patricia McBride, all of whom she'd danced with at Lincoln Center and other venues around the world when the company went on tour. You weren't supposed to meet a stranger at a health food store who could examine one of Balanchine's ballets with all the incandescence of an x-ray machine. I was Debbie's dark angel, I suppose. I must…

In January 2020, in a remote, arid corner of southwestern Rajasthan, I was squeezed in the back seat of a Toyota SUV with my five-year-old son and Prachi and Prince Ranawat, a sister and brother, ages 23 and 18, from a dot of a town called Parsad. On a motorcycle, their father, Gajeraj Ranawat, followed. The driver propelled us along a parched roadway overgrown with candelabra cactus and bougainvillea, its pink and white flowers covered with dust. Sprays of yellow oleander spilled onto our path, and the screeches of langur monkeys echoed in the distance. The family was leading me to a temple complex that once sheltered the so-called Tanesar sculptures, a set of 12 or more stone figures dating to the sixth century. Naturalistic, slender, luminously jadelike, and around…

The March Up Country is the English title of Xenophon's Anabasis, “a true story of remarkable adventures,” as the Loeb Classics edition advertises this famous account of a failed military campaign against the Persian king, after which Xenophon led 10,000 Greek mercenaries “from the gates of Babylon back to the coast through inhospitable lands.” “The Anabasis of Godspeed” is Ishion Hutchinson's title for the following excerpt from his long poem School of Instructions. Hutchinson overlays two narratives. One is the history of West Indian soldiers in the British Army who were deployed in Europe and the Middle East during the First World War. The other is the tale of a 12-year-old boy, Godspeed, living in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. Godspeed is a visionary in the making. He rejects “the…

Caitriona Lally is the author of the novels Eggshells and Wunderland. She won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2018 and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 2019. She is employed as a cleaner at Trinity College Dublin and is working on her third book. I've had tinnitus—a constant ringing in my ears—throughout all my knowing life, my inner ear conducting its own private symphonies in the bony amphitheater of my skull. I hear a constant hissing-swishing sound like water dissolving an antacid tablet, a noise that can progress to trilling, beeping, or shrieking as loud as microphone feedback, depending on tiredness or viruses or the whims of the ear gods. These sounds are not just annoying to listen to; they block out the real-world sounds around me.…

Alejandro Puyana is a Venezuelan writer living in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020, New England Review, American Short Fiction, Tin House, The Idaho Review, and other publications. He is at work on a novel. My mom must have held me more than once when I was a baby, but I only know of the one time. The photos fit in the first three pages of the baby album, blotches of brown stretching across them like lichen. In one, my mom is in the hospital bed, her mouth a flat line. I am lying on her chest, swollen and red, my face as wrinkled as an old witch. In another, my mother faces away, all curly brown hair, and my dad poses for the…

In his essay “Of Cannibals” (c. 1580), Montaigne talks of meeting, in Rouen in 1562, three indigenous men from Tupinambá, Brazil. They had been brought to entertain King Charles IX, who at the time was just 12 years old. Traveling through Europe, these foreigners were viewed not only as outsiders but also as representatives of “barbaric” civilizations. Of all the things they had seen, the French locals wanted to know what they found most admirable. “In the first place,” Montaigne states, they thought it very strange that so many tall men, wearing beards, strong, and well armed, who were about the king (‘tis like they meant the Swiss of the guard), should submit to obey a child, and that they did not rather choose out one amongst themselves to command.…

In 2010, when she was 25 years old, Dasha Kiper abandoned her pursuit of a PhD in clinical psychology to move in with a man she calls Mr. Kessler, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor who was succumbing to Alzheimer's. Kiper did this, she writes, not only because she felt alienated by academia, but because she was inspired by the work of the physicianwriter Oliver Sacks. Her new book, Travelers to Unimaginable Lands, is an homage to Sacks, one that self-consciously emulates his blending of clinical case study with medical and literaryphilosophical meditations in an attempt to explain why the human brain is so ill-equipped to care for patients with dementia. Kiper doesn't have the vast storehouse of clinical experience that Sacks did (few do), but she evinces a capaciousness of sympathy…

Death is not only the ultimate dissolution of identity, as all the physical, psychological, and social ligatures that tether it in place are severed; death is also that in the face of which we make our identity. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as T. S. Eliot put it in The Waste Land. Habits, interests, love, the hourly, the daily, and all the busyness of life. Above all, art. It was the philosopher Bernard Williams who argued, in an essay on Leoš Janáček's opera The Makropulos Case—about a woman gifted, or rather cursed, with immortality—that life makes sense only in the face of its finitude. We are “lucky in having the chance to die,” Williams concluded. This does not require that death itself be desirable: death can destroy…

It's a chilly December night, and I am attending a performance of Gian Carlo Menotti's nativity opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, at the Church of the Holy Aposdes in Manhattan. Over the course of a single act, Amahl tells the story of an impoverished mother and her disabled shepherd son who offer shelter to visitors traveling to Bethlehem. Commissioned by NBC, it was the first opera written for television and made its premiere during a live Christmas Eve broadcast in 1951. Yet tonight, I am seeing a striking innovation in the production of this innovative opera. As I look on, the mother sits at a table, gazing at an empty plate. Nearby lies a sleeping bag unrolled on a cot. The opera's three wise men make their appearance pushing…

Then proceeded to BAGHDAD and AMMAN. Godspeed was almost afraid of butterflies. They sickened him during the breeding season when they swarmed around any source of water in the viceregal district where he was born. The day was hot and everything was green. He saw that the puddles were moving and the cars were crushing butterflies and the roads were moving too because the butterflies were slowly dying on the roads. Everything moved around him. The leaves on the trees swayed not from the wind but from butterflies. Butterflies were everywhere alive on the blooming lilacs and dead on the roads. He ordered a hurricane to wipe the roads clean and immediately disappeared into the shutting fan of a shame-me-lady. It was around this time two weeks before his 13th…

David McGlynn is the author of three books, most recently One Day You'll Thank Me. His work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and Best American Sports Writing. He teaches English at Lawrence University and has recently completed a book manuscript about life in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). On a wet, gray afternoon in February 2007, the rain turning to snow as the light faded and the temperature dropped, my wife delivered our second child: a boy, like our first, and, like our first, a surprise. We'd learned of the pregnancy only a few weeks before we moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where I was to begin teaching at a small liberal arts college. It had been a taxing fall…

As an ambitious young scientist at Cambridge University, Isaac Newton famously trained a glass prism on a narrow beam of sunlight to divvy the white light into its constituents, a dazzling rainbow of colors. There were no demarcations between one component color and the next, no clear way to count just how many basic hues were on view, but Newton was a systematizer with an appreciation for the number seven. After all, seven was synonymous with luck, and it showed up everywhere in Western culture: there were seven days in a week, seven notes in the musical scale, seven wonders of the world, seven virtues, and seven vices. Why not seven colors in the rainbow? And so, Newton specified as the primary ingredients of white light the septet captured by…

Americans have never been particularly good at seeing the poor. Whether your cable news channel is MSNBC or Fox, you will hear very little about poor people. The middle class tends to imagine poverty as a problem of developing nations, its worst forms in the distant past and reminiscent of a Dickens novel. The cultural impulse to make the poor “invisible” is undeniable, but the so-called invisible hand of the market, writes Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, does more than notice the poor; it preys on them. Despite common assumptions about opportunity, Desmond shows how Americans of means support a government that thwarts real solutions and perpetuates inequality while never really trying to eliminate poverty. Desmond's book is a jeremiad, a wake-up call about one sad, simple truth: the rich, and…

If brown rats spoke a human language, they would coin the term rodentism to affirm their conviction that the world is their trash can. Homo sapiens, however, is convinced, with Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things,” and so we invented humanism. The doctrine rests, according to Sarah Bakewell, on three principles: “Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.” And it is her fervent hope that we each live the one life we have with joy, curiosity, and compassion. She is an evangelist for a movement that substitutes reason for religious dogma. In books such as How to Live and At the Existentialist Café, Bakewell has made a career of writing engagingly about philosophy for nonphilosophers. To the back of her latest book, Humanly Possible, she appends the “Declaration of Modern…