August 2011
57 posts
6 tags
5 tags
4 tags
Fiction: The House at Belle Fontaine
“Who would guess that something like that would happen to us? We were so happy, so … ” Monsieur Rossier searches for a word, “so united. And life never seemed quite the same after that, for my wife and me.”
Click here for author Lily Tuck’s full story.
7 tags
“A poem is not the same poem from reading to reading, because the reader is not...”
– Quote from “COMPRESSION WOOD” by Franklin Burroughs, Spring 1998.
Postcards from the Past: Pressing questions & persisting vitality.
Richard Nicholls for The American Scholar.
7 tags
Jacob and Esau →
7 tags
8 tags
6 tags
4 tags
8 tags
5 tags
A young psycholinguist, Jessica Love, confesses to her love affair with pronouns in “They Get to Me.”
No Degrees of Separation →
7 tags
55 years ago...
So today’s adolescents turn to the weekly picture magazines, to the documentary films, to the real life stories of public men and women, trying to model their career lines after people whom they do not know personally but whom they have been led to believe they may come to know through pictures, through “verbatim” interviews, through broadcasts and telecasts. Uninformed by the imagination or the...
5 tags
10 tags
“So much of what we think of as “history” is, really, nothing more than bare...”
–
When we study literatures and culture, we should remember that we are, in the end, studying human lives like those; and yet the span of a single human life is nothing to all that time; it is the pebble under your foot as you approach the Parthenon or the Pantheon for the first time when you go to...
Get Used to It →
11 tags
6 tags
“He was nursing yesterday’s adventure—pleasure and bruises. He wanted to see her...”
– “North of Ordinary,” by John Rolfe Gardiner.
6 tags
Shipwrecked
Like Robinson Crusoe after the storm, a daughter salvages what she can after her mother’s death:
But unlike Crusoe, I found it hard to judge utility, to know just what to keep. Something undesirable now might become crucial later. I didn’t want to create a museum, even in storage boxes. Yet I didn’t want to leave myself unprovisioned in a future season. The...
5 tags
““Your father informs me that Christmas breakfast and gift-giving will be delayed...”
–
Ralph Lombreglia’s tale of the perils of stealing on Christmas, “Mountain People.”
No Proverbs, Please →
8 tags
8 tags
“Chance brings so many miracles and so much tragedy into all of our lives that it...”
– James McConkey looks back on at a lifetime of parenting sons and being parented by them in “What Kind of Father Am I?”
5 tags
"Somehow in the motion from the singular to plural...
In any case, the street dialogue escalated from measured dissent to colorful—okay, obscene—language. At last I dared the policeman: “What are you going to do? Arrest me?”
Three seconds later, the cuffs were on and I was in the back seat of a patrol car en route to the Morningside Heights precinct on West 126th Street.
A Manhattan writer runs afoul of the local penal system and lives to...
9 tags
“These grown-up children—it was like discovering a new tribe, somewhere deep in...”
– Excerpt from Roxana Robinson’s “The Leap,” from our fiction section.
7 tags
I do think, though, that both the problem of, and the solution to, our individual anxiety is a metaphysical one. Some modern philosophers (Heidegger, Kierkegaard) have argued that existential anxiety proceeds from being unconscious of, or inadequately conscious of, death. True, I think, but I wonder if the emphasis might be placed differently, shifted from unconscious reaction to unrealized...
6 tags
Reading in a Digital Age
My real worry has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking— their demotion, as it were. I mean reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection. I mean, in my shorthand, intransitive thinking. Contemplation. Thinking for its own sake,...
5 tags
“One day, Dinah had arrived home from school and her mother’s things were gone....”
– “Plum Creek,” a fiction work by Laura Furman.
5 tags
“Today’s fires do not burn as those of the past did; they have to accommodate...”
–
Take a closer look at fire than you ever have before.
In “Passing the Torch,” Stephen J. Pyne explains why the eons-old truce between humans and fire has burst into an age of megafires, and what can be done about it.
13 tags
8 tags
New York Journal →
6 tags
“His black hair fans out on the pillow. He needs a haircut. What does it tell us...”
–
Patricia Volk, “Ground Rule,” The American Scholar.
6 tags
“She only ever gave me two pieces of advice. One was that if a drunk asked for my...”
– In “Mother Country,” Evelyn Toynton examines a life played out in romantic defiance of bad fortune: her mother’s.
7 tags
Living Dangerously
…the [Sunday Leader] ran a report about a cell phone video, leaked to Channel 4 News in England, which showed Sri Lankan soldiers executing unarmed LTTE guerrillas. The following week, [the head muckraker] received a clipping of the story in the mail, scrawled over with a message in red ink: “B*tch if you write you will be cut into pieces.” A handwriting expert later confirmed that the...
9 tags
7 tags
4 tags
Cuss Time
Every day for five minutes, usually right after school, [my son] could say anything he wanted. He liked to bounce on the already beaten up leather sofa while saying the words, sounds emitted as his feet left the cushion. It was a kind of Trampoline Tourette’s—hell, bitch, doo-doo—and I’ll confess I was always happy that we were never interrupted by ups or a friend stopping by….I found it...
In a State →
7 tags
5 tags
“Consider the phrase, “I am spiritual but not religious,” which serves as a...”
–
Can we begin to think about unexplained religious experiences in ways that acknowledge their existence?
Robert Orsi, “When 2+2=5,” The American Scholar
7 tags
“What is common to all these stories, ancient or recent, is a lack of...”
– Robert Finch discovers the ebb and flow of life in a Newfoundland fishing village, in “Flat Time.”
5 tags
“People who need movies, the true moviegoers, go in the afternoon; matinees are...”
–
I was enhancing my visual literacy.
Mark Edmundson, “Alone at the Movies,” The American Scholar
4 tags
5 tags
Office for Rent →
7 tags
“As I read, I ask myself how they will respond—will this intrigue them, amuse...”
–
After years of favoring the endurance-test approach to teaching literature, a professor focuses on how to make books spark to life for her students.
Paula Marantz Cohen, “The Seduction,” The American Scholar
6 tags
