The American Scholar

I don’t know how many years it has been since the word sumptuous has come to mind, but my head was absolutely ringing with it as I looked at Louis XIV’s carpet at the Met—actually 92 individual pieces that once made up a single work. I wanted to rub my cheek against the thick pile. I wanted to squish my toes into the creamy wool, and I wondered briefly if the king had ever wanted to do the same. But despite the expense and effort spent in its creation, the king never used the carpet. He had plac

For millennia, the darkest doorways on the spookiest of nights have been haunted by one figure: woman. Whether in the form of a fanged and cloaked vampire, a clawed fury, or a baby-slaying witch, wicked women have frightened and titilated us in equal measure. Eleanor Johnson’s provocative new book, Monstrous Bitch, follows these demonic archetypes through more than 4,000 years of human history to identify their source: the demoness Lamashtu of ancient Mesopotamia. Wearing different guises, she a

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. … —Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” In December 2016, when I lost my close friend the novelist Sydney Blair to a sudden and fatal attack of pancreatitis, my then-83-year-old father tried to console me. “December,” he said, “thins the herd.” I don’t thin

Standing on Kelly Road, in Magdalena, New Mexico, are a number of abandoned buildings on some open, grassy, weedy acres. These 14 buildings form a loose cluster, as if called together for a dance they hadn’t rehearsed and left there. Around them, to the east, west, and north, sit a few houses, and open fields rise to the south. Half the buildings are terracotta, with standard windows; the other half are midcentury modern, one story, with yellow Transite panels and flat roofs. In the 25 years I’v

Amanda Holmes reads Charlotte Mew’s “The Farmer’s Bride.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “The Farmer’s Bride” by Charlotte Mew appeared first on The American Scholar.

The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon by Michael Dobbs; Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $30 The enigma of the war scare of 1983 is that in the end, nothing happened. NATO completed Autumn Forge 83, a series of massive war games culminating in November with a command-post exercise called Able Archer 83, and then everyone packed up and went home. To the extent Ronald Reagan was worried about nuclear war, it was thanks to having screened the made-for-TV movie The Da

Until recently, whenever I read a novel or a play, I largely forgot its contents within a matter of weeks. The words and events would drain through me, leaving me, at best, with isolated remnants. I marveled at people who could describe in detail passages they’d read years before. They seemed to have been bestowed with some freakish gift of the gods. But one day something changed, and I am now able to recall the structure and even extended sections of a few dozen works of literature, meaning tha

It was August, and my mother’s friend Fritz had recently opened up his second art gallery in Magdalena, New Mexico, just down the street from my mother’s house. He was eager to show it to us, and we were eager to see it. The gallery didn’t have regular hours, but when we had a free moment and called, Fritz came to show us around. He unlocked the door and ushered us in. Fritz is a retired marine biology teacher, a fabulous cook, a painter, an art collector, and a businessman with a bed-and-breakf

Amanda Holmes reads Robert Hayden’s “Monet’s Waterlilies.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Monet’s Waterlilies” by Robert Hayden appeared first on The American Scholar.

Photography runs in Jill Enfield’s family. Her ancestors owned and operated camera shops in Frankfurt, Germany, for nearly a century until the Third Reich forced them to flee to the United States in the 1930s. The Leitz family, who founded Leica Cameras, sponsored the Enfields’ visas and helped them resettle in Miami Beach, Florida, where Jill was born. Growing up, “we always had cameras,” she says. Mom and dad “would bring us home all the silly little-kid cameras like the [Polaroid] Swinger and

Bogs exist in the liminal space between water and land, haunted by will-o’-the-wisps and home to carnivorous plants, equally ready to suck in unsuspecting wanderers or disgorge eerily preserved ancient artifacts—or bodies. Long relegated to the purview of horror films or dismissed as wastelands, bogs have been sites of historical resistance and refuge in the past while quietly resisting the greatest threat to humanity in the present: climate change. Bogs sequester a third of the world’s so

The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society by James Marriott; Doubleday, 208 pp., $28 As reading habits wane, we devotees of books rally to one another like the exiles on the train tracks in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Those noble book memorizers defied their dystopian darkness. “They weren’t at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light,” Bradbury writes. Yet this “odd minority crying in

Is the sonnet making a comeback? I’d like to think so, and I’m not the only one. Ken Gordon’s online publication The Sonneteer is making a strong case for the venerable form. And this month’s Next Line, Please prompt—to write a sonnet beginning with a line adapted from Shakespeare—testifies to the attractions of the 14-line poem as well as to the ability of our NLP all-stars. The three lines I tossed out as possible openers are these: Take all I love, from dolls to jewels to guns, When I wink,

In 1990, I was in grad school still, with life still a virtually open road before me. That’s the year Stanley and Iris came out, a film about two people in difficult circumstances who meet, help each other, fall in love, and live happily ever after. Stanley is smart and talented, but he’s functionally illiterate, a condition he must hide to keep a job and avoid the ridicule of his fellows. He has withdrawn from people for fear they will discover his secret. Stanley is only in his 40s, but hardly

Amanda Holmes reads Amy Levy’s “To Lallie (Outside the British Museum).”   Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “To Lallie (Outside the British Museum)” by Amy Levy appeared first on The American Scholar.

An American Problem: How the Country Built—and the Supreme Court Broke—the Voting Rights Act by Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris; Princeton University Press, 376 pp., $32 “I hope that our votes still matter in November.” That was my dad, back in May, when I was in my home state of South Carolina on a reporting trip. The General Assembly was preparing to hold a special legislative session to determine whether the state’s lone heavily Black congressional district—a seat held by Representative

One afternoon in early September, at the outdoor city pool in La Pola with my brother, I asked whether he would like to be 10 again. We were watching some kids about that age play in the pool. “No,” he said, “been there, done that.” And I agree. No need to go through that phase all over. Or any. Not the teen years or the college years, not getting settled in my 30s and having children, not the stretch of time between then and now, slowing down, contemplating my surroundings in a newly appreciati

Amanda Holmes reads Thomas James’s “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh” by Thomas James appeared first on The American Scholar.

Multimedia artist Lizz Freeman has been taking photographs of her daily life since she was 14 years old. Photography, she says, “lit a fire under me and made me so excited about art.” The pictures, mostly self-portraits from her adolescence in the 1980s and ’90s, are “so incredibly vivid that I can put the smell back in, I can put the feeling in the air back in. It is the place where my memories are held.” She now creates multimedia collage art from those photos, reflecting on “time and memory,

Though the line between the living and the dead might seem at first obvious, the medical state of brain death invites complex moral questions, as bioethicist Carl Elliott writes in our Autumn issue. Organ transplantation regularly occurs in brain-dead individuals, but why stop there? Why not, as Willard Gaylin asked in 1974, keep brain-dead subjects—which Gaylin terms “neomorts”—on life support in specialized “bioemporiums” for use in medical training or drug trials? Though one’s first reaction