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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES 

E Pluribus Unum: The Assimilation Paradigm Revisited 

"The Confidence of His Country": James Monroe on Impeachment 

The Beginning, End, and In Between of Adolescence 

Ceia Lume: The Romanian Way of Death 

Torturing Women and Mocking Men: Hitchcock's Rear Window 

HELL 101 

POEMS 

Surrealism  

What to Eat, and What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison 

Concerning the Naked Woman on Her Porch 

Hieroglyphs 

Planting The House 

Entering Strange Cities 

The Confusion of Time 

Ecology 

Equinox 

At Our Dancing Away 

January 

Vultures 

Crow at Dawn 

REVIEWS 

Theda Perdue, editor; Sifters: Native American Women's Lives 

Myrna Stone; The Art of Loss 

Venus Khoury-Ghata; Here There Was a Country 

Abstract

MELVIN G. HOLLI proposes an answer to the question of why some societies assimilate their immigrants relatively easily and why some do not: assimilation occurs most easily in advanced host societies and more slowly (and sometimes not at all) in undeveloped host societies. Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a specialist in the history of Chicago, urban politics, and ethnicity, Holli is author of numerous scholarly articles and fourteen books, including Reform in Detroit, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, and The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition.

James Monroe, as ARTHUR SCHERR notes, was the only individual to both vote against ratifying the Constitution and to have been elected President of the United States. In the present article Scherr lays out Monroe's views on the chief executive with particular reference to impeachment, a subject of recent interest. Scherr teaches United States history at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. His research interests are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political and social history, psychohistory, and gender roles in the Early Republic. The author of numerous articles on history, the humanities, and social sciences, several of which have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Scherr's study of a major Philadelphia magazine's attitudes toward women, “I Married Me a Wife": Male Attitudes Toward Women in the American Museum, 1787-1792, was published by Lexington Books in 1999.

ELIZABETH DODD teaches creative writing at Kansas State University in Manhattan. Her most recent book of poems is Archetypal Light (University of Nevada Press). Her poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

CAMILLE DUNGY teaches literature and creative writing at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Obsidian III, Crab Orchard Review, Missouri Review, Poetry International, and other journals. She has been a fellow at Cave Canem and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writer's Conference.

CHARLES FREELAND teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Carolina Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, and other journals. His poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

MARTIN GALVIN, Chevy Chase, Maryland, has published poems in Poetry, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monthly, and other journals. Some of his work was selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry of 1997. In 2001 he was a reader at NIH's Children's House, and in 2002 was selected to read in the Library of Congress's Poetry at Noon Reading Series. His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

MICHAEL HETTICH has published two books of poetry and five chapbooks. His most recent chapbooks are Sleeping With The Lights On (Pudding House, 2000), Singing With My Father (March Street, 2001), and The Point of Touching (LeBow, 2002). His poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Witness, The Literary Review, Poetry East, and other journals. Hettich teaches at Miami-Dade Community College in Miami, Florida.

ALLAN JOHNSTON, Evanston, Illinois, has published poems in Poetry, Weber Studies, California Quarterly, and other journals. His book, Tasks of Survival, appeared in 1996. In 1999 he received a fellowship in poetry from the Illinois Arts Council.

DONNA J. GELAGOTIS LEE has published poetry in Bitter Oleander, The Cortland Review, Wisconsin Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art & Literature by Women, and other journals. She works as a freelance editor in Hillsborough, New Jersey. Her poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

BOB MOHRBACHER teaches English at Pierce College in Puyallup, Washington. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Seattle Review, Georgetown Review, and Phoebe.

DENNIS SALEH's most recent chapbook, This Is Not Surrealism, won the chapbook competition from Willamette River Books. His poetry, prose, and artwork have appeared in ArtLife, Prairie Schooner, Psychological Perspectives, Social Anarchism, and other journals. Selections of his poems have also appeared recently in two anthologies, How Much Earth and The Geography of Home. His poems have also appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

WILLIAM SHELDON lives with his family in Hutchinson, Kansas, where he teaches and writes. His first collection of poems, Retrieving Old Bones, just appeared from Woodley Press. His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

DIANE SWAN, Barre, Vermont, has published poetry in American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Carolina Quarterly, Green Mountain Review, and other journals. She has received two grants from the Vermont Arts Council, and her chapbook, Jewelweed, won the State Street Press competition. Her work has also been selected by Robert Pack and Jay Parini for the forthcoming Anthology of New England Poetry.

LARRY D. THOMAS has published poems in Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, Southwestern American Literature, Writers' Forum, and other journals. His three collections of poems are The Lighthouse Keeper (Timberline, 2001), Amazing Grace (Texas Review, 2001), and The Woodlanders (Pecan Grove, 2002). His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly. Thomas lives and writes in Houston and Galveston, Texas.

SEAN WHALEN, Pilot Mound, Iowa, has published poetry in Flyway, Grasslands Review, Blind Man's Rainbow, Sketch, and Lyrical Iowa. He won first place in the Iowa Poetry Association's 2001 poetry contest.

THOMAS J. COTTLE suggests that misdirection or distraction hampers the psychological development of adolescents as they enter the entirely necessary and natural process of discovering the self. Relationships, not rules, and support, not censure, he suggests, offer a better means of helping adolescents on this journey. Professor of Education at Boston University, Cottle has published Time's Children: Children's Secrets; Like Fathers, Like Sons; Children in Jail; A Family Album; Private Lives and Public Accounts; and the recent At Peril: Stories of Injustice and Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long Term Unemployment.

LEIGH COLLINS believes that Americans might do well to recover bereavement strategies maintained by Romanians where death seems less an end than the beginning of a new phase in the relationship between those still living and the newly departed. A clinical social worker at Jewish Family Service of New Orleans, Collins's publications include essays and poetry in Visions International, Exquisite Corpse, Poetry Motel, and Phoebe: A Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory and Aesthetics. During her five years in Eastern Europe, she worked for the Press and Culture section of the American embassy in Bucharest and taught at the University of Timisoara in Romania and at the American University in Bulgaria.

JOHN FAWELL contends that Alfred Hitchcock's supposed antipathy toward women in his films may in fact be the opposite and was criticizing male attitudes, and he uses Rear Window as evidence for this thesis. Fawell teaches in the Humanities Department of the College of General Studies at Boston University. He has published articles on film (Jacques Tati, Eric Rohmer, Howard Hawks, Roman Polanski) and literature (Sophocles, Tolstoy, Valery, Tennyson) in a wide variety of scholarly journals.

The hell of it is that many of the practitioners (processitioners?) of English 101 are about as clueless (or do they have so many clues they've found themselves in the Conservatory with Colonel Mustard?) as those whom they presume to educate. In fact, DOMINICK GRUNDY traces "the talk" of new paradigms and liberating ideologies, trends for which students are quite marginal, not to poststructural authorities but to the difficult relationship of humanities teachers with language and literature. A New York City psychologist with doctorates in psychology and literature, Grundy teaches in the English Department of a local community college. He has published essays previously in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Literature and Psychology, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and The Arts in Psychotherapy. He has also initiated a series of groups and workshops for graduate students with writing-block problems at New York University and CUNY, New York City.

DENISE LOW is chair of the English Department at Haskell Indian Nations University. Her New and Selected Poems, 1970-1999, was recently published by Penthe Press. Her poetry and reviews have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

RONALD CHARLES EPSTEIN, a Canadian freelance writer, has recently had two movie reviews in Videoscope. His verse has appeared in Tucumcari Literary Review and in a special international collection from the publishers of Finland's Muuna Takeena.

RICHARD HOLINGER, who teaches writing at Marmion Academy in Aurora, Illinois, is a frequent reviewer for The Midwest Quarterly. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has published short fiction and essays in a variety of journals. He lives in Geneva, Illinois.

Two new members have been added to the Board of Editors and one has retired.

THOMAS R. WALTHER, who has served as a valued member of the Board of Editors for many years, has recently retired as Chair of the History Department and has decided to pass the pleasure of reading such a wonderful variety of articles on to a colleague.

JOHN L. S. Daley got his doctorate from Kent State University with a specialty in military history. Doctrinal development, combat leadership, civil-military relations, and American intellectual history, are his chief scholarly pursuits. His literary interests range from Byron, the Naturalists, the Angry Young Men, the American frontier experience, any well-written science fiction that attempts social commentary, occasionally William James, and anything his wife recommends. He is completing a book manuscript analyzing the development of U. S. tank doctrine between World Wars I and II.

EARL LEE has Masters degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He is author of a novel, Drakulya, a collection of essays, Libraries in the Age of Mediocrity (McFarland), and has written a foreward to a new unexpurgated edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle that will be available from See Sharp Press next year. Lee frequently writes on intellectual freedom issues and several of his articles have been anthologized in Alternative Library Literature.

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