Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:35:20 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Eric Ormsby :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Eric+Ormsby istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-voice-of-fiction-james-campbells-syncopations/85049/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The best interviews are not simply dialogues; they're theater in miniature. The stage may be little more than a living room or an anonymous hotel suite and the props may be limited to a tape recorder on a coffee table, but there is a sense of dramatic occasion in the air. The interviewer must be well prepared, of course, and yet, that dogged preparation serves best when a carefully considered question elicits some seemingly unguarded response and a small discovery takes shape. As in the... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-forger-as-huckster-two-books-on-han-van/84664/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The forger isn't just a swindler. He turns values upside down. He doesn't merely change good coin for bad; he's an alchemist in reverse, offering base metal for gold. This is why, in Dante's "Inferno," the poet puts forgers and counterfeiters together with alchemists near the lowest circle of hell. There, Dante and Virgil meet the forger Master Adam, a bloated and legless torso wracked with thirst; this false Adam is himself a counterfeit, a mocking copy of the father of mankind. In the Middle... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-man-and-his-gun-mr-gatlings-terrible-marvel/84207/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Richard Jordan Gatling (1818-1903), the inventor of the weapon that bears his name, had a passion for setting objects in orderly motion. His first invention was a four-bladed, screw-type ship's propeller, for which he just missed establishing a patent. That was in 1836, when he was still a teenager. Over his long career he would devise a mechanical seed planter, a steam-powered plow, and a new and better flush toilet. Of the dozens of patents he registered, 18 were for agricultural implements... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/wisdom-like-a-flower-bed-sadis-gulistan/83729/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Common sense is probably the last thing we want or expect from poets. Give us confessions, prophecies, manifestos, but spare us the advice — especially advice in verse. The poet should be a firebrand, not some mumbling old uncle. And yet, it wasn't always thus. In older cultures, not only in Greece and Rome but in India, Persia, and China, the poet was often seen less as a visionary than as a dispenser of wisdom. This wasn't usually lofty wisdom; it was homespun, practical, and shrewd. It... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-activist-and-the-recluse/83240/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that each new acquaintance was potentially "an ambassador of the infinite." For one of the Sage of Concord's most fervent admirers, the now-forgotten reformer and man of letters Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), the phrase proved surprisingly apt. On April 17, 1862, he received a mysterious unsigned letter in an almost illegible hand; into the envelope had been tucked four poems, along with yet another smaller, sealed envelope. Inside that he found a card on... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/against-the-day-david-lebedoff-on-orwell-and-waugh/82841/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST If Evelyn Waugh might be described as a social alpinist, clambering up one aristocratic pinnacle after another, George Orwell, his exact contemporary — both were born in 1903 — was a spelunker, burrowing ever deeper into the seamiest depths. Waugh loved the high life and made it his domain. Orwell may not have loved the low life, but he valiantly tried to live it. While Waugh was chatting up dukes and duchesses, Orwell was rubbing shoulders with coal miners and tramps. Like a gourmet who sniffs... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-country-of-quixote-henry-kamens-imagining/82416/ Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Hamlet showed "method in his madness" but the same cannot be said of Don Quixote. When the Knight of the Mournful Countenance is interviewed late in the novel by Don Diego de Miranda, that worthy sees him "as a sane man with madness in him, and as a madman with the same tendencies," in John Rutherford's translation. Don Diego was especially puzzled because what Don Quixote said "was coherent, elegant and well expressed, and what he did was absurd, foolhardy and stupid." "Hamlet" was first... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/stanley-plumlys-romance-with-keats/81953/ Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Poets who die young often have surprisingly lively posthumous careers. John Keats (1795-1821) provides the most celebrated example: Almost immediately after his death in Rome, at the age of 25, he entered the realm of legend. Though his poetry wasn't much read at the time, he himself was quickly transformed into a figure of myth. For Shelley — who drowned with a copy of Keats's last book in his pocket — he was "like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished," as he put it in "Adonais," his... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/man-and-his-maker-kafkas-letter-to-my-father/81457/ Wed, 9 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Almost 90 years ago, on November 10, 1919, Franz Kafka sat down to write a long letter to the one person he feared more than anyone. That person was his father, Hermann Kafka, a successful Prague businessman and a domestic tyrant of epic proportions. The 100-page letter took Kafka two months to complete. It was "a lawyer's letter," he told his friend and lover Milena Jesenskα. In fact, it is a furious indictment. In his fiction, Kafka, a practicing lawyer, saw the world — and the law itself... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/snake-bitten-twice-shy-jamie-jamess-the-snake/81101/ Wed, 2 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The ancient art of snake handling is a tricky business. First you have to catch the thing; for this, a quick eye and an even quicker hand are essential. Once caught and held by the back of its head, the snake will often whip its whole length around your arm. There's an unsettling intimacy to its fierce grip. To uncoil the critter and maneuver it into the safety of a collecting bag demands a certain practiced finesse. But all that's the easy part. The real skill of snake handling comes into play... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/after-the-great-fire-london-rising/80593/ Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST When rebuilding finally began on St. Paul's Cathedral, nine years after the Great Fire of 1666, Christopher Wren and his masons found an auspicious item amid the rubble of the site. It was a fragment of a gravestone which bore the Latin word Resurgam: "I will rise again." The reconstruction of the church would take 33 years and consume most of Wren's prodigious energies. But when the new St. Paul's was inaugurated, on October 26, 1708, that stone, surmounted by the image of a phoenix surging... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/out-of-aesops-overcoat-two-histories-of-childrens/80183/ Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Our first books were magical. They weren't like windows you could see through; they were closed like doors. Their covers were gaudy and promised surprise but they never really gave away what lay hidden inside. If the book was new, we heard the little creak of the spine, itself like the stiff hinges of a door, when we opened it. And with each new book, we stepped into a space where anything might happen, and often did. Every page seemed a strange room in an unknown house whose least corner we... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/roots-of-civilization-robert-pogue-harrisons/79717/ Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Adam was the original gardener. When God came in the cool of the evening for a chat with his creature, he called out, "Where are you, Adam?" But our first father called back: "In a moment. I'm busy now." Gardens need constant attention. Adam had flower beds to water, weeds to pull. The great Czech writer Karel Capek imagined this droll, alternative Eden in his 1929 book "The Gardener's Year." The cosmopolitan Capek, a master of whimsy, was intensely modern, if not downright futuristic (he... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/william-staffords-poetry-of-false-witness/79220/ Wed, 4 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST When William Stafford (1914-93) was given the National Book Award for poetry, for his 1962 collection "Traveling Through the Dark," the judges said of his poems that "their music knows the value of silence." This seems a dubious tribute. Would a composer be acclaimed for his mastery of rests? In fact, though Stafford often wrote about silence — and made grand claims for it — he was an unusually chatty poet. Apart from a handful of surprising poems, in which he seemed overtaken by the listening... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/on-the-revolutionary-road-victor-serges/78701/ Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The novelist and professional revolutionary Victor Serge (1890-1947) spent much of his restless life in exile, often a mere step ahead of murderous pursuers. Even so, Serge cannot really be called an exile. He had no lost homeland to return to. Victor Serge was the pen name of Victor Lvovich Kibalchich. Despite his Russian lineage, he wrote exclusively in French. Born in Brussels to fiercely anti-tsarist parents — an ancestor had been hanged for his involvement in the assassination of Tsar... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/geniuses-and-the-men-hidden-inside-them/76795/ Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In four photographs of Albert Einstein, taken over a 30-year span between 1911 and 1942 and reproduced in Silvan Schweber's "Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius" (Harvard, 432 pages, $29.95), he positions himself, whether in a group or alone, so that his left hand is caught by the camera. He holds that hand in a distinctive gesture, with his thumb and forefinger joined to form a little ellipse. Though he tends to face away from the camera, as though indifferent to appearances, he is... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-lives/76397/ Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Certain old habits survive even the fall of empires. When the Habsburg dynasty collapsed, after World War I, it wasn't only the grand palaces and spacious parade grounds which survived: Its stubborn bureaucracy lived on, too. Imperial protocols vanished, but the civil service endured. The Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy was notorious for its obsession with order; even a requisition for pencils in a remote Tyrolean post office had to travel up an intricate chain of command. Such meticulous control... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/newtons-single-vision/75952/ Wed, 7 May 2008 00:00:00 EST For Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the universe was governed by precise laws which could not only be formulated but mathematically proved to a certainty. These physical laws were not sporadic or local; they were universal and extended "everywhere to immense distances," as he wrote in "The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy," first published in 1687. Newton's three laws of motion may not apply at the atomic level or under conditions approaching the speed of light, as we now... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/lovely-bones-poems-of-the-late-tang/75582/ Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST In the year 755 common era, when the T'ang dynasty was shaken by violent rebellion, many of its leading citizens — courtiers as well as poets — took to the roads. The dynasty was weakened but would endure for another century and a half, until it would be overthrown in 907. For the exiles, no return seemed possible. One of these was the poet Tu Fu (or Du Fu, as his name is now romanized), generally considered the greatest of classical Chinese poets. In the poems he composed during his years of... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/americas-leading-flimflam-man/75122/ Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST In one of his "Proverbs of Hell," the poet William Blake wrote, "The lust of the goat is the bounty of God." The unbridled randiness of the billy goat was an ancient commonplace: The Greeks gave Pan, their goatherd god, horns and hooves; he was not only the lord of panic but epitomized the rutting instinct. But neither the ancient Greeks nor Blake, even in his wildest imaginings, could have foreseen quite how bountiful — or how lucrative — that goatish libido could be. It took an American con... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/reviving-ann-hathaway/74800/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Invisibility is no protection for the wives of great men. In fact, the more self-effacing the women are, the more they tend to be maligned. Socrates's wife Xanthippe is always portrayed as a shrew, yet all we know about the poor woman is that the philosopher briskly sent her packing — along with their three soon-to-be-bereft children — before he lifted the hemlock to his lips. No fond farewells for him! We know precious little about Shakespeare, but even less about Ann Hathaway, his wife; this... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/looking-into-the-mirror-of-nature/74412/ Wed, 9 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST When John Donne in the 17th century wrote, "I am a little world made cunningly," he was echoing a theme which had intrigued philosophers and poets since ancient times. This was the notion that the human form mirrored the larger world in which we live. The human being was a microcosm, a universe in miniature. Our bones were like the rocks that support the earth, our veins were like the rivers. The comparisons were far-fetched but a deeper perception lay beneath them. The world displays a... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/shakespeare-in-court/74058/ Wed, 2 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Shakespeare the man remains the most potent of ghosts. Through his plays and poems we have a strong sense of him as a person, and yet the details of his life are tantalizingly obscure. We know that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564 and died there, also in April, in 1616, and that between those two Aprils, he spent 25 years in London, at various addresses, as an actor, playwright, and somewhat reclusive "gentleman." We know a bit about his marriage to Ann Hathaway, to whom he... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/lines-like-old-friends/73628/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Certain poets come to seem our secret friends. We may not have met them; we may not have wanted to meet them. But their particular voices, as distinctive and familiar as those of our childhood, accompany us, sometimes for years. We don't turn to their poems for comfort or for wisdom, though they may offer these in abundance. We say their lines over and over to ourselves for the sheer pleasure of their words, much the way we might hum a favorite melody. Oddest of all, these lines, which memory... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/logic-of-the-labyrinth/73209/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Few places are spookier a big library at night. The rows of shelves hold a swarm of shadows of all shapes and sizes. There are mysterious creaks and rustlings. The books stand in their dark ranks, their spines touched by occasional gleams from some distant window. The silence is unnerving. It's a silence that feels charged with all the dreams and hopes and dreads that the books in their ordered multitudes contain. Still, add a shaded reading lamp, a comfortable armchair, and a footstool, and... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/starry-messenger/72759/ Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST A certain age-old nosiness lies at the origins of modern astronomy. For centuries scientists and philosophers dreamed of a fabulous device which would abolish distance. The heavens, which ancient star-gazers searched as much for signs and portents as for clues to their mysterious operations, would then disclose their secrets to our peering eyes. But a stronger impetus than the quest for scientific knowledge often fed these longings; in many cases, the military advantages alone promised to be... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/auden-america/72350/ Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST W. H. Auden sailed for New York on January 19, 1939. He would remain in America off and on until of the last his year of his life, becoming an American citizen in 1946. Auden was roundly criticized for leaving England when he did; after all, the1930s had been dubbed "The Age of Auden," and even admirers of his poetry saw his departure as an unpardonable — and cowardly — defection in time of war. The criticism still simmers. Last year, during the centenary celebrations of his birth, the charges... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-plato-can-change-your-life/71951/ Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST The notion that philosophy begins in wonder is as old as Socrates. In his dialogue "Theaetetus," Plato quotes him as saying that "the sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher" and that in fact, philosophy has "no other origin" but wonder. More than 2,000 years later, Immanuel Kant wrote that "only two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder." These were "the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me." Of course, neither Socrates nor Kant remained content simply... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/citizen-of-a-lost-world/71535/ Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST The Austrian novelist Gregor von Rezzori (1914–98) remained for all of his wandering life the stubbornly loyal subject of a vanished empire. Born in Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was the quizzical child of a fiercely contested region. A dozen or so nationalities, and at least as many languages, seethed together there in uneasy symbiosis. In the Bukovina, Austrians and Romanians, Ukrainians and Poles, Jews and Turks defined their... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/piece-of-ice-on-a-hot-stove/71198/ Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Robert Frost may be the only American poet, and certainly the only great one, who started out as a chicken farmer. T.S. Eliot worked in a bank, Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer, and Hart Crane toiled in advertising. William Carlos Williams could write that "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white chickens," but probably got no closer to the barnyard than his breakfast egg would allow. For almost 10 years, beginning in 1900, Frost ran a... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/our-emily-dickinson/70813/ Wed, 6 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST A tough Yankee thriftiness underlies many of Emily Dickinson's musings on fame. She drove a hard bargain with posterity. Against the short-term profits of the literary marketplace she held out for grander gains. In a poem written around 1862, she scorned the "Bullion of Today" in favor of the "Currency of Immortality." The wordplay wasn't only wry but prescient: More than a century after her death in 1886, her greatest poems display a startling currency. The rough-hewn, deliberately knotty... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/looking-through-the-other-end-of-the-microscope/70440/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Scientific discoveries are not only cumulative but a bit haphazard. They emerge in reaction to wrongheaded hypotheses as well as from moments of sudden insight. Often they occur inadvertently or by sheer dumb luck. Almost always, despite the genius of their discoverers, they are the product of the long, stubborn investigation of other scientists who remain obscure. Neither James Watson nor Francis Crick would have arrived at an understanding of the double helix without the prior work of... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/man-of-mischief-and-letters/70041/ Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Though Washington Irving (1783–1859) is often seen as the prototype of the successful American writer, he actually stumbled into his astonishing career. For over 50 years, he produced one best-selling book after another. Histories, biographies, essays, and tales poured from his pen. He commanded high advances and earned unprecedented royalties. He hobnobbed with the great and the powerful; named for George Washington, he was favored as a small boy with a presidential pat on the head. Once, when... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/words-of-hot-effect/69628/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST After he conquered the island that would bear his name, King Utopus decreed that "everyone was free to practise what religion he liked." The force of the decree was such that when one overzealous Christian publicly condemned other faiths, he was sent into exile — not for his beliefs but for disturbing the peace. The king believed that "it was stupid and arrogant to bully everyone else into adopting one's own particular creed." This defense of religious tolerance occurs, astonishingly enough, in... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/music-of-fatality/69155/ Wed, 9 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The life of an exile is a life in suspension. Between a home that is lost, sometimes forever, and a home that has yet to be found, the exile endures a provisional existence. The cities of exile are shadowy; their languages and customs and traditions have a stopgap quality. They never possess the satisfying substance of home. In the ancient world, exile was the harshest of penalties. When Ovid wrote his poems from exile, he charged them to be his eyes in his native city; his words could go where... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/across-the-species-divide/68803/ Wed, 2 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Conversations with wild animals are always one-sided. If we speak to them, we hear how empty our words sound in the silence between us. If we manage to make eye contact with some startled deer in a forest clearing or with a caged lion in the local zoo, we search their faces for visual clues, but we can't quite decipher the look they give us back. We depend almost exclusively on our eyes, but animals apprehend us with all their senses. They know us by our smells and sounds as well as by sight... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/map-of-the-heavens/68565/ Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Much of the genius of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) lay in a mix of audacity and exactitude. His boldest leaps of insight sprang from laborious plodding. Years of careful computation, based on sporadic stargazing with the crudest of instruments, lay behind his astonishing discoveries: Our earth was not the fixed center of the universe, nor did the sun and the stars move around us in perfect epicycles, as Ptolemy had argued more than a millennium earlier; in fact, our earth not only revolved... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/poetry-2007-12-19/68327/ Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST "Fetch" is an old word for a double. It's that secret self, often scarcely known to us, we dispatch on errands we're too timid to undertake on our own. We stay home, listening to the rain beat against the windowpanes, but our fetch is on the prowl, stepping boldly into shady dives and shadier adventures. In her third collection of poems, the American poet Tamar Yoseloff, long a resident of London, uses the notion of the fetch to give structure and resonance to a sequence of strong but delicate... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/autobiography-of-a-mythic-life/68355/ Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST In his 1989 poem "Telegraph Wires," the late Ted Hughes wrote, "Towns whisper to towns over the heather. / But the wires cannot hide from the weather." No matter how secret the whisper, the weather breaks in and distorts the voice. In his poetry, Hughes (1930–98) tried to capture that spontaneous and confidential tone. He hated what he called "the meanness and deadness of almost all modern English verse." But at the same time, he wanted that living voice to coincide somehow with the mythic, the... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/odes-to-longing-and-to-change/67901/ Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Sometimes a fine sentiment is turned by time into a mockery of itself. When the Roman poet Horace (65-8 BCE) wrote that "it is lovely and honorable to die for the homeland," he could hardly, even in his wildest imaginings, have foreseen that it would come to stand, centuries later, as a sarcastic epitaph for those young men whose lives were squandered in the trenches of the Great War. The English poet Wilfred Owen used the Horatian tag ("Dulce et decorum est") as the title of one of his... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/dressing-up-the-photo-album/67526/ Wed, 5 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Few things are harder to assemble than the posthumous work of a much-loved friend for a world of strangers. We want others to see and to value our friend and her work as we did. Out of those heaps of sketches or negatives or drafts of poems we struggle to find what is most characteristic as well as most convincing. Sometimes we'd like to add a few improving touches but that wouldn't be right. Often we'd like to tuck away what's weak or unrealized. But it's too late for second thoughts or... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/songs-of-innocence-and-experience/67078/ Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST One fine late 18th-century morning, an affluent collector named Thomas Butts came to call on his friend William Blake and found the poet and his wife sitting stark naked in the summer house of their modest lodgings in Lambeth. The happy couple, "freed from those troublesome disguises which have prevailed since the Fall," as his early biographer Alexander Gilchrist put it, were reciting Milton's "Paradise Lost," with William taking the part of Adam and his wife Catherine the role of Eve. Butts... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-defense-of-drama/66908/ Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The theme is as old as Homer: A son sets out in search of his missing father. His quest isn't only to find the man who brought him into the world: It's a quest to learn who he truly is. The theme takes on added poignancy when reversed, and a father searches for a missing son. He isn't on a quest for identity; he hopes to recover some part of himself, of his very flesh and bone. His search is an act of restitution. When the Prodigal Son came home, his father killed the fatted calf and ordered a... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/feeling-with-the-eye/66452/ Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Over the course of his long career, Ansel Adams (1902–84) confronted the vast landscapes of the American West with a shrewd innocence of eye. His black-and-white photographs, whether of Yosemite in winter or of the Sierra Nevada at sunrise or even of a shivering stand of aspens in a Colorado canyon, capture those vistas as if they were being glimpsed for the first time. That this was an illusion, the result of technical mastery as well as of artistic design, takes nothing away from the grandeur... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/seeking-the-end-of-the-known-world/66027/ Wed, 7 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Marco Polo was not much given to modesty. In the prologue to his fabulous "Travels," he brags that no man "since the creation of Adam" had seen or searched out so many wonders as he had. There was a certain defiance in his boast: The more precise and detailed his descriptions of Persia and India and China, the less people believed him. He had set out for the East in 1271, when he was only 17. His destination was the Mongol court of Kublai Khan, a figure of dread to Europeans. He spent almost... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/catching-chickens-as-they-hatch/65569/ Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST The clown who hides a broken heart beneath his gags is a stock figure in opera. But there aren't many Pagliaccis among contemporary poets, most of whom cultivate a prim solemnity of tone. The late poet, playwright, novelist, and longtime Columbia University professor Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) may have been the great exception. His poems brim with exuberance and yet there is often a startling undertone of sadness to his work. It is as if he needed all the bells and whistles, the slapstick... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/glittering-insufferable-raj/65148/ Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST British India came to an end 60 years ago, on August 14, 1947, at the stroke of midnight. In one bittersweet moment India gained independence. On that same day, the country was partitioned, the Muslim state of Pakistan came into being, and a violent shift of populations began. The end of British rule was abrupt; instead of allowing for gradual transition, Viceroy Mountbatten scheduled a mere 10 weeks for the change. After ruling much of India for 250 years, the British couldn't get out fast... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/writing-on-the-side-or-on-the-sly/64696/ Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Emily Dickinson wrote her "letter to the world" but somehow never got around to mailing it. Her hundreds of poems, which she stitched carefully together into tiny booklets, were only published, to great acclaim, long after her death. She was an amateur in the best sense of the word; she wrote out of a compelling love of the art. She did try on one occasion to publish her verses but got nowhere and never tried again. In the end, publication was incidental to her passion. The notion of the poet... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/errand-in-an-unknown-land/64313/ Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST The Knights of the Round Table were expert at lance and broadsword and the terrible double axe, but their real strength lay elsewhere. They were undefeated as warriors because of their valor. This old word, now used only in military citations, doesn't just mean physical courage. When King Arthur wants to praise Sir Kay, he calls him "a steward of valor." The word comes from the same root as "value," and designates a moral quality. At Camelot, such valorous knights as Galahad or Gawain stand out... ERIC ORMSBY http://www.nysun.com/arts/uncaged-animal/63879/ Wed, 3 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST The greatest portraits convince by the subtlest means. In a Rembrandt self-portrait, the least curl of his lip seems to proclaim the man. Velαzquez could make the shadowy folds of a velvet tunic tell us all we need to know about some long-dead duke. Royal portraits follow established conventions but the cunning brush of a Goya could allow a hidden personality to peep out from behind the stiffest pose. In such portraits, through the droop of an eyelid or the flourish of an upraised hand, we seem...