Pope Boniface VIII was looking for a new artist to work on the frescoes in St. Peter’s Basilica, so he sent a courtier out into the country to interview artists and collect samples of their work that he could judge. The courtier approached the painter Giotto and asked for a drawing to demonstrate his skill. [...]
Archive for October, 2010
The Frisbee of Art
Posted in Other on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Escape to the Sun
Posted in Photo galleries on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Cranes fly past the setting sun near Linum, Germany. The cranes spend the summer in Scandinavia, where they breed. Every fall they migrate south to spend the winter in warmer climes in southern France and Spain. En route the birds take a four to six week break in the German wetlands. Cranes are omnivorous, living [...]
How Handwriting Trains the Brain
Posted in Living on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Forming Letters Is Key to Learning, Memory, Ideas Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old’s stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane’s mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning. She’s right. [...]
Serendipitous Connections
Posted in Other on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Innovation occurs when ideas from different people bang against each other. In the physical universe, chemical reactions are limited by the molecules that are close to one another and the ease with which they can meet up. You can run an electrical current through a chemical bath and synthesize the basic amino acids that form [...]
Poster poems
Posted in Poetry on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Epigrams Getting straight to the point … Dorothy Parker. ______ The epigram is one of the briefest of poetic forms, but, as the derivation of the name might suggest, it is also one of the most enduring. Originally a Greek stone inscription, the form found its feet in Rome, especially in the frequently risqué works [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
What mystery pervades a well! by Emily Dickinson Sending postcards to the future … Emily Dickinson. _____ Shamefaced confession: I’ve been renewing my library copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson for more than a year. It’s the perfect dipping-book, utterly reliable for a moment’s, or an hour’s, refreshment. There’s no poet who’s so [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Easter, 1944 by John Lucas ‘I am kept to a road / under a lowering sky and I can’t tell / which way the children took or when they left’ _____ Childhood recollection is one of contemporary poetry’s favourite genres. It seems to replace unsettling notions that even poems may have fictional or unreliable narrators [...]
Berlin Researchers Crack the Ptolemy Code
Posted in History on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Mapping Ancient Germania A 2nd century map of Germania by the scholar Ptolemy has always stumped scholars, who were unable to relate the places depicted to known settlements. Now a team of researchers have cracked the code, revealing that half of Germany’s cities are 1,000 years older than previously thought. The founding of Rome has [...]
The Waltz That Defines Vienna
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The river that inspired Strauss’s symphonic waltz. On June 3, 1899, in the midst of a benefit concert at Vienna’s Volksgarten, someone approached the podium and spoke to the conductor. The orchestra was stopped and a quick order whispered to the musicians. A moment later they began to play the ethereal string tremolo that introduces [...]
Kant on a Kindle?
Posted in Computers, Other on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The technology of the book—sheafs of paper covered in squiggles of ink—has remained virtually unchanged since Gutenberg. This is largely a testament to the effectiveness of books as a means of transmitting and storing information. Paper is cheap, and ink endures. In recent years, however, the act of reading has undergone a rapid transformation, as [...]
O Captain, Our Captain
Posted in History on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
George Washington was a genius and a titan, but it was politics, not war, at which he excelled It was said of Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck that he was the subtle son of his feline mother posing all his life as his heavy, portentous father. Similarly, the George Washington who emerges from this truly [...]
Actress, Seductress
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
To say she over-emoted is defamatory understatement. Audiences adored her. Long before parents told their tantrum-throwing daughters “don’t be such a drama queen,” the world had a single branded role model for self-defeating histrionics. In the 1950s, when I was a tot, I heard mothers at the school gates shout: “Don’t be such a Sarah [...]
Literary Life
Posted in Literature on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
The working habits of authors can sometimes be as interesting as their creations, on the evidence of Harry Bruce’s “Page Fright,” a delightful volume about the practical side of “the world’s loneliest calling.” He starts with a close look at the tools of the trade: John Steinbeck sometimes went through 60 pencils a day, and [...]
A Gangster Goes to War
Posted in History, Literature on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
In New York right after the turn of the 20th century, the baddest man in the whole downtown was a thug named Monk Eastman, who controlled a gang of 2,000 Jewish hoodlums on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His was among the most scandalous criminal enterprises in American history, according to biographer Neil Hanson in “Monk [...]
Hatching the Pot
Posted in Living on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
In the last column, I discussed ellipses and how drawing them involves the fluid, fairly fast movement of the hand, letting your reflexes carry out the kind of rounded shape you intend to make. Now we’ll move on to shading the pot that we previously described in simple outline, using curving lines that are like [...]
On the afternoon of Sept. 28, 1999, sheriff’s deputies pulled into the driveway of Cynthia Stewart’s Ohio home and arrested her. Her crime: taking pictures of her 8-year-old daughter playing in the bathtub. She had sent the photos to a film-processing lab, and the lab called the police. The police took the pictures to the [...]
Ten of the best wolves in literature
Posted in Literature on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Metamorphoses, by Ovid Lycaon, king of Arcadia, serves his dinner guest (Zeus in disguise) a special supper: he took a human hostage, “opened his throat with a knife, and made some of the still warm limbs tender in seething water, roasting others in the fire”. His punishment for such savagery is transformation. He howls and [...]
Ten of the best vendettas in literature
Posted in Literature on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Hámundarson vs the family of Gissur the White In Icelandic sagas, life is given its relish by family feuds. In Njál’s saga, there are several (all the more dizzying because of inter-marriage, divorce and foster-parenting). The main feud is begun when Njáls’s friend Gunnar Hámundarson kills two members of the same family (one might have [...]
‘The Americans Want to Blackmail Us’ Representatives of US security agencies want further concessions from the EU to ensure free access to police computers, bank transfers and airline passenger data in the fight against terror. But members of the European Parliament have said they will resist the moves. Washington’s army of diplomats in Europe has been [...]
Predatory Cats Return to the Harz Mountains
Posted in Animals, Photo galleries on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
For the past decade, conservationists have been releasing zoo-bred Eurasian lynx in Germany’s Harz mountains, with the goal of returning them to their natural habitat. The lynx, once targeted by hunters because they threatened farm animals and local game, disappeared from the region nearly 200 years ago. On Easter Sunday, 2009, officials at Germany’s Harz [...]
Nicholas Royle’s top 10 writers on the telephone
Posted in Literature on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Literature on the line … a rotary telephone. Nicholas Royle was born in London in 1957. His first novel, Quilt, a study of grief in which the news of a father’s death is delivered suddenly and brutally by telephone, was published in August. “I’ve chosen 10 writers on the telephone, rather than 10 novels, stories [...]
Annabel Lyon’s top 10 books on the ancient world
Posted in Literature on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Bringing the past back to life … Persian bust of Alexander the Great. _____ Annabel Lyon is he author of four books, most recently The Golden Mean, a novel about the relationship between Aristotle and the teenaged Alexander the Great. The novel was a Canadian bestseller, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor [...]
A medical historian’s discovery that American researchers in the 1940s deliberately infected hundreds of people in Guatemala with syphilis or gonorrhea has provoked outrage in both countries. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rightly apologized to President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala. More will be needed to make amends, beginning with a planned [...]
November election results will vindicate or undercut Obama
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Promoting his new book, Jimmy Carter, whose version of Christianity allows ample scope for what some Christians consider the sin of pride, has been doing something at which he has had long practice — praising himself. He is, he says, “probably superior” to all other ex-presidents, and would have enacted comprehensive health care if a [...]
The Colbert Democrats
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 7, 2010 | Comments Off
A president’s first midterm election is inevitably a referendum on his two years in office. The bad news for Democrats is that President Obama’s “reelect” number is 38 percent — precisely Bill Clinton’s in October 1994, the eve of the wave election that gave Republicans control of the House for the first time in 40 [...]
Democrats and ‘Poisoned’ Politics
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Incumbents launch personal attacks to divert attention from the economy’s poor performance. In March 2004, when Barack Obama was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in the Illinois Democratic primary, he excoriated President George W. Bush for creating a “jobless recovery.” The month he said that, 334,000 new jobs were created—none of them temporary Census [...]
Revolt of the Accountants
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Washington is turning America into Paperwork Nation. If you write a column, you get a lot of email. Sometimes, especially in a political season, it’s possible to discern from it certain emerging themes—the comeback of old convictions, for instance, or the rise of new concerns. Let me tell you something I’m hearing, in different ways [...]
Five Best World War II Memoirs
Posted in Literature on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
1. Quartered Safe Out Here By George MacDonald Fraser Harvill Press, 1992 George MacDonald Fraser, British author of the Flashman series of novels, fought in the 17th (Black Cat) Indian Division of the 14th Army during the siege of Meiktila and the battle of Pyawbwe in Burma. He believed, probably correctly, that soldiering in Burma [...]
Five Best in International Crime Fiction
Posted in Literature on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
From Nine to Nine by Leo Perutz, 1918 A year older than his Prague compatriot Franz Kafka and later much admired by Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Perutz forged his own variety of the paranoid fantastic. His early novel “From Nine to Nine,” an international best seller in its day, eschews the supernatural trappings of some [...]
Wagner for a Song
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
ON Monday night, “Das Rheingold,” the first part of a mammoth new production of Richard Wagner’s opera cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” will thunder down on the Metropolitan Opera. A 45-ton set will test the theater’s foundations; a reported $16 million budget will test the company’s finances. In the midst of economic troubles, is it [...]
