Word: homers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exuberant 5-ft. 5-in. shortstop crouched low on the base path (so the home-plate umpire could see better, she later explained), then leaped in the air as the ball was ruled fair. The Chinese team disputed the call for 10 minutes, to no avail, and the homer provided the winning 3-1 score, bringing the favored U.S. team a long-awaited gold medal...
Perhaps we make a mistake to insist that the monarchy should be majestic. That is only one way for the royals to be exemplary. Homer's gods on Olympus, after all, played out elaborate soap operas of venality, stupidity, cruelty and greed. The Windsors, bearing up well under their hereditary burden of chinlessness and a tendency to run to twits, managed nonetheless to turn the saga of the stunningly unbright Duke and Duchess of Windsor into one of the century's great love stories. Perhaps Charles and Diana, in their follies, are simply enlarging the dramatic franchise of the family...
...Homer did not simply view the sea as a danger. His sea pieces, even when the weather is bad, are seductive. The paint is of great richness, beautifully manipulated, running the gamut from thin, subtle glazes to expansive slathers of opaque pigment. And there is often a character of apparition: things are stranger than you imagine, though you believe he saw what he saw--witness the heads of the Gloucester fishermen appearing from the wave that hides their dory in Kissing the Moon, 1904, or the breaking wave on the rocks in West Point, Prout's Neck, 1900, that flings...
Such works remind you that the view of Homer that was current 20 years ago, and that this show corrects--that he was a realist in a simple and straightforward way--was wrong. It reckons without the deep strand of existential pessimism that runs in Homer's work and that creates its own symbolic structures. For Homer, as for another great and underrated artist, his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, man is at constant war with his surroundings in a world that cares nothing about him and gives him no natural allies. The moment you step from the social path, where security...
...from animal to man. A black sailor lies on the afterdeck of a dismasted sloop, adrift and rudderless in the deep Caribbean blue. Enormous sharks circle the boat. Their ominousness is reinforced by the zone of black water from which they rise. (The catalog, rather absurdly, suggests that celibate Homer was invoking that hoary phantom of the Freudian couch, the vagina dentata. This could make sense only to an art historian who has never been near a live shark.) On the horizon, a square-rigger sails indifferently by, and we see the waterspout of a coming tornado. There will...