Of all the varieties of underappreciated artist, circus acts might just have it the worst. Their technical virtuosity is taken for granted, but is what they do actually art? In 1893, Paul Cinquevalli, one of the greatest jugglers of all time, succeeded in catching an egg on a plate without breaking it. It took him nine years to learn the trick, and he soon dropped it from his routine, because audiences weren’t particularly impressed. READ MORE >>
One Whale Too Many: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Arctic Adventure
The Myth of the Londoner
Tailey, Twirley, Loopey
All About Eve
Animality
IN ONE OF Aesop’s fables, an overambitious frog tries to puff himself up to the size of an ox, and explodes. Paul Muldoon mocked this type of moralizing animal tale in his poem “The Frog,” in 1983. Attempts to find a “moral for our times” in the frog’s story are naïve, and threaten to turn sour, as Muldoon suggests: What if I put him to my head and squeezed it out of him, READ MORE >>
