On Dec 17, 2008, at 9:30 PM, William Conger wrote:
this guy is a relic from some Reader's Digest or Coronet magazine of long ago. Just too awful to even mention. Below us.
Some years ago, I read "Don't Get Taught Art This Way" (but now, I seem to have lost my copy). Miller's excerpts make interesting reading. They remind me of my reaction a long time ago: Shaw came across then--and now--as a naive person who is confounded by the new art around him. I suspect many many people subscribe to an American myth, a Walter Mitty-esque fantasy of being the undiscovered genius, the savant who arrives from the frontier and reveals great depth or insight or talent, like the mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, who burst upon the English mathematical world from India in 1913. Ramanujan's work was the real deal, however, but Shaw's remained mired in an inarticulate naivete that can be mistaken for disingenuousness and passion. With faux science thrown in, too. (See Barzun, "Science, The Glorious Entertainment" on this point.)
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