For Wonky
#1
Yo, Mr. Wonky: I agree with this, and when I read it I thought of you. I think it captures a lot about what is not quite right about a lot of things lately (here, there, and everywhere).

Quote:Tom Stoppard Thinks You’re Dumb
Is the award-winning playwright a snob, or are audiences less intelligent than they used to be?
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world’s brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. In a February interview with the Telegraph that was occasioned by the National Theatre’s London premiere of “The Hard Problem,” his latest play, Mr. Stoppard complained that he now has to water down his punch lines: “It’s very rare to connect an audience except on a level which is lower than you would want to connect them on....You could raise it a notch and you might lose an eighth of them….I really resent it.” By way of illustration, he mentioned a scene in “Travesties,” one of his earlier plays, that contains a joke which hinges on knowing the name of Goneril, King Lear’s oldest daughter. “In 1974,” he said, “everybody in the audience knew who Goneril was and laughed. In about 1990 when the play was revived, maybe half knew.”
This isn’t the first time that Mr. Stoppard has made that complaint—or used that example. He said the same thing to a reporter for the Financial Times in 1998. This time, though, he got a brisk bit of blowback from the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, best known to American TV viewers as the High Sparrow in “Game of Thrones.” “I think Tom Stoppard’s gotten snobbier,” Mr. Pryce told Country Life magazine. “I thought it was an extraordinary thing to say. Just because people didn’t get his esoteric piece of writing at the National Theatre….Write something more comprehensible.”
Not having seen “The Hard Problem” and not knowing Mr. Stoppard personally, I have no opinion on the play’s comprehensibility, much less its author’s alleged snobbishness. But I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing “dumber,” if what you really mean to say is “less culturally literate.” It’s certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they’re required to learn in school is still too much.
Just the other day, the Washington Post published a rant by Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English at an inner-city school in Sacramento, Calif. Not only does Ms. Dusbiber happily admit to “disliking”  Shakespeare, but she wants to “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely.” Her preferred replacement is “the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior.” She believes that Shakespeare’s plays are no longer relevant to the lives of the “students of color” whom she teaches: “Shakespeare lived in a pretty small world. It might now be appropriate for us to acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.”
I doubt that Ms. Dusbiber is entirely representative of America’s public-school English teachers—at least not yet. On the other hand, I also doubt that her views are remotely close to unique. That said, I see no reason to rehearse for the gazillionth time the self-evident argument that her point of view is both criminally ignorant and devastatingly hurtful to the students whom she purports to teach. W.E.B. DuBois, after all, did it for me in 1903 in “The Souls of Black Folk”: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.” Unlike Ms. Dusbiber, DuBois knew that familiarity with the classics of world literature is not punishment but power, and that it can transform beyond recognition the lives of the children who are introduced to their wisdom by wiser teachers who believe in their permanent, life-changing relevance.
No, I’ll stick with Mr. Stoppard, who still thinks, poor booby, that he has a right to have his plays performed in front of people who know who Goneril is. For if you’ve never seen or read, say, “Hamlet,” then you will be utterly incapable of understanding “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the 1966 philosophical comedy in which Mr. Stoppard placed two of the minor characters from “Hamlet” at center stage and built a coruscatingly brilliant, endlessly thought-provoking masterpiece around their absurd follies. It will be a closed book to you, one whose covers you’ll find it impossible to pry apart.
I’m sure that some of Mr. Stoppard’s fans are full-fledged snobs who pride themselves to a fault on “getting” his jokes. But a world in which nobody knew who Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were would be a world devoid of that which makes us more than mere talking dolls. To sit with Shakespeare and Chekhov and Shaw and Tom Stoppard—and, yes, with August Wilson and Lynn Nottage as well—is to aspire to being the best that we can possibly be. Ms. Dusbiber and Mr. Pryce dismiss that aspiration as snobbery. Not me: I call it humanity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-stoppard...1434649666
Reply
#2
(06-19-2015, 12:27 PM)Big Rock Wrote: Yo, Mr. Wonky: I agree with this, and when I read it I thought of you. I think it captures a lot about what is not quite right about a lot of things lately (here, there, and everywhere).


Quote:Tom Stoppard Thinks You’re Dumb
Is the award-winning playwright a snob, or are audiences less intelligent than they used to be?
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world’s brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. In a February interview with the Telegraph that was occasioned by the National Theatre’s London premiere of “The Hard Problem,” his latest play, Mr. Stoppard complained that he now has to water down his punch lines: “It’s very rare to connect an audience except on a level which is lower than you would want to connect them on....You could raise it a notch and you might lose an eighth of them….I really resent it.” By way of illustration, he mentioned a scene in “Travesties,” one of his earlier plays, that contains a joke which hinges on knowing the name of Goneril, King Lear’s oldest daughter. “In 1974,” he said, “everybody in the audience knew who Goneril was and laughed. In about 1990 when the play was revived, maybe half knew.”
This isn’t the first time that Mr. Stoppard has made that complaint—or used that example. He said the same thing to a reporter for the Financial Times in 1998. This time, though, he got a brisk bit of blowback from the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, best known to American TV viewers as the High Sparrow in “Game of Thrones.” “I think Tom Stoppard’s gotten snobbier,” Mr. Pryce told Country Life magazine. “I thought it was an extraordinary thing to say. Just because people didn’t get his esoteric piece of writing at the National Theatre….Write something more comprehensible.”
Not having seen “The Hard Problem” and not knowing Mr. Stoppard personally, I have no opinion on the play’s comprehensibility, much less its author’s alleged snobbishness. But I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing “dumber,” if what you really mean to say is “less culturally literate.” It’s certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they’re required to learn in school is still too much.
Just the other day, the Washington Post published a rant by Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English at an inner-city school in Sacramento, Calif. Not only does Ms. Dusbiber happily admit to “disliking”  Shakespeare, but she wants to “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely.” Her preferred replacement is “the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior.” She believes that Shakespeare’s plays are no longer relevant to the lives of the “students of color” whom she teaches: “Shakespeare lived in a pretty small world. It might now be appropriate for us to acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.”
I doubt that Ms. Dusbiber is entirely representative of America’s public-school English teachers—at least not yet. On the other hand, I also doubt that her views are remotely close to unique. That said, I see no reason to rehearse for the gazillionth time the self-evident argument that her point of view is both criminally ignorant and devastatingly hurtful to the students whom she purports to teach. W.E.B. DuBois, after all, did it for me in 1903 in “The Souls of Black Folk”: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.” Unlike Ms. Dusbiber, DuBois knew that familiarity with the classics of world literature is not punishment but power, and that it can transform beyond recognition the lives of the children who are introduced to their wisdom by wiser teachers who believe in their permanent, life-changing relevance.
No, I’ll stick with Mr. Stoppard, who still thinks, poor booby, that he has a right to have his plays performed in front of people who know who Goneril is. For if you’ve never seen or read, say, “Hamlet,” then you will be utterly incapable of understanding “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the 1966 philosophical comedy in which Mr. Stoppard placed two of the minor characters from “Hamlet” at center stage and built a coruscatingly brilliant, endlessly thought-provoking masterpiece around their absurd follies. It will be a closed book to you, one whose covers you’ll find it impossible to pry apart.
I’m sure that some of Mr. Stoppard’s fans are full-fledged snobs who pride themselves to a fault on “getting” his jokes. But a world in which nobody knew who Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were would be a world devoid of that which makes us more than mere talking dolls. To sit with Shakespeare and Chekhov and Shaw and Tom Stoppard—and, yes, with August Wilson and Lynn Nottage as well—is to aspire to being the best that we can possibly be. Ms. Dusbiber and Mr. Pryce dismiss that aspiration as snobbery. Not me: I call it humanity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-stoppard...1434649666
Humanity? Maybe.
I heard Mr. Stoppard "holding forth" on a NPR interview recently. He has a point. But his point is shallow and narrow because he assumes we have all enjoyed the privileges of being harbored by mentors and parents, schools and social settings that provide us with all the information he deems necessary for "the examined life". 

Well...

Some of us come from a long line of rednecks and after a point it's useless to attempt to gain the understudying of all that Stoppard feels is important. 

And then, most of Stoppard's complaints are things "learned and remembered" and his own contribution to the hard science of investigation and exploration of discovery is sorely lacking. He should feel some sober reflection about his lack actually contributing something new and useful. 

And still...I am sympathetic, to a point, about his basic premise. We should all be "a work in progress" and as long we enjoy health and attention we should be curious and want to expose ourselves to those traditional and historical things in our culture so that we might continue the tradition. Reading King Lear might not only bring us up to speed with others who  enjoy the "finer arts" and the magic of Shakespeare's genius, but we might even gain some understanding of our own nature in that (those) works. Like chicken soup, would't hurt.

But, we all start from different places and take different paths. Mr. Stoppard enjoys a rarified atmosphere of those of some privilege. Let he stew in his discomfort that some of his fellows have not kept pace. I don't feel his pain.
Reply
#3
(06-19-2015, 04:14 PM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 12:27 PM)Big Rock Wrote: Yo, Mr. Wonky: I agree with this, and when I read it I thought of you. I think it captures a lot about what is not quite right about a lot of things lately (here, there, and everywhere).



Quote:Tom Stoppard Thinks You’re Dumb
Is the award-winning playwright a snob, or are audiences less intelligent than they used to be?
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world’s brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. In a February interview with the Telegraph that was occasioned by the National Theatre’s London premiere of “The Hard Problem,” his latest play, Mr. Stoppard complained that he now has to water down his punch lines: “It’s very rare to connect an audience except on a level which is lower than you would want to connect them on....You could raise it a notch and you might lose an eighth of them….I really resent it.” By way of illustration, he mentioned a scene in “Travesties,” one of his earlier plays, that contains a joke which hinges on knowing the name of Goneril, King Lear’s oldest daughter. “In 1974,” he said, “everybody in the audience knew who Goneril was and laughed. In about 1990 when the play was revived, maybe half knew.”
This isn’t the first time that Mr. Stoppard has made that complaint—or used that example. He said the same thing to a reporter for the Financial Times in 1998. This time, though, he got a brisk bit of blowback from the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, best known to American TV viewers as the High Sparrow in “Game of Thrones.” “I think Tom Stoppard’s gotten snobbier,” Mr. Pryce told Country Life magazine. “I thought it was an extraordinary thing to say. Just because people didn’t get his esoteric piece of writing at the National Theatre….Write something more comprehensible.”
Not having seen “The Hard Problem” and not knowing Mr. Stoppard personally, I have no opinion on the play’s comprehensibility, much less its author’s alleged snobbishness. But I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing “dumber,” if what you really mean to say is “less culturally literate.” It’s certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they’re required to learn in school is still too much.
Just the other day, the Washington Post published a rant by Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English at an inner-city school in Sacramento, Calif. Not only does Ms. Dusbiber happily admit to “disliking”  Shakespeare, but she wants to “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely.” Her preferred replacement is “the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior.” She believes that Shakespeare’s plays are no longer relevant to the lives of the “students of color” whom she teaches: “Shakespeare lived in a pretty small world. It might now be appropriate for us to acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.”
I doubt that Ms. Dusbiber is entirely representative of America’s public-school English teachers—at least not yet. On the other hand, I also doubt that her views are remotely close to unique. That said, I see no reason to rehearse for the gazillionth time the self-evident argument that her point of view is both criminally ignorant and devastatingly hurtful to the students whom she purports to teach. W.E.B. DuBois, after all, did it for me in 1903 in “The Souls of Black Folk”: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.” Unlike Ms. Dusbiber, DuBois knew that familiarity with the classics of world literature is not punishment but power, and that it can transform beyond recognition the lives of the children who are introduced to their wisdom by wiser teachers who believe in their permanent, life-changing relevance.
No, I’ll stick with Mr. Stoppard, who still thinks, poor booby, that he has a right to have his plays performed in front of people who know who Goneril is. For if you’ve never seen or read, say, “Hamlet,” then you will be utterly incapable of understanding “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the 1966 philosophical comedy in which Mr. Stoppard placed two of the minor characters from “Hamlet” at center stage and built a coruscatingly brilliant, endlessly thought-provoking masterpiece around their absurd follies. It will be a closed book to you, one whose covers you’ll find it impossible to pry apart.
I’m sure that some of Mr. Stoppard’s fans are full-fledged snobs who pride themselves to a fault on “getting” his jokes. But a world in which nobody knew who Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were would be a world devoid of that which makes us more than mere talking dolls. To sit with Shakespeare and Chekhov and Shaw and Tom Stoppard—and, yes, with August Wilson and Lynn Nottage as well—is to aspire to being the best that we can possibly be. Ms. Dusbiber and Mr. Pryce dismiss that aspiration as snobbery. Not me: I call it humanity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-stoppard...1434649666
Humanity? Maybe.
I heard Mr. Stoppard "holding forth" on a NPR interview recently. He has a point. But his point is shallow and narrow because he assumes we have all enjoyed the privileges of being harbored by mentors and parents, schools and social settings that provide us with all the information he deems necessary for "the examined life". 

Well...

Some of us come from a long line of rednecks and after a point it's useless to attempt to gain the understudying of all that Stoppard feels is important. 

And then, most of Stoppard's complaints are things "learned and remembered" and his own contribution to the hard science of investigation and exploration of discovery is sorely lacking. He should feel some sober reflection about his lack actually contributing something new and useful. 

And still...I am sympathetic, to a point, about his basic premise. We should all be "a work in progress" and as long we enjoy health and attention we should be curious and want to expose ourselves to those traditional and historical things in our culture so that we might continue the tradition. Reading King Lear might not only bring us up to speed with others who  enjoy the "finer arts" and the magic of Shakespeare's genius, but we might even gain some understanding of our own nature in that (those) works. Like chicken soup, would't hurt.

But, we all start from different places and take different paths. Mr. Stoppard enjoys a rarified atmosphere of those of some privilege. Let he stew in his discomfort that some of his fellows have not kept pace. I don't feel his pain.

Well said Wonk. In short he's an ego egghead that never noodeled a cat fish or cut off a pigs balls. Never cut a cord of wood in two hours. Never drank nasty bong water on a bet. Never walked through east St Louis at night. Was never shot at or beat up. Never took out a perfectly good V8 engine just to put in a bigger one. Never built anything.
Never lived on the road and used that big brain to just stay alive. Never cried when his dog "up an died". (Thanks Bo Jangles).
Yeah that's "in short" Razz
Reply
#4
(06-19-2015, 08:06 PM)tvguy Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 04:14 PM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 12:27 PM)Big Rock Wrote: Yo, Mr. Wonky: I agree with this, and when I read it I thought of you. I think it captures a lot about what is not quite right about a lot of things lately (here, there, and everywhere).




Quote:Tom Stoppard Thinks You’re Dumb
Is the award-winning playwright a snob, or are audiences less intelligent than they used to be?
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world’s brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. In a February interview with the Telegraph that was occasioned by the National Theatre’s London premiere of “The Hard Problem,” his latest play, Mr. Stoppard complained that he now has to water down his punch lines: “It’s very rare to connect an audience except on a level which is lower than you would want to connect them on....You could raise it a notch and you might lose an eighth of them….I really resent it.” By way of illustration, he mentioned a scene in “Travesties,” one of his earlier plays, that contains a joke which hinges on knowing the name of Goneril, King Lear’s oldest daughter. “In 1974,” he said, “everybody in the audience knew who Goneril was and laughed. In about 1990 when the play was revived, maybe half knew.”
This isn’t the first time that Mr. Stoppard has made that complaint—or used that example. He said the same thing to a reporter for the Financial Times in 1998. This time, though, he got a brisk bit of blowback from the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, best known to American TV viewers as the High Sparrow in “Game of Thrones.” “I think Tom Stoppard’s gotten snobbier,” Mr. Pryce told Country Life magazine. “I thought it was an extraordinary thing to say. Just because people didn’t get his esoteric piece of writing at the National Theatre….Write something more comprehensible.”
Not having seen “The Hard Problem” and not knowing Mr. Stoppard personally, I have no opinion on the play’s comprehensibility, much less its author’s alleged snobbishness. But I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing “dumber,” if what you really mean to say is “less culturally literate.” It’s certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they’re required to learn in school is still too much.
Just the other day, the Washington Post published a rant by Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English at an inner-city school in Sacramento, Calif. Not only does Ms. Dusbiber happily admit to “disliking”  Shakespeare, but she wants to “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely.” Her preferred replacement is “the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior.” She believes that Shakespeare’s plays are no longer relevant to the lives of the “students of color” whom she teaches: “Shakespeare lived in a pretty small world. It might now be appropriate for us to acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.”
I doubt that Ms. Dusbiber is entirely representative of America’s public-school English teachers—at least not yet. On the other hand, I also doubt that her views are remotely close to unique. That said, I see no reason to rehearse for the gazillionth time the self-evident argument that her point of view is both criminally ignorant and devastatingly hurtful to the students whom she purports to teach. W.E.B. DuBois, after all, did it for me in 1903 in “The Souls of Black Folk”: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.” Unlike Ms. Dusbiber, DuBois knew that familiarity with the classics of world literature is not punishment but power, and that it can transform beyond recognition the lives of the children who are introduced to their wisdom by wiser teachers who believe in their permanent, life-changing relevance.
No, I’ll stick with Mr. Stoppard, who still thinks, poor booby, that he has a right to have his plays performed in front of people who know who Goneril is. For if you’ve never seen or read, say, “Hamlet,” then you will be utterly incapable of understanding “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the 1966 philosophical comedy in which Mr. Stoppard placed two of the minor characters from “Hamlet” at center stage and built a coruscatingly brilliant, endlessly thought-provoking masterpiece around their absurd follies. It will be a closed book to you, one whose covers you’ll find it impossible to pry apart.
I’m sure that some of Mr. Stoppard’s fans are full-fledged snobs who pride themselves to a fault on “getting” his jokes. But a world in which nobody knew who Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were would be a world devoid of that which makes us more than mere talking dolls. To sit with Shakespeare and Chekhov and Shaw and Tom Stoppard—and, yes, with August Wilson and Lynn Nottage as well—is to aspire to being the best that we can possibly be. Ms. Dusbiber and Mr. Pryce dismiss that aspiration as snobbery. Not me: I call it humanity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-stoppard...1434649666
Humanity? Maybe.
I heard Mr. Stoppard "holding forth" on a NPR interview recently. He has a point. But his point is shallow and narrow because he assumes we have all enjoyed the privileges of being harbored by mentors and parents, schools and social settings that provide us with all the information he deems necessary for "the examined life". 

Well...

Some of us come from a long line of rednecks and after a point it's useless to attempt to gain the understudying of all that Stoppard feels is important. 

And then, most of Stoppard's complaints are things "learned and remembered" and his own contribution to the hard science of investigation and exploration of discovery is sorely lacking. He should feel some sober reflection about his lack actually contributing something new and useful. 

And still...I am sympathetic, to a point, about his basic premise. We should all be "a work in progress" and as long we enjoy health and attention we should be curious and want to expose ourselves to those traditional and historical things in our culture so that we might continue the tradition. Reading King Lear might not only bring us up to speed with others who  enjoy the "finer arts" and the magic of Shakespeare's genius, but we might even gain some understanding of our own nature in that (those) works. Like chicken soup, would't hurt.

But, we all start from different places and take different paths. Mr. Stoppard enjoys a rarified atmosphere of those of some privilege. Let he stew in his discomfort that some of his fellows have not kept pace. I don't feel his pain.

Well said Wonk. In short he's an ego egghead that never noodeled a cat fish or cut off a pigs balls. Never cut a cord of wood in two hours. Never drank nasty bong water on a bet. Never walked through east St Louis at night. Was never shot at or beat up. Never took out a perfectly good V8 engine just to put in a bigger one. Never built anything.
Never lived on the road and used that big brain to just stay alive. Never cried when his dog "up an died". (Thanks Bo Jangles).
Yeah that's "in short" Razz

Crying Crying Crying  You nailed it!
But...
There's no reason those of use who have done all the above (I've never noodeled a cat fish) can't investigate some of the stuff this guys talks about. 
For instance, what I don't know about Shakespeare is almost everything, but I've struggled though Hamlet and marvel at the speech Polonius gives to young Laertes as he rides off to into the wide world: That thing that ends with:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.


It's brilliant and everything a man would want to tell a son. 


And knowing "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep" won't keep a guy (or gal) from knowing how to chain oil in a  ¾ ton truck. 


We don't have to be what we were 30 years ago. 
Reply
#5
Cool. I agree. Stoppard is a snob. However, check this out:

Reply
#6
And speaking of Goneril:

Reply
#7
(06-19-2015, 09:53 PM)Big Rock Wrote: And speaking of Goneril:


A reminder of the great times we live in!
I'm a guy "of a certain age" who had little, if any access to this kind of thing. Raised in the woods by rednecks (doing the best the could with what they had) our tiny town library had little to offer and I didn't get there often anyway. Then I did everything I could to mess up the early part of my life keeping me from any kind of exposure to education beyond what I needed to make a living. (Ended up, for a time, in a Housing Project where being tough was the class one had to do well in) 
And I bet I'm singing a song at least a few here know. 
Now, without leaving my house I watch (thanks to you) clips from Shakespeare! How cool it that! And beyond that, when I do tackle the hard chore (for me at least) of trying to wade through the difficult rhythm of Shakespeare, Cervantes, etc, I have the Internet with tons of information to help me interpret the gaps I find difficult to get my mind around. 

We have You Tube and Craig's List and they are helpful in many ways. I hope to never restrict myself to the limits of only those kinds of sites, and to take advantage of what I can from this WWW./ 

Never dreamed it would be here. Never dreamed there would be a "forum" where we could exchange views and learn, as we go along, the value of civil discourse that makes this kind of place so valuable. Thanks, Big Rock: You often kick off a thought or subject that gives us stuff to think about and to react to. 
Reply
#8
(06-19-2015, 09:21 PM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 08:06 PM)tvguy Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 04:14 PM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 12:27 PM)Big Rock Wrote: Yo, Mr. Wonky: I agree with this, and when I read it I thought of you. I think it captures a lot about what is not quite right about a lot of things lately (here, there, and everywhere).





Quote:Tom Stoppard Thinks You’re Dumb
Is the award-winning playwright a snob, or are audiences less intelligent than they used to be?
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world’s brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. In a February interview with the Telegraph that was occasioned by the National Theatre’s London premiere of “The Hard Problem,” his latest play, Mr. Stoppard complained that he now has to water down his punch lines: “It’s very rare to connect an audience except on a level which is lower than you would want to connect them on....You could raise it a notch and you might lose an eighth of them….I really resent it.” By way of illustration, he mentioned a scene in “Travesties,” one of his earlier plays, that contains a joke which hinges on knowing the name of Goneril, King Lear’s oldest daughter. “In 1974,” he said, “everybody in the audience knew who Goneril was and laughed. In about 1990 when the play was revived, maybe half knew.”
This isn’t the first time that Mr. Stoppard has made that complaint—or used that example. He said the same thing to a reporter for the Financial Times in 1998. This time, though, he got a brisk bit of blowback from the Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, best known to American TV viewers as the High Sparrow in “Game of Thrones.” “I think Tom Stoppard’s gotten snobbier,” Mr. Pryce told Country Life magazine. “I thought it was an extraordinary thing to say. Just because people didn’t get his esoteric piece of writing at the National Theatre….Write something more comprehensible.”
Not having seen “The Hard Problem” and not knowing Mr. Stoppard personally, I have no opinion on the play’s comprehensibility, much less its author’s alleged snobbishness. But I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing “dumber,” if what you really mean to say is “less culturally literate.” It’s certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they’re required to learn in school is still too much.
Just the other day, the Washington Post published a rant by Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English at an inner-city school in Sacramento, Calif. Not only does Ms. Dusbiber happily admit to “disliking”  Shakespeare, but she wants to “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely.” Her preferred replacement is “the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior.” She believes that Shakespeare’s plays are no longer relevant to the lives of the “students of color” whom she teaches: “Shakespeare lived in a pretty small world. It might now be appropriate for us to acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.”
I doubt that Ms. Dusbiber is entirely representative of America’s public-school English teachers—at least not yet. On the other hand, I also doubt that her views are remotely close to unique. That said, I see no reason to rehearse for the gazillionth time the self-evident argument that her point of view is both criminally ignorant and devastatingly hurtful to the students whom she purports to teach. W.E.B. DuBois, after all, did it for me in 1903 in “The Souls of Black Folk”: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.” Unlike Ms. Dusbiber, DuBois knew that familiarity with the classics of world literature is not punishment but power, and that it can transform beyond recognition the lives of the children who are introduced to their wisdom by wiser teachers who believe in their permanent, life-changing relevance.
No, I’ll stick with Mr. Stoppard, who still thinks, poor booby, that he has a right to have his plays performed in front of people who know who Goneril is. For if you’ve never seen or read, say, “Hamlet,” then you will be utterly incapable of understanding “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the 1966 philosophical comedy in which Mr. Stoppard placed two of the minor characters from “Hamlet” at center stage and built a coruscatingly brilliant, endlessly thought-provoking masterpiece around their absurd follies. It will be a closed book to you, one whose covers you’ll find it impossible to pry apart.
I’m sure that some of Mr. Stoppard’s fans are full-fledged snobs who pride themselves to a fault on “getting” his jokes. But a world in which nobody knew who Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were would be a world devoid of that which makes us more than mere talking dolls. To sit with Shakespeare and Chekhov and Shaw and Tom Stoppard—and, yes, with August Wilson and Lynn Nottage as well—is to aspire to being the best that we can possibly be. Ms. Dusbiber and Mr. Pryce dismiss that aspiration as snobbery. Not me: I call it humanity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-stoppard...1434649666
Humanity? Maybe.
I heard Mr. Stoppard "holding forth" on a NPR interview recently. He has a point. But his point is shallow and narrow because he assumes we have all enjoyed the privileges of being harbored by mentors and parents, schools and social settings that provide us with all the information he deems necessary for "the examined life". 

Well...

Some of us come from a long line of rednecks and after a point it's useless to attempt to gain the understudying of all that Stoppard feels is important. 

And then, most of Stoppard's complaints are things "learned and remembered" and his own contribution to the hard science of investigation and exploration of discovery is sorely lacking. He should feel some sober reflection about his lack actually contributing something new and useful. 

And still...I am sympathetic, to a point, about his basic premise. We should all be "a work in progress" and as long we enjoy health and attention we should be curious and want to expose ourselves to those traditional and historical things in our culture so that we might continue the tradition. Reading King Lear might not only bring us up to speed with others who  enjoy the "finer arts" and the magic of Shakespeare's genius, but we might even gain some understanding of our own nature in that (those) works. Like chicken soup, would't hurt.

But, we all start from different places and take different paths. Mr. Stoppard enjoys a rarified atmosphere of those of some privilege. Let he stew in his discomfort that some of his fellows have not kept pace. I don't feel his pain.

Well said Wonk. In short he's an ego egghead that never noodeled a cat fish or cut off a pigs balls. Never cut a cord of wood in two hours. Never drank nasty bong water on a bet. Never walked through east St Louis at night. Was never shot at or beat up. Never took out a perfectly good V8 engine just to put in a bigger one. Never built anything.
Never lived on the road and used that big brain to just stay alive. Never cried when his dog "up an died". (Thanks Bo Jangles).
Yeah that's "in short" Razz

Crying Crying Crying  You nailed it!
But...
There's no reason those of use who have done all the above (I've never noodeled a cat fish) can't investigate some of the stuff this guys talks about. 
For instance, what I don't know about Shakespeare is almost everything, but I've struggled though Hamlet and marvel at the speech Polonius gives to young Laertes as he rides off to into the wide world: That thing that ends with:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.


It's brilliant and everything a man would want to tell a son. 


And knowing "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep" won't keep a guy (or gal) from knowing how to chain oil in a  ¾ ton truck. 


We don't have to be what we were 30 years ago. 

That's not at all what I meant.
Reply
#9
(06-20-2015, 09:19 AM)tvguy Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 09:21 PM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 08:06 PM)tvguy Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 04:14 PM)Wonky3 Wrote:
(06-19-2015, 12:27 PM)Big Rock Wrote: Yo, Mr. Wonky: I agree with this, and when I read it I thought of you. I think it captures a lot about what is not quite right about a lot of things lately (here, there, and everywhere).





http://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-stoppard...1434649666
Humanity? Maybe.
I heard Mr. Stoppard "holding forth" on a NPR interview recently. He has a point. But his point is shallow and narrow because he assumes we have all enjoyed the privileges of being harbored by mentors and parents, schools and social settings that provide us with all the information he deems necessary for "the examined life". 

Well...

Some of us come from a long line of rednecks and after a point it's useless to attempt to gain the understudying of all that Stoppard feels is important. 

And then, most of Stoppard's complaints are things "learned and remembered" and his own contribution to the hard science of investigation and exploration of discovery is sorely lacking. He should feel some sober reflection about his lack actually contributing something new and useful. 

And still...I am sympathetic, to a point, about his basic premise. We should all be "a work in progress" and as long we enjoy health and attention we should be curious and want to expose ourselves to those traditional and historical things in our culture so that we might continue the tradition. Reading King Lear might not only bring us up to speed with others who  enjoy the "finer arts" and the magic of Shakespeare's genius, but we might even gain some understanding of our own nature in that (those) works. Like chicken soup, would't hurt.

But, we all start from different places and take different paths. Mr. Stoppard enjoys a rarified atmosphere of those of some privilege. Let he stew in his discomfort that some of his fellows have not kept pace. I don't feel his pain.

Well said Wonk. In short he's an ego egghead that never noodeled a cat fish or cut off a pigs balls. Never cut a cord of wood in two hours. Never drank nasty bong water on a bet. Never walked through east St Louis at night. Was never shot at or beat up. Never took out a perfectly good V8 engine just to put in a bigger one. Never built anything.
Never lived on the road and used that big brain to just stay alive. Never cried when his dog "up an died". (Thanks Bo Jangles).
Yeah that's "in short" Razz

Crying Crying Crying  You nailed it!
But...
There's no reason those of use who have done all the above (I've never noodeled a cat fish) can't investigate some of the stuff this guys talks about. 
For instance, what I don't know about Shakespeare is almost everything, but I've struggled though Hamlet and marvel at the speech Polonius gives to young Laertes as he rides off to into the wide world: That thing that ends with:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.


It's brilliant and everything a man would want to tell a son. 


And knowing "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep" won't keep a guy (or gal) from knowing how to chain oil in a  ¾ ton truck. 


We don't have to be what we were 30 years ago. 

That's not at all what I meant.

Yeah. I know.  Sad
Reply
#10
Thanks for responding to my stupid little idea for a new thread. I totally enjoy reading posts by both TVGuy and Wonky. In my opinion, you two are the reasons to come back to this site and read what you're arguing about now. I think you're both good, funny, and insightful writers who are coming at things from a very different and very interesting angle (very different from my perspective).
I have never been a Stoppard fan. His writing is cute, facile, clever, and shallow (in my opinion). However, I think he (and the guy who wrote this article) make an interesting point about Shakespeare. I do think Shakespeare should continue to be taught in American public school English classes. I think Shakespeare is still totally relevant. I don't think race and ethnicity should be factors in determining whether or not something should be taught. I think that is extremely dangerous and ironic, especially when it applies to Shakespeare. Once you get used to the language, I don't think it's really difficult to understand the meaning and appreciate the beauty and greatness of the writing.
Reply
#11
(06-20-2015, 12:23 PM)Big Rock Wrote: Thanks for responding to my stupid little idea for a new thread. I totally enjoy reading posts by both TVGuy and Wonky. In my opinion, you two are the reasons to come back to this site and read what you're arguing about now. I think you're both good, funny, and insightful writers who are coming at things from a very different and very interesting angle (very different from my perspective).
I have never been a Stoppard fan. His writing is cute, facile, clever, and shallow (in my opinion). However, I think he (and the guy who wrote this article) make an interesting point about Shakespeare. I do think Shakespeare should continue to be taught in American public school English classes. I think Shakespeare is still totally relevant. I don't think race and ethnicity should be factors in determining whether or not something should be taught. I think that is extremely dangerous and ironic, especially when it applies to Shakespeare. Once you get used to the language, I don't think it's really difficult to understand the meaning and appreciate the beauty and greatness of the writing.

Aw shucks Embarrassed
Reply
#12
(06-20-2015, 05:43 PM)tvguy Wrote:
(06-20-2015, 12:23 PM)Big Rock Wrote: Thanks for responding to my stupid little idea for a new thread. I totally enjoy reading posts by both TVGuy and Wonky. In my opinion, you two are the reasons to come back to this site and read what you're arguing about now. I think you're both good, funny, and insightful writers who are coming at things from a very different and very interesting angle (very different from my perspective).
I have never been a Stoppard fan. His writing is cute, facile, clever, and shallow (in my opinion). However, I think he (and the guy who wrote this article) make an interesting point about Shakespeare. I do think Shakespeare should continue to be taught in American public school English classes. I think Shakespeare is still totally relevant. I don't think race and ethnicity should be factors in determining whether or not something should be taught. I think that is extremely dangerous and ironic, especially when it applies to Shakespeare. Once you get used to the language, I don't think it's really difficult to understand the meaning and appreciate the beauty and greatness of the writing.

Aw shucks Embarrassed

Yep: Aw shucks.  Embarrassed
And I'm as guilty as sin. Shakespeare out there just for the taking, and I've ignored him for most of my life. I agree with you (Big Rock) when you said "meaning and appreciate the beauty and greatness of the writing." I'm a mental slob and ashamed. 
While the "elite" among us often tend to be snobs and often have only a "cocktail party" knowledge of these classics, we really do owe it to ourselves to be familiar to some degree with the wisdom found in those things not so often read these days. 
Your post about Stoppard has been "grist for the mill" and I hope it encoureges those of us here at the RVF to consider a second look at many of the works we have been neglecting.  
Right after I finish my "summer reading" of mind candy trash.  Embarrassed Embarrassed
Reply
#13
Reply
#14
(06-20-2015, 07:09 PM)Big Rock Wrote:

I know it shouldn't make a difference but I like my Shakespeare "straight-up" in costumes of the period. It's the words that make the play, I know, but the period dress helps blunt the price of admission. 

Now, "Out dammed spot!" 
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