Word: autodidact
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...film, only a lot of self-conscious artiness which he takes to its furthest extremes, directorial touches which never coalesce. It all starts with the opening credits, white letters on black background, no sound: "Oh, Christ," you think--"not another American Bergman." Throughout, Redford blunders like the typical autodidact, smothering whatever intuitions he might have about film with a congeries of tony cliches: an aerial shot of a breakfast table, for example, or a shot of a license plate as the family car pulls into the garage...
Kubrick is a self-taught man with an autodidact's passion for facts and the process of gathering them. Son of a Bronx physician, he was an indifferent high school student. He experimented endlessly with cameras and at 17 was hired by Look as a staff photographer. He learned something about people and a lot about photography, traveling the country shooting pictures for 4% years. At 21, he made his first short subject, three years later his first fictional feature-very low budget. He also audited Columbia University courses conducted by the likes of Lionel Trilling and Mark...
...debate. Reared in a vigorously intellectual home in Baltimore, he graduated from Exeter and Harvard, studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and at the London School of Economics. He never earned a doctoral degree and, as a result, he says, "I have all the vices of an autodidact: thinking you can make sense of more of the world than most scholars think...
...Harold Ross of The New Yorker said that he was "the most enlightened man writing today." That praise now seems a shade inconsequential-as if a potentially great pianist had squandered his digital gifts as a pinball virtuoso. In truth, Mencken worked hard at his prose but had the autodidact's fatal fondness for the fancy word. As for the flowers of wit culled by Carl Bode, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, they have wilted badly. Intended to shock rather than illuminate, the once celebrated epigrams shock no more. The examples quoted, such as, "Love...
...Without Sleep. Martinez still takes council with his "invisible legions," calls himself "the Autodidact" (self-taught), and gives frequent radio lectures on anything from "applied psychoanalysis" to sociology. He knows little about such subjects and speaks in what his detractors call "basic Spanish." But his undulating words have a certain hypnotic effect upon his simpler subjects. Some of them believe that he can make himself invisible and eavesdrop upon their secret, often rebellious thoughts. The President does not sleep well, paces the Palace at night or wanders around the heavily guarded grounds. Many Salvadorans believe that he is haunted...