Word: autodidacts
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...Anthony Braxton...was a black politician, who was challenging everything, including the idea of racial construction and music as such," says Radano, explaining his interest in the jazz legend. "He is an autodidact.... But he is a product of the very rich cultural and intellectual setting of Chicago's south side. He is one of the leading thinkers and artists in the post-1960s jazz/'art music' intersection...
...admit he's pretty good at it. In The Rainmaker, playing Rudy Baylor, a young, undertrained lawyer trying his first case, he shows a nice sneaky knuckler, tracing an erratic path toward the strike zone. In Good Will Hunting, he pitches a sharp curve ball as a brilliant autodidact, confused by his own genius, alternately angry and vulnerable. Yet whether Damon has a high hard one, a true star's blowback fastball, is not a question these movies permit him to answer...
...critics seem to have been provoked, as much as anything else, by the wall labels he rashly insisted on appending to his work. All that these revealed was the vice of the autodidact-a mania for cultural name dropping. They read like Woody Allen. Thus Baseball, 1983-84, came garnished with references to Red Smith, Bill James, Velazquez, Durer, Max Brod, Satchel Paige and, of course, Kafka; while The Sensualist, 1973-84, was prefaced by quotes from Picasso ("My one and only master!") and Matisse ("It is undoubtedly to Matisse that I owe the most"). Then Kitaj: "Cazanne...
Despite such flaws, Certain Trumpets moves along perkily, if only because Wills is incapable of writing a really dull page. The author has a splendid ability to characterize his subjects. He reminds us, for example, that Washington was as accomplished an autodidact as Lincoln and that the famous portraits of the Father of our Country as an unsmiling, po-faced stuffed shirt do an injustice to someone whose contemporaries thought him the livest of wires, even in a room with the likes of Franklin and Jefferson...
...ANCIENT TEXTS were, literally, Greek to Stone. He taught himself the language and read them in the original, bringing to them the enthusisam of the muckraker and the autodidact. He loves the material, and his sense of excitement is contagious. Publication of the book is justfied if only to have a man with Stone's impeccable "progressive" credentials on record as a lover of the much-maligned great books. It can only help to have a writer with Stone's verve bring the ancient texts and characters to life and demonstrate how the classic writers of Athens speak...