tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764506766343254616.post4543930057247882738..comments2024-03-26T14:20:38.103-04:00Comments on The Thought Criminal: Randon Thoughts On RUR and People As RAMUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764506766343254616.post-31488136379753821482019-01-15T21:52:24.597-05:002019-01-15T21:52:24.597-05:00I, of course, grew up being told that Shaw was the...I, of course, grew up being told that Shaw was the second greatest English language playwright, told that over and over again. Other than Pygmalion I've never, once, found any of his other plays convincing. I know most of them are never or almost never given, I would really like to know what the statistics are on productions of his plays. I would bet that other than about four of them they're pretty much never produced. I'd guess Pyg. Arms and the Man, Mrs. Warren's Profession, maybe Candida or St. Joan are the most produced. I don't mean by the Shaw Festival, I mean by non-dedicated companies. The Shaw Festival, I see, have even produced the abomination Geneva which Shaw had to keep re-writing because he knew he couldn't get away with presenting Mussolini and Hitler in the positive light he had as Britain was getting closer to and entered into the war. That history of the revisions of that play is like a roadmap into the moral depravity that was GBH. His post-war behavior and production and his production during the war and in the years before that are probably the most disgusting of anyone considered to be a major and respectable writer of the stature given to him. I can't read him or hear him with anything like pleasure because I know about that, now. I think Pygmalion was his high-water mark. He might be the most disgusting human being given the Nobel in literature, though some of the scientists and politicians given the award match his depravity. The Nobel Prizes are a joke. The Thought Criminalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01381376556757084468noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764506766343254616.post-31088354787129436132019-01-15T11:56:19.547-05:002019-01-15T11:56:19.547-05:00Shaw is remembered for "My Fair Lady," i...Shaw is remembered for "My Fair Lady," ironically. HIs old age output was capped off with "Man and Superman," a Wagnerian length play cycle that nobody performs or revives, because it's intolerable. In fact, aside from superannuated college professors, who even reads Shaw anymore?<br /><br />Yeats got better as he aged, but that was through sheer strength of will. The exception that proves the rule, in fact.<br /><br />As for Messerly, I toyed with pointing out (and then discarded it in favor of just shredding his nonsense) that you could easily replace "religion" in his article, with "humanities," and get the same nonsensical result. Nowadays the popular acronym is "STEM," sometimes amended to "STEAM" in order to include "Art." But the wisdom of making the humanities the keystone of an educated populace (a post-Renaissance ideal, btw) still holds, or should; it is the humanities that remind us of the importance of, well, humanity. Remove the humanities as your starting point and core, and it's all too easy to reduce humans to machines (I'm old enough to remember when there was something of a crisis in medical schools, concerned as they were with teaching doctors-to-be to develop a "bedside manner" rather than treat patients as biological units and bags of chemicals). Humanities are not in themselves the panacea, but how do you treat people as human when you start with the assumption they are merely scientific curiosities?<br /><br />Well, "they" are; you and I are people. Right? That, too, is a lesson/observation from the humanities, not to exclude even a touchstone of religion. Even after the Renaissance, religion was behind the humanities. The loss of that connection, and of the core interest in humanity, has done us all more damage than we can calculate.Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.com