Re: Barbarians vs All Blacks 1973

On 2005-12-09, Martyn Winters <ukhamlet@xxxxxxxxx> dropped the ball when he ventured :
>
> Ferdi Greyling wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:30:54 GMT, Martyn Winters
>> <ziggy.stardust@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> << For me genius
>> >can be seen in the works of Lennon, Van Goch, Wittgenstein, Dafydd ap
>> >Gwilym, Fanny Trollop, but not in the scribblings of over-hyped bean
>> >counters.>>
>>
>> Lennon? He wasn't that good....
>>
>> Tom Waits is better.
>>
>> Anyway, add TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis
>> Borges etc and I cheer with you.
>>
>> And allow me to point out that in the realm of philisophy, art and
>> literature there are an equal number of extremely boring plodders as
>> in maths?
>>
>> Also in rugby, of course...
>
> Yes, of course you are correct in this instance, especially about the
> distribution of plodders (but not IMHO about Lennon). The thing that
> gets my goat is the adulation that number crunchers get. It is
> completely disproportionate to the regard with which artists are held
> for no reason other than most people reckon they have a novel in them,
> or they can paint, create a poem to match those of Keats, or write a
> best selling tune, but arcane math is beyond them. The truth is, they
> can't do any of these with any degree of accomplishment, but the fact
> of their inability in math being obvious and not arguable makes them
> believe, incorrectly, that great mathematicians are somehow
> intrinsically better and more worthy of the mantle "genius" than great
> artists.
>

It's hard to find a concrete way to describe why I disagree since
anyone can hide behind the mantle of "genius" when it comes to "art".

But anyone who thinks that Damian Hurst is more of a genius than say
Stephen Hawking is nuts. The ability to read, understand, digest and
play with theoretical physics is, to my mind, a tad more difficult
than getting an hallucination and sticking a dead baby into whale
semen or whatever he does.




--
"I prefer rugby to soccer. I enjoy the violence in rugby, except when
they start biting each other's ears off." - Elizabeth Taylor (1972)
.

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