Exactly right. I’m reminded of the story of Noah, with today’s info-explosion performing in the role of The Flood.

Which writer? Why, Shakespeare, of course. This passage (from Marlowe’s Ghost, by Daryl Pinksen, a fabulous book) underscores what can rightly be called The Shakespeare Education. And, it just so happens, The Shakespeare Education is basically a classical education, the most time-tested form of education the West has — over two millennia of culture behind it. Add to the above excerpt a healthy learning of Latin and Greek, as well as immersion the Holy Bible.

It is the view of POLYSEMY that this education should be the standard we insist upon for all Western artists from this point onward. And as it happens, a effective way to understand classical education for working artists is simply to read about the intellectual biography of Shakespeare, whether in Pinksen’s book or elsewhere. This is why the study of who actually authored Shakespeare’s works is so compelling. We find out what it takes.

Quintilian, quoted from here.

In undergraduate English programs, students read Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth – the mature Shakespeare masterpieces. If they are required to read a Marlowe play, it will likely be Dr. Faustus, the play most associated with Marlowe. Marlowe does not fare well in the comparison. The instructor will then guide students through a “compare and contrast” of the two playwrights’ styles. Even the dullest student will easily see the differences between Shakespeare masterpieces and early Marlowe. For many students of English literature this will end their study of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and they will depart with the firm, albeit superficial, conviction that the styles of Marlowe and Shakespeare are markedly different, and proceed to ridicule anyone so blind as to suggest otherwise.

A more honest approach would lead to a very different conclusion. Dr. Faustus was written before 1588, when Marlowe was in his early 20’s. Hamlet and Lear were written after 1600, when Marlowe (and Shakespeare) were in their mid to late 30’s. A fair comparison would examine plays written closer to the same time. If students were to begin their studies with an early Shakespeare play, like Richard II, and then read a late Marlowe play, like Edward II, plays separated by only a handful of years, they would find it hard to believe that they were written by different playwrights.

. . . [P]recisely because in the post-Roman period Latin was no one’s native tongue, but rather a common lingua franca of Europe’s educated, whatever their vernacular speech, and that Latin became the language reserved for expression of the most advanced and sophisticated thoughts, while never losing a less formal, “spontaneous”, and convivial strain, this phase of Latin is especially worthy of the attention of Latin students. Anyone who studies Latin should have some exposure to the ages when Latin was the acquired languaged of almost every educated person and Latin literature flourished as the vehicle not only for theology, philosophy, and science, but also poetry, letters, satire, fiction, and many other genres. This is a remarkable development and a fundamental element in the intellectual tradition of Europe and its offshoots.

The consequence of Tunberg’s point is that it puts to bed the claim that Latin is not worthy of study due to its “dead language-ness”. It hasn’t been a mother-tongue language for quite some time yet has been the vehicle, or medium, for ideas and perspectives among the most profound the West has offered. It should be noted that by learning Latin, one’s intimacy and thus one’s embodiment of the many Latin-based profundities is pronouncedly deeper and “first generation” (to borrow a term from live music concert bootlegging) — thus for artists, more likely to penetrate to our most generative levels of imagination, and thus influence our creative work all the more. After all, roots are, by definition, fecund.

Further, Tunberg’s view fits perfectly into a practical understanding of classical education for ourselves, today. Where the rubber meets the road, classical education for ourselves can be understood as “what educated Shakespeare”. As one writer put it, Shakespeare acquired from his study of Latin “a heightened sense of cadences and patterns” among many other acquisition. And what educated Shakespeare can, and I think should, educate us, at least in terms of the core disciplines. Err, did I say Shakespeare? I meant . . .

Also installed at The Cathode Ray.

More families singing, dancing, playing music at home together is one of many obvious solutions.

— from Latine Doceo, by Luigi Maraglia and C.G. Brown

The communion of saints is the support of the mystical life; the banquet of the sages, perpetuated by our assiduous cult, is the invigoration of our intellectual life. To cultivate the faculty to admiration and because of it to keep constantly in familiar touch with illustrious thinkers, is the means, not of equalling those whom we honor, but of equalling our own best self; and that, I repeat, is the objective to be visualized and pursued.

from The Intellectual Life, by A.G. Sertillanges

Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.

It is all but impossible to take seriously an art of rebellion crafted by pensioners of the state.

Quote number two:

The NEA, if it is to make art a sustainable enterprise in American communities and not merely a bureaucratic fetish, should make the recovery of the civic focal point central to its mission. Rocco Landesman, with his Broadway experience of unsubsidized forms of art, might possibly be interested in an alternative to the worm-eaten Romanticism of the NEA. But even if he were to take up the cause of reform, it is unlikely that he would get very far. Were a sustainable art on the Parthenon-Chartres model to be reborn, the NEA would lose its raison d’être, and bureaucracies are by instinct loath to solve the problems that keep them in funds.

Both from this very good article.

Creativity is exhibited by a certain skill in problem solving.
Creativity is the ability to take existing objects, feelings, and concepts and combine them in different ways for novel and innovative purposes. Creativity is available to any one no matter where he is at in life, whether infant or elderly or somewhere in between. Creativity can produce things (technically, “artifacts”) of any kind or nature, which means accountants, librarians, lawyers, housewives, middle managers, janitors, CEOs, presidents, artists, and anyone can be creative, and of course are every day.

Creativity is what artists do.
The exhibition and usage of creativity is strictly what artists do. They are able to see new combinations, new grammars, new ideas, new horizons. That ability is creativity. Artists use creativity to make and embed signs in artwork that can relate to ways of feeling and sensing the world. Their work ‘creates’ a world of perception. Creativity is what artists seek to cultivate and sustain in their artist practice or study. Creativity is like yeast; it lives and dies in the process of artistry; it is taken from to produce work, and the work then replicates it for others, through its inspiration. Not all artists are truly creative, but it is what all artists seek to be.

Creativity is a learned attribute.
Creativity is equivalent to mastery, achieved through training, commitment, and extended study. Here the term relates to “originality” in the sense of “going back to the origins”; this relation leads inevitably to a kind of “classical education”, and the person trained in this way can push the leading edge and demonstrate creativity at a very high level, entirely afforded by his study of traditions. Creativity is very elite, and a reaction to deep immersion in traditions as well as deep apprenticeship within a given discipline. Creativity is a stable level of personal development (involving education, skill/craftsmanship) and endures as a trait of the person.

Creativity is a state of consciousness.
As a temporary altered mode of feeling, creativity is the exhibition of impulses that arise in a person, and then die down, to be experienced spontaneously at some later point. Creativity comes about from nowhere, stays awhile as a heightened awareness or impulsive drive, and then leaves, to return without reason or rhyme. Creativity is akin to pure inspiration, and the momentum that comes from it — a temporary feeling. Tools and routines, both healthy and unhealthy in nature, are often used to stimulate and trigger creativity.

Creativity is the fabric of the Kosmos.
The kosmos — a short term for all of consciousness, or (more poetically) the total weave of interior and exterior wool — creativity is what that wool is made of. It is the mother of consciousness, and so it is programmed into deepest codes of human existence. Thus there isn’t a single thing, action, thought, exchange, or mode of being/knowing that does not exhibit creativity, or is not creativity at its core. As the primary drive of existence, in the manifest and unmanifest realms, creativity is inevitable, inescapeable, and the primary condition of life. Creativity comes through us, driven by God. One cannot avoid creativity, just as one cannot avoid birth, life, and death. One can simply accept creativity, in is vast, unqualified “I Am-ness” or “is-ness”, and as the always already symphony of everything. In this sense, even breathing is creative.

“In the drama category, “Small Comforts” by Hannah Dallman took first place . . .

“Small Comforts” used animation to help tell the touching story of a young girl who saved her money and her single mother’s tips from a waitress job to buy a small sofa for their home.”

Here is the film’s trailer.