[HN Gopher] The Algorithmic Genius of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"
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The Algorithmic Genius of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"
Author : diaphanous
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-02-27 06:48 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| gcp123 wrote:
| My favorite play since high school.
| initramfs wrote:
| This reminds me of Jackson Pollock's use (or unwitting use) of
| fractals:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock#Fractal_comput...
|
| The attempt to apply science to a plot a story or theme of art
| reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
|
| At the very least, it shows an appreciation for The Two Cultures.
| It's not possible to reconcile certain generalizations about
| science and art- that is, one can write about science, but it's
| not easy to make accurate claims without being an expert, and
| vice versa- one can try to write a poetry from the perspective of
| a doctor, but it might sound like bad poetry:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKpYBStDLVA
|
| Of course there are some really talented writers and scientists.
| rpmuller wrote:
| If I remember correctly, Stoppard was an artist in residence at
| Caltech while he was writing Arcadia.
| kkylin wrote:
| I just got my copy off the shelf & will have to re-read it. Is
| there a production available online that someone would recommend?
| dotsam wrote:
| There is an audio recording by L.A. Theatre Works that you can
| listen to here https://beta.prx.org/stories/43614 and
| https://beta.prx.org/stories/43844
| eszed wrote:
| There's a brilliant theatrical moment that neither reading
| nor listening to this play can ever quite re-create. In the
| final act, while characters from both time-periods are
| sharing the stage, Augustus/Gus (the younger brother in both
| time-periods, played by the same actor) comes in the door,
| and for a moment _you don 't know which century he's in_.
|
| This play is one of my go-tos for an example of what theatre
| can do that film and television cannot. Because theatre
| depends on the audience's imagination to create its reality
| (more so, or at least differently, than film), more than one
| reality can be simultaneously present, and time and space and
| distance can be collapsed.
| scandox wrote:
| I saw this at its first run at The National Theatre in 1993. I
| certainly enjoyed it a lot but even at fifteen my feeling was
| that it was a kind of imaginative con job making people think
| they had understood something complex when in fact one came away
| understanding nothing at all, but having enjoyed a good story and
| some beautiful but empty analogies.
| tarboreus wrote:
| I really don't think it's empty, though if you think it's
| actually going to teach you an algorithm, then yes, it's empty
| in that sense.
| ameliaquining wrote:
| I think there's a reasonable case to be made that the
| understanding it imparts to the audience is entirely
| illusory. See, e.g.,
| https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/408971325
|
| I mean, I enjoyed it as a young student too! But we should be
| honest with ourselves about the truth value of the history-
| of-science stuff in there.
| escape_goat wrote:
| > It feels as though Stoppard read James Gleick's Chaos (or
| a similar popular text), misunderstood it, forgot half of
| it, and then wrote the play on this basis of what remained.
|
| I feel seen.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| Arcadia is amazing. I commented about it on HN years ago, and it
| seems to be quite popular among this crowd for good reason.
| eszed wrote:
| I had the immense privilege, for a few years, of teaching this
| play to classes of university students. (I'm still somewhat proud
| of the lecture I devised, with maths and pictures, illustrating
| iteration -- and of the gasps it invariably got when the graphs
| got colored in, and the Mandelbrot Set leapt off the screen in
| all its infinite colourful delight.)
|
| Reading and understanding the play then spring-boarded the
| individual research project and paper that these students were
| required to write. What I appreciated most about Arcadia was that
| it provided an almost infinite scope for students to bring their
| own interests to bear. The only rule was that whatever they did
| had to, in some way, give a reader a deeper understanding of the
| play, and/or the world(s) in which it was set. Some highlights:
|
| - The fashion-design student who did a _deep_ dive into early-
| nineteenth century clothing trends, and explained why Lady Croom
| should be wearing _this_ in the first act, but _that_ in the
| second. She got extra marks for submitting swatches she 'd hand-
| stitched to illustrate some kind of revolutionary technique that
| reached England around that time.
|
| - The "edgy" students who wanted to write something about Sex. I
| think they got excited about the thought that I'd shoot them
| down. In the end they usually wrote fairly boring papers about
| adultery rates, or sexual education.
|
| - A gun nut (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he stormed the
| Capitol, or went off-grid and ended up being besieged by the FBI;
| you know the type), who wrote a creepy-but-fascinating paper
| about the ballistic properties of dueling pistols, and the
| expected survival rates of duels conducted at 7 paces, 10 paces,
| 12 paces, and so forth.
|
| - The "non-traditional" (read, slightly older) student who ran
| her own franchised dog-walking and training business -- I'm
| pretty sure she made a lot more money than I did, and really hope
| that Wag, and the like, didn't drive her out of business -- who
| researched how hunting dogs were used and trained in the early
| 19th century.
|
| - Biology majors who wrote about various aspects of population
| dynamics, and either confirmed or dismantled Valentine's
| assumption that game books were a valid source of data. After a
| while I started giving them (anonymized) former students' papers
| with the opposite view-point to critique.
|
| - LOTS of comp-sci and maths majors (I think either their
| professors or previous generations of students took to
| recommending my class) to whom my direction in tutorials
| invariably reversed Septimus: I'm not going to "give this an
| alpha in blind faith", though I'm sure your equations / program
| checks out. Now, explain it in words so a Humanities guy like me
| can understand.
|
| Arcadia is my favourite play, too.
| crescit_eundo wrote:
| Neat!
|
| My introduction to Tom Stoppard was stumbling upon a
| performance of Arcadia one evening years ago. I left the
| theatre completely enthralled.
| imrehg wrote:
| If there was an online course/lecture version of this, I'd
| totally sign up/watch it. It's a great play (generally Adore
| what Stoppard wrote, in all their variety), and I'm sure most
| of it went whoosh over my head. The projects sound very
| interesting too, miss a bit the uni environment when people are
| forced to think more creatively - learning on my own it's a lot
| harder to kick that into gear. :)
| eszed wrote:
| The bit that usually went "whoosh" over my students' heads
| was what happened to the Regency characters following the end
| of the play. You kind of have to put it together from clues
| dropped throughout:
|
| - On the evening of her sixteenth birthday Septimus and
| Thomasina dance
|
| - They kiss
|
| - She invites him to her room, to de-flower (ugh, awful word)
| her
|
| (This is where the play ends)
|
| - Thomasina leaves a candle burning, waiting for him to go to
| her
|
| - He doesn't
|
| - The candle catches the house on fire
|
| - She burns to death
|
| So, poor Septimus is left in an awful mental / moral
| position, where by doing the "right" thing, and not taking
| (awful word again) his pupil's virginity, he's accidentally
| caused her death. He goes (possibly) mad, and spends _the
| rest of his life_ living in the fake hermitage, running the
| iterations of Thomasina's algorithm by hand.
|
| It's so beautifully tragic, and Stoppard leaves it there as a
| trail of breadcrumbs for his readers / audience to suss out
| on their own. I love it.
|
| When I got out of the education game the Online Everything
| push was just beginning. I'm kind of glad I missed it, to be
| frank. As techy as I am, as a teacher I really grooved on the
| immediate, in-person nature of a classroom environment. I
| never put any of my classes online, and (though not taking
| anything away from those who have found success doing it)
| have no desire to teach like that.
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