Tom Stoppard has died
bbc.com
bbc.com
“Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”
Thank you for sharing that quote.
Guildenstern: We came from roughly south.
Rosencrantz: Which way is that?
Guildenstern: In the morning, the sun would be easterly. I think we can assume that.
Rosencrantz: That it's morning?
Guildenstern: If it is, and the sun is over there for instance, that would be northerly. On the other hand, if it's not morning and the sun is over there, that would still be northerly. To put it another way, if we came from down there, and it's morning, the sun would be up there, but if it's actually over there and it's still morning, we must have come from back there, and if that's southerly, and the sun is really over there, then it's the afternoon. However, if none of these are the case...
Rosencrantz: Why don't you go and have a look?
Guildenstern: Pragmatism. Is that all you have to offer
R and G are dead is a true gem of the English language. Strongly recommend the film!
Roth was the first of the two that I noticed excelling in later projects, but he's only a really great actor.
I can't recall another role where Oldman played clown to a straightman character, but he dissolves into every role so completely...
Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is "not." Death isn't. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
I read this play for the first time last week and this exchange really stuck with me.
When he passed away a couple days ago, I was surprised to discover he was originally from a Moravian town I've been to since one of my ancestors grew up 10 miles farther down the road. The twists and turns his family took escaping from there to the other side of the world and back no doubt enhanced his keen insight into people.
"Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
Sad day.
A lot of folks here will have read either Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Arcadia, which are still probably his best plays, and certainly the best introduction to his work. I personally also really like The Invention of Love, about the gloomy tortured homosexual poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, which was also apparently Stoppard's favorite of his plays. It's definitely niche territory though and you might need to care at least just a little about A Shropshire Lad and latin textual criticism. The Coast of Utopia is even more packed with history and erudition, although worth a read; the currently top comment here is a quote from it about death, childhood, and the pursuit of happiness.
He had an interesting combination of traits that many HN readers will probably appreciate: erudite to the point of elitism, although never attended college; a self-described "small c. conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre" with libertarian inclinations, but he wrote a sprawling trilogy about 19th-century Russian socialist and anarchist exiles (The Coast of Utopia).
Now that he's dead, I want to go back and re-read all his plays, including the ones I never managed to get to before.
I love that movie. Never got to see it on stage though, which I've read was superior.
R&G is a nice play, but honestly it doesn't come off the page nicely. The same is true for late-Beckett. I'm a huge fan of these guys, but I never understood the obsession literary teachers have with only a handful of plays, like R&G, or Waiting for Godot. These are very specific, nerd-like, I would even go as far as calling superficial—pieces of art. At any rate, Stoppard is best appreciated when read off the page, or on radio.. he's just one of these guys. Indian Ink is really good.
The entire group of "Martians" (von Neumann, Teller, Pólya, Szillard, von Kármán tec.) were Hungarian Jews. More than half of that community perished.
For what it's worth, a lot of people think the Nazis undermined their own war machine by persecuting Jewish scientists.
People don't even realize that as late as 100 years ago, Americans would travel to Germany for first-class university education. Harvard was good for networking and decent for overall education, but top notch science was done in places like Heidelberg.
Your average German/Austrian universities have plenty of ex-pat Americans, there for precisely the fact that the education systems have such variety between the two nations. They are understated and under-represented in mainstream culture about academia, but for sure there are still Americans making the pilgrimage to older universities, for the diversity and strengths they offer.
I think the USA, like the UK, does tend to use name recognition. Oxford and Cambridge use interviews to filter out people, but are disproportionately represented in power structures.
Prior to Nazism, Germans would collect as many science Nobel Prizes as the British, the French and the Americans together.
https://preview.redd.it/nobel-prizes-by-country-manually-upd...
While German academia was rebuilding itself, American academia was chasing clout - one side effect being that the Nobel prize is more of a carnival attraction than an academic accomplishment.
The person I responded to made this claim, not me. I don't personally rate the Nobel prize very highly at all, as a metric.
My paper wasn't any good. Really in retrospect or at the time.
How he had reinvented it, reinvigorated it. (TIL about banished Rama and Sita from the Bhagavad Gita.) But then I realized it would just be easier to be a critic.
Anyways, truly when I lucked into big time screenwriting gigs it was in part because of the time I had spent writing a paper about Tom Stoppard's work.
I also remember watching "Finding Forrester" a lot. Punch the keys!
Nor "Shakespeare in Love"ish.
ROS: Yes?
GUIL: What?
ROS: I thought you...
GUIL: No.
ROS: Ah.
The alternative reading, where an entire exchange cleverly takes place without any substance, seems almost mistaken to me? In context it seems very clear it's "I thought you...[were going to say something.]" "No." "Ah."
It starts off with G thinking R has said something, but G is wrong - R didn't say anything. It ends up with G telling R he hadn't said anything, but again G is wrong, G started the whole thing off when he says Hm?
This is funny because R ends up thinking he'd imagined G saying something when infact the opposite happened.
It fits the characters well with G frequently being clever with no common sense and R having common sense but not being terribly smart.
One reason that it is funny is that it plays against that.
We the audience maybe forget for a moment that we are not watching real life. We are watching a drama or entertainment. So we expect something relevant to happen. That’s the convention.
The exchange plays with that expectation. It deliberately forces us out of our pleasant illusion and makes think us about our real experience - we are sitting in a seat and watching a performance, which is happening at that moment.
And nothing happens, just the same as real life
It's the antithesis of Chekhov's Gun.
At a surface read, it's banal.
In reality, it contains depth.
(ROS and GUIL ponder. Each reluctant to speak first.)
if the dialogue should be clearly about who speaks first, wouldn-t the stage direction have been something like:
(ROS and GUIL ponder. Each reluctant to speak first. ROS tries to say something but does not) ?
i mean - you could play it like that. But then to me some of the beauty of that dialogue is lost, that comes from the fact that for the spectator it-s not clear what is the subject of it.
I haven't heard her say that there's anything wrong with being trans, that it's an illness, or that there should be any consequences. I have heard her decry the excesses of some trans activists and allies, particularly in her defense of women-only spaces. That seems to me to be a poor fit for "asshole".
Using a dogwhistle instead of more well-known hate speech does not mean a person is innocent of bigotry - quite the opposite.
To her, trans women are really cis men pretending to be women, to make it easier to rape them. There’s kind of no nice way of saying it.
It’s textbook transphobia / queer bashing. Fear of sexual assault at the hands of queer people is probably one of the most basic reasons to justify this particular brand of bigotry. “I don’t hate queers, I’m just concerned for the safety of -“ take your pick - women, children, sometimes even men. For JK it’s women.