Posts Tagged ‘farce’
“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”*…
Kurt Vonnegut took an early interest in what he considered the fundamental “shapes” of stories…
Stories have very simple shapes, ones that computers can understand.
This was the basic idea behind the master’s thesis that Kurt Vonnegut submitted to the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. It was rejected, however, “because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut said…
“Kurt Vonnegut on the 8 ‘shapes’ of stories“
He never abandoned the idea. Years later, in a 2004 lecture at Case Western University, he shared his theory– a recording of which has washed around the internet ever sense…
Now, a group of academics have used AI to analyze hundreds of published stories, and have confirmed Vonnegut’s contention (sort of: he argued for 8 “shapes”; they found 6), as they explain in the abstract of their paper…
Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’ lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads…
“The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes” (where you can read/download the full paper).
* Kurt Vonnegut
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As we agnize archetypes, we might spare a thought for a master of the entertaining tale, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (or as he’s better known by his stage name, Molière); he died on this date in 1673. A playwright, actor, and poet, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in world history, and possibly the greatest writer in French history. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the “language of Molière.”
“Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above / Don’t fence me in”*…
All of humanity could fit in a building the size of this red box, though it wouldn’t be very comfortable…
The human urge to own land sometimes borders on the absurd… Do we have too many cities with too few people in them? (Answer: Yes!) But there’s an implicit question embedded in that notion of anti-NIMBY place-making, once posed by Leo Tolstoy: “How much land does a man need?”
Tolstoy’s answer was pretty grim. But leave it to a YouTuber to take that existential literary question literally by asking, “How much land does humanity need?”
That’s the issue enterprising online video-maker Joseph Pisenti explores on his channel, Real Life Lore.
Pisenti ups the ante on the density game by examining two more specific questions in three videos: How large would a city need to be to fit all of humanity, and how big would a building need to be fit every human being?…
More metropolitan musing– and all three of the videos– at “Could the Human Race Fit in a Single City?”
* Lyric from the song “Don’t Fence Me In”; music by Cole Porter, lyrics by Porter, adapted from a poem by Robert Fletcher. Originally written in 1934 for an unproduced film musical (Adios, Argentina), it was recorded a decade later by Roy Rogers, and (almost simultaneously) Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters; later it was covered by Ella Fitzgerald, and many others.
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As we speculate about space, we might spare a thought for Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; he died on this date in 1673. Better known by his stage name, Molière, he was a respected French actor who became one of the great comedic playwrights in Western literature. His worldy farces– The Misanthrope, The School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Miser, The Imaginary Invalid, and The Bourgeois Gentleman.– earned him popular adulation… and the scorn of moralists and the Catholic Church. At the time of his death, French law forbade the burial of actors in the sacred ground of a cemetery. But Molière’s widow, Armande, asked the King if her spouse could be granted a normal funeral at night. The King– a fan– agreed, and Molière’s body was buried in the section of a cemetery reserved for unbaptized infants. (Molière’s remains were later transferred to grand Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and re-laid to rest near those of La Fontaine.)
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