Caen Spree Redux

Dot, dot, dotting my way through humpday

Well, why not? Some days I have a lot of little thoughts and not one big one, so rather than cobble them into a Frankenstein’s monster let me lay them out as Herb Caen did back in the day, ellipsodically…

I wouldn’t be surprised to find some Tom Stoppard fans here. When he passed recently at age 88 (good innings, as they say), there were many sighs among the literati, some heavy. One Substacker, a smart fellow, said that Stoppard’s Arcadia is “the greatest play written in the English language in the last 150 years or so.” Well. I like it, but really. I like most of his plays, probably for similar reasons to those of his superfans: He was unbridled in just about every way, artistically, including in the largesse of his verbal gifts — he never underwrote anything, but when you’re that good why should you. At the same time he was profoundly conservative — who else would make such a romp as Travesties into a reproach of Dadaism, and out of the mouth of James Joyce, no less? That tension in his work just made the frisson fizzier. And his plays are mad fun to act, which more than anything will probably assure their survival, on stage if not in sesquicentennial lists…