proximoception

20. The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck
21. The Coast of Utopia: Salvage

Latter two parts of Stoppard's 350 page megaplay about the Men of the '40s (see Fathers and Sons - or Demons, which I may resume next, since Coast of Utopia gives useful background on pretty much every figure Dostoevsky's spitting at) - a.k.a. Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky and sometimes Turgenev.

I've read a lot of very long plays, nearly all the ones anyone's heard of, and most of which are from the 19th century for some reason - though I never managed to get through The Dynasts or Bothwell. They're kind of fascinating for their unmanageability. You can't quite approach them as novels, which they do come to resemble, especially the unplayable ones; they're still doing the play thing, are sustained on that immediacy of people brushing by one another while talking, characters somehow autonomous, somehow drawn apart from their context in a way novel characters never are just by that isolation of their words. Their words belong to them, the portion of the work they speak is theirs. Not to overstate this, but it emphasizes the present moment at every point, highlights the ten things you need to remember about exactly what's going on now, and this somehow makes it hard to remember the hundred things at once you need to with novels. Maybe that's more what I mean, that novels aren't trying so hard to distract us but plays always are, and long plays maybe end up distracting us from the distractions to a point we're just lost.

So I've kind of lost the overall arc and I winder if that's because Stoppard did. Toward the end it was like he was explaining his own complicated, proudly self-contradictory political opinions (he's one of those leftists who tries to correct the left vaguely rightward, but not to anywhere near the right or for any of the reasons the right usually gives, rather like Orwell, I guess acting on the assumption that conservatives don't read/listen so that's the most meaningful way to have an influence?). Not that it wasn't all amusing and rewarding - but unless you have a special interest in the period I'd advise going for Invention of Love or Arcadia, among late Stoppard, which I remember being more consistently inspired and definitely cleaner.

Novels are crazy too, but we expect that of them going in. There's a reason Andy Kaufman read The Great Gatsby at an appearance, even that short novel goes on too long. But interesting things get into that 'too.' Too many to not read it. Move past successive presents and you start to make time.