Wallace Shawn has written a new play, and it’s unsettling to watch. In it, a group of wealthy, middle-aged party hosts reveal their roles in a dystopian future, where political murders, random beatings and censorship are all commonplace. In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Francine Prose reviews the play in the context of Shawn’s other works.
The Future Is Near
Which Author Spells The Best?
The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses is hosting their annual Spelling Bee Fundraiser on October 30th. New Yorker editor Ben Greenman will host the event, which will pit Jonathan Ames, Amor Towles and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures author Emma Straub against one another (and more) in a battle of lexicographic perspicacity. (Can you state the language of origin, please?) The event will be judged by none other than Jesse Sheidlower, editor of the inimitable Oxford English Dictionary.
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Haiti: A Love Poem
Our friend Nelly Lambert, who spent several years in Haiti growing up, offers the country a love poem.
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An Accomplished Saxophonist
Here's a great interview with Colin Stetson, the saxophonist who's lent his talents to such acts as Tom Waits, Bon Iver, TV on the Radio, Arcade Fire, and Feist.
El Diablo
As part of the latest chapter of the McConnaissance, Matthew McConaughey has been tipped to star in The Stand, the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s famous novel. McConnaughey is expected to play Randall Flagg, the malevolent sorcerer and necromancer. In the words of director Josh Boone, who also directed The Fault in our Stars, the movie will be “the Godfather of post-apocalyptic thrillers.” This might be a good time to read our own Lydia Kiesling on growing up with Stephen King.
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“A Native Son” in Ferguson
"It is early August. A black man is shot by a white policeman. And the effect on the community is of "a lit match in a tin of gasoline." No, this is not Ferguson, MO." Laila Lalami reports for NPR on rereading James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son in the context of Ferguson. Pair with Teju Cole's essay in The New Yorker about rereading Baldwin's "Stranger in the Village."
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Literature in Emojis
Slate has translated famous first lines of literature into emojis, and they're surprisingly coherent. Pair with Jonathan Russell Clark's essay on opening sentences.
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The Other Side
“Paris had more sex than most church-laden places, and more church than most sex-laden places.” Luc Sante’s new book, The Other Paris, seeks to uncover Paris’s sedimentary layers of filth and grit. Here he is in an interview with Guernica Magazine.
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DFW, Edited
The changes between the transcription of David Foster Wallace reading 'A fragment of a longer thing' in 2000 and the version of that story 'Backbone' as published in the recent New Yorker. (via The Paris Review)
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When Harold checked out, it was down to Wally. After Wally, who?
This, from the NYRB review of the play, by Wallace Shawn, in question…
“Little by little, the harrowing details of life under the current regime begin to emerge. There are frequent elections and a rapidly-growing “Program of Murdering” that’s been put into place because “it attracted an awful lot of voters,” especially in rural areas. The characters bicker politely about how many lives are being lost as a result of the Program. Annette asserts that the Program is necessary, unavoidable:
It’s like something one does behind one’s back, so to speak—like something slightly unpleasant that one does with one’s ass once a day or so without paying it really a lot of attention…I’m making an analogy between dropping some waste into the toilet, you see, and dropping a few small bombs onto certain targets, you know, dropping some rather small bombs onto certain people who pose a threat to us, all rather casual, and then you wash your hands and return to the table, and there you have your Program of Murdering.
Annette is quick to reassure Tom, who idly frets about the challenge of being sure that the right individuals are being murdered; later Ted mentions that school children are being trained to target “people who represent a serious danger.”
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“But what makes the play even more chilling is the historical moment in which it is being performed. Evening at the Talk House was first staged in 2015 at the National Theater in London. That was before Brexit, before the election of Donald Trump, at a time when the drama may have seemed more like a reminder of a disturbing reality (the drone program, for example) than an account of where the brutalization and demagoguery now set in motion might lead.”
…is eerily chilling for the spin it attempts to put on Shawn’s obvious message(s), which are not a matter of Shawn’s “uncanny prescience” (to paraphrase Prose’s tone) but about the *NOW* of when Shawn wrote the piece, just as Orwell’s 1984 was about 1948. The way Prose underplays the drone program (ie The Murder Program), in a parenthetical aside, is an almost a pitch-perfect enactment of the horrors which “Evening at the Talk House” theatricalizes.
But I’ve seen that defensively-distancing effect before, with audience members tittering at passages, being performed by Shawn, in readings that clearly aren’t intended to be funny… or “confirming”… for the target audience at all. Even in the most intelligent auditors, these days, a self-protective incomprehension too often kicks in, when needed, and the audience takes on the ironic duties of the damning performance itself.
“Living theater” indeed.