Wallace Shawn - Night Thoughts

Praise for Night Thoughts

With impeccable logic, [Shawn] gently, but lethally, skewers the complacency of the lucky while highlighting the plight of the less fortunate, including the Muslims living in the slums of European cities, the maid of a wealthy friend, and a boy at a dance who shoots someone flirting with his girlfriend.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Praise for Essays

Lovely, hilarious and seriously thought-provoking.

Toni Morrison

Wallace Shawn writes in a style that is deceptively simple, profoundly thoughtful, fiercely honest. His vocabulary is pungent, his wit delightful, his ideas provocative.

Howard Zinn

Its short and easy to read but incredibly thought-provoking and novel in its own subtle, idiosyncratic way.

Glenn Greenwald

Wallace Shawns essays are both powerful and riveting. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing.

Michael Moore

From a low-earning playwrights troubles to reflections on why the Palestinians are justified in their resentment of Israel. Wallace Shawn: Fearless!

GQ , Best Books of 2009

Full of what you might call conversation starters: tricky propositions about morality... politics, privilege, runaway nationalist fantasies, collective guilt and art as a force for change (or not). It's a treat to hear [Shawn] speak his curious mind.

O , The Oprah Magazine

Wallace Shawns career as a playwright has been uncompromisingly devoted to proving, again and again, that theater is an ideal medium for exploring difficult matters of great consequence. The qualities that make his dramatic work so challenging, startling, unsettling, sensual, mind-and-soul expanding, so indispensable, are equally in evidence in the marvelous political and theatrical essays collected here. The basic faith of politically progressive people, that human beings are full of decent impulses perverted by political and economic malevolence, is in Shawns writing held up to the liveliest, sharpest scrutiny imaginable; not, as in so much reactionary art, to shift blame from oppressor to oppressed, or from artifice to Nature, not to insist that were innately, inescapably incapable of change, but rather as a scrupulous accounting of the slippery ethics, dream logic, fear-ridden resistance to progress, disturbing desires, of the greatest problem confronting all our hopes for a better, transformed world: Us, the actors in our collective drama. His essays are without sentiment and entirely resistant to the easy comforts of despair. Complexities are rendered delightfully plain, obfuscations are unsnarled and illuminated, clarity and rational thought are organized to plumb mysteries, and mysteries are respected and celebrated. Shawns language, his unmistakable, original voice, felicitous, is unadorned, elegant, immediate, true. Hes also a brilliant interviewer, as everyone whos seen My Dinner with Andr (which is just about everyone) knows. And, of course, hes very funny.

Tony Kushner

Wallace Shawn is a bracing antidote to the op-ed dreariness of political and artistic journalism in the West. He takes you back to the days when intellectuals had the wit and concentration to formulate great questionsand to make the reader want to answer them.

David Hare

2017 by Wallace Shawn

Published by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

info@haymarketbooks.org / www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-813-3

Trade distribution:

In the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution,
www.cbsd.com

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,
intlsales@perseusbooks.com

This book was published with the generous support
of the Wallace Action Fund and Lannan Foundation.

The text and display of this book are composed in Kepler Standard.

Cover design by Rachel Cohen. Cover photography by Tom Knox.

Library of Congress CIP Data is available.

also by the author

Essays

Grasses of a Thousand Colors

The Designated Mourner

The Fever

My Dinner with Andr (with Andr Gregory)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Serge Nivelle

Wallace Shawn is the author of Essays . Among his plays (published by Grove Press and TCG Books) are Our Late Night , A Thought in Three Parts , Marie and Bruce , Aunt Dan and Lemon , The Fever , The Designated Mourner , Grasses of a Thousand Colors , and Evening at the Talk House . He wrote the libretto for Allen Shawns opera The Music Teacher (Bridge Records). His three films with Andr Gregory were released on DVD by Criterion. He has worked as a shipping clerk, schoolteacher, and actor.

About Haymarket Books

Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.

We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their 1886 struggle for the eight-hour daywhich gave us May Day, the international workers holidayreminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation. For more information and to shop our complete catalog of titles, visit us online at www.haymarketbooks.org.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To publicly name the people who kindly offered thoughts on the manuscript of this essay might expose them to ridicule, so I wont do that, but I am enormously grateful to I, D, D, C, B, and A, you know who you areand, natrlich , D.

Murder

Night. A hotel. A dark room on a high floor. Outside the hotel, miles of empty city streets, silent, gray, like gray fields in winter. Inside, Im alone in a very cold room with a buzzing minibar. Through the window, far below in the street, I can see a couple of thin, solitary, wandering men, one with a hat cocked at a debonair angle. Then I turn on a dim lamp and stare at the newspaper, and my eye goes as always to the stories about crime, the murders. A crime of passionjealousy, frenzya body falling in the shower. Strange deaths in a quiet suburban odd weapona serial killer? My senses quicken, my lethargy falls away. Theyre writing about me. Well, no, not me, not quite, not yet. But I know, as I read, that Im not reading as the victim, Im reading as the murderer.

In a courtroom, the case of a robbery gone wrong. The thief had been inside the house when the man who owned it unexpectedly came home. The thief had gone after the man with a knife, and when he was asked, Why did you stab him thirty-eight times when you knew he was dead after the first blow? the murderers answer was, I dont know. Murderers always seem to say, I dont knowunless they say, I cant remember what happened.

Then, on the television, a different kind of murder. Brightly dressed university students in pools of blood, their books scattered all over the street. The Islamic State. A machine gun. Screaming. Sobbing. An Arab empire in the fourteenth century?

The hotel itself, in this dead, ruined neighborhoodall shards and scraps floating in the windis rather magnificent, resplendent with ballrooms, as if we were living in the nineteenth century. Not long before, some young people from a housing project in the neighborhood had put together quite a lot of money in order to dress up in tuxedos and evening gowns and hold a celebration in one of the ballrooms. As the party wore on, one boy thought another boy had flirted with his date. A fight broke out. Mayhem in the ballroom. Then shots were fired, and the party ended in bondage and deathone boy gone forever, another boy handcuffed and carried away.