The Paris Review, Issue 201, Summer 2012 by Lorin Stein

The Paris Review, Issue 201, Summer 2012 Reviews

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  Ned

  notable for me mostly for the non-fiction this time.
  
  For Instance an edit from Rich Cohen's "City of Pirates":
  "Lafitte remade Grand Terre, turned it from a mean camp into a criminal metropolis, the nightmare city of buccaneers. ... By 1809, perhaps a thousand pirates were living on the island, a sandy barrier, its back to the bayou, its face to the sea. Six miles long, three miles wide, five feet above sea level, a swell covered by scrub trees. The wind never stopped blowing, leaving the island gloriously free of bugs. If you had gone in 1810, you would have found a well-planned town in the middle of a swamp: dirt streets lined with thatch houses; mansions on stilts that seemed to float when the sea surged; clapboard storefronts, markets, hotels for plantation owners; bordellos, taverns, a casino where men sat ten to a table; warehouses filled with merchandise—carpets, cotton, grain, gin; a scaffold where slaves were auctioned. It was strangely temporary, makeshift and ramshackle, blown together by the trade winds, a mirage, a trick of light, a driftwood empire, a parody of New Orleans reflected in the black water.Ships traveled to Grand Terre on a regular schedule. To people in New Orleans, it was a vacation, a week at Sandals. The best house belonged to Lafitte. Built around 1808, it sat on high ground overlooking the channel. It was Spanish-style, made of pulverized oyster shell, the windows crossed by iron bars. From the veranda, dozing in his red hammock, Lafitte could keep an eye on the incoming ships.It was not long before the authorities—tax officials, shore patrol—decided Lafitte had to be stopped. Though he would rule for a decade, Lafitte spent half those years in battle with Governor Claiborne. At times, this struggle took on the spirit of a comic opera. You chase, he runs, we laugh. Again and again, Claiborne sent ships to chase the pirates, but each time the pirates vanished into the channels, only to reappear hoisting the black flag. Claiborne finally arrested Pierre on July 2, 1814. He locked him in the old colonial jail. Jean hired two attorneys to defend his brother, but their arguments failed. And so Pierre simply escaped. Vanished. Walked through the bars. The governor plastered the city with wanted posters. It offered five hundred dollars to anyone who delivered Jean Lafitte to the sheriff of New Orleans. It was signed, “By the order of William Claiborne.” It was posted at dinnertime. Before breakfast, a second sign had been placed beside the first: “A One-Thousand-Dollar Reward is offered anyone who can deliver Governor Claiborne to Cat Island for Trial,” signed Lafitte. It was the sort of gesture that turned the pirate into a cult figure. Crimes make a criminal, style makes a criminal hero. Lafitte was nothing but style. He knew how to dress, how to carry himself. History is not what’s remembered, but what remains when everything else is forgotten: the kidnappings and the killings, the slave trading, the smoke rising from the plundered coastal towns. Lafitte knew he could not win forever. He depended too much on luck. Even the king of hearts knows the ace of spades is somewhere in that deck. He was looking for an escape, a ladder to the street. He spotted it on September 3, 1814. That morning, HMS Sophie, a British warship, dropped anchor off Grand Terre. Lafitte rowed out in a canoe. He was greeted by Nicholas Lockyer, captain of the Sophie. The men exchanged pleasantries before Lafitte, unrecognized by the British, asked the captain the nature of his business. “I have a message for Mr. Lafitte.” “Get in the canoe,” said Lafitte, “I’ll take you to him.”The captain and a few of his men climbed in. Lafitte talked as he ferried them across the bay. He had a florid manner of speech that worked a kind of magic. He spoke of sea battles and fog, of man’s fate and treasures worth pursuing in this too-short life. The conversation turned to the terrific battle then underway. Later called the War of 1812, it pitted the British against their former American colonists. For the British, New Orleans would be a great prize, economically important and weakly defended, with a large French population whose loyalty to America was questionable. As Lafitte ran the canoe aground, he reintroduced himself with a flourish, saying, “Lafitte c’est moi!”The British were surrounded as pirates came down to shore to greet their leader and his guests. Several men in the crowd wanted to kill the British, run ’em through, string ’em up. The British Navy was hated. No, said Lafitte, these men have come on parlay, as our guests. We don’t hang guests.The men sat on the veranda of Lafitte’s house, eating lunch within sight of the sea. Red snapper, oysters, wine. After much drinking, the British captain stated his business: he wanted Lafitte and his men to join the British in an attack on New Orleans. If Lafitte agreed, he would be rewarded with thirty thousand pounds and a captaincy in the Royal Navy. If he refused, the British would destroy Grand Terre. Carrot, stick. The specifics were explained in letters that were left with Lafitte: the first included the promise (money, rank), the second included the threat (cannon ball, ruin). Lafitte said he needed time—he would have to explain the offer to his followers. As a Frenchman in the age of Napoleon, Lafitte hated the British. He was, in fact, something of an American patriot, had come to love his adopted country, though he lived outside its laws. To him, the British offer was just an opportunity. He’d recently heard the U.S. Navy would dispatch an armada to destroy Grand Terre. Here was a way to save his island.The next morning, Lafitte sent a message to Governor Claiborne, including the letters from the British. These had great intelligence value, as they spelled out Britain’s plans. This resulted in a correspondence between Lafitte and Claiborne, in the course of which Lafitte offered the services of his men in the defense of New Orleans in return for a pardon, which Lafitte described as “an act of oblivion for all that has been done hithero.” “I may have evaded the payment of duties to the custom house,” wrote Lafitte, “but I have never ceased to be a good citizen; and all the offence I have committed I was forced to by certain vices in our laws.”"
  _______________________
  
  Also, the Art of Theater #16 with Tony Kushner. Here's a quote:
  "KUSHNER: As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people. But most audiences come to the theater eager to have experiences, so they’re open to having things inflicted on them. I run into people who tell me, I lost a partner to aids and Angels was incredibly hard for me, or, My mother committed suicide, and that scene in act 4 of Intelligent Homosexual is unbearable. There’s some part of me that says, Good, that’s what this is about. That’s what this is for. I believe in the power of theater to teach and to heal through compassion, through shared agony. And it also offers a way of developing critical consciousness. It teaches how to look at the world, to see it with double vision."
   INTERVIEWER [Catherine Steindler] "What do you mean by “double vision”?
  KUSHNER: "The essential thing in theater is that what happens onstage very obviously both is and isn’t at the same time. The play demands that the audience extend its empathic imagination. But simultaneously, the audience—both the individual audience member and the collective animal—is skeptical. It says, But that man isn’t dead. He’s still breathing. And, That isn’t an angel crashing through the ceiling. It’s got these big wires hooking it up. It’s just a woman in a dress and cardboard wings. That disbelief is engaged in a dialectic with the surrender of skepticism. The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can’t get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism—well, you meet people like this. Run away from them. They’re not good people. When I was a sophomore at Columbia, I simultaneously discovered Marx, Brecht, and Shakespeare, and I realized they’re all playing with the same thing—the way things both are and are not what they seem. All three ask us to see the surface, but also what’s beneath the surface, what shapes the surface. They ask us to think about intended effects and about what’s being concealed within the effect. Capitalism has done exactly what Marx said it does—it gives the inorganic machine the qualities of the living beings who created it and makes it seem like a living thing itself, not a dead thing created by human labor. We’re trained through market research and the dark genius of advertising to develop increasingly erotically charged relationships with the inorganic. You develop the feeling that you can’t live without your iPhone and your iPad because they’re sold to you as having souls, as magical manna from heaven, instead of what they actually are, which is just stuff that people put together. We feel the object has a soul because human energy went into making it. That’s its truest value, that it’s human made. But to disguise its origins, to hide the fact that your stuff is made by powerless and exploited human  beings, it’s packaged and sold as being actually human, organic, erotic. The labor, the human energy that went into making the lifeless commodity, is concealed within, covered over by an effective illusion of life. The Nike sneaker or the iPad seem alive, and we have to learn how to look beneath their surface effects to locate and understand the sources of their uncanny, cyborg power. Brecht says the point of theater is, among other things, to make you conscious of this disappearing trick. That’s why he used a half-curtain in his productions, with the audience watching one scene being played out in front of the curtain and, behind it, the next scene being prepared. As he wrote in one of his theater poems, let people “see that this is not magic, but work, my friends.” His most famous, and most misunderstood, idea about staging is what he calls the distanciation effect—he wants theater to enable you to see the familiar as strange and the strange as familiar, so that you greet reality with an appetite to interpret it. You find the same dialectic between illusion and reality in Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is kind of Shakespeare’s aesthetic manifesto. In act 5, scene 1, when Hippolyta and Theseus find the lovers asleep—I could talk about this endlessly—she says, “ ’Tis strange my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.” And Theseus says,      More strange than true. I never may believe     These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.     Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,     Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend     More than cool reason ever comprehends.  He says that you can’t believe this stuff—that, like poets or lunatics, lovers make up shit that’s not real. They “give to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” And then Hippolyta has the great answer. She says,       But all the story of the night told over,      And all their minds transfigur’d so together,      More witnesseth than fancy’s images,      And grows to something of great constancy;      But howsoever, strange and admirable.  “All the story of the night told over” is the play. “All their minds transfigur’d so together” is the audience. “More witnesseth than fancy’s images”—they’re seeing something that’s more than just fantasy. “And grows to something of great constancy”—it’s real at the same time, however strange, however freakish and unusual and admirable this reality is. That’s theater." 
• 
  Gemma Mahadeo

  4.5/5
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  Ben

  I thoroughly enjoyed the first two stories - the first for the plot and storytelling, the second for its elegant prose. I also greatly liked the interview with Tony Kushner, who I felt an immediate bond with, as I found many similarities between both our biographies and influences. The art in this issue also piqued my interests, reminiscent of the works of some of the surrealists.
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  Adrian Alvarez

  If you've never read The Paris Review, issue #201 is the perfect one to compel you. I was particularly moved by Davy Rothbart's non-fiction piece, the poems by Roberto Bolano and Octavio Paz (interesting to include them both here, sorry Roberto), and the interview with Tony Kushner. Really, though, every piece here was inspiring and enjoyable.
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  Sara

  I particularly liked Sam Lipsyte's short story, "This appointment occurs in the past," a modern send-up of Pushkin's "The Shot", and Davy Rothbart's non-fiction piece, "Human Snowball." It's crazy how one piece coheres to the next in ways you wouldn't expect.
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  Janine

  I appreciated how much non-fiction was in this issue! The artwork was amazing, as was the Kushner interview. I liked the Shawn interview as well, but it struck me as being awkward, as though he really didn't enjoy being interviewed.
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  Larry

  I really like JD Daniels' story at the end, "Letter from Majorca," but I can't seem to find any more information about this person other than the little blurb with the other author bios about being born in Kentucky in 1974. Does anybody know anything about this author?
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  Adam

  Great stuff including: Davy Rothbart's essay on a love and a long night in Buffalo, Beattie's twisty story of siblings, and Cohen's essay on the king pirate of old New Orleans.
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  Vicki

  I eagerly tap my foot by the mailbox until the next issue of The Paris Review comes, and this is one of the best in a long time. Tony Kushner and Wallace Shawn on theater and playwriting?? HEAVEN!!!
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  Rose Gowen

  Shawn, Daniels
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  John

  lots of good non-fiction, some of it rather well-blended with the fiction. nice change of direction with two playwrights as the interviewees. and who doesn't love ryan mcginley?
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  T P Kennedy

  It's not one of the better issues. There's some good poetry but the short stories are self indulgent. It's redeemed by fantastic piece on New Orleans and its pirate past.
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  Eaycrigg

  Great interview with Wallace Shawn!