I just read a few books, an unfortunately rare occurrence these days. One was Speed Tribes by Karl Taro Greenfeld, the other Make Believe Town by David Mamet. Great, the computer insists that both Mamet and Greenfeld are mispelled names. Greenfeld is the child of a Jewish-American father and a Japanese mother. Which makes him the opposite of the woman in the New York Times who married a Chinese-American guy and took his name, Chang. She quite sensibly points out that the merging of their names Berke and Chang would sound like an ailment--oh I've been in the bathroom all day with the Berke-Changs. (The computer doesn't believe that any of these names are real. Let's try Walker, ooo, that's real. How about Johnson? Also real.) Speed Tribes is written in an icky first-person perspective which only makes me think "How did you know that? How do you know what they are thinking?" and I don't find the world that he describes to be too different from modern life anywhere. People interact with machines more than people. Check. Funny hair styles and weird clothes. Check. God-awful commutes. Check. It has its moments, but mostly it makes me think--this is the guy? This is the guy who is in charge of TIME-ASIA? But David Mamet has always given me a cosy feeling even when he is uprooting the intellectual furniture.
He has a great way of reversing things. Most of Make-Believe Town isn't as good as his earlier books of essays, such as Writing in Restaurants, and it isn't as good as the self-help book packaged as acting advice: True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, but with Mamet you aren't going to go away feeling cheated. He comes from theater and real theater people know that you have to entertain the crowd. Shakespeare in Love caught a lot of flack from proper people, but one thing that was great about it was that it didn't treat the author--Shakespeare--as a minor diety. You got to see the pressures and (imagined) circumstances of creation. Which is better than the Minerva-like process that we are otherwise led to believe results in authoring plays or books or anything for that matter.
In the Mamet book there is a wonderful, wonderful exposition of a joke--the Swimming Pool Joke--the one which goes (this is from Mamet, and actually this is the way the essay begins):
"Now here is the reappearance of the Gun in the Pool joke.
Previously it was the man who called, and then the maid said, in a Spanish accent, "'ello," and the man said, "Who is this?" and she said, "I de new maid." The man said, "Where is my wife?" and the maid said, "Oh, no, Meesa, she upstair in de bedroom, her an' another man."
So the man now instructs the maid: Look in my study. You'll find a revolver in the table drawer. Go upstairs, shoot the both of them. The maid complies. He hears bam bam bam over the telephone. She comes downstairs. "I shoot dem, what I do now?," she says.
"All right," he says, "now go outside and throw the gun into the pool." There is a pause. "What pool?" she says.
Then Mamet explains how the joke is all about the racial fear of the wealthy Whites. In a really interesting and not ponderous at all kind of way. Its funny how the one author, Greenfeld is going for total verisimilitude and Mamet is dealing almost totally in the realm of made up things, as the title of his book indicates, but I instinctively believe and appreciate Mamet and distrust and scorn Greenfeld. Part of it is that Mamet lets us know exactly what he feels about something--calling Schindler's List an "exploitation film" for example, whereas Greenfeld is imposing his vision of reality on us in every frame but insists that it just is. There is the irony. Mamet is writing about things that we all have prior knowledge about and expressing his opinion about them, Greenfeld is presenting special knowledge and insisting that we take it at face value. The tragic thing is that Mamet is just kind of riffing on themes and Greenfeld obviously did a lot of hard work. But that's the priviledge of the artist and that's why we love art.
