One of my 2008 "resolutions", to use the preferred nomenclature, is to read more -- for pleasure. Being an ex-English literature graduate student, I would sometimes read 200-300 pages worth of material a night. When I graduated and moved into the business sector I figured my days of "required reading" were over...until I took a job as a proofreader, a position I still hold (in addition to 3 or 4 other positions I've accumulated in the gray cubicles of the business world that is the catalog industry). Needless to say, after work the last thing I wanted to do was come home and read more...so I essentially stopped reading for pleasure.
This year I'm attempting to get back on the "reading horse" regardless of how my days are spent earning a paycheck and so far it's been pretty enjoyable. I've been digging through Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, George Carlin's When Will Jesus Bring the Pokrchops, Dave Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and The Ten Day MBA. I've also traded fantasy football time online with perusing great sites like bookforum.com, which today has a link to a great interview from New York Magazine with playwright David Mamet, whose play Glengarry Glen Ross sits behind me on the bookshelf just begging for a second reading...
David Mamet’s Election Season
The playwright on Hillary, corruption, and our democracy’s saving grace.
When the star of The Producers decides to play a U.S. president in a Broadway play written by David Mamet (November, opening January 17), is it any wonder he becomes a desperate con man? Mamet, whose last play was the 2005 courtroom farce Romance, deliberately got this new comedy up as early in the primary season as possible. But Nathan Lane’s president, Charles H.P. Smith—a cash-poor incumbent on the verge of losing reelection—looks a lot more like a certain lame duck than like any of the current White House contenders. And Smith is in a venal class all his own, deploring the job as “too much stress, too little opportunity for theft,” and lighting on the annual Thanksgiving-turkey pardon as a potential fund-raising scheme. Mamet may not have expected the primary season’s latest surprises, along with all the expressions of hope (Change! Change! Change!) that make scandal-a-minute 2006 (amply referenced in November) seem like a long-ago nightmare. But then, he’s got a surprisingly positive take on the political process—which he laid out for us, albeit in broad terms (just don’t ask him to endorse a candidate).
So what made you decide to write a comedy set in the Oval Office?
Like a lot of other Americans, I’ve gotten very interested in politics lately.
And what do you make of the primaries?
I was shocked, after Iowa, to find myself thinking, Well, you know, if there were the two candidates, McCain and Obama, either of them would probably make a hell of a president.
And what about Hillary’s tearful turnaround?
Well, I only heard something on the radio. I don’t think I’m misquoting her. She said, “I have so many opportunities for America.”* [Long pause.] That’s kind of wonderfully revelatory. It’s not that there are so many opportunities for America, but she has so many opportunities for America...
Continue reading at NYMAG.com