Mamet appeared before a sold-out crowd as part of the book tour for his new novel, Chicago, which, thankfully, was less than half the size of the tome, Leonardo da Vinci, that I had to lug home and attempt to wade through after seeing Walter Isaacson speak at a CHF based-on-a-book program last October.
Mamet was erudite and funny. I preferred the funny part, like when he quoted Mel Brooks. When he was quoting Archimedes, Aristotle, or Shakespeare, or rambling (the kind of rambling where no one remembers the question) on about the relationship between theater and religion, I was less interested. If some University of Chicago professor wants to delve into that at another program, go for it, but I won’t be there.
The interviewer, Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones, spent most of the hour appearing star-struck. He said he had already read Mamet’s book three or four times, and read aloud a passage from it, apparently for the purpose of informing the audience that he didn’t understand several of the words (Chris, if you’re reading this, here is the url for the online Merriam-Webster dictionary – https://www.merriam-webster.com), a sycophantic move that said more about Jones than it did about Mamet.
The highlight of the hour for me was Mamet saying that his favorite writers were Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur. My mother used to tell me that my brother and I were named after Charles McArthur, which, early on, I unfortunately, traumatically, mistakenly heard as Charlie McCarthy, one of Edgar Bergen’s dummies. She also used to tell me that she and my father found me after I fell out of the crab apple tree in the backyard, at which point they exclaimed “Eureka!” (I made up that last part to show that I also could quote Archimedes), so who knows.