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David Mamet: Closet Conservative
Not terribly surprised.
All this explains why David Mamet, America’s most famous and successful playwright, caused widespread consternation two years ago when he published an essay in the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in which he announced that he had “changed my mind” about the ideology to which he had previously subscribed. Having studied the works of “a host of conservative writers,” among them Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, Thomas Sowell (whom he called “our greatest contemporary philosopher”), and Shelby Steele, Mamet came to the conclusion that “a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”
On balance, I suppose that if you’re more interested in describing your world as you find it than in wanting to aspire to make it better, liberalism probably isn’t for you.
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
He should just move to Europe. There his “liberalism” and “free-market understanding” would be synonymous.
In my experience, it is free-market libertarianism that is the idealized version of how things “work” and not liberalism, which accepts the grey areas and ambiguities and works toward making life bearable.
It strikes me as convenient that a writer like Mamet, after he’s struck it rich, would come round to the wisdom of free-market philosophy. A sinking back toward conservative thought is a pretty typical kind of slide, but one expects writers to fall outside the “pretty typical” category. Interestingly, William James went the other way — he started his life conservative, and grew toward liberalism as he aged…
“A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was ‘a United Front against Bullshit.’”
— Christopher Hitchens on Robert Conquest
[...] perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism” comes from the Conversational Reading blog, which says: “On balance, I suppose that if you’re more interested in describing [...]