Comment by Bryan on Saturday, Apr 19 at 03:27 PM

I can't even fathom how high his IQ must be.

Comment by JLee on Monday, Oct 15 at 01:42 AM

Gore Vidal in a blurb compares Mamet to George Bernard Shaw which is less of a complement than a symptom how far our civilization has fallen. Mamet has, in my opinion, one singular talent--a fine ear--that he's milked as far as one pap can be milked. Otherwise he is the most popular writer possessing the least imagination. A brute with a tuned ear, he seems incapable of writing a single line of dialog approaching an epithet. Instead, we get in his "celebrated style," a character trying to say something without the character really saying anything--a fit of verbal epilepsy he calls "poetry." I think this newest batch of essays to be poison to the beginning writer. He pushes relentlessly, to knife point, Artistole's Unities and Eisenstein's Montage, and damns anyone who doesn't follow them--and him. But one wonders whether Mamet understands Aristotle was exposed only to Greek drama, which his "Poetics" dissected, and that the Italian Opera, the Japanese Noah, and the Lyrical French, have crafted all powerful and genuine works of drama that deviates far from Aristotle's maxims--and Mamet's cherished canons. One also wonders whether Mamet saw Eisenstein's latter and mature films which deviates heavily from Eisenstein's earlier theory of montage--another one of Mamet's cherished canons, never to be broken. He lambasts higher education--our second oldest institution--as entirely unnecessary, then proceeds to brag a play he wrote "entirely in iambic pentameter--a fact no one has yet perceived." And one concludes Mamet understands neither iambic pentameter nor higher eduction as the iambic was coined to meter pedestrian conversation normal in every day speech--a fact they teach you in college.