A Reading In Bushwick That Won't Be Awful

In general, I am opposed to readings. Not reading, mind—I'm reading right now!—but readings, where a roomful of literates sit quietly and endure what may be the least interesting possible spectacle: an author murmuring aloud from his latest book. Readings go on too long, they happen in places I do not want to be, and they require me to drink more white wine than I like. For this, they are to be avoided. 

However, there are occasional exceptions. My friend Robert Norman has solved the problem of the all-too-boring reading by instituting a few informal guidelines. His readings are funny. They are always shorter than a half an hour. They tend to include beer and liquor. And there is one happening tonight in Bushwick, at the Pleasure Jail at Silent Barn. (Silly Bushwick—in my part of Brooklyn, our arts spaces have sensible names.) For what it's worth, I'll be among those reading—recounting the two times in high school that I fielded inquiries from secret admirers, without managing to ever get laid.

This is all part of one of Rob's new projects, a gorgeous little chapbook (I think that's the word for it) called Notes To Girls. He made 300 of these little beauties—an envelope filled with notes, some real and some fake, written by people...to girls. It is a charming project, and totally typical of the kinds of things he makes so well. Come on out, drink some booze, hear a few minutes of reading, and then drink some more.

Some Things Don't Need To Be Discussed

I dreamt last night that I was Walter White. Walt is not a happy person to be at this point in Breaking Bad , and my unwaking self endured the full brunt of his fear. I was Walt, hat and beard and panicky, sinister cleverness and all, racing cross-country in hiding, dodging the police by just a few steps, wondering if I had enough bullets left to settle my problems or if I would have to figure out a way to buy more without being recognized. I mention this not just to brag about how exciting my dreams are—and they are fabulous—but to point out that Breaking Bad  has become embedded not just in our collective unconscious, but in my private one too. So why don't we just shut up about it?

This is the best moment in history to be making television, and the worst to talk about it. Each week, tens of thousands of words are churned out about the hot TV topic of the moment—whether it's Breaking Bad  or Mad Men  or last season's hit drama Complaining About Mad Men —in recaps, podcasts, think pieces, and commentary shows produced by the networks themselves. Each moment of the show is picked over, retold, argued about and pondered, again and again until, by the time "Last Week On Breaking Bad " rolls around, the previous show has grown stale in our mouths. It is the single greatest act of collective, instantaneous criticism that has ever happened, and I think it's too much for one TV show to bear.

Breaking Bad  is a crime drama. This is my literary turf. I think crime dramas have endless appeal, both for their comforting repetitiveness and for the art that comes from exploiting that repetition, but I've also found that writing seriously about them is not always a good idea. In college I wrote a paper about The Killer Inside Me , Jim Thompson's most literary novels, and one of his best. Despite that book's surprising amount of literary merit, though, I found it was a tough paper to get through. Stories of suspense do not demand much intellectual underpinning, which is why I like them. But when a novel's foundation is 90% plot, the critical structure you can build on it can only get so high before it collapses, and your teacher thinks you an idiot. 

So, the best way to appreciate crime is to read it, muse on it, and let it go. Suspense television is the same way.    The plotting in Breaking Bad  is intricate and brilliant, but great plotting is rarely more than a clever trick. Delving into it for hundreds or thousands of words at a time—something practiced by traffic-hungry publications who should know better—is the critical equivalent of explaining a joke. The trolls who haunt the comment sections of these godforsaken bits of writing are even more misguided. Take the top comment on this week's Vulture recap by Matt Zoller Seitz, the gold standard in overly literal recaps. From Jake_M:

I’d like to believe that the opening sequence for episode 5.09, skaters in empty pool, the opening for the final eight episodes, is important. There are 4 persons at the pool. Two skaters performing/playing, one person videotaping the performance, and one person sitting on the edge of the empty pool, watching the performance.  

What if this is a sketch of the defining moment in Walts tragedy as he sees it. That he was reduced to be a spectator in every way to the succes of Gretchen and Elliott. That they got the succes, happiness and attention he was cheated for and believed he deserved. That their wrongdoing, in Walts mind, propelled him into all these catastrofic events in life. Then it seems probable that the ricin he is collecting is intended for G and E.

 "I'd like to believe ___________ is important" is the watchword for all those who demand too much from their TV. Of course we want to believe it's important, because otherwise, why did we waste so many hours watching it, thinking about it, dreaming about it? But TV is better when it isn't weighed down with the importance of being the only healthy area of American mass culture. Suspense shows are mostly plot, and everything else—bits of great acting, characterization, and directing—are morsels to be savored, and savored quietly. 

A year or two ago, I quit reading anything anybody wrote about Mad Men . That includes recaps, obviously, but also more pieces to which more care was paid: interviews and historical nitpickings and deep unpackings of all the little symbols that Matthew Weiner shoves wherever they will fit. My enjoyment of the show skyrocketed. As we stumble towards the finale of Breaking Bad , I suggest doing the same thing. (Right after the end of this paragraph.) It's a beautifully constructed piece of television. Turn down the outside noise, and you might actually be able to hear it.

I Am A Writer And Here Are Things That I Wrote

Did you know I am a professional writer? That's right. I type up words—words just like these—and then I put them in a special, top secret order, and mail them off to companies who pay me for them. Truly, it is a wacky life.​

Lately I have been so busy writing things professionally that I haven't had time to tell you about them on this, my blog. Allow me to catch you up, in reverse chronological order, because we writers are saucy like that.​

First, I reviewed Here Lies Love​ for Howlround​, a wonderful website whose name is hard to say out loud. (It's not quite The Rural Juror​, but it's a toughie.) If you click on that link, you can see a picture of me wearing a cat. I talked about this play a bit after I saw it, and what it was like to dance next to David Byrne, but now you can see my fully-fleshed-out critical whatnots. Here is a sample:

Eight drumbeats thud out, a martial pulse that sounds suspiciously like the famous opening bass line to a Talking Heads classic. Two lovers march towards each other through the crowd, and the audience wonders—“They’re not covering ‘Psycho Killer,’ are they? They wouldn't dare!” And then the lovers kiss, the room explodes in disco, and “Psycho Killer” is a distant memory.

Until that moment, I was wondering if David Byrne was the only reason anyone had come to Here Lies Love, the former Talking Head’s new musical, which plays at the Public Theater through June 2. In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

​Pretty good, eh? If you like that, you'll love this article I wrote for the Observer​ about Europa Editions, a scrappy independent publisher whose new line of World Noir makes me so happy I could just sneeze. Seriously, I read almost nothing but crime fiction, and these guys have got the goods.

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests,Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. The city loved him for it, and when he died in 2000, Marseilles’s bookstores closed their doors and filled their shop windows with Mr. Izzo’s pioneering novels.

​Pretty heavy stuff? So heavy that maybe you'd like to read something about sports? Or, since this article is on The Classical, perhaps I should say sporps. I write about the proposed Flushing Meadows MLS stadium, and why handing it over to one of English soccer's many billionaires is a totally unfun idea.

This is the dead period in the English Premier League. The title race ended weeks ago, with Manchester United claiming their eleventy-millionth championship in honor of retiring rage-legend Sir Alex Ferguson. At the end, there was nothing left to wonder about but whether or not Wigan Athletic will escape relegation. Coming as it does with the start of spring, this annual tepid period carries a pleasant taste of the English countryside—village greens and quiet pubs and all the other stuff Ray Davies just couldn't get out of his system. But for Manchester City, who will finish second this year, it is a time of seething discontent.

Last May, the blue half of Manchester won its first title since 1966, in five minutes of madness that made the madcap end to the 2011 baseball season look contrived. (Relive it here, accompanied for good or ill by the musical stylings of The Verve.) Manchester City won the FA Cup the year before, and will try for it again this weekend, taking on hard-luck Wigan in a match as well balanced as Goliath vs. David’s asthmatic younger brother. With all their recent success, the placid American fan would expect them to be happy. “You can’t win them all,” we tell them, naively. But if City loses on Saturday, a dapper gent named Roberto Mancini will probably be out of a job. The Premier League is no place for sentiment.

And in a league where a bad season is rewarded with relegation, there is no such thing as rebuilding. (Jeff Fisher, for instance, would not have lasted in England.) Sheikh Mansour, City’s doe-eyed billionaire owner, has dumped nearly half-a-billion pounds into the club, and has no interest in passing a springtime afternoon over a pint of bitter, wistfully crooning, “Wait ‘till next year.” The Premier League system is a mad one, driven by greed unheard of in American sports. So it is maybe or maybe not a good thing that it appears to be on its way to Flushing.

​What's that? You want more? Well I just remembered that I never linked to my Richard Foreman profile on here. Lordy, have I been slacking. It's got a pretty good lede:

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?”

The actors offered more suggestions—“blind rage,” “mad rage” “octopus rage”—but their director’s attention had shifted to the lightboard. As the actors waited, he conferred with his staff of 10—some Public employees, some interns—flipping through light cues and eventually casting the theater into darkness. By the time the lights were sorted, and he had settled on “incalculable rage … Rage!” it was time to break for lunch.

Five Decades On, "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" Is Still The Best Chronicle Of History's Worst Team

​The nice thing about writing for a weekly paper is that your work is featured for more than the Internet's customary fifteen seconds. Since last Wednesday, I've been smiling about the fact that the twenty or thirty people silly enough to buy a copy of the New York Observer​ at the newsstand held in their hands a few hundred words I wrote about my greatest affliction: the New York Mets. Specifically, a few hundred words abou​t Jimmy Breslin's Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?​, a slim, bracing story of the Mets' 120 loss first season. It came out five decades ago this week, and remains (I assert) a must-read, not just for Mets fans, but for anybody who's ever failed at anything. A sample:

In the summer of 1962, New York fell in love with a man named Marvin Throneberry. A subpar first baseman who had washed out with the Yankees, he was sliding toward early retirement when he was rescued by the fledgling New York Mets. As thanks, he played worse than ever before—once getting called out on a triple for failing to step on first andsecond base—but each time “Marvelous” Marv came to the plate, the city chanted: “cranberry, strawberry, we love Throneberry!”

It was a third-rate chant for a third-rate player, but in the Mets’ first season, it didn’t take much to make the fans cheer. The team was on its way to 120 losses—a baseball record that stands to this day—but with the Dodgers and Giants five years gone, New York was desperate for something to scream about. Throneberry’s Mets were more than lovable losers—they were spectacular. “Name one loyal American,” writes Jimmy Breslin, in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (Ivan R. Dee, 128 pp., $12.95) “who can say he does not love a team which loses 120 games in one season.” Published 50 years ago this week, this beautiful little book remains the ur-text for Metsian blundering. Here is the franchise’s origin story, writ in Mr. Breslin’s trademark barroom prose and cast with enough devils, heroes and clowns to fill out a pantomime of Faust. They are gamblers, toughs and crusty baseball lifers whom Mr. Breslin rallies in opposition to “the era of the businessman in sports,” when America’s postwar success led to a “dry and agonizing” focus on the bottom line.

Even in 1963, Mr. Breslin’s style was a throwback, a nostalgic echo of sportswriters who were chomping cigars and torturing metaphors before he was born. His New York is deliberately larger-than-life, as though he is trying to mold the modern city into a Damon Runyon story, and his prose is sweet enough to make the ’62 debacle an American epic.

There's a whole lot more, and I'm pretty pleased with it.​ Check it out if you have the time. And if you don't, take in this anecdote about Babe Ruth. It's my favorite from the book, but because it has nothing to do with the Mets, I couldn't let myself force it in. Here it is, reprinted in full:

In fact, in eighteen years of being able to look at things and remember what I have seen, the only sports legend I ever saw who completely lived up to advance billing was Babe Ruth.

It was a hot summer afternoon, and the Babe, sweat dripping from his jowls and his shirt stuck to him, came off the eighteenth green at the old Bayside Golf Club in the borough of Queens and stormed into the huge barroom of the club.

"Gimme one of them heavens to Betsy drinks you always make me," the Babe said in his gravelly voice. 

The bartender put a couple of fistfuls of ice chunks into a big, thick mixing glass and then proceeded to make a Tom Collins that had so much gin in it that the other people at the bar started to laugh. He served the drink to the Babe just as it was made, right in the mixing glass.

Ruth said something about how heavens to Betsy hot he was, and then he picked up the glass and opened his mouth, and there went everything. In one shot he swallowed the drink, the orange slice and the rest of the garbage, and the ice chunks too. He stopped for nothing. There is not a single man I have ever seen in a saloon who does not bring his teeth together a little bit and stop those ice chunks going in. A man has to have a pipe the size of a trombone to take ice in one shot. But I saw Ruth do it, and whenever somebody tells me about how the Babe used to drink and eat when he was playing ball, I believe every word of it.

​Yes—I've already printed that once before. But it's my blog.

Staying Up Late With F. Scott Fitzgerald

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​Truly, I have never met a Princetonian who didn't appear to need a good kick in the teeth.

There was an excellent article in last week's New Yorker​ about a nauseating new fad: the memoir of failure. The piece is hidden behind the paywall, sadly, but it's an overview of four or five books written in the last decade by novelists who responded to failure by devoting their literary talents to the ancient art of self-pity. They launched themselves into self-destruction like it's what they had been dreaming of all along, developing substance abuse problems, alienating their families, and sometimes turning on the novel altogether. The memoir is a form that lends itself to self-indulgence, and this takes that to a whole new level—self-flagellating in a last, desperate attempt to impress the crowd, and finding an audience of people eager to gawk at your grotesquerie. Blech, amirite?

For a day or two, these hacks had me worried that, if dealt a creative setback or two, I might sink to their level. Then I realized I have a secret weapon in reserve, one that should keep me from ever fetishizing my own failure: I'm not a total chump. Funny how that can come in handy, right?​

None of that matters, really, except to explain why I was thinking about The Crack Up​, a sort of ur-text for the literature of failure, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the period between his literary success and his Hollywood failure. Charmed by a sexy cover, I picked up The Crack Up​ years ago, but never took it down from my bookshelf until the New Yorker​ story stoked my creative fear. Unable to sleep last night, I started reading the accompanying essays, which included heartbreaking meditations on Fitzgerald's lost New York, and tiresome humor pieces co-written by Zelda Fitzgerald. All in all, good reading.

Fitzgerald's prose is so lush, and the world he conjures up is so inviting, that it's natural to want to pretend you belong. Yes, Scott, I do miss the feeling of awe and inspiration that New York gave me once. Yes, Scott, I do think jazz is nifty. Yes, Scott, I do think I would like a cocktail. As soon as you try to join your yoke to his, you find how hard it is to keep up. Well no, Scott, I've never gotten tired of the Riviera. No, Scott, I've never tossed off a Broadway play just for the paycheck. No, Scott, I don't spend most weeknights staying out past dawn. For Christ's sake, Scott, I have a real fucking job!​

In one of the essays, he mentions that he and Zelda burned through $400,000 during the '20s—roughly $5 million in boring old 2013 money. And that's why it's impossible to relate to the guy. I may have similarly complex ideas about love, art, and New York City—but I don't have the cash to explore them day and night. He was living in a Bertie Wooster world, and I live in Lena Dunham's. Sheesh. 

This was all seemed quite complicated to my sleep-deprived, four a.m. mind. And then I stumbled upon something that made all my prickly thoughts go away. In "Sleeping and Waking," Fitzgerald writes about insomnia, bridging our divide in an instant. He writes of the moment that "those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two," dividing into "the 'first sweet sleep of night' and the last deep sleep of morning," and separated by "a sinister, ever widening interval." This is an experience I've been enjoying since high school. As long as I don't have to get up in the morning, a few hours' wakefulness in the middle of the night is just an inconvenience. But if it's caused my mosquito, he and I will both lose our minds.

For two or three New York summers, I had an air conditioner specially designed to let mosquitos in from the outside. I became highly sensitive to their bite, and would wake just a few second after they had finished dining on me, aware that I had a visitor in the room but clueless as to where he was. Knowing that I would not be able to fall back asleep until the tormenter was dead, dead, dead, I would turn on the light, perch on my bed, and go hunting—either with a rolled up towel or that day's New York Times​. Repeat this three or four times a week, or until your girlfriend becomes so angry that she purchases a mosquito net. Fitzgerald's had only one such bout with mosquitodom, but it was no less dramatic:

It is astonishing how much worse one mosquito can be than a swarm. A swarm can be prepared against, but one mosquito takes on a personality—a hatefulness, a sinister quality of the struggle to the death. This personality appeared all by himself in September on the twentieth floor of a New York hotel, as out of place as an armadillo. He was the result of New Jersey’s decreased appropriation for swamp drainage, which had sent him and other younger sons into neighboring states for food.

The night was warm—but after the first encounter, the vague slappings of the air, the futile searches, the punishment of my own ears a split second too late, I followed the ancient formula and drew the sheet over my head.

And so there continued the old story, the bitings through the sheet, the sniping of exposed sections of hand holding the sheet in place, the pulling up of the blanket with ensuing suffocation—followed by the psychological change of attitude, increasing wakefulness, wild impotent anger—finally a second hunt.

This inaugurated the maniacal phase—the crawl under the bed with the standing lamp for torch, the tour of the room with final detection of the insect’s retreat on the ceiling and attack with knotted towels, the wounding of oneself—my God!

— After that there was a short convalescence that my opponent seemed aware of, for he perched insolently beside my head—but I missed again.

At last, after another half hour that whipped the nerves into a frantic state of alertness came the Pyrrhic victory, and the small mangled spot of blood, my blood, on the headboard of the bed.

​Since that night, his sleep became fragile. (Being a confirmed alcoholic probably didn't help.) Mine is fragile too, but I don't mind it. Awake in the middle of the night, I get to read neat stuff by neat dudes like F. Scott Fitzgerald. No matter how different he and I are, I can imagine us meeting in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and sharing war stories about killing mosquitos.

When James Met Nora: An Eight Paragraph Love Story

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​Posts about James Joyce are to be illustrated only with this picture.

Like all recovering English majors, I've always been mesmerized by June 16, 1904. The date on which Ulysses​ takes place, it is also the day that James Joyce's first date with his beloved—the wonderfully named Galway maiden, Nora Barnacle. It's easy to picture James and Nora strolling by the River Liffey, punning and thinking about Hamlet​.

But as described in this lovely excerpt from Richard Ellman's biography—which I found, for some reason, on this nifty blog—James and Nora's meeting was much more ordinary, and all the sweeter for it.

The experience of love was almost new to [Joyce] in fact, though he had often considered it in imagination. A transitory interest in his cousin Katsy Murray had been followed by the stronger, but unexpressed and unrequited, interest in Mary Sheehy. He shocked Stanlislaus [Joyce's brother] a little by quoting with approval a remark of a Dublin wit, ‘Woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month and parturiates once a year.’ Yet tenderness was as natural to him as coarseness, and secretly he dreamed of falling in love with someone he did not know, a gentle lady, the flower of many generations, to whom he should speak in the ceremonious accents of Chamber Music.

Instead, on June 10, 1904, Joyce was walking down Nassau Street in Dublin when he caught sight of a tall, good-looking young woman, auburn-haired, walking with a proud stride. When he spoke to her she answered pertly enough to allow the conversation to continue. She took him, with his yachting cap, for a sailor, and from his blue eyes thought for a moment he might be Swedish.

Joyce found she was employed at Finn’s Hotel, a slightly exalted rooming house, and her lilting speech confessed that she was from Galway City. She had been born there, to parents who lived in Sullivan’s Lane, on March 21, 1884. Her name was a little comic, Nora Barnacle, but this too might be an omen of felicitous adhesion. (As Joyce’s father was to say when he heard much later her last name was Barnacle, ‘She’ll never leave him.’) After some talk it was agreed they should meet in front of Sir William Wilde’s house at the turning of Merrion Square on June 14. But Nora Barnacle failed to appear, and Joyce sent her a note in some dejection:

60 Shelbourne Road

I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me — if you have not forgotten me!

—James A. Joyce 15 June 1904

The appointment was made, and for the evening of June 16, when they went walking at Ringsend, and then arranged to meet again.

To set Ulysses on this date was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a recognition of the determining effect upon his life of his attachment to her. On June 16, as he would afterwards realize, he entered into relation with the world around him and left behind him the loneliness he had felt since his mother’s death. He would tell her later, “You made me a man.” June 16 was the sacred day that divided Stephen Dedalus, the insurgent youth, from Leopold Bloom, the complaisant husband.

​Joyce's work is weighed down with so much critical blather, but at heart, he was a man with a sense of humor. How nice to see him being happy. 

On a related note, would it be too too cute to name a character in something Nora Barnacle? It's such an unbelievably wonderful name—I want to hear it every day.​

Dammit, Maisie Dobbs, You Let Me Down Again

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Few pieces of art stay mindblowing for long. A great TV show is only red hot for a season or two. ​A favorite band releases dud albums. Most novels sag in the middle; most great movies let us down in the end. And a play that's brilliant one night may be flabby the next. It's no surprise. Brilliance is a passing thing.

We live in an era of media glut. Hollywood may be making less movies than ever before, and the major publishing houses may be spewing out less fiction, but music, TV and small-scale theater is as fertile as a farmer's daughter in the springtime. (I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but it's an appealingly filthy image.) This means we don't have to be satisfied with anything less than brilliant entertainment. Once a piece of amusement becomes less than perfectly satisfying, we can discard it, and move on to something else, like a bored Roman emperor ordering a pair of gladiators killed so he can skip ahead to the next fight.

It's hedonistic. It's fun.​​ And there's nothing sadder than having to move on to the next thing.

There is an acute sense of disappointment tha comes when we realize that, shit, this thing I like isn't perfect any more. I've written about it before as regards television, and this weekend I encountered it again, this time in print.

I'm in a dry stretch as far as fiction goes. My preferred vice is crime fiction, and aside from the relentless pleasure that comes from reading Ed McBain, I haven't read anything truly wonderful since I picked up Larry Block's When The Sacred Ginmill Closes​ last summer. This is partly a problem of genre. A devotee of a form that lends itself to formula can hardly be surprised when he goes months or years without stumbling over something original. But I'm not looking for a reinvention of the form. All I wanted was something well-written, amusing and fresh—something that didn't have to do with serial killers.

(As an aside, is there anything less interesting than a serial killer? I can enjoy it once in a while, but in general, they're just crackpots. Crazy people do crazy shit. Where's the fun in that? Stories about serial killers aren't even really murder mysteries—they're butchery, and it makes me yawn.)​

​On vacation this weekend, a book called Maisie Dobbs​ caught my eye. A mystery starring a plucky young woman in 1920's London, whose only weapon is keen observation and an empathetic sense forged in the trenches of World War I France? Might it possibly be a real detective novel, and not a suffocating cozy mystery? The praise quote on the front—from the New York Times​, no less!—told me to "be prepared to be astonished." I decided to take the chance.

I'm coming quite late to this party. The first in a ten book (so far) series, Maisie Dobbs​ was published in 2003. Lots of people have heard of, read and loved this series—as my bookseller informed me, it's her mother in law's favorite. If Jacqueline Winspear's work had passed me by, it's just because I make a habit of avoiding mystery novels written by people with names like Jacqueline Winspear, for fear that I might be wandering into another Agatha Christie trap. 

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate cozy mysteries?​

But Maisie Dobbs​ is no cozy, and it charmed me immediately. The hero is plucky, but not insufferably so—a battle-scarred nurse who has put every shilling she has into a detective agency, and spends much of the book's first hundred pages pinching pennies. (I like my detectives realistically broke. Every PI novel starts with a complaint about how little work the snoop is getting, and yet he never has trouble paying for his car, women, or booze.) Her first investigation is peppered with hints of a traumatic past—hints that make us interested in Maisie without slowing down the action. The book is quiet, mannered and grim, and I found myself getting my hopes up. "This is brilliant," I thought, "and there are nine more in the series!" And then, around the hundred page mark, the narrative comes to a howling halt.

As if not confident that her heroine was holding our attention, Winspear decides to dive into young Maisie's origin story, leaping back to the day of her mother's death, some decades before. Maisie is taken into service by a kindly, progressive London Lady, and what follows is chapter upon chapter of wheezing Upstairs, Downstairs​ action that is as deflating as one of the more predictable storylines in Downton Abbey. ​What was fresh turns sour, and the pages of my attractive little Penguin edition, I find, begin to turn much more slowly.

It was around the third chapter in Lady Rowan's London house that I began to feel it creeping in. Disappointment had returned. I'm still going to finish Maisie Dobbs​, and if the ending is more Sherlock​ than Downton​, I'll probably pick up the sequel, in hopes that it avoids dallying around the Christie-fied manner house that I loathe so much. But the balloon is popped. This isn't going to be My New Favorite Thing. I'll have to move on to the next bit of culture.​

Help Me! Help Me Read More Plays!

I have a dirty secret. I'm a playwright. I write about theater. I like to watch theater. I like to talk about theater. I sometimes even have very tedious dreams about theater. But I don't read a lot of plays. And by that I mean, I never read plays.

I used to have all sorts of rationalizations about this, but the real explanations are simple. Plays are among the least exciting things to read. There are a few authors whose work leaps off the page—Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, Tennessee Williams, Martin McDonagh—but if a playwright isn't highly verbal, his writing can sag in print. If you're not in the mood to act it out, at least in your head, even a great play can put you straight to sleep.

And it can be hard to find great plays in print. Unless you're in a bookstore that specializes in carrying them, the drama section can be depressingly understocked. I don't need to buy another copy of Chekhov's plays, or the best of Eugene O'Neill. I'd like to buy something written in the last three decades by someone besides Tony Kushner, and I would like to pay less than $10 a play to do it. That can be a tricky thing to arrange.

But none of that is an excuse! I'm a playwright, dammit. I only have time to go see so many new plays—the ones that I can't see, I should read. There are plenty of classics I'm not familiar with—famous and less famous—that I need to cram into my mind-bucket. It will make my work better. It will make me sound smarter. It will make me a happier theater-dude, which is the kind of happy dude I want to be. 

Since January is the season of sweeping declarations of self-improvement, I have decided to start reading a play a week. That's not really that much, but I know myself. Trying to read a play a day would be rather overshooting the mark. If by the end of this year I've read 52 plays by people not named W.M. Akers, that's about 50 more than I read in 2012. To keep me on task—and to make sure I get something out of the plays, instead of just napping through them—I'll make a weekly feature out of it, writing about whatever I learned or failed to learn from whatever I've just read. I think that would be not-boring, and I think you might enjoy it.

But if I'm gonna do all that work to entertain you—for free, mind!—I'm going to need some help. After all, it's about time you started pulling your weight around here. You see, I have a bookshelf problem. My girlfriend and I own quite a lot of books, and every shelf in the house is full to overflowing. We're stacking them on the floor now—something I thought I had put behind me when I graduated from college. While I like the way that this gives our apartment the look of a Woody Allen movie, it means that if I announced that I was planning on buying a whole bunch of new books, she would hit me on the head with a spoon.

So, as much as is possible, I would like to read plays for free or electronically. I see that Samuel French has started offering e-books—are they any good? Although I do a lot of work for an e-book publishing company, I've always resisted buying a Kindle. This might be a reason to do so. If you know of any bookstores with a good supply of used plays, tell me and I'll go. Or—and imagine I'm whispering now—if you have an electronic copy of a play you'd like to share, email me and I'll read it.

For now, I'm going to see what they've got at my local library. That's right, baby. I've got a library card, and I'm not afraid to use it. That will get me through a few weeks, but I have a hunch it will quickly run dry. So please—post in the comments, email me, or tweet at me and tell me what to read. I've got no standards. Reading at all would be more than I'm reading now.

Babe Ruth's "Heavens to Betsy drink"

Awake at five o'clock this morning and unable to fall back asleep, I found that thinking about the play I'm working on provided more stress than it was worth. To help ease my way into drowsiness, I turned my mind to placid, tedious baseball. Emerald grass. The sweet crack of the bat. Other cliches.

But sleep did not come, because I made the mistake of thinking about the Mets. I won't bother you with the details, but let's just say that they are in deep shit. Because they can't afford to field a competitive team, the owners should be forced to sell the franchise. But Fred and Jeff Wilpon are best budsies with commissioner Bud Selig, and will never be forced to let their baby go. Oh well.

This is not great stuff to sing oneself to sleep with, so I turned my thoughts to the past. There is no finer bit of classic Mets lore than Jimmy Breslin's Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?, a slim, brutally funny look at the Mets' spectacularly bad inaugural season. The team was much worse than it is now, but the future was much, much brighter. 

Continuing my thoughts from yesterday's post about the forthcoming Yankee stage play, I typed up one of my favorite passages from the book, when Breslin relates the most spectacular thing he ever saw Babe Ruth do. Read it. Breslin's just like me, but he's a better reporter. Also a better writer. And he's tougher. And he knows more dangerous people. Also he's not actually a baseball fan—he just happens to write about it brilliantly. Basically, we're the same guy.

In fact, in eighteen years of being able to look at things and remember what I have seen, the only sports legend I ever saw who completely lived up to advance billing was Babe Ruth.

It was a hot summer afternoon, and the Babe, sweat dripping from his jowls and his shirt stuck to him, came off the eighteenth green at the old Bayside Golf Club in the borough of Queens and stormed into the huge barroom of the club.

"Gimme one of them heavens to Betsy drinks you always make for me," the Babe said in his gravelly voice.

The bartender put a couple of fistfuls of ice chunks into a big, thick mixing glass and then proceeded to make a Tom Collins that had so much gin in it that the other people at the bar started to laugh. He served the drink to the Babe just as it was made, right in the mixing glass.

Ruth said something about how heavens to Betsy hot he was, and then he picked up the glass and opened his mouth, and there went everything. In one shot he swallowed the drink, the orange slice and the rest of the garbage, and the ice chunks too. He stopped for nothing. There is not a single man I have ever seen in a saloon who does not bring his teeth together a little bit and stop those ice chunks from going in. A man has to have a pipe the size of a trombone to take ice in one shot. But I saw Ruth do it, and whenever somebody tells me about how the Babe used to drink and eat when he was playing ball, I believe every word of it.

Otherwise, most legends should be regarded with suspicion.

See, that's how you open a fucking play.

Now Is Your Chance To Think About James Bond

Continuing my tradition of breaking news harder than any other typist in New York City, I have cracked open an early candidate for scoop of the year.

Spy books are awesome.

Zero Dark Thirty goes into wide release next week, and viewers across the country can expect something that has been lacking from this year’s Oscar season: a movie with some meat on its bones. In terms of running time, that’s a bad thing. No movie has any right to be 160 minutes long. But in terms of storytelling, it’s a positive. This is a war movie that doesn’t hold your hand. Its first two hours are obsessed with the grit of intelligence gathering, and shot through with lingo that will be incomprehensible to all but the most devoted viewers of Homeland. But even when it’s difficult to follow, the film has two things that carry the viewer through: a strong central character, and a touch of authenticity that is, in espionage thrillers, impossible to do without.

Nobody else is telling espionage stories this compelling. For its feverish, brilliant first season, Homeland had this. But by the end of season two, the tension was gone, and the authenticity followed soon after. Skyfall was as gritty as any James Bond film since The Living Daylights, but the villain’s absurd plan meant that it was, when the credits rolled, just a very good Bond movie. For those who like their spies cold, their villains believable, and their armories gadget-free, may I suggest turning to the golden age of espionage: the Cold War.

If you are positively nauseous with boredom, here are three books that can help.