It is ... essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic--i.e., non-quantifiable. Peace With Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride--these are the stuff of pageant. They are not social goals; they are, as Alfred Hitchcock told us, the MacGuffin.... The less specific the qualities of the MacGuffin are, the more interested the audience will be.... A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.

Although occasionally academic, the overall tone of the lectures is consistent with Mamet's no-nonsense manner of speech. He has no time for obfuscation and little time for repetition, save when he must absolutely employ it for emphasis. He is passionate about good theater, and passionate about the truth. 3 Uses of the Knife makes an excellent companion piece to his True and False, which addressed similar philosophical matters in the form of advice on the actor's craft.

But to me -- it was all too worth it.

David Mamet is all at once a very clear writer and a very mysterious writer. Critics of this particular book mainly see fault in its "seeming" lack of clarity -- Mamet has the intellect of an academic but does not feel that he should write like a dry academic because ACADEMIC PAPERS ARE BORING -- right? At least, I think so.

Three Uses of The Knife -- I've read it about 30 times, I've underlined my favorite parts, and the dust jacket is falling to shreds. When I had Mamet sign it at a book reading he gave me this confused look because everyone had a brand-new book (it was South of the Northeast Kingdom) and I had this tattered one. I had to have that book signed because that book is really awesome and means a lot to me (it taught me alot).

Wether you love it or hate it you have to appriciate it. Mamet's genius is undeniable, and the confidence he enbues in his writing is unforgettable.

The reader doesn't get any help to piece it all together. Eventually, you might suspect Mamet has something to say about the "three acts" of theatre (no other dramatic structures apparently exist). Mamet dips here and there into the function of drama, his bold thesis being that theatre is magic. Theatre, he declares, is a place of wonder, and no place for popular entertainment or politics. We are to walk out of theatres with "cleansing awe", knowing we are "sinful and worthless".

Mamet never considers any ideas apart from his own. He draws heavily on the Old Testament and a primer on Freud for back-up, but no theatre theorists ever get a mention - apart from Brecht, with a single word, namely: "problematic".

Most of "Three Uses" is actually nothing to do with theatre. It's an outpouring of quotables about statesmanship, the "Information Age", the psychology of the masses, the causes of gambling ... all argued with arrogant inconsistency: Mamet rails against "centralisation by the body politic", and then derides all manner of extremism; he argues against "avant garde nonsense" with absurd phrases like "In endorsing a blank canvas, or the Domino Theory, the individual becomes like a King Canute". For Mamet, "good art" is no more than The Bible, Shakespeare and Bach, plus an American work - "Death of a Salesman", of course. There are no surprises in the ideas, however much they're dressed to impress with showy associations and stiff fundamentalism. Too bad that the result is more like a freshman's freewheeling weblog on "life", than anything from the likes of Brook or Grotowski on "the theatre". American critics equating it with such works is no more than chauvinism.

One use of the knife Mamet forgot was editing. Then he might have been able to communicate something useful here - into 3 or 4 pages. But there's no holding back the primary process exhibitionist. You have to get out the knife and do the editing yourself.

Oh, yes, the knife. Nice title, and it's the substance of a few lines near the end, which Mamet cares - and seems only able - to explain by offering more curly metaphor: "the knife is the dramatist's bass line". Meaning? Dramatists are misanthropes who basically want to kill their audiences? Who knows, but the meandering content and grandiose style of this work sure suggests Mamet's fundamental contempt for the reader.