Keeping Score :: Double your pleasure

Writer Jonathan Ames' The Double Life Is Twice As Good - Essays and Fiction is out in a Scribner paperback, and Out There dove right into devouring it. The author of The Extra Man and Wake Up, Sir! has given us hours of reading pleasure, as we admire his faux-naif, neo-Wodehousian prose style.

The collection includes the piece "Bored to Death," originally published in McSweeney's, which became the basis for the HBO series, just renewed for its second season, starring humpy actor Jason Schwartzman as "Jonathan Ames." He loves white wine and pot. But that only scratches his surface.

The book's cover is a clever Photoshopping of Ames delivering an upper-right knockout jab to himself during a boxing match, illustrating "The Herring Wonder," his recounting of amateur bouts he fought under that moniker. Since OT's own grandpappy was a bantamweight prizefighter from the Lower East Side, this piece had special punch for us.

"A week before the fight, while sparring with a training partner, my nose, once again, was broken. The pain was devastating, and my face swelled up. By the next day, I had two black eyes from blood running off from my fractured nose bone. [Performance artist David] Leslie nevertheless convinced me to go through with the fight. He was producing the whole thing and had sold six hundred tickets. He said he wouldn't go for my head. A professional boxer would never fight with a broken nose, but I was a writer, so what the hell, and, too, my friend promised that he wouldn't go for my head (i.e., my nose)." You can see where this is going.

There's also a brief piece, "Why Did I Write The Alcoholic?" that addresses the genesis of Ames' graphic novel with illustrator Dean Haspiel. He describes the book as "a mixture of comedy and tragedy, kind of like an alcoholic - you start off laughing, enjoying your drinks, and then things can turn dark, which keeps in place my original idea of the cliffhanger: will the alcoholic survive?"