Knowing One's State as Fiction

My research for the screenplay is taking me far afield, I'm off course, reading a second Higgins novel that has nothing to do with gambling but which I am enjoying because the settings are towns in this state I've never gotten to know because we've never had any reason to visit them in person, so one feels surrounded by hordes of absolute strangers, so I'm finally getting to know what some of these towns are like, as fiction, but that suits me, it's better than nothing, the other rewarding aspect of the novel, Defending Billy Ryan, being the likeable attitude of the narrator, a criminal trial lawyer who says of himself, 'To this day I have no idea how I passed the bar exam.' I mean if you're reading Joyce and Proust and Beckett, why do you need to go to Framingham? I need to go back to the library and do a "gambling addiction" key word search instead of just "gambling." I tried Jack Spicer's Magazine Verses as the result of a Sorrentino recommendation in Something Said, but it was a waste of time; also glanced at poems by Zukofsky and Tate in a paperback anthology I found next to the door to a squash court years ago and this also proved to be a waste of effort.