Synecdoche, New York

    Nowadays, a celebrity-turned-director is enough to make me cringe. A red flag pops up. Okay, I think, this is going to be a piece of you-know-what.      But there’s an exception to every rule.      Charlie Kaufman has become a writing tour de force in cinema for his bizarre, intricately woven stories that take everything you thought you knew about reality and linear plot lines, and smacks it upside the head. He destroys conventions, invents new ones, blatantly disregards reality, and somehow ends it all with a surprisingly poignant examination of love, humanity, and all that other junk filling the corners of this tragicomedy called life.      The first film that really shot Kaufman into the public eye – a considerably rare feat for screenwriters – was 1999’s fantastic and imaginative Being John Malkovich, directed by fellow cinematic absurdist, Spike Jonze. In 2002, the film Adaptation – also directed by Jonze – won him a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay, and in 2004 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the wildly hip and successful mis-fitted story of memory, mistakes, and love, gained him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.       But Kaufman steps into the director’s shoes, with his film Synecdoche, New York, a film Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers called “exhilarating and exasperating in equal doses” and “something you don’t find at multiplexes overrun with Chihuahuas and violent escapism… Kaufman,” he says, “wants to prove that intellectual ambition isn’t dead at the movies. Godspeed.”       Anyone who has seen previous Kaufman films – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Human Nature – knows the chaos of the Kaufman diegetic. Synecdoche is no different. The film chronicles the life and various incredibly unfortunate events of the wildly depressed, indisputably pathetic Caden Cotard. After his wife and daughter leave on a trip and never come back, becoming an outrageously celebrated artist in Berlin and a tattooed ten-year-old girl – respectively – Cotard’s hypochondria and maniacal obsession with a new idea for a play spins into a more and more twisted mass of bitter memories, pitiful insecurities, and burning shames.       Cotard’s play, which is a reflection of Kaufman’s penchant for sardonic metafiction, attempts to be an imitation of the ‘real’ Schenectady, New York. He aims to have an actor for every person, acting out exactly what every person in Schenectady is doing – hence the ‘synecdoche’ of the title, a literary device that is a small part representing the whole.       Synecdoche is long – that much is true. It’s long, depressing, and has no characters you’d want to be, admire, or even probably hang out with, but with Kaufman it is not about the catharsis of the happy ending, but the craft and art of his writing. His masterful use of symbolism, and manipulation of time and events creates an underlying layer of meaning and depth that makes this one of the most intense, poignant, and complex films this generation has ever seen. There are times when you squirm, when the film seems like it will never end, and when you want to close your eyes with embarrassment and disgust for the characters; just like, incidentally, reality. But within Kaufman’s tragicomedy debut film is truth at its most sour-sweet – a true representation of the disappointments of life, the patheticness of man, and the disappointment, the failures, the sorrows, that occur when it all ends – not with that proverbial bang; but with a decidedly dissatisfied whimper.

Laura Lippman

This spring, Laura Lippman spoke at the Library. In preparation, I read most of her books, and really enjoyed them. They’re mysteries, which is a genre I love. (Though in some ways they grow increasingly serious, and I think could be appreciated by a non-mystery fan.) Her first is Baltimore Blues. I think that my favorite was The Sugar House, but it’s hard to pick one. Snell Library has most of her books, including her latest, Life Sentences, which she discussed when she spoke in March:  

Recommendations

As far as blog posts go, this is most likely my last for a while. I will not be around in the summer or fall of this year. In the spring of 2009, I should be back at work. Provided that this blog is still operational, I will be back to posting then. I will continue to post on the Facebook page and continue to leave comments. This is my opening disclaimer for this post.

I have decided to make this a comment–oriented post. There are numerous books that I want to read in the upcoming months, but it seems that I can never get around to them. Sometimes I feel that I am being too ambitious and trying to read books that are too weighty for this time in my life, when I have a lot of things going on. But I think I will get around to reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I have heard generally good things about this book, and it seems to be very popular for a work of ‘literary fiction.’ It has been made in to a movie starring Viggo Mortensen that will premiere at Cannes in May. Before I see that film I will try to read this book and try not to picture Viggo Mortensen as the main character. Perhaps this will add another dimension of difficulty to the book.

I also want to get around to reading, at least partly, some of Pauline Kael’s writings in her various collections of Film Criticism. Trash, Art and the Movies is her most famous essay; I don’t think I’ve ever gotten around to reading all thirty-something pages. I would like to read The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane, where she argues that Orson Welles deserves more credit than is necessary for revolutionizing cinema with Citizen Kane, and even in the creation of certain aspects of the movie itself. I have read with interest other writings by Pauline Kael that I’ve read (what fan of movies hasn’t?) and feel the need to dig in to more.

But I need some recommendations as well. What are other good books that Snell Library has which are worth reading? What about movies? What is a good summer read. i.e something that is sort of silly but interesting? I still have two and a half more months in Boston (before I go to New York for a spell) and still need to spend some time in the Snell stacks.

Hole in My Life

I would heartily recommend Jack Ganto’s memoir Hole in my Life as a good read for anytime at all. The main reason that I believe it could be read at anytime (and by anybody, whatever your overall reading habits are) is that it is one of the simpler and more economical books that I’ve ever read, making it easy to get through in about three days–the length it took me. The book follows the young Jack Gantos, and his struggles to become a writer, which turn out to be rather more drastic than the ordinary struggles of aspiring writers. While working for his father’s construction company down in St. Croix in the early seventies– at that time run amok with race-riots and crime– Gantos is offered a job on a sailing boat by one of his father’s shadier customers. The nature of the job is to deliver two thousand pounds of hash buried on a nearby island to New York, where Gantos would then recieve ten thousand dollars for his services. Gantos immediately accepts the job because of the money, which he plans to use to pay his college tuition. He also thinks that getting wild life experience of any kind is the key to becoming a great writer, and so he largely overlooks the simple fact that what he is doing is seriously illegal. From that point on, he sails with the captain, a prickly english drug-smuggler named Hamilton, up to New York, everything going smoothly up until and after arrival. But then, Gantos and his companions start to notice a car that has been following them while they are driving back from upstate New York. Then, they hear that their boat was searched one night while they were gone. It all culminates in the FBI busting in on them at their Chelsea hotel and arresting Hamilton. Gantos, ever the one for adventure, briefly escapes, but is soon forced to turn himself over to the FBI, as they have at least as much information on him as they did on his partners and informed his family about all his activities. Gantos is sentenced to an uncertain amount of time in a federal prison; anywhere between sixty days and six years. He begins serving time in the truly ugly world prison racked with guilt, fear and regret. I came about this book myself in a somewhat unusual way; one of my professors, who vaguely knows the author from her job at Emerson, bought me the book as an end of the semester present, saying that she thought I would enjoy it. (I was not an exception in the class; every one recieved a book). I  started reading it that same day and finished it some fifteen minutes ago as of this writing. Gantos actually has a background in mostly children’s literature, and while this book is certainly not for children, this background comes through in the writing. Everything is stated in a matter-of-a-fact, unsensational way, the vocabulary is simple and straightforward and Gantos portrays himself in a way that anybody else could emotionally relate to, even though some of the early chapters reveal a predilection towards recklessness that do make him a unique and worrisome character. What Gantos goes through is far more painful than what the average idealist in their early twenties has to go through and if anything, will leave you telling yourself ‘I will never, ever go to prison.’ At the same time, I was sometimes faced with the strange envy that I haven’t had quite this interesting a life; that is, the same envy Gantos felt about other writers, leading him to make such a massive mistake. But this is an emotion that evaporates for Gantos while he is in prison. The book is ultimately reassuring. As he writes in one passage; ‘Prison may have been serious, but from within it, looking out my cell window, I knew life outside prison was more interesting.’

Publishing Datasets (warning: geek content!)

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation) has released a white paper with the refreshingly jargon-free title, “We need publishing standards for datasets and data tables” (.pdf). (http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/603233448430). Some of the paper talks about publishing issues, especially the options for OECD participation in CrossRef’s doi system and the challenges with that compared to publishing e-journal articles (primarily the dynamic nature of many datasets, compared to the static nature of e-journal articles). For all you metadata geeks out there, there is a section with a proposed metadata set for data. It is pretty bare-bones, kind of on a par with simple Dublin Core for online and digital information. It accommodates parent-child relationships (for example, a table linked to its parent dataset, linked in turn to its parent collection of datasets).  That seemed to be important to OECD. There was a field called “variable index” I was wondering if that would be something like the metadata in Lexis-Nexis Statistical, which allows you to search or browse by data breakdowns such as geographic region (e.g. “by country” “by city”),  demographics (e.g. “by age” “by ethnicity” “by educational attainment”) or economic (e.g. “by industry” “by occupation”).   That is really, really useful. There is also the suggestion to use a thesaurus of controlled key terms to describe datasets, the one suggested is called “JEL” but it’s not spelled out anywhere.  Is that the “Journal of Economic Literature” thesaurus?  Is that a common one to use if you’re an economist? The OECD paper proposes that metadata include a field called “periodicity,” which in some cases is mandatory, in others is optional.  I wasn’t sure what that meant.  Does that mean that data is available on a yearly basis, possibly in different files or data sets, or that it is presented in the described dataset with yearly rows or columns?  It seems to be the former, because this metadata field is considered “not appropriate” in the case of static tables. In Lexis-Nexis Statistical, the latter type of metadata is supported. It means you can search or browse for a chart or table of information, say unemployment statistics, presented in a single view “by year” “by quarter” or “by month”.  Invaluable feature!!