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!!

Before the News Dies…

The purported death of newspapers sure is taking a while, and in some ways seems like just another trendy lamentation. First there was ‘The Death of Rock.’ Then there was ‘The Death of Cinema’ (which has died hundreds of times). Now, the death of newspapers will apparently coincide with the death of the publishing industry. However, there also appears to be some frightful truth to this predicament. The New York Times recently announced that it may be closing the Boston Globe. It seems that people everywhere, even journalists, would rather write something for the internet than publish something on a physical piece of paper that one can carry with them. What a pity. (I might note here that I’m the pot calling the kettle black by posting all this on a blog).

If the newspaper does in fact die, then let’s take a moment to celebrate the wide variety of newspapers that Snell contains. They really are from all over the globe. You can read newspapers from different areas of the U.S, such as The Philadelphia Enquirer, or the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Or you can read newspapers from other countries, in other languages, such as Die Welt, from German, where you can find out that ‘Deutschland sucht neuen Wirtschaftsminister’ (Germany searches for a new Economic Advisor). Or you can read The Moscow Weekly News (which comes in an English edition), Le Monde, from France, or The India Reporter, from India. It is helpful to have this diverse array of newspapers, of course, for the foreign students who want to read news in their own language from their native country. But it is also beneficial for Americans, even one’s who do not know any foreign languages. You are not going to read in The Boston Globe, at least not in a detailed article, that Germany is choosing a new Economic Advisor. Perhaps facts like this are, or will be, more important than they seem. U.S news, including its newspapers, has always had an aversion to world news. The only place in this country to my mind you can hear comprehensive world news in on NPR radio. Many of these newspapers have English editions, if not in print, then online, so why not be informed? (It’s also worth noting that these papers do mention all the U.S news that is relevant)

Will newspapers die in this country? Will this death be a payback for a disregard for the rest of the world? Actually, there is no direct correlation. Newspapers are dying because of an economic crisis, the internet, plummeting sales and overall poor writing. But perhaps newspapers from other parts of the world will remain. At least for a little while.

Embroidered History

I recently saw two films with unexpected parallels: Waltz With Bashir and Frost Nixon. The first film is an animated feature about an Israeli soldier’s quest to uncover hidden memories of his time in the 1982 war in Lebanon, during the massacres of Palestinian camps in Sabra and Shatila. The latter presents the events surrounding flashy talk show host David Frost, first losing a battle of wits with American ex-president Richard Nixon in a series of interviews, then turning the tables on the savvy Nixon and eliciting a confession of wrongdoing in the White House. Both films, different in format and story, are worthy of viewing, as they offer several layers of ideas that challenge cinema goers today. The similarity between the two films is their debt to the documentary filming style and their blurring of the edge between reality and fiction. Talking heads portrayed by actors and animations intercut more fanciful scenes of the narrative, jarring the viewer to question where reality stops in the film and where the fiction begins. Today, I still question if the devices work, if history will applaud or censure this blend of documentary style with fictional narrative. To its credit, the device is effective for pulling the audience out of a passive viewing exprience into a more active one. To its detriment, the flow of the film’s narrative is interrupted as the viewer questions the intent of the director and the content of the narrative. This idea of blurring fiction with reality in the film medium, although treated with a new style in today’s films, is hardly a novel development. Italy’s Neorealist movement of the 1940s produced some of the most celebrated films of the struggle of everyday man: Rome, Open City, La Strada and The Bicycle Thief. Inspired by the movement and the writings of critic Andre Bazin, French director Francois Truffaut in turn produced a cinematic masterpiece, The 400 Blows, a simple but tragic story of a boy sent to reform school. Autobiograpical in nature, the film’s gritty scenes and natural acting performances leave the viewer unsettled by a certain reality creeping into the cinematic experience. In the years since Italy’s Neorealism and France’s New Wave movements, it seems a new movement has developed in cinema: a director takes a historical event and actually uses the devices normally employed by a modern-day documentary to advance a narrative, which takes license with the actual historical events themselves. The intent of Neorealist and New Wave directors was to bring cinema back to the people, to strip away the artifice of the day. What directors Milos Forman (Waltz with Bashir) and Ron Howard (Frost Nixon) intend with their choices of narrative will be interesting to follow.

The Enormous Radio

Short stories are valuable for the simple reason that everybody has time to read one. A novel is necessarily a complex undertaking and in this day and age, we are overloaded with so many appliances and distractions that an interest in novel reading, to say nothing of reading in general, has declined. Google, IPhones, MP3’s, NetFlix and Tivo are all various culprits in squashing the attention span of the general public and thus making people believe that reading takes too long and is too inconvenient. Will reading as a practice eventually die out altogether? That is not for me to say. But I very much believe the short story will outlast the Novel. Since this is the case, here is a great short story for people to read. In a sense, it is really about all of the above. The Enormous Radio, written by John Cheever is a story set in Manhattan during the 1940’s, detailing the almost-happy marriage between Jim and Irene Wescott, who decide to purchase a new radio. This radio seems like simply an additional luxury to their life, but it soon becomes apparent that it is, in fact, a menace. Every time it is turned on, a different domestic scene of another family’s life elsewhere in the apartment is broadcast; all of them involve scenes of violence, alcoholism and crumbling relationships that begin to tear the Wescotts apart. There has recently been a slight revival of interest in John Cheever, with a new biography of him having just come out called Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. He is about as quintessentially an American writer as one can find and The Enormous Radio, due to its message that owning commodities exposes our lives and alienates humans from relationships, is a quintessentially American story for this day and age as well as the late 40’s. The story can be found in The Stories of John Cheever.