On books, movies, and not going to Burma
I finally finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, and it really was a bit of a slog. The man writes like a dream; I stand by that. But the characters: if you lined up the characters from Kavalier and Clay like cookie dough on a pan and simply made the cuts separating the individual cookies from each other in slightly different places, you'd have the characters from The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I had the dyspeptic and unappetizing "already-eaten" feeling all the way through the book. But the worst sin: it's just really not a good story. The plotline snoozes along in great big swaths, and then a bunch of things happen all of a sudden, in a very arch and precious way, to secondary characters that you have to go flipping back through to remember who they were. I admired the book for the way it displayed the inarguable virtuosity of Chabon, but enjoyed it? No.
Contrast this to Vikas Swarup's Q&A. The writing is tone-deaf clunky, marginally made better by supposedly being first-person singular from a child's perspective; the characters are so poorly distinguished that I misremembered one's adventures as happening to another; there are consistency and continuity holes you could drive an autorickshaw through; and the plot is pure melodrama. But what a story, in a guilty-pleasure, Arabian Nights-type way. I sipped The Yiddish Policemen's Union over the course of a couple weeks, occasionally preferring the latest New Yorker on my morning bus commute instead, but I gulped down Q&A in a day and a half. An expectations game? Perhaps. But there are some primordial elements of storytelling that Q&A simply nailed, and it's amazing how much else can be forgiven in the face of a grand old yarn.
For movies, it's the other way 'round. With Lust, Caution (warning: quasi-spoilers ahead!), I was like a fly helplessly trapped in the six coats of sticky varnish on this high-gloss film. What a fantastically shot picture! How gorgeous to look at! And how thin, tired, and horrible a story! The moral of this Chinese soap opera seems to be that women can't be genuine revolutionaries, because the battleground of the heart takes precedence; never mind patriotism, the real contest the mistress will unhesitatingly lay down her life for is being able to trump the wife, and the brilliance of a nice diamond acts like the Men in Black's memory ray on feminine principles (S: "Well, it was a really nice diamond..."). Liked the movie? Yes, despite myself; for the dazzling style and aesthetics, I'd probably even see it again. Those weren't enough, however, to keep me from feeling empty and slightly deceived once the eidetics faded, as if I'd been handed a very prettily-wrapped present with nothing inside. Or as K put it, with customary sensitivity: "So what you're saying is that it was delicious, but an hour later you're hungry for another movie, huh?"
...Which, sadly, wouldn't have been The Darjeeling Limited (again: more quasi-spoilers ahead). Which gets points, however, for its truth-in-advertising title.
I love Wes Anderson, and pretty much everything he's ever done, and I'm a huge fan of just about all the actors in this movie. But I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm getting older and Wes Anderson isn't. K (who, I think, disliked it a little more than me) pointed out that the film is a thematic near-remake of The Life Aquatic. Which I don't think is fair: that was ships, this is trains. (Joking. Actually a very valid point.)
Some critics have complained about the cultural colonialism involved in having an Indian boy die so that the characters could have their epiphanies. I find that a bizarre kind of liberal guilt; the same kind that prompted the equally inexplicable complaints about the white POV in the excellent Last King of Scotland. Rather: an Indian boy dies and the characters have their epiphanies. Life is more tenuous in the developing world, which, I think, is the crux of their realization, allowing them to cut through the Western self-indulgence of their neuroses. Unfortunately, as epiphanies go, that's about five kinds of hoary.
Where I was slightly offended -- or, at least, where the movie kept jarring me out of non-critical mode, so that I ended up seeing the black-and-white html coding in place of the colorful webpage, was in its depiction of India itself. This was a movie set in New Jersey but filmed in India. The cultural impossibilities piled up like corpses in a Schwarzenegger flick. Contrast this with Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which, while not overall a good movie, nonetheless realized it was in India, offered some very funny and astute local observations, and pretty much succeeded in not violating cultural physics. Darjeeling made fun of itself for using India as a lazy shorthand for spiritual odyssey, but that didn't, unfortunately, stop it from also trying to genuinely use India as a lazy shorthand for spiritual odyssey. And those odd, desperate attempts at visual lyricism just totally didn't work for me: I didn't see exoticism, romanticism and alien beauty; I just saw India.
Yeah, yeah: to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and all that. It's true: if you want to keep glamor in your life, never attempt to actually do the things you think are glamorous.
Which is why I don't think I'm going to Burma.
Well, not really. Let me back up. An occupational hazard: I was expounding to a colleague how amazing it would be to be in Rangoon at this historic time, and he pointed out how very doable that would be: how a job in my specialization in Rangoon was going begging for takers. And I tried to ignore that, and my mind kept returning to it like a tongue to a new filling, and I found myself going to an in-house job fair and talking to the guy responsible for assigning the job. Having just gotten back to the States, I'm not actually eligible to bid on overseas assignments right now. But was it possible, I heard myself ask him, that this job might go to a "critical need - fill now" status, which would suspend the usual rules and let me pursue it? Oh yes, he said. Imminently.
After that, I sort of blew the impromptu interview, because I was really put off by the way he gave me the once-over, and then started looking over my shoulder and around the room for more important people he might not be talking to because he was stuck talking to me. It's an unfortunate aspect of my specialization: because it deals with media, the bosses all want Allison Janney, and me, I'm Kristin Chenoweth, but twice as heavy and a tenth as cute.
But, on paper, I do have the qualifications for this job, and if the call came out and I replied to it, I'd have at least something of a real shot. And while there could easily be a better candidate than me, I can't really submit a "what-the-hell-I'll-never-get-it" application; I still need to carefully think through how I'd feel about spending this Thanksgiving (and the one or two after that) in Rangoon, because, with my luck, if I didn't, I definitely would be.
I'm thinking, despite my temptation to let hope trump experience, that I probably shouldn't do this. I know I want out of my career; why prolong it for another two years? And I wouldn't be bringing democracy to the people; I'd be bringing bluegrass bands. And spending twelve hours a day arguing with Washington over budgets and worrying that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And adjudicating local employees' disputes over who had the bigger desk. And going to endless receptions and making small talk with bureaucrats who assume I'm the wife of whatever male I'm standing near. Been there, hated that.
And then I look at pictures of Rangoon.
But, argh. "This time, it'll be different" never is.
But I'm such a sucker for tropical forests. And pagodas. I do like pagodas.
But there'd be no time for language training, and I'd never learn Burmese on my own.
So, to amend: I'm leaning heavily against applying. I've suggested to K -- since, I think, Rangoon would be like my years in Thailand, which would have been lovely were I not so often lonely -- that if he can commit to coming with me for two years, I'll put in for it.
That seems like a fairly safe way to avoid going.
Contrast this to Vikas Swarup's Q&A. The writing is tone-deaf clunky, marginally made better by supposedly being first-person singular from a child's perspective; the characters are so poorly distinguished that I misremembered one's adventures as happening to another; there are consistency and continuity holes you could drive an autorickshaw through; and the plot is pure melodrama. But what a story, in a guilty-pleasure, Arabian Nights-type way. I sipped The Yiddish Policemen's Union over the course of a couple weeks, occasionally preferring the latest New Yorker on my morning bus commute instead, but I gulped down Q&A in a day and a half. An expectations game? Perhaps. But there are some primordial elements of storytelling that Q&A simply nailed, and it's amazing how much else can be forgiven in the face of a grand old yarn.
For movies, it's the other way 'round. With Lust, Caution (warning: quasi-spoilers ahead!), I was like a fly helplessly trapped in the six coats of sticky varnish on this high-gloss film. What a fantastically shot picture! How gorgeous to look at! And how thin, tired, and horrible a story! The moral of this Chinese soap opera seems to be that women can't be genuine revolutionaries, because the battleground of the heart takes precedence; never mind patriotism, the real contest the mistress will unhesitatingly lay down her life for is being able to trump the wife, and the brilliance of a nice diamond acts like the Men in Black's memory ray on feminine principles (S: "Well, it was a really nice diamond..."). Liked the movie? Yes, despite myself; for the dazzling style and aesthetics, I'd probably even see it again. Those weren't enough, however, to keep me from feeling empty and slightly deceived once the eidetics faded, as if I'd been handed a very prettily-wrapped present with nothing inside. Or as K put it, with customary sensitivity: "So what you're saying is that it was delicious, but an hour later you're hungry for another movie, huh?"
...Which, sadly, wouldn't have been The Darjeeling Limited (again: more quasi-spoilers ahead). Which gets points, however, for its truth-in-advertising title.
I love Wes Anderson, and pretty much everything he's ever done, and I'm a huge fan of just about all the actors in this movie. But I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm getting older and Wes Anderson isn't. K (who, I think, disliked it a little more than me) pointed out that the film is a thematic near-remake of The Life Aquatic. Which I don't think is fair: that was ships, this is trains. (Joking. Actually a very valid point.)
Some critics have complained about the cultural colonialism involved in having an Indian boy die so that the characters could have their epiphanies. I find that a bizarre kind of liberal guilt; the same kind that prompted the equally inexplicable complaints about the white POV in the excellent Last King of Scotland. Rather: an Indian boy dies and the characters have their epiphanies. Life is more tenuous in the developing world, which, I think, is the crux of their realization, allowing them to cut through the Western self-indulgence of their neuroses. Unfortunately, as epiphanies go, that's about five kinds of hoary.
Where I was slightly offended -- or, at least, where the movie kept jarring me out of non-critical mode, so that I ended up seeing the black-and-white html coding in place of the colorful webpage, was in its depiction of India itself. This was a movie set in New Jersey but filmed in India. The cultural impossibilities piled up like corpses in a Schwarzenegger flick. Contrast this with Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which, while not overall a good movie, nonetheless realized it was in India, offered some very funny and astute local observations, and pretty much succeeded in not violating cultural physics. Darjeeling made fun of itself for using India as a lazy shorthand for spiritual odyssey, but that didn't, unfortunately, stop it from also trying to genuinely use India as a lazy shorthand for spiritual odyssey. And those odd, desperate attempts at visual lyricism just totally didn't work for me: I didn't see exoticism, romanticism and alien beauty; I just saw India.
Yeah, yeah: to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and all that. It's true: if you want to keep glamor in your life, never attempt to actually do the things you think are glamorous.
Which is why I don't think I'm going to Burma.
Well, not really. Let me back up. An occupational hazard: I was expounding to a colleague how amazing it would be to be in Rangoon at this historic time, and he pointed out how very doable that would be: how a job in my specialization in Rangoon was going begging for takers. And I tried to ignore that, and my mind kept returning to it like a tongue to a new filling, and I found myself going to an in-house job fair and talking to the guy responsible for assigning the job. Having just gotten back to the States, I'm not actually eligible to bid on overseas assignments right now. But was it possible, I heard myself ask him, that this job might go to a "critical need - fill now" status, which would suspend the usual rules and let me pursue it? Oh yes, he said. Imminently.
After that, I sort of blew the impromptu interview, because I was really put off by the way he gave me the once-over, and then started looking over my shoulder and around the room for more important people he might not be talking to because he was stuck talking to me. It's an unfortunate aspect of my specialization: because it deals with media, the bosses all want Allison Janney, and me, I'm Kristin Chenoweth, but twice as heavy and a tenth as cute.
But, on paper, I do have the qualifications for this job, and if the call came out and I replied to it, I'd have at least something of a real shot. And while there could easily be a better candidate than me, I can't really submit a "what-the-hell-I'll-never-get-it" application; I still need to carefully think through how I'd feel about spending this Thanksgiving (and the one or two after that) in Rangoon, because, with my luck, if I didn't, I definitely would be.
I'm thinking, despite my temptation to let hope trump experience, that I probably shouldn't do this. I know I want out of my career; why prolong it for another two years? And I wouldn't be bringing democracy to the people; I'd be bringing bluegrass bands. And spending twelve hours a day arguing with Washington over budgets and worrying that I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And adjudicating local employees' disputes over who had the bigger desk. And going to endless receptions and making small talk with bureaucrats who assume I'm the wife of whatever male I'm standing near. Been there, hated that.
And then I look at pictures of Rangoon.
But, argh. "This time, it'll be different" never is.
But I'm such a sucker for tropical forests. And pagodas. I do like pagodas.
But there'd be no time for language training, and I'd never learn Burmese on my own.
So, to amend: I'm leaning heavily against applying. I've suggested to K -- since, I think, Rangoon would be like my years in Thailand, which would have been lovely were I not so often lonely -- that if he can commit to coming with me for two years, I'll put in for it.
That seems like a fairly safe way to avoid going.
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