The weighty event guide that one is handed upon registration is 176 pages long.
But the novel doesn't plod forward in a predictable, linear way; with self-assurance and playful erudition, it seems to follow the unreliable chronology of memory, hopscotching back and forth over critical moments in family and world history, displaying an extraordinarily bearable lightness of being even as it describes weighty, tragic events.
Besides being a handy catchall for the day's top headlines, the Crawl is attractive to news directors in that it enables them to dispense with an occasional trivial item -- information that would seem jarring or silly if spoken aloud in the midst of weighty war events.
Fittingly, Underclass Hero fancies itself as a weighty arbiter of these events, filling its lyric sheet with tales of going down in flames, paranoia and love.
The subtitle of the nearly 11ft-wide canvas that hangs in the gallery of the Louvre reserved for the greatest French history paintings - those large and weighty accounts of public events, among which this is a rather small and modest image - is very specific.
Political experts, who at times earn their keep by getting things wrong a day or two ahead of everyone else, accept as axiomatic that New Yorkers in summertime can't worry their pretty little heads about events much weightier than Paris Hilton's latest arrest.
How weighty is this issue?
Kaufman's characters are stick figures, but the projections he displays of Beethoven's fierce, blunt musical notations, often gouged into the paper, impose a weightier biographical reality on the events.
The character Kenneth Waters – who died shortly after the events recounted – is a weightier, more sombre version of the several extreme cases that the actor has played in his time.
