“These new books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.”

From Michiko Kakutani’s latest Times piece, “Texts Without Context,” in which she considers a number of recent books, mostly the ones that she finds to be “nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change,” focusing on Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough and You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier — with whom the Rumpus is arranging an interview at present.

Jason Epstein started out as an editor and publisher in a now-vanished era — his first editorial job was at Random House in 1949 — and he was a co-founder of the New York Review itself and also the Library of America. He’s of an old school but he’s not a Luddite — in fact he was also a co-founder of the company that markets the Espresso Book Machine — and he maintains the sensible (if somewhat unexciting) view that e-books will be an inevitable part of the publishing landscape from now on, but paper books will remain important too.

A couple weeks ago, the New York Review of Books ran a lengthy, somewhat rambling piece about the future of publishing by Jason Epstein, which is nevertheless worthwhile spending time with.

In the essay he makes a few remarks about about each aspect of publishing that is changing today, but refreshingly, he refuses to speculate too far into the future, limiting his predictions to only the few steps ahead that can really be foreseen, and where he has concerns, he voices them without immediately proclaiming that this problem will lead directly to the end of civilization. It’s a worthwhile read for anybody interested in the future of publishing.

On June 13th, 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, the New York Times began to publish excerpts of an internal Pentagon document that detailed the top-secret history of US-Vietnam relations from 1945 to 1967. …more

Over on TechCrunch, one of the developers who helped build the Flash platform was asked to speculate about the technical future of web content — essentially, whether he thinks the Flash platform will be made obsolete as HTML5 is adopted.

His response to this question is neither yes nor no, but a lengthy, carefully considered, nuanced view of the entire ecosystem that Flash exists in now — web productivity sites, content sites, and handheld apps — and the article doesn’t seem overly influenced by his connection with Flash. It makes for an interesting read.

In honor of the True/False Film Fest, the Criterion Collection is making available for free online viewing six films that previously showed at the festival. They will be available through February 28th. The titles are Son of a Gun, Someday My Prince Will Come, The Mother, The Order of Myths, Running Stumbled, and The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories.

The Codex Seraphinianus — a mysterious book by an artist named Luigi Serafini, which is often described as seeming to be “a visual encyclopedia of an unknown planet” — has been placed online in its entirety.

Back in 2007, Justin Taylor wrote about the book in the Believer, and in 2009 he wrote a follow-up article about reader response to it over at HTMLGIANT. You may want to save these links for the weekend; it’s worth spending half a day or more with this amazing book and the stuff Justin has written about it.

Quentin Tarantino gave an interview to the LA Times, in which he discusses the films that influenced Inglourious Basterds, although he first expresses annoyance with critics who, instead of reviewing his movies, really try to “match wits” with him, and try “to show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making.”

Of World War II films, he says: “They were fun and thrilling and exciting and, most amazingly, they had a lot of comedy in them, which really made an impact on me. I mean, for every movie with a sadistic Nazi, there’s one with a Nazi who’s more of a buffoon or a figure of ridicule.”

More details here, including how he prepared each of his actors with a special screening series.

The Center for the Art of Translation has an interview up with Susan Bernofsky, translator of Robert Walser’s novel The Tanners, among other works. She talks about the six volumes of Robert Walser’s miniaturized shorthand that has come to be known as the “Microscripts.” Her translation of selections from these are forthcoming from New Directions.

But wait, what are Microscripts?
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Last month Nerve published a really fantastic piece by Andy Horowitz about Repo Man, and why this studio picture from a British director is actually the seminal American indie film.

“Shot after shot,” Horowitz writes, “you find yourself saying, ‘Where have I seen that before?’ and then realiz[e] you saw it after, in somebody else’s movie.”
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The Washington Post reports that an English physician, Joshua Silver, has designed eyeglasses that absolutely anybody in the world, no matter how poor, can afford, and he has plans to distribute a million pairs in India this year.

The glasses are based on a very simple principle: clear plastic lenses encase a flexible sac, and silicone oil can be added or removed from the sac with a syringe. The more oil in the lenses, the stronger the correction. The user adds or removes oil until focus is achieved, and then the syringe is removed.

According to the article, for many people in developing nations, a pair of glasses can cost “more than a month’s wages.” But these glasses, which “look like something from the back of Woody Allen’s closet,” cost only $19 to make, and Silver hopes that the cost can be brought down to a few dollars per pair.

CNET has a short piece up about a number of security vulnerabilities on Facebook that have recently been demonstrated by researchers — and they’re more serious than the notion that some random employee there might check out your profile. In fact, one of these vulnerabilities make it possible for some random hacker to use Facebook in order to check out not just your profile, but you.
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The history of handwriting and handwriting systems is sketched out in this article by Oberlin professor and GOOD columnist Anne Trubek.

Trubek also sketches out the history of the writing machines that began to replace handwriting from 1874 onward, with the invention of the first typewriter. Plus she includes a few notes about how old writing systems tend to get romanticized when they’re replaced by other systems more practical to people’s daily needs. …more

The newly-launched and amazing Pictory Magazine just published a beautiful and interesting showcase of twenty-eight photos of San Francisco; don’t miss their first showcase, Overseas and Overwhelmed, either!

Recently I was reminded of this lovely little essay by the cartoonist Seth, about the solitary art of cartooning. From his description I’d say that cartooning — at least fiction cartooning such as Seth practices — sounds exactly like fiction writing, except you have to draw pictures. Which by rights should make it even harder.

Of course, nonfiction cartooning, such as Joe Sacco practices, is exactly like reporting — except you have to draw pictures, so that practice should be even more difficult.

Anyway, at Seth’s essay, don’t miss the little included strip, Down the Stairs. And here’s an illuminating Q&A with Seth from the same magazine.

Last month Cory Doctorow gave an eloquent and often-amusing speech at the National Reading Summit to an audience of “librarians, educators, publishers, authors and students” called “How to Destroy the Book.” The transcript was published yesterday by the University of Toronto’s student paper, The Varsity.

Doctorow begins by describing the threat of a group of copyright pirates who “dress up their thievery in high-minded rhetoric about how they are the true defenders and inheritors of creativity,” and that “what they really see is a future in which the electronic culture market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the centre of it.” …more

Although the title of this book would seem to promise another critique of the practices of specific corporations we do business with every day (often for a lack of alternatives), Rushkoff is after much bigger game: Life, Inc. is a critique of how a way of doing business became a way of life. …more

“The movies are now old enough — we’ve had a century of movies — that you can actually look at a long period of time during which there has been interaction between the forms [of film and the novel]. And it has been both ways, and we tend to think of it only going one way, because there isn’t the specific act of adapting a film into a book. But there is, all the time, the more general act of writers being strongly influenced by things they’ve seen in movies, and wanting to do something like that in a book.”

Salman Rushdie discusses the the adaptation of novels into films, why free adaptations are better than strict adaptations (“infidelity is better,” he says, and after getting a laugh cites There Will Be Blood), the influence of film on his writing (including how his viewing of 8 1/2 influenced his writing of Midnight’s Children), why novelizations of films tend to be so wretched, and so forth.

One of the videos is here and the rest can be found in the related videos; there doesn’t seem to be any playlist as yet.

“Nerval is remembered as a minor literary figure, an eccentric who walked his pet lobster on a ribbon in the Palais Royal, gabbled his poetry in doorways, read at night with a candlestick on his head, and slept in coaches with his head in a noose, habits that endeared him to aesthetes and literary anecdotalists.”
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“Someone said there are only two ways to live your life: one is as if nothing is a miracle, the other is as if everything is. I’ve always been convinced Havana is an annexed colony of the latter…

“I was sitting in the rafters next to a father and son for the morning set of fights going on during the Cuban National Boxing Championships held at Kid Chocolate gymnasium in Old Havana. My high school gym might’ve cost more to build, but with hundreds of millions of dollars you couldn’t recreate what this place looks like.

“The murals and chipped paint and scoreboards and rafters and ceiling takes your breath away — yet it’s the faces in the crowd that steal the show. The tickets don’t cost anything for Cubans. Everyone can come. There’s no advertising anywhere. Even though there are Olympic champions in the ring periodically who could cash in to the tune of millions, most don’t. Nobody here is making a dime off world class ability.”

Brin Friesen writes about Cuba, and boxing in Cuba, in an excerpt from his ongoing memoir/novel The Domino Diaries, over at the Nervous Breakdown.

William Deresiewicz just published a long essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that’s worth spending some time with: “Faux Friendship,” in which he traces how the concept of friendship has changed since classical times — it used to be an intense and serious matter; these days, not so much — and worries that social networking in general, and Facebook in particular, is accelerating a trend he perceives in our culture towards shallower friendships. More “friends” on Facebook, less engagement with friends in life. Or so the argument would seem to run.

[Click for more, we want your feedback!] …more

New York Magazine’s Sam Anderson — who is, in my opinion, a top contender for a spot on IHateYouAndIWantYourLife.com — has written a fascinating piece outlining his view of the way ambitious novels have changed in the past ten years.

Those doorstops from the late 90s — Infinite Jest being Anderson’s main example — have given way to smaller novels “obsessed with creating and capturing voices,” books like Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Anderson’s main counterexample to Infinite Jest, Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao. Why is that? …more

The David Lynch Foundation wrote us the other day to mention a delightful film they’re screening on the DLF.TV website until December 9th: Path Lights.

It’s a 22-minute short, based on a 2005 story by Tom Drury, about a voice actor who almost gets hit by a flying bottle one day — and then sets out to track down the culprit, much like the private eye in the cheesy detective novels he performs for an audiobook company. All in all a charming twist on the LA noir, written, directed, and produced by one Zachary Sluser, who appears to be getting off to a good start in the movies.

“His prose may often rest on a banality (“we like to feel superior to others. But our problem is that we’re not superior”) but his inner turmoil over such bland ideas, expressed with a post-adolescent intensity, is disarming.”

Ron Slate reviews the new book from actor, playwright and filmmaker Wallace Shawn, Essays. (Several months ago, we wrote about one of these essays, “Writing About Sex”.)

In setting up Open Source Cinema, I was inspired by the open source software process – software that people can contribute to and change and collectively build. And I thought that idea applied really well to documentary film. I thought, why not set up something for collaboratively-produced truth? …more

Total Film has published an installment of their regular feature “Movie by Movie,” about each one of Terry Gilliam’s films: “The Trials, the Tribulations, The Triumphs.” From Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwocky on to Time Bandits – about which there is an amazing story:

Gilliam was having a big argument with the studio about the ending, where the parents are blown up. The studio didn’t want exploding parents at the end of a movie. So he agreed to have a test screening in Fresno, with parents. But there was something wrong with the print, the sound was garbled, and it died altogether about a third of the way through. The test audience left, writing on their feedback cards that the one thing they liked most, was the ending — that is, they were relieved it was over! But the studio never found out the screening got botched, and so Gilliam got to keep his exploding parents.

Similar stories are given for Brazil, Baron von Munchausen, the Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing, the Brothers Grimm, Tideland, and Doctor Parnassus.

Thoreau’s Journal is forthcoming in a new edition from NYRB Classics, abridged by Damion Searls; the Quarterly Conversation’s Geoff Wisner has given a favorable and interesting review of the book: …more

Two people meet at a party, have a one-night stand, and — in the cold awkward light of morning — finally get around to introducing themselves to one another. And maybe they even have coffee, and continue the conversation. And maybe even keep hanging out for another night. …more

“Fitzgerald, to put it mildly, did not impress the studio bosses. The rap against him was that he couldn’t make the shift from words on the page to images on the screen. His plotting was elaborate without purpose; his dialogue arch or sentimental; and his tone too serious — at times, even grim. Billy Wilder, who seemed genuinely fond of Fitzgerald, likened him to ‘a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job’ — with no idea how to connect the pipes and make the water flow.”

The November 16 New Yorker features an article by Arthur Krystal (abstract) about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s years trying to make a go of it in Hollywood, from 1937 until his death in late 1940. It’s a fascinating overview, not only of those years in his life, but of Fitzgerald’s entire career and how Hollywood worked at the time. Fitzgerald never had much luck with anything after 1930, and as Krystal writes, “on the face of it, he should have taken Hollywood by storm: he wrote commercially successful stories; he knew how to frame a scene; and his dialogue, at least in his best fiction, was smart, sophisticated, evocative. [...] So what was the problem?” …more

“Thin as legend claims, the models streamed into view. [...] There was a bit of everything going on. The models appeared, variously, as flappers, can-can dancers, sprites, zombies — you name it. A seasoned fashion writer said to me later that this show had actually been comparatively tame: ‘There were things in it that you might even wear,’ he said. Nothing brought home to me my ignorance of couture more clearly than this crestfallen lament.

“To my untutored eye what was on offer here had nothing to do with clothing as traditionally understood. Looking at the coats — which seemed capable of almost anything except keeping you warm or dry — I was reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright’s response to clients who grumbled about the roof leaking: that’s how you can tell it’s a roof. And so it was here: it was primarily by their extravagant refusal of the function for which they had been nominally intended that they could be defined as clothes.”

The incomparable Geoff Dyer, reviewing Paris fashion shows in Issue 8 of Five Dials. Beginning there, he ends up discovering the “primal” and timeless qualities of an art I also know nothing about. …more

France has a law in place, established in 1981, that requires all booksellers in the country — big-box stores, independent stores, online retailers — to sell a given book at the same price as all their competitors. (Stores can do some discounting in order to help move stock, but the maximum discount allowed is 5%.) Chad Post at Three Percent writes of the effect this law has had on book culture in France, and it’s a lesson we’d do well to emulate (as if): there are no price wars, publishers can set prices based primarily on internal costs, and it has encouraged diversity in publishing. …more