Graphic designer Jason Huff has taken the 100 most-downloaded copyright-free books and applied Microsoft Word’s 10-sentence autosummary to them. The Book Bench highlights some funny ones, but it’s really worthwhile downloading Huff’s entire PDF.

(via The Millions)

A long and very interesting interview with Bill Murray is up at GQ; one of the most interesting things comes right up front, where we learn that anybody can get in touch with Bill Murray simply by calling an 800 number he set up. If he wants to talk to you, he’ll call you back. (I was going to say I should get one of those, but I already have email, which is pretty much the same thing.) He also talks about the fine art of comic timing and rhythm.

Melville House is publishing three novellas translated from German this month, and they’re giving away a complete set to every tenth person who emails them. All you have to do is send an email to be considered!

(via the Center for the Art of Translation)

In an article that appeared in the Observer yesterday, a trio of writers introduces a trio of experimental authors. Skip past most of the article — it’s a bit of filler not worth the trouble — but check out the paragraphs towards the end, about Stewart Home and César Aira, which are a good quick introduction to these two (very interesting) authors. If Aira piques your interest, try Ghosts — I read it some months ago and I’m still thinking about it!

(via Largeheartedboy)

Yesterday I opened my Sunday Times Book Review to find that the Rumpus Book Club pick has once more been reviewed by the New York Times. Obviously the folks at the New York Times are reading the Rumpus.

Stacey Derasmo’s wonderful piece for the Blurb column, “The Long Haul,” is about the reasons writers keep writing — the reasons any artist keeps doing their work, really, whatever that work is.

Have you read Derasmo’s piece? The discussion has been extensive, and you might have something to add. Check it out.

There’s a pretty good chance you already have an idea who Jack Rebney is, even if you don’t recognize the name; if you don’t, you should immediately watch one of the clip reels that made him notorious: this one is my favorite (NSFW!) of the many edits. The video consists of outtakes from a sales video Rebney made for Winnebago in August 1988, in which he gives frequent and hilarious vent to his frustrations at forgetting lines he wrote himself, being beset by swarms of flies, and the basic absurdities of advertising. The crew thought he was so hilarious that they edited together the outtakes and circulated it amongst themselves; friends passed it to friends, and it became a VHS viral phenomenon. Rebney became widely-known as the Winnebago Man.

Documentarian Ben Steinbauer became fascinated with this video and wondered if he could track down Rebney, who had apparently disappeared 15 years earlier, and he has made a hilarious movie about his journey (you can see the trailer here — also NSFW). …more

You probably heard the news that Amazon has struck a controversial deal with literary agent Andrew Wiley.

It works like this: digital rights are separate from print rights, and Wiley sold an exclusive 2-year license on digital rights, for a certain number of his authors, to Amazon. Or perhaps just the rights to 20 titles. Or perhaps the rights for all 757 of the authors and estates he represents. The details are not totally clear, but the deal appears to include certain novels by Bellow, Roth, Ralph Ellison, and Nabokov at a minimum.

In order to publish these electronic editions, Wiley set up an imprint called Odyssey Books; in retaliation for simultaneously cutting them out of a deal and becoming a competitor, Random House cut the Wiley Agency off, announcing that they would do no further business with Andrew Wiley, and maybe even sue Amazon.

The best analysis of the deal I’ve seen so far is this article at the Constant Conversation: Amazon Partners Up with Possibly the Most Hated Man on the Literary Scene.

Scott Rosenberg has written a thorough takedown of Jeffrey Rosen’s NYT Magazine piece, “The End of Forgetting.” When I read it yesterday, I felt like there was something amiss about it, and Rosenberg ably diagnoses the principal issues with Rosen’s examples: they don’t really support his thesis.

But Rosenberg gets to the heart of the problem in his conclusion:
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Join The Rumpus Book Club today to receive our second selection, Doug Dorst’s  The Surf Guru.

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Just a quick post today. Such a vigorous discussion about the book as a whole has been going on at our previous post (15 comments and counting), that I think it may well be a little superfluous for me to say much about it here at this point. (We’re still learning here!) So if you’ve been meaning to chime in, please do so here.  For background, you might want to see Post #1 and #2, and be sure to have a look at John Francisconi’s thoughts on Part III. If you’re in the club, you should have received an email with details about the author discussion, which is in just a couple of days. If you haven’t received that email, let us know.

See you at the discussion!

This Tuesday and next, the PBS doc show POV is broadcasting two great documentaries that I highly recommend.

Tomorrow at 1o pm (check local listings; your date and time may differ) check out William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. Kunstler made his name as a radical civil-rights and first-amendment attorney in the 60s — most famously, he defended draft protesters, the prisoners who rebelled at Attica State Prison, and AIM at Wounded Knee — but by the late 70s he rarely represented clients with self-evidently noble causes, instead taking the cases of accused rapists, murderers, terrorists and mobsters. The documentary is about the man, but it’s also the story of his family: it was written and directed by Kunstler’s daughters, Emily and Sarah Kunstler, who remember their father with alternating tones of pride and shame. It’s a really fascinating doc.

Then next Tuesday, June 29th at 10pm, you’ll have a chance to see Agnès Varda’s very fine documentary from last year, the Beaches of Agnès. I probably don’t need to say much about this one — Varda remembers her life, with her characteristic blend of humor, pathos, and cinematic inventiveness — and it was one of the best docs I saw last year.

A slapstick farce about one man’s revenge on a pair of rival arms dealers, Micmacs succeeds as comedy but attempts to ignore its own political content. …more

Join The Rumpus Book Club today to receive our second selection, Doug Dorst’s  The Surf Guru.

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Welcome to the continuing Rumpus Book Club Blog, where a Rumpus contributor reads the book of the month and regularly blogs about his or her reactions. It’s the first move in a conversation that we want you to join. Today, Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch reacts to Part Two of Citrus County.
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Join The Rumpus Book Club today to receive our second selection, Doug Dorst’s  The Surf Guru.

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Welcome to the continuing Rumpus Book Club Blog, where a Rumpus contributor reads the book of the month and regularly blogs about his or her reactions. It’s the first move in a conversation that we want you to join. Today, Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch reacts to Part One of Citrus County, and links to another blog discussing the book. Beware: major spoilers beyond the cut!
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Welcome to the first post of the Rumpus Book Club Blog, where a Rumpus contributor reads the book of the month and regularly blogs about his or her reactions. It’s the first move in a conversation that we want you to join. Today, Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch on what he hopes for from the first book club pick, Citrus County, based on his recent one-night stand with Brandon’s first novel, Arkansas. …more

A little while back, Roger Ebert wrote a great article on Newsweek entitled “Why I Hate 3D.” It’s a fun read, an entertaining rundown of all the ways in which 3D is a pointless novelty that mostly exists to help Hollywood feel better about its bottom line, and which — worst of all — is skewing their attention and money towards movies for kids.

But my particular favorite is reason #1: It’s a Waste of a Dimension. “When you look at a 2-D movie, it’s already in 3-D as far as your mind is concerned,” Ebert writes. “When you see Lawrence of Arabia growing from a speck as he rides toward you across the desert, are you thinking, “Look how slowly he grows against the horizon” or “I wish this were 3D?” Our minds use the principle of perspective to provide the third dimension. Adding one artificially can make the illusion less convincing.”

Well said, Roger!

On Monday evening, SFIFF53 is presenting a short documentary about the life and work of Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, and I recommend it; the film is interesting, plus this event will be a rare chance to see Snyder in person, as he doesn’t do much in the way of public appearances any longer. After the jump, read a few more words about the film with some choice quotes from an interview I did with Snyder and with Jim Harrison, who is also a substantial part of the film. …more

Coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival by Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch.

There’s some great, possibly-overlooked-by-you stuff coming up in the festival today through Sunday, and these picks will give you the details on: a documentary by Tim Hetherington about a platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley; Kore-Eda’s new, touching film about an inflatable sex doll that comes to life; a doc about an Argentinian DIY filmmaker; Roger Ebert honored in person; the highly anticipated first film from San Francisco’s Joshua Grannell, better known as drag diva Peaches Christ; a documentary about a guy who recovers from a trauma by building and photographing a miniature WWII town; and a one-time screening of a new epic film that, according to Sean Uyehara, is 2/3rds political chess game, 1/3 kung fu action classic. Schedule details and more description after the jump.

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Coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival by Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch.

When programming director Rachel Rosen took the stage at the Kabuki last Friday night to present the Persistence of Vision Award to Don Hertzfeldt, she said, “let’s face it: we live in a narrative feature-length world,” and talked about how much more difficult it is to succeed by making films that lie outside that definition. (Pretty much impossible, given how difficult it is to succeed by making films that lie within them.)

Don Hertzfeldt’s films, though narrative, are otherwise about as far outside that definition as is possible. They’re short animations whose every frame is hand-drawn on paper and photographed, drawing by drawing, with a 35mm animation camera from the 1940s, and he has often created the entire soundtrack himself as well. As Rosen described it, this is a “painstaking, artisanal process” and then described his body of work as ranging “from the incredibly simple to the fantastically dense.” For 15 years, Hertzfeldt has succeeded in making films his way, and so the Film Society presented him with what amounts to a lifetime achievement award. At the age of 33.

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Coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival by Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch.

This is my third year covering film in San Francisco, but this opening night, which took place last Thursday, was the first I’ve ever attended, for any festival. For one thing, I really wanted to go to this particular one: Micmacs is the new film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of Amélie and Délicatessen, and he would be there in person! But there’s another reason I’ve never previously been: opening nights tend to be gala affairs, and almost every means of gaining admission is way beyond my budget. But this year, an avenue was open to me: I got an invitation to cover the event for the Rumpus. So there I was, and here I am. …more

Coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival by Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch.

Today and over the next few days, I’ll be filing reports on the festival events and one-time screenings I attended over the weekend — opening night, Don Hertzfeld, Walter Murch, Sam Green’s Utopia in Four Movements — but for now I just want to throw out some more film and event recommendations for today and the next few days, now that I’m a few days older and slightly wiser. Click through to read them.
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Coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival by Rumpus Film editor Jeremy Hatch.

At the press conference for the festival given a few weeks ago, programming director Rachel Rosen characterized the selections as, overall, showing a return to basics and beauty — there is much less shaky cam work and jagged editing than there has been in recent years, and more of a return to classical presentation. She also discerned a number of genre-crossing films — films that blur the line between documentary and fiction, or between one genre and another — as well as an interest in the creative process itself.

What we’ve seen so far definitely bears this out. As I mentioned the day before yesterday, we’ve been watching selected films and listening to buzz over here for the past two weeks, and so we hereby present our initial picks, just a day later than promised, after the jump.

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The largest and, arguably, the most glamorous film festival in San Francisco is about to get underway for the 53rd year in a row, and the Rumpus has been watching selected films and listening to buzz for the past two weeks. (The full schedule and tickets are available online from this page.)

Read on for my initial recommendations on events to attend in this first dispatch from the festival! Tomorrow’s dispatch will recommend films.

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Just a small addendum to Notable San Francisco this week: there’s an interesting event in Berkeley on Wednesday night at 7:30. PEN World Voices, with the assistance of Berkeley Arts & Letters, The Believer, and the Center for the Art of Translation, are presenting Tommy Wieringa (of the Netherlands) and Christos Tsilokas (of Australia) in conversation with Oscar Villalon, discussing their work and their lives, and reading from their current work. The event is cheap, $6-$12 sliding scale. Here’s the ticket page, with further details about the authors.

The recent film Chloe gets the Rumpus Original Combo treatment today, with a review and an interview from two different contributors. Details after the jump. …more

The Christian Science Monitor just printed a great story by Jordan Heller that opened my eyes to a whole world I didn’t even know existed: baseball players who have dropped out of the major leagues for one reason or another, who are now in the minor leagues, and struggling to get back into the majors. Heller spends time behind the scenes and reveals a colorful world of ambition and disappointed hopes.

“The chances of getting back are slim,” Heller writes. “Like your better financiers across the Hudson on Wall Street, the big league general managers prefer their assets with more upside. But there are major league scouts in the stands at Bears games, even this late in the season, waiting for a glimpse of overlooked brilliance that tells them to take a gamble on a quick return on their investment.” …more

A writer named Charlie Stross just posted a fascinating article on his blog about why novels are the length they are.

The reasons have to do with market dynamics — costs faced by publishers and bookstores. In the Victorian era, novels could get tremendously long because they were published serially: writers could go on week after week providing chapter-length installments indefinitely, until either they or their readers threatened to get bored.

And remember those fat mass-market paperbacks in grocery stores in the 80s and 90s? Publishers had been forced to raise the prices on paperbacks owing to inflation, and distributors “pushed back,” according to Stross, demanding fatter novels for the higher price. (Production costs weren’t much higher.) Hence all those 4×6″ doorstops by Stephen King. Stross concludes with the hope that ebooks, if widely adopted commercially, will separate considerations of form from production considerations for the first time in history. Which is a thought we’ve heard before, but it’s an interesting piece all the same.

“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