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.

Ahmad Saidullah reviews The Salt Smugglers, by Gerard de Nerval, in the current issue of the Quarterly Conversation.

In the wake of the failed 1848 revolution, “laws were enacted to curb populist fiction in newspapers, such as Dumas’ ephemera and Eugene Sue’s serial novels, that the authorities believed had stoked the masses into action.” This book was Nerval’s immediate reaction to the politics of the day, and he called it “not a novel,” but “a history,” in the form of letters addressed to the editor of the newspaper that published it.

The book, Saidullah writes, “embodies Bakhtin’s idea of the polyphonic or dialogic novel where narrative authority is undermined. In this playful, pre-postmodern work, the frame dominates the story.”

“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.

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Plus email has ensured that nobody ever writes a letter longer than a thousand words. “The 10-page missive has gone the way of the buggy whip, soon to be followed, it seems, by the three-hour conversation. Each evolved as a space for telling stories, an act that cannot usefully be accomplished in much less. Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition. Exchanging stories is like making love: probing, questing, questioning, caressing. It is mutual. It is intimate. It takes patience, devotion, sensitivity, subtlety, skill—and it teaches them all, too.”

I agree with all this, except the notion that Facebook is somehow making us incapable of connecting “for real.” Long emails, long conversations, and hanging out with friends continue to be a part of my own life, after all.

What do you think? Has Facebook completely destroyed your capacity for intimacy? Or has Google made you too stupid by now to reach the end of this post?

Ironically enough, I learned about this essay because a previous contributor and friend of the Rumpus — somebody I probably wouldn’t have gotten to know without the mediation of Facebook, I might add — posted the link on her Facebook wall.

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?

Anderson argues that the web has indeed changed the way we read. No, it doesn’t mean the death of literature, but we have become accustomed to taking in dozens or hundreds of voices in a single sitting — everything from the single-line updates on Twitter to posts like this, and when you follow the links, articles and essays — and although we may stay engaged for hours on end, we’ve gotten used to constant novelty. And this is why he thinks Oscar Wao was such a successful book, artistically and commercially. Anderson observes that it took Díaz eleven years to follow his first book, and that

instead of pouring that time and energy into making Oscar Wao long and sprawling and sweeping and universal, Díaz made the book radically particular and condensed. It performs classic meganovel services— tracking a family through several generations, telling the history of an entire nation—in 350 pages. It’s rare to find a novel so short so often referred to as “epic.”

The really stunning thing about Oscar Wao, in true aughts fashion, is its style. Díaz turns the book over to a small crowd of narrators, each of whom seems to channel 100 different subcultures and dialects. The result is a reference-studded Spanglish loaded so densely with extratextual shout-outs (ringwraiths, Le Corbusier, Joseph Conrad’s wife) it practically requires the web as an unofficial appendix. The book could have been sponsored by Google and Wikipedia; you either have to consult them constantly or just surrender to the vastness of the knowledge you don’t have—which is, of course, its own kind of pleasure.

Here’s the link to the full article.

Although Nog has never been entirely forgotten since its first publication in 1968, it has never fully emerged from cult-classic status; as Erik Davis observes in the introduction to the recent Two Dollar Radio edition, it has been “attracting passionate fans over forty years of slipping in and out of print.” It’s easy to see how it managed to stay alive during those decades despite critical neglect: it’s a successful and haunting piece of experimental fiction, and a reader who has enjoyed it will press it upon others.

Its neglect is a little trickier to explain; perhaps it’s as simple as the fact that many contemporary reviewers pegged the novel as being a record of a drug trip (based upon no evidence other than sales copy) and that the most superficial reading of the book would likely focus on the vaguely hippie-like characters and their pastimes of popping pills and having casual sex. And many of the contemporary blurbs on the book, including the much-reproduced remarks of Thomas Pynchon, amount to little more than “wow, what a trip, man.” It’s easy to dismiss a book if it’s merely a document of the times.

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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.

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”.)

Brett Gaylor is a filmmaker who argues that [the reaction to filesharing and the threat to remix culture] are directly related, and he has made a film, largely based on the work of Lawrence Lessig, that calls for reform in intellectual property law: RiP: A Remix Manifesto. The Manifesto of the title consists of four points: 1. Culture always builds on the past; 2. The past always tries to control the future; 3. Our future is becoming less free; 4. To build free societies, you must limit the control of the past.

As those four points imply, the film moves from the special case of music into much wider issues raised by existing intellectual property law, touching “foreign trade, the kind of democracy we want to create,” and so forth. Since this interview was a conversation about the Internet, we minimized discussion of these wider issues — for example, Gaylor makes a compelling case that patent law is stifling medical innovation — in favor of discussing those issues that relate directly to the Internet.

But we discuss one other thing too: the way the film itself actually embodies these ideas about copyright and remix culture. Not only is the film released under a Creative Commons license; it was created alongside his innovative Open Source Cinema project — a website where documentary filmmakers can post the raw footage from their projects, and invite an audience to remix the footage and contribute it to the site. Gaylor found this collaborative process so successful with RiP that he has included dozens of viewer-contributed sequences in his many intermediate “final” cuts of the film. Infected with the remix spirit, Gaylor can’t seem to resist tweaking his own film with ever more contributions as time goes on.

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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.