Jeff Ragsdale (Jeff, One Lonely Guy) produced, shot and edited an “immersion documentary” in which he accompanied Canadian escorts on hundreds of calls over a span of several months. The half-hour film is entitled “30 Nights with a Call Girl.” Millions readers may recall Ragsdale’s work from its mention in our own Sonya Chung’s essay “On Loneliness.”
Feeling Lonely Tonight?
Gun Wizard
What do you call a genre that mixes westerns and fantasy novels? Damien Walter proposes the term “weird western.” In The Guardian, he runs down the history of the hybrid category, citing Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country and Molly Tanzer’s Vermillion as examples. Pair with Daniel Kalder on the Euro-Western.
The Art of Encouragement
The Best Books of the Year (2013)
Amazon released their annual Best Books of the Year: Top 100 in Print list today (as well as a free and helpful Reader’s Guide), and numerous Millions favorites made the cut. Both George Saunders’s Tenth of December and Philipp Meyer’s The Son cracked the top 10. We reviewed both here and here, respectively. Other notable books boasting extensive Millions coverage include Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings (review), George Packer’s The Unwinding (review), Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (review), Dave Eggers’s The Circle (review), James Salter’s All That Is (review), Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove (interview), Stuart Nadler’s Wise Men (review), Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (review), and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (review). Meanwhile, the top spot belongs to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.
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Franzen on Film
The Corrections might never make it to screen, but Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker essay on songbird poaching, "Emptying the Skies" (behind the paywall), is already a documentary. The film follows a group of bird lovers trying to save the endangered animals and even includes an interview with Franzen. Although the documentary just found a distributor, there is no word on an official release date. Until then, here's the trailer.
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Walk, Don’t Run
Haruki Murakami retired his running shoes to walk to Kobe and rediscover his hometown. "Strictly speaking, it’s not my home town any more. I feel a deep sense of loss at this fact, as if the axis of my memories is faintly, but audibly, creaking within me. It’s a physical sensation," he writes in an essay for Granta.
Best New Blogs
A fresh take on the year-end list: Bygone Bureau's Best New Blogs of 2010.
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The Trouble With Memoirs
"If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that." Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times lays some ground rules for those compelled to write memoirs.
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Stephen FryTube
Some kind soul has uploaded all of Stephen Fry's QI (Quite Interesting) to YouTube. Enjoy.
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As one of the escorts who he went on calls with, that refused to sign any contracts after seeing how information and footage where twisted and edited, and who was told this was scrapped and will not be used I am very intrigued to see it is going ahead. What Mr. Ragsdale has forgotten, is not only did he tape us, but we taped him. Including his drunk encounters with canadian police. What about the facebook FBI thing? Jeff, if you see this I hope you know that you have no legal right to use the information, footage, our stories or likeness without our permission. To the person who put up this story, thanks. I need all the documentation I can get. Maybe ask Mr. Ragsdale about the footage we have of him that we might use to counteract him lying to us.