Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 10

Greg Mulcahy

“Literature is always reaching its end because we are always reaching our ends. I don’t believe literature will go away. It constitutes and reconstitutes in different forms, but it’s as permanent as humans are. When we go, it goes. Until then, it goes on.”

- Greg Mulcahy (interviewed at Numéro Cinq)

Susan Sontag

“I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: ‘Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.’

Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth that I thought of some more recipes for writer’s virtue.

For instance: ‘Be serious.’ By which I meant: Never be cynical. And which doesn’t preclude being funny.” 

- Susan Sontag (from “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”)

PHOX - Lovefool

“The Stories We Tell” by Anita Felicelli

“Perhaps the very diversity of India is what makes the publishing of diverse Indian perspectives in America so difficult. It is assumed that a writer’s own ethnic group will constitute some part of his or her readership in America—that readers want to see themselves. But that means that substantially less than 1% of Americans are even available to “relate” to a particular Indian American work solely because of ethnic identification.

The metric for whether our fiction should be published must not be whether there are enough people to “see” themselves in our work. Rather, the standard should be whether it enables us to see each other, and whether it does so in an artistic and inventive way.”

- “The Stories We Tell” by Anita Felicelli in India Currents

Kate Walbert

“I love the novella; I love short form. I love the work of Penelope Fitzgerald. There’s a kind of a book—Julian Barnes writes them, Hilary Mantel when she writes short, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams—that’s just so elegant in its construction. I’m drawn to things that feel very honed. I love economy of form. If I were a filmmaker, I would be making shorts.

I would love to write something that felt perfectly constructed, perfectly constrained, and yet somehow held everything—like when you look at a drop of water through a microscope and see the world. That’s my goal.”

- Kate Walbert (interviewed at The Rumpus)

Eleanor Antin

Eleanor Antin, 100 Boots at the Bank (from the 100 Boots series), 1971

Interview at The Collagist

I was interviewed about my story “Face” at The Collagist. (Thanks to Dana Diehl for the great questions.)

“Ways” at Corium Magazine

This story was originally published in Dark Sky Magazine back in 2010 (a year or two before the journal went under). The good folks at Corium Magazine were kind enough to reprint it in their latest issue. It’s only a few hundred words, so I’m not bothering with an excerpt. Oh, fine…

There are three ways we can do this, he says to me. I elect for the second way, immediately, before he’s had time to explain any of the ways. Are you sure? he asks. I tell him I am sure. He says I ought to have selected the third way. I tell him I am quite smitten with the second way, thank you very much, and it would be difficult to change my mind at this point in time.

Father John Misty - The Suburbs

A cover of Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” performed by Father John Misty

List of Rejections

David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress was rejected fifty-four times before it was finally accepted by Dalkey Archive Press. (Knopf apparently rejected the manuscript on three separate occasions.)

“I suspect it set a record. For years, the highest number of turndowns I’d ever heard of was thirty-six, on The Ginger Man. Then I read in the Deirdre Bair biography that Murphy had about forty two. Ironweed had a dozen, as I recall, and I once jokingly told Bill Kennedy while Wittgenstein was going around that if rejections were any sign of quality, then mine was already twice as good as his. But then I left Donleavy and Beckett in the dust also.”

- David Markson in conversation with Joseph Tabbi