Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 11
June 19, 2015
James Salter
“Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.”
- James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime
June 16, 2015
Renata Adler
“Here’s what I think is wrong with boring people to no purpose. It’s not just that it corrupts their attention, makes them less capable, in other words, of being patient with important things that require a tolerance, to some greater purpose, of some boring time. The real danger lies, I think, in this: that boredom has intimately to do with power. One has only to think of hypnosis, of being mesmerized. Monotony, as a literal method of enthrallment. So this claim to find art in boredom, for its own sake or as one of the modes of alienation, is not simply a harmless misunderstanding, which finds it avant garde to stupefy. Deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power.”
- Renata Adler from Pitch Dark
June 11, 2015
June 8, 2015
“True Blue” at The Paris Review Daily
I wrote a short history of ultramarine blue for The Paris Review Daily.
June 4, 2015
Elizabeth Hardwick
“The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”
- Elizabeth Hardwick (from The Paris Review)
May 31, 2015
May 27, 2015
May 15, 2015
Mary Ellen Bartley
Untitled 53, 2012 (from Paperbacks series)
May 6, 2015
Maggie Nelson
“My first writing teacher Annie Dillard always told her students to leave it all on the floor, every time. Or as she put it: ‘One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.’ I believed in this then and I believe in it now, with something akin to religious fervor.”
- Maggie Nelson interviewed at Tin House
May 1, 2015
Robert Motherwell
“Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest—and rarest—of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.”
- Robert Motherwell (in a letter to Frank O’Hara)
