Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 17
October 22, 2014
Sam Lipsyte
When I’m writing on a good day, attending to the sentences, the paragraphs, the rhythm of the prose, the tonal integrity of the piece (story, novel, essay), I’m not thinking about my body of work. I’m just locked into the current project. It’s when I’m not writing well, or just not writing that day, that I start to turn over other questions. Why am I writing this? Why did I write that? Is there something I’m trying to get to? I think there is something. But I never know precisely what it is, so I keep writing. I write to find out what I’m writing, and maybe to find out more about what I’ve already written. I’m aware of certain themes I’ve explored in the past and others I want to circle back to, or the way my books ‘talk’ to each other in strange ways, but that’s not quite what the pursuit is all about. I’m not trying to bring all of my work under one unifying theory. But I am after something. The pursuit you speak of has something to do with the ‘fail better’ model and something to do with death, probably. The umbrella is a patchwork job of fear, desire, love, loss and mortality, or the way my heart and mind filter them in both abstract and visceral terms. I know writers who think about what they ‘should’ write at a particular moment, what makes logical sense at this point in their careers, or what they suppose their readers expect, but I can’t get that distance on myself. I just try to remember that there is no ideal form for my next fiction out there in the ether, waiting for me to arrive and tuck it under my arm. It’s just endless improvisation, not just the first draft but all of them, all the editing, all the thinking, all the discussion.
- An epistolary conversation between Diane Cook and Sam Lipsyte at Granta
October 20, 2014
October 15, 2014
Recent Reads
Two essays that I like very much:
“That There Would Be Better Pornography" by Barbara Duffey at The Collagist
“My Private Property" by Mary Ruefle at The Kenyon Review
October 9, 2014
"Anamnesis" at Wigleaf
October 6, 2014
"Rejection Notes #7: Cormac McCarthy"
New rejection note at BULL Men’s Fiction (long gap between #6 and #7):
The prose is, as always, richly textured and painstakingly precise, but I can’t get past the gratuitous use of product placement in the manuscript.
For example, in chapter six the narrator is warming up a Tombstone pizza, even though the story takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
October 4, 2014
Jo Baer
We all have an understanding of things that are alive in our time, that speak to people in our time, and for time to come. Good art will always have this peculiar quality that it carries through the ages. It really does change people, their mindsets, their emotional sets; it speaks in very complicated ways. But please don’t ask me to explain it.
- Jo Baer
September 29, 2014
September 25, 2014
"The Ancestor of Hearts" by Christine Schutt and Diane Williams
Once shed of her fur, she looked skinned as a rabbit. “I don’t know how I got across the country.”
“Maybe you swam?”
“Possible,” she said.
“What would warm you up?”
Shivering was her response.
- “The Ancestor of Hearts” by Christine Schutt and Diane Williams at The Brooklyn Rail
