Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 43
July 2, 2012
On Readings
The other week Emerging Writers Network posted an excellent list of ways to improve the live reading experience. I was hoping to piggyback on that idea and add a few thoughts of my own. Here are those aforementioned thoughts:
1) Don’t chew tobacco during the reading. It’s incredibly distracting.
2) Periodically shout out Whose cell phone is that?, even if no cell phone is ringing. Volatility helps sell books.
3) Consider using sock puppets for scenes with heavy dialogue.
4) Don’t show pictures from your recent vacation. Nobody wants to see that.
5) If you decide to bring a beach ball for the audience to play around with, make sure to blow it up before you arrive at the reading. You’d be surprised how long it can take to blow up a beach ball.
6) Place a butter knife on the podium as a “Chekhov’s gun” sort of thing. Let people wonder how the butter knife will be used later.
7) Answer every question with a question of your own. It’s a great way to let the audience know you studied philosophy in college.
8) Wear a fun hat.
9) If the event includes more than one reader, maybe split up the readings with a t-shirt cannon or mascot of some kind.
10) A headworn microphone will allow you to move around with greater freedom.
June 28, 2012
June 27, 2012
A Short but Comprehensive List of Clown Questions
What’s your favorite beer?
Do you have any tips for applying greasepaint?
How many bowling pins can you juggle at once?
When did you first learn how to ride a unicycle?
Have you ever been mauled by a bull?
Do you do bar mitzvahs?
If I shake your hand, will I feel an electric shock?
Can you make me a giraffe out of balloons?
How long is your handkerchief?
Does the sadness ever creep up on you?
June 26, 2012
George Saunders
We humans tend to reduce. We live through a great day, full of literally millions of perceptual instants (a beach, a love affair, a really weird old couple who mysteriously keep saying incredibly insightful things while picking off of one another bugs that aren’t there; a stream, a snake under a faded sail, etc, etc.), and at the end that day, we go: “Wow, that was awesome.” Art is the inversion of that process: paying hyper-attention to the things that make reality what it is, resisting reduction, trusting that the truest (and most beautiful) thing that can be said has something to do with the accretion of those small instants.
- George Saunders interviewed by Gary Percesepe (from BLIP Magazine)
June 25, 2012
Richard Yates's List of Underrated Writers
PS: Who do you consider some other good, neglected writers?
RY: Read the four splendid books by Gina Berriault, if you can find them, and if you want to discover an absolutely first-class talent who has somehow been left almost entirely out of the mainstream. She hasn’t quit writing yet, either, and I hope she never will.
And read almost anything by R.V. Cassill, a brilliant and enormously productive man who’s been turning out novels and stories for twenty-five years or more, all the while building and sustaining a large influence on other writers as a teacher and critic. Oh, he’s always been well known in what I guess you’d call literary circles, but he had to wait a long, long time before his most recent novel, Doctor Cobb’s Game, did bring him some widespread readership at last.
And George Garrett. I haven’t read very much of his work, but that’s at least partly because there’s so very much of it—and he, too, has remained largely unknown except among other writers. I guess his latest book, like Cassill’s, did make something of a public splash at last, but that, too, was long overdue.
And Seymour Epstein—ever heard of him? I have read all of his work to date—five novels and a book of stories, all expertly crafted and immensely readable—yet he, too, seems to have been largely ignored so far.
But hell, this list could go on and on. This country’s loaded with good, badly neglected writers. Fred Chappel. Calvin Kentfield. Herbert Wilner. Helen Hudson. Edward Hoagland. George Cuomo. Arthur J. Roth—those are only a few.
My God, if I’d produced as much good work as most of those people, with as little reward, I’d really feel qualified to rant and rail against the literary establishment.
- Richard Yates interviewed in Ploughshares (Issue 3, Winter 1972)
(Evan S. Connell, Brian Moore, and Edward Lewis Wallant are also mentioned in the interview.)
June 22, 2012
June 21, 2012
Possible Sequels to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
Andrew Johnson: Monkey Detective
Ulysses S. Grant: French Toast Enthusiast
Rutherford B. Hayes: Student Council Treasurer
James A. Garfield: Lucha Libre
Chester Arthur: Cocktail Waitress
Grover Cleveland: Amateur Tattoo Artist
Benjamin Harrison: Spin Doctor
Grover Cleveland: Semi-Professional Tattoo Artist
William McKinley: Harlem Globetrotter
Theodore Roosevelt: Collector of Exotic Birds
William Howard Taft: Parking Lot Attendant
Woodrow Wilson: Horse Whisperer
Warren G. Harding: Baker of Erotic Cakes
Calvin Coolidge: Pool Shark
Herbert Hoover: Reluctant Party Host
Franklin D. Roosevelt: Belly Dancer
Harry S. Truman: Serial Monogamist
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Opener of Stubborn Jars
John F. Kennedy: Youth Group Minister
Lyndon B. Johnson: Former Member of the Band Menudo
Richard Nixon: Alligator Wrestler
Gerald Ford: Live Action Role Player
Jimmy Carter: Peanut Farmer
Ronald Reagan: Lovable Chimney Sweep
George W. Bush: Rocket Scientist
Barack Obama: Street Magician
June 19, 2012
June 18, 2012
Selected Literary Tweets
- Today’s challenge: See how many times you can drop “Kafkaesque” into conversation before somebody slaps you.
- Reading Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. So this is how Stifler meets his end…
- Technically, it’s a novello if there’s a bookmark sticking out of it.
- I wish Sam Lipsyte would write a book called Fifty Shades of Gary.
- Hysterical realism is one of the most common symptoms of greatamericanovelitis.
- Critics tend to dismiss Cheever’s foray into hip hop, but I think The Wapshot Chronic is some of his best work.
- NaFiWaToBrUpYoUnNoInCaCoMo (National Find Ways to Bring Up Your Unfinished Novel in Casual Conversation Month)
- I don’t appreciate being called a writer of midget stories. I’d prefer if you used the term little fictions.
- Maybe more people would visit the library if there was a small area set aside for laser tag.
- For a limited time only all Pushcart nominations can be redeemed for a half-price appetizer at P.F. Chang’s.
- The term “metafiction” feels dated. I say we change the name to metta world fiction.
- SS writers should put out special holiday collections. Who wouldn’t want to read Santa’s Workshop in Bad Decline?
- When I say I write juvenile fiction, I mean I write fiction about the rapper Juvenile. The fact that it’s for children is incidental.
- New publishing strategy: hollow out the center of the book and fill it with a small prize, like a tin whistle or matchbox car.
June 16, 2012
Ray by Barry Hannah
I didn’t realize how old-fashioned it was, and how much it had been talked about before, but I was after the presence of all time in one moment. Hardly anybody is in the moment. You go buy something at a counter and you see the clerks staring away. They have a past, they have a future but no present. The past is never over, you’re still in it; or you’re projecting yourself into the future. So there’s hardly room for a present. Ray was supposed to answer that.
But, you know, I don’t think I have the, let us say, psyche that I had when I wrote Ray. I was drinking heavily and almost manic-depressive. Up down, up down, and fragmented. Now I’m very sober, for twelve years now, and clearheaded. I can concentrate longer, yet I still believe what I was doing with logic in Ray. I was trying to skip logic, trying to make time and place and space move quickly. Real quickly. I still like that. Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
- Barry Hannah on Ray (from The Paris Review)
