Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 44

Of Monsters and Men - Mountain Sound

Spoiler Alert

We are on this Earth only to love and to build the biggest shopping mall.

- Laura Eve Engel & Adam Peterson (from [Spoiler Alert])

Bibliophilia by Michael Griffith

Basically my approach boils down to this: Updike once wrote of Nabokov that — this is a paraphrase — he writes prose the only way it should be written, ecstatically. That seems to me exactly right, but honest-to-God ecstasy is hard to gin up every day and I’ve made peace with th e fact that I’ll never be prolific and that there will be long stretches of silence. Of course, there’s no guarantee that if you’re taking pleasure in what you do the reader will, too. But it seems to me a dead certainty that if you’re not taking pleasure in what you do, you have no hope of inducing the reader to.

- Michael Griffith (from City Beat)

The Future of American Fiction

I’d say the future of fiction will be even less curated, more egalitarian. It will be a good time for art and a bad time for making money, unless you are writing erotica, in which case it will be a really good time for making money.

- Amelia Gray interviewed at Flavorwire

Gary Amdahl on the Novella

JR: I’m curious about the novella format. You can do more things in a novella than you can in a short story, but you get your resolution much faster than you would in a novel. They seem like an accidental medium and are viewed as short stories that went long or novels that ran out of steam. Do you agree? Did you set out to write novellas?

GA: Yes, I set out to write novellas. The misunderstanding of them (I agree with you, either stories that are too long or novels that aren’t long enough) is tragic, a vicious circle of categorization and commodification and uniformity of product that no longer makes sense to anybody but which we can’t break free of. I hear people talking about wanting to make an investment of time, I guess, and a minimal kind of attention, in a story when they buy a book, and the novella, I dunno, makes them feel like they’re not getting full value on their entertainment dollar. It’s horrifying and stupid. Imagine a gang of Russian financial wizards (bright boy bankers and slavically suicidal hedge funders, with “an interest in the arts,” telling Tolstoy that “The Death of Ivan Illych” is, at 40-45 pp., neither fish nor fowl and therefore unpublishable: pad it, Leo old man, or gut it—all stories can benefit from cutting, da? Or the learned playboys who sold out to the world media congloms (exception: the late great James Laughlin and New Directions) straightening Saul Bellow’s lapels, “Saulie, Seize the Day looks so…I dunno, slender propped up next to Augie March, I mean, come on, fella, you see what we’re saying…we want a man’s book. Novellas are for women’s magazines.” And anyone suggesting Joyce’s “The Dead” is too long or too short ought to be sentenced to live without that masterpiece for ten years. It’s all categorizing (a means of escaping the thing itself by naming it) and marketing (“Readers don’t want to buy novellas, sorry.” WELL WHY THE FUCK WOULD PEOPLE DRAW THE LINE THERE??? “I don’t care how good it is, seventy-five pages leaves me feeling uneasy….”))

- Gary Amdahl in conversation with Jim Ruland (from Vermin on the Mount)

Bowerbirds - Always an Ear to Bend

All the Day's Sad Stories by Tina May Hall

In a broad sense, I think poetry and fiction have the same purpose as any kind of art—to remake the world, to reveal something about it, to give us another lens through which to view our lives. Poetry and fiction both work through empathy and image. The two deviate in the ways that they create tension to pull the reader through a piece. Usually we look to narrative arc and character development to do that in a piece of fiction. The line itself, along with the energy of the language (and in formal poetry, the expectations set up by the form), are what pull the reader through poetry. Of course, there is great overlap between the two genres and great potential for play. This shifting edge between poetry and fiction is what I find really interesting to explore in my own writing.

- Tiny May Hall (from Erie Reader)

Millhauser on the Novella

JS: Perhaps as much as any American writer I can think of, you’ve been drawn to the novella. Are there aesthetic advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the form? Does it even have a form?

SM: Is it possible not to be drawn to the novella? Everything about it is immensely seductive. It demands the rigor of treatment associated with the short story, while at the same time it offers a liberating sense of expansiveness, of widening spaces. And it strikes me as having real advantages over its jealous rivals, the short story and the novel. The challenge and glory of the short story lie exactly there, in its shortness. But shortness encourages certain effects and not others. It encourages, for instance, the close-up view, the revelatory detail, the single significant moment. In the little world of the story, many kinds of desirable effect are inherently impossible—say, the gradual elaboration of a psychology, the demonstration of change over time. Think of the slowly unfolding drama of self-delusion and self-discovery in Death in Venice — a short story would have to proceed very differently. As for novels: in their dark hearts, don’t they long to be exhaustive? Novels are hungry, monstrous. Their apparent delicacy is deceptive—they want to devour the world.

The novella wants nothing to do with the immense, the encyclopedic, the all-conquering all-devouring prose epic, which strikes it as an army moving relentlessly across the land. Its desires are more intimate, more selective. And when it looks at the short story, to which it’s secretly akin, it says, with a certain cruelty, No, not for me this admirably exquisite, elegant, refined—perhaps overrefined?—delicately nuanced, perfect little world, whose perfection depends so much on artful exclusions. It says, Let me breathe! The attraction of the novella is that it lets the short story breathe. It invites the possibility of certain elaborations and complexities forbidden by a very short form, while at the same time it holds out the promise of formal perfection. It’s enough to make a writer dizzy with exhilaration.

- Steven Millhauser interviewed by Jim Shepard (from BOMB)

Julia Stone - Bloodbuzz Ohio (The National Cover)

(Thanks to The Dopeness for the tip.)

Europeana by Patrik Ouředník

In any case, my goal was not to conceive of the twentieth century as a theme—not even in the sense of a “reflection theme”—but as a literary figure. The primary question wasn’t to know what events, what episodes were characteristic of the twentieth century, but which syntax, which rhetoric, which expressiveness belonged to it, in what sense was it redundant, etc.

I could simplify this: what were the key words of the twentieth century? Undoubtedly, haste (rather than ”chaos,” which is no more appropriate to the twentieth century than to any another). This meant, let’s try to write a hurried text. Another peculiarity of the twentieth century, I think, is infantilism—with everything that it implies, from the romantic-commercial image of juvenility to the refusal of taking the full responsibility of one’s acts and words. Let’s try then to write a childish text, a text that could have been told by a kid reciting his lesson or by the village idiot. Thirdly, this century has been explicitly scientific. This meant, let’s use a vocabulary more or less scientific, with all its contradictions and, if possible, with all its vacuity. These are the elements that gave birth to the form and content of the book.

- Patrik Ouředník on Europeana (from Context N°17)