Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 45
June 3, 2012
Visiting Writers @ The Conium Review
James R. Gapinski reviewed my collection for The Conium Review. It’s not the most flattering of reviews, but I deeply appreciate his close reading of the text.
June 2, 2012
Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford
I wrote the first draft of the novel in San Francisco and re-wrote it in Northern New Mexico in the spring of 1970. I remember receiving a tremendous boost in confidence in it when my English editor sent me a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude: I felt I was mining a small tributary or tendril of the vein Marquez had discovered. What else? I discovered Virginia Woolf about that time; also Edith Wharton. But I can’t say what was generally happening in the literary world, in part because I had moved so far away from London and New York. At that time people were still wondering whether New Mexico was in the United States…
- Stanley Crawford on Log of The S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine (from Bookslut)
June 1, 2012
May 31, 2012
Anis Shivani
The successful creative writers can’t afford to offend anyone in authority who may withhold rewards and opportunity in the future—a necessary consequence of nearly all of America’s literary writers having become, in essence, state employees, upholding a collective aesthetic of bourgeois realism and individualized confessionalism, leaving the state’s politics and policies well enough alone for the sake of job security. Somehow, separate from these two black holes of critical nothingness, a new criticism needs to arise to take on the honest evaluation of the literary merchandise.
Without such blunt assessment, we cannot know who is doing worthwhile writing and who is not, amidst the flood of hyped authors being published. We cannot separate the fads and fashions from the durable and classical. Without outspoken criticism reaching the vast potential audience, writing itself cannot be returned to a central position in culture, since the output is immense in volume and drowns out any thought process about its relevance or importance or meaning.
- “What Should Be the Function of Criticism Today?” by Anis Shivani (from Subtropics)
May 30, 2012
May 29, 2012
Stoner Reading List
- Billy Budd by Herman Melville
- The Golden Bowl by Henry James
- The Gunter Grass Reader
- The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
- Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
- The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
- Stoner by John Williams
May 28, 2012
Flash Interview
Lakisha Burroughs (of FlashFiction.Net) interviewed me about story craft. Read it here.
May 27, 2012
May 26, 2012
Michael Griffith
Plot is a petty tyrant, almost always the part of novels that seems to me most false and dull. Lots of lives are full of incident, but whose has a plot? Digression gets a bad rap. Even the word itself implies that there’s a proper gress from which one has strayed, that every life is a line. But surely linearity is a myth, is something we impose only afterward, when it’s time to make a narrative. We are poor, forked animals who live most of our lives in a state of ungress. I like fiction that accommodates as much of the mess of consciousness as possible, and it struck me that this was a chance to put up or shut up. Digress plus egress equals progress. It’s not Archimedes, but it’s what I had to go on.
- Michael Griffith interviewed by Steve Almond at The Nervous Breakdown (6/11)
May 25, 2012
Happy Birthday, Raymond Carver!
After work Raymond Carver and I would frequent this bar in downtown Palo Alto where all the bartenders and waiting staff dressed as characters from the silent film era, communicating solely through gestures. Carver had made it his mission to gull one of them into talking. He undertipped, then overtipped, spilled his Bloody Mary on the hardwood floor, and sometimes etched words into the bar with the blade of his keys. But the staff, in their drab fashions, their unbroken silence, continued to circle around us as if nothing at all was the matter.
- “1967” from Visiting Writers
