Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 46
May 25, 2012
May 24, 2012
"Self-Portrait in a Sheet Mirror: On Vivian Maier" by Joanna Scott
On a winter’s day in 2007, a young realtor named John Maloof paid $400 for a box full of negatives that was being sold by an auction house in Chicago. The box had been repossessed from a storage locker gone into arrears, and Maloof was hoping it contained images he could use to illustrate a book he was co-writing about the Chicago neighborhood of Portage Park. As it turned out, he had stumbled upon a much more valuable treasure: the work of a photographer who looks destined to take her place as one of the pre-eminent street photographers of the twentieth century.
- “Self-Portrait in a Sheet Mirror: On Vivian Maier” by Joanna Scott (from The Nation)
May 23, 2012
"Gatsby's Hydroplane" by Chris Bachelder
Will this adaptation include the mythical hydroplane scene? We shall see…
“Gatsby’s Hydroplane” by Chris Bachelder (from Subtropics)
May 22, 2012
DeLillo on Film
I thought that ‘Libra’ or ‘White Noise’ could easily be turned into films, but apparently it is very complicated. I don’t know why. Anyway, don’t expect me to take care of it myself and write a screenplay… Many people think that in the 1960s I quit my job in an advertising company to write my first novel. Not at all: I just quit so I could go to the movies every afternoon. Only afterwards did I seriously take up writing… As I live close to New York, I keep discovering many new films that have become impossible to watch in a theater anywhere else in the United States. At some point in my life I lived in Greece, for three years, and I was film-starved, many good films weren’t shown there, I really missed it. Otherwise, I have kept a close look on what has been happening in the cinema industry, and I think that lately The Turin Horse by Béla Tarr, The Tree Of Life by Terrence Malick or Melancholia by Lars von Trier have been real milestones.
- Don DeLillo (source: http://moviecitynews.com/2012/05/don-delillo-talks-cosmopolis-spoilers/)
May 20, 2012
May 19, 2012
Deb Olin Unferth
Prose can be what keeps you wanting to read. Strong prose contains conflict, even at the level of the sentence. If a sentence is pushing against itself, or if each sentence is contradicting what just came before it and you’re wondering how you can hold all these contradictory statements in your mind at once, that’s interesting to me. What you’re getting then is a complex psychology or philosophy as a result of the very sentences that you’re reading. That’s a Lishian way of looking at prose. I subscribe to it. I admire work and I strive to in my own work have that kind of pressure on the individual sentence, so that each sentence is in conflict with what’s around it in some way.
May 17, 2012
Pachaas Contest
Foundling Review is holding a fifty-word fiction contest (and I get to play judge). The first place winner receives $50 and publication in the journal. There is no entry fee (though donations are certainly welcome). The deadline to submit is July 15th. Click here for more information.
