Ravi Mangla's Blog, page 8
November 19, 2015
Carl Phillips
hear the rush of whole lives passing
elsewhere, without you, and still believe
you have not been entirely abandoned.
- Carl Phillips (from “Death of the Sibyl”)
November 16, 2015
November 9, 2015
“Court of Appeals” at matchbook
A short piece, “Court of Appeals,” is live at matchbook. Here’s the start:
Since her acquittal, Agnes couldn’t land even the lowliest of jobs. They either recognized her face from the evening news or the morning papers. That she was found innocent was of as little consequence as her professional references. Nobody wanted to hire a suspected axe murderer. Her family, eager to cheer her up, ascribed the reluctance to a weak job market.
November 5, 2015
November 1, 2015
George Saunders and Ben Marcus
“If they ever get around to building The Short Story Museum, I think they’d better carve this over the doorway: ‘A short story works to remind us that if we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.’ Just beautiful. To me, this implies that one purpose of art is to get us to wake up, recalibrate our emotional life, get ourselves into proper relation to reality. Which sounds to me a lot like what we ask our spiritual life to do, if we have one.”
- A conversation between George Saunders and Ben Marcus
October 27, 2015
Mary Ruefle
“There is no substitute for wonder and curiosity in a life. It’ll take you a long way. But of course one must, among other things, wonder where there is such inequality on earth, and why our species keeps fucking things up.”
October 24, 2015
“The Race Dynamics of Online Dating” at Pacific Standard
Read my piece on race and dating at Pacific Standard.
People of color open to dating outside their own race must resign themselves to the fact that large portions of the dating pool, white or otherwise, exist outside the sphere of possibility. In a crowded bar or coffee shop, one might—with an opportune bon mot—manage to scale the barrier of race, or at least be politely entertained, but this feat proves more difficult on dating apps and websites. The anonymity of online dating allows us to discriminate freely without the guilt associated with point-blank rejection. And if the studies are to be trusted, Asian men face the steepest climb.
October 15, 2015
“Lever” in The Collagist
I have a short piece (”Lever”) in the October issue of The Collagist. The issue also features new work from Sara Levine, Mary South, David Rice, Katie Moulton, Tyler Gobble, and others.
October 11, 2015
5 Writing Tips: William H. Gass
“Try to remember that artists in these catastrophic times, along with the serious scientists, are the only salvation for us, if there is to be any. Be happy because no one is seeing what you do, no one is listening to you, no one really cares what may be achieved, but sometimes accidents happen and beauty is born.”
- William H. Gass at Publishers Weekly
October 6, 2015
Dinty W. Moore
“We live our lives and then relive them on the page in a relentless search for some nugget of discovery, some further comprehension of what it all means. Otherwise, essay or memoir is flat: it is just “this happened to me” or “I happen to think this about that.” If a writer isn’t examining and re-examining her ideas and observations in each draft, ending up places she never thought at the beginning that her essay would take her, then she is not doing the job.”
- Dinty W. Moore (from The Rumpus)
