#parul sehgal
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Karlotta Freier’s illustration for Parul Sehgal’s piece on Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home in this week’s New Yorker magazine.
#Karlotta Freier#Great Illustration#Parul Sehgal#Lorrie Moore#I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home#The New Yorker
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Manto established his distinctive form in the book “Black Margins” (1948): thirty-two sketches of compressed power, some no more than a few sentences long, which brought to life the obscene logic of the new world. In “The Advantage of Ignorance,” a sniper takes aim at a child. His companion objects, but not for the expected reason. “You are out of bullets,” he exclaims. In “Double Cross,” a character complains about being sold bad petrol—it won’t set fire to any shops. The stories are not just expressions of shock; they are modes of refusal—a response to facts that will not, ought not, be easily assimilated into a narrative. The ink feels fresh, wet. Manto remains our eternal contemporary, his capacity to unnerve undiminished.
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Manto’s fiction routinely blurs the line between life and death, sanity and madness. Characters merge with their weapons. (In “The Last Salute,” a platoon leader “felt as though he had turned into a rifle, but one whose trigger was jammed.”) Weapons act as agents in their own right. (From “Mishtake”: “Ripping the belly cleanly, the knife moved in a straight line down the midriff, in the process slashing the cord which held the man’s pajamas in place.”) These transformations occur beyond the characters’ awareness. You will cross the threshold without knowing, Manto seems to say. You will not be able to see what you have become. There is no self-knowledge or remorse, no greater sense of justice than there was in 1947. Nor does the author permit himself the reprieve of moralizing. There are only loops of retribution.
#what I'm reading#partition#saadat hasan manto#parul sehgal#describing manto as 'our eternal contemporary' is such a good way of putting it parul sehgal is so talented#this time in 2021 I was reading manto's mottled dawn and right now I'm reading tomb of sand
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“I’m allergic to most forms of self-exposure. It must have something to do with being an Indian person in this world where I feel conspicuous, but I think it’s mostly instinctive. I’m just very protective of myself, and congenitally secretive. I’m always happier watching rather than being watched. But then again, who said it, D.W. Winnicott? The writer is a person who wants to hide and be found. I think that’s the central tension for a lot of people, not just writers. I was playing with my daughter, and realized how interesting it is that the first game people play is peek-a-boo. See me, don’t see me. See me, don’t see me. Or hide-and-seek. Can you find me? Can I hide from you? So many writers I love share this strain. I live across the street from Marianne Moore’s old apartment building. She’s someone who’s very important to me, someone who wrote compulsively about shells and zoos, about how to keep other people out.”
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“The task is always to write every single piece like it’s your only one. It has to have that energy. Use your best material now. Just squander yourself. Enjoy it. I don’t want to read anyone’s tepid writing. For the critic (or any writer, really), your first mandate is get the reader’s attention and then keep it. All your fine thoughts and nuanced interpretations are worthless if no one bothers to get to them. Fundamentally your job is to keep somebody reading. Sentence by sentence. You have to hold them. Sentence by sentence. Demonstrate authority. Books deserve it.”
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“Hilton Als is the gold standard. He doesn’t write about anything that doesn’t matter to him. And even when he’s not present in the piece, his affection and sensibility suffuses it. And when he does talk about himself or his family, he finds a way to do it in a way that I feel like I am seeing just one piece of him. He eludes me, and I like that. That’s very hard to do, to maintain one’s mystery like that. It’s that lovely feeling you get after one conversation with someone who interests you. You connect and then leave each other. I haven’t caught you, I couldn’t. I don’t know you. But I have these things now: a handful of gestures, that lilt in your voice, I have them.”
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Much of life is the narrative equivalent of dark matter, and Virginia Woolf had a name for it. “Often when I have been writing one of my so‐called novels,” she recounted, “I have been baffled by this same problem”:
That is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand—“non-being.” Every day includes much more non-being than being. . . . As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week after week passed at St Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock.
—Parul Sehgal, "The Tyrrany of the Tale"
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shiv roy/trauma as haunted house
Christina Marie Brown; Ghost I // opening credits // 2.05 // Angela Carter; "The Fall River Axe Murders," Saints and Strangers // 2.08 // Yiyun Li; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write To You in Your Life // opening credits // 3.06 // Elizabeth Thomas; Catherine House // @turtleneckshiv; x // Christine Ro; Reassuring Ghosts and Haunted Houses // 3.02 // @nedlittle // 2.09 // 3.03 // Parul Sehgal: "In The Dream House" Recounts An Abusive Relationship Using Dozens Of Different Genres," // 3.08 // Silvia Moreno Garcia: Mexican Gothic // 3.08 // Mahmoud Darwish: "A River Dies of Thirst," // 3.09 // Adonis, Selected Poems; "Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea (tr. by Khaled Mattawa)
#shiv roy#succession#machinery#logan roy#parallels#succession hbo#haunted house#tomshiv#web weaving#on hauntings#literally shiv sunday btw. if you even care#sorry for the excessive tagging lmao this took me forever#ask to tag#blood chamber blogging
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Does anyone recall that, in the original version of the tale, it’s unclear whether Scheherazade survives? The Arabic manuscripts offer no resolution; the convention of a happy ending came from the revisions imposed by European translators. What a different ancestor storytelling would have if we knew Scheherazade not as a triumphant, silver-tongued heroine but as a woman controlling her terror as she nurses her smallest baby and minds the other two, telling a story not because she thinks it will save the world, or herself, but because there is nothing else she can do. We can even wonder about what swarm may have nestled against her spleen. But that’s another story.
— "The Tyranny of the Tale" by Parul Sehgal
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some essays i’ve enjoyed recently:
Anne Boyer - “No”
Parul Sehgal - “The Case Against The Trauma Plot”
Brandon Taylor - “against character vapour”
Jhumpa Lahiri - “Indian Takeout”
S.L. Huang - “The Ghost of Workshops Past”
Frankie Thomas - “What Was it About The Animorphs?”
Carmen Maria Machado - “How Surrealism Enriches Storytelling About Women”
Jaya Saxena - “The Limits of the Lunchbox Moment”
Emma Garland - “What does it mean to be a ‘dissociative feminist?’”
Hussein Omar - “Unexamined Life”
Roland Barthes - “The Death of the Author”
Laura Mulvey - “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Andrea Long Chu - “Hanya’s Boys”
Jia Tolentino - “Love, Death, and Begging For Celebrities to Kill You”
Robin D.G. Kelley - “A Poetics of Anticolonialism”
Angelica Jade Bastien - “The Hollow Impersonation in Blonde”
i’ll probably be adding to this list with more pieces as i come across them-- please feel free to add on your own recommendations, or send me an ask if you agree, disagree or want to chat more about any of the essays already listed!
#ari's recs#essays#to keep#this was also done so that i could have a compilation post to put all my essay links because i keep losing them [sob]
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The Stuff I Read in May 2023
stuff i Extra Liked is bold
nevermind that this is four days late
Books
Chainsaw Man Part 1, Tatsuki Fujimoto
This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Introduction to Graph Theory, Richard J. Trudeau
Short Fiction
Like two dozen Shirley Jackson short stories. I will not list them all but my favourites were: Paranoia, Showdown, The Possibility of Evil, The Renegade, The Tooth
Transfag Home Video, O’Neill
Halfway People, Karen Joy Fowler
با پایین دستی ها بهتر میشه کنار آمد، عزیز نسین
دنیا جای گل و گشادیه، عزیز نسین
جل خر چی شد؟ عزیز نسین
من تربیت خانوادگی دارم! عزیز نسین
مسافرت آمریکا، عزیز نسین
کودک و شمشیر، روژه دوینی
Other
Against the Wife: Abolishing Romance and Family, Practicing Disability Love-Politics, Jina B. Kim
Stone-age toddlers had art lessons, study says, Caroline Davies
Evidence for cave marking by Palaeolithic children, Kevin Sharpe, Leslie Van Gelder
Counting the Children: The Rold of Children in the Production of Finger Flutings in Four Upper Palaeolithic Caves, Leslie Van Gelder
The Case Against the Trauma Plot, Parul Sehgal
Sudan’s crisis and the hidden hands of the IMF, Dian Maria Blandina
The Drug-Fueled Protest in Dianne Feinstein’s Office You Haven’t Heard About, Ben Terris
Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of a Nakba That Never Ended, Mohammed El-Kurd
Boots on the Ground, Zoya Teirstein
The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg, Leonard Euler
Palestinian history doesn’t start with the Nakba, Palestinian Youth Movement
#reading prog#don't think i got quite everything on here but#it's been a pretty miserable month if you can't tell#probably because of the chronics#i had to read time war bc i've seen a dozen ppl i know review it anywhere from DNF to GOAT#i had to see it for myself
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who are like the good modern literary critics. i like parul sehgal but that’s about it
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saw Parul Sehgal and Wesley Morris on my first trip to NYC.. i was STRUCK seeing them
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Against Narrative, works from 2023:
1) The Tyranny of the Tale by By Parul Sehgal: ‘Anyone in my line has every incentive to fall in step, to proclaim the supremacy of narrative, and then, modestly, to propose herself, as one professionally steeped in story, to be of some small use. Blame it on the cortisol, though: there’s no stanching the skepticism. How inconspicuously narrative winds around us, soft as fog; how efficiently it…
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#1000 and one nights#a thousand and one nights#authors#classics#editors#Game of Thrones#grief#Homer#James Baldwin#James Franco#Kendrick Lamar#loss#mother#motherhood#narration#narrations#Narrative#Peter Pan#poetry#Scheherazade#Stories#story#storyteller#storytellers#Storytelling#Wendy
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PARUL SEHGAL, ‘The Case Against the Trauma Plot’
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