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“Ravana,” Vivek Narayanan

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  “Ravana,” Vivek Narayanan Yahoo / Inbox Sat, May 30 at 8:15 AM View this email in your browser Vivek Narayanan Ravana after Valmiki’s Ramayana (Aranya Kanda, Sarga 46)                  Dressed simply but not          without elegance, holding ritual                 staff and parasol Radiating gloom, like an asteroid with designs on a star like night’s curved shadow that swims across the Earth like the darkness of our Sun in its deepest explosions like the planet Budhan about to take hold of Rohini like Saturn advancing on Chitra like the forests and cities and far ridges of infinity each planetary body with its moons each moon that governs a forgone set of miserable inhabitants like the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst like the coma of gas that covers the nucleus of a comet like comets, dirty snowballs, signing the skies with their anger like the coronal holes stirring in ...
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Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction

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Advertisement The Paris Review Subscribe Susan Sontag , The Art of Fiction No. 143 Interviewed by Edward Hirsch Issue 137, Winter 1995   Paris Review - Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143 Susan Sontag lives in a sparsely furnished five-room apartment on the top floor of a building in Chelsea on the west side of Manhattan. Books—as many as fifteen thousand—and papers are everywhere. A lifetime could be spent browsing through the books on art and architecture, theater and dance, philosophy and psychiatry, the history of medicine, and the history of religion, photography, and opera—and so on. The various European literatures—French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, etcetera, as well as hundreds of books of Japanese literature and books on Japan—are arranged by language in a loosely chronological way. So is American literature as well as English literature, which runs from Beowulf to, say, James Fenton. Sontag is an inveterate clipper, and the books are filled with scraps of pa...
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