Sebald's Writing Tips

[John Bailey]

I've only read The Emigrants but it was unlike anything I've come
across. I didn't think I liked it but a certain mood it produces has
haunted me for a decade. Refuses to give you anything resembling drama
but the great roiling motion of human history is buried somewhere
within it, and occasionally you can make out its wake.

Reminds me of that tiny instant in Chris Marker's La Jetee where you
blink and wonder if you just hallucinated something (you know it if
you've seen it).

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 1:28 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rings of Saturn hit me, by the end, like Gothic (or horror) fiction
> hits some folks. Slow accumulation of feelings about the past.
> All lost, gone. Death-haunted to me.
>
>  When Ford called The Good Soldier the saddest story ever told, he
> may have meant this one.
>
> On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 8:45 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've read Rings of Saturn.  It's a pleasant read. A mix of memoir and
>> beautiful divergences and speculations.  But I wouldn't call it a novel.
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>> On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 4:39 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> But also this from "On the Natural History of Destruction":
>>>     I do not think my dislike for the ostentatious avant-gardist style
>>> of Schmidt's study of the moment of destruction derives from a
>>> fundamentally conservative attitude to form and language, for unlike
>>> this five-finger exercise the discontinuous notes made by Jacki in
>>> Hubert Fichte's novel Detlevs Imitationen "Grunspan" (Detlev's
>>> Imitations) during his researches on the Hamburg air raid seem to me a
>>> very plausible literary approach, probably mainly because they are not
>>> abstract and imaginary in character, but concrete and documentary. It
>>> is with this documentary approach, which has an early precursor in
>>> Nossack's Der Untergang, that German postwar literature really comes
>>> into its own and begins the serious study of material incommensurable
>>> with traditional aesthetics.
>>>
>>>    I think this shows what it is that James Wood likes so much about
>>> Sebald's writing, this approach that is documentary and conducts a
>>> serious study of that stuff writer's mine, called history. It is
>>> apparently this which he finds lacking in writers like Pynchon.
>>>
>>>   Have many of you folks read much of Sebald? I read Austerlitz some
>>> months ago and it's interesting how it overlaps with GR in a way and
>>> yet is 180º out from it. Maybe Kai doesn't see it like that.
>>>
>>> ciao
>>> mc
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > http://richardskinner.weebly.com/blogposts/max-sebalds-writing-tips
>>> >
>>> > Reminds me of the intro to Slow Learner.
>>> >
>>> > " ... My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God,
>>> > accompanied
>>> > by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon. My second thought was
>>> > about
>>> > some kind of a wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way
>>> > to
>>> > one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend
>>> > to
>>> > have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then
>>> > ..."
>>> >
>>> >
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l