W. G. Sebald

En blogg som jag alltför sällan hinner läsa är Vertigo: Collecting and reading W. G. Sebald.
Där finns en länk till förlaget Hamish Hamilton’s nedladdningsbara magasin Five Dials, som bl a innehåller en del intressant om Sebald.
Två studenter, David Lambert och Robert McGill, som följde hans undervisning förde anteckningar och de publicerar nu yttranden av Sebald, The Collected ‘Maxims.’ .
Så här skriver de:

"W.G. Sebald taught his final fiction workshop
at the University of East Anglia during the
autumn of 2001. In the literary world he was
rapidly gaining renown: there had been the
succès d’estime of his first three books, and
then the publication of Austerlitz earlier that
year. In the classroom – where David Lambert
and I were two of sixteen students – Sebald was
unassuming, almost shy, and asked that we call
him Max. When discussing students’ work he
was anecdotal and associative, more storyteller
than technician. He had weary eyes that made
it tempting to identify him with the melancholy
narrators of his books, but he also had a gentle
amiability and wry sense of humour. We were in
his thrall. He died three days after the final class.
As far as I’m aware, nobody that term
recorded Max’s words systematically. However,
in the wake of his death, David and I found
ourselves returning to our notes, where we’d
written down many of Max’s remarks. These
we gleaned and shared with our classmates. Still,
I wish we’d been more diligent, more complete.
The comments recorded here represent only a
small portion of Max’s contribution to the class."

Här är några smakprov under rubriken "On Reading and Intertextuality":

"• Read books that have nothing to do
with literature.

• Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll
see nothing there. For example, Kant’s
Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings
are fascinating.

• There has to be a libidinous delight in
finding things and stuffing them in your
pockets.

• You must get the servants to work for
you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself.
That is, you should ask other people
for information, and steal ruthlessly
from what they provide.

• None of the things you make up will be
as hair-raising as the things people tell
you.

• I can only encourage you to steal as
much as you can. No one will ever
notice. You should keep a notebook of
tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions,
and then after a couple of years
you can come back to the notebook and
treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

• Don’t be afraid to bring in strange, eloquent
quotations and graft them into your
story. It enriches the prose. Quotations
are like yeast or some ingredient one adds.

• Look in older encyclopaedias. They
have a different eye. They attempt to be
complete and structured but in fact are
completely random collected things that
are supposed to represent our world.

• It’s very good that you write through
another text, a foil, so that you write out
of it and make your work a palimpsest.
You don’t have to declare it or tell where
it’s from.

• A tight structural form opens possibilities.
Take a pattern, an established model
or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing,
limitation gives freedom."