bookofjoe

The Maxims: W.G. Sebald on Writing

Write about obscure things but don't write obscurely.

 

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

 

The present tense lends itself to comedy. The past is foregone and naturally melancholic.

 

A sense of place distinguishes a piece of writing. It may be a distillation of different places. There must be a very good reason for not describing place.

 

"Significant detail" enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation.

 

Oddities are interesting.

 

 

It’s always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not perhaps trust "facts" in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

 

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.

 

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

 

Use the word "and" as little as possible. Try for variety in conjunctions.

 

Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer awhile.

....................................

Via Robert McGill, who wrote the following on July 25, 2013.

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.

Find all the collected maxims here.

How To Send Web Articles To Your Kindle To Read Later

From Popular Science:

Amazon has an official Send to Kindle tool which you can find on the web.

Log in with the same Amazon account you're using on your Kindle, and you can simply drag and drop files into place, or select them from your computer.

After you've confirmed the upload, they'll appear on your Kindle in a few minutes.

To make this even easier, you can install the Kindle for Browser extension in Google Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge).

This means you can send web articles to your Kindle with a couple of clicks, and it also reformats the page you're looking at to make it easier to read on your e-reader.

English Jockey Scale

Fine carved oak with tufted leather seat, rope twist legs, and a built-in scale, all in excellent condition.

These scales were used at English race tracks to determine the jockey's weight.

Made by the famed firm of Henry Pooley & Sons circa 1890.

41"H x 32"W x 22"D.

Sold at auction in 2009 for $34,500.