(Untitled)

[grashupfer]

I remember finding out you had access to the elevator that led down to the secret stacks. And the first elevator ride. You gave me no sign you had a thought in your head about me. Meanwhile my mind was racing. Some places that house books are clean and bright, and you could eat off the floor. Others are bleak cellars that entomb the dust that old

Comments

[grashupfer]

Tell me more about this Coded Letter.

[grashupfer]

You have a gift for delivering wonderful replies to my questions.

[localcharacter]

Coded Letter, meet Teeming Black Scrawl: "The act of writing, in Sebald, may always be teetering on the edge of manic schizophrenia, threatening to veer into senseless repetition, and the hope that the writer might reach a reader across a vast distance of time and space is one that constantly evades us, but even in that devolution into nonsense there might yet be preserved some measure of hope, and resistance against the forces of bourgeois capitalism and fascism that drive the writer to madness in the first place." (http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-teeming-black-scrawl-w-g-sebalds-a-place-in-the-country)

Re: Writing

[localcharacter]

Sebald goes back to Walser and his fellow Swiss solitary walker Rousseau, and then (via another Alpine stream) out again to Diderot, voyages around one's room, and, it seems, to Tomeo. A library is nothing but an asylum for ideas.

[grashupfer]

Sebald is like a moon orbiting Walter Benjamin. Huge planet and equally huge moon. Both are collectors of melancholy objects. With the same passion for strict thematic exactitude that my daughter has for her tiny objects she keeps in her pockets.

[grashupfer]

I don't think I've seen anybody before dare the word nonsense w/r/t Sebald.

[localcharacter]

But you see where he's coming from. If a plot is a walk in history, Sebald's can be so meandering as to appear random. How does he not end up face down in the snow?