From the sides

Yesterday, my class discussed "All'estero," from Sebald's Vertigo. This morning (i.e., just now), without even looking, as it were—prompted by a seemingly random Google Alert, pegged to my name listed on the margin of the Sebald blog Vertigo (I wonder, has it just been added?)—I came across Will Self's thoughts on "reverse-engineering" a Sebaldian narrative, in the Guardian:

When I came to Vertigo myself, then read the interviews conducted with Sebald and collected in the volume entitled The Emergence of Memory, it was with that same sense of deliberately engineered déjà vu that I had experienced trudging the subsiding loess of the Holderness coast. Sebald speaks of his own methodology in spatial terms: "If you are travelling along the road and things come in from the sides to offer themselves, then you're going in the right direction. If nothing comes, you are barking up the wrong tree." Then again: "We're living exactly on the borderline between the natural world . . . and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs through our physical and emotional makeup . . . where these tectonic plates rub against each other [are] the sources of pain."

[At The Unarchivable: My 2002 piece on Sebald and Gaddis.]

Late-Night List

Vertigo, the laudable W.G. Sebald blog, is putting together a list of novels with photographer characters...My contribution: Saul Henchman from Powell's The Fisher King.

Here are the first few:

Adolfo Bioy Casares, La Aventura de un Fotografo en la Plata. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1985 (translated as The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata in 1989)

Italo Calvino, Gli Amori Difficili. Milan: Mondadori, 1993 (contains the story translated as The Adventure of a Photographer in Difficult Loves in 1983) [the story can be read online here]

Julio Cortázar, Las babas del diablo, in Las Aramas Secretas. 1959 (translated in 1967 as Blowup, in Blowup and Other Stories) [the source for Antonioni's film Blowup]

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves. NY: Pantheon, 2000

Delia Falconer, The Service of Clouds. Sydney: Picador, 1997

* * *

This is sort of an Ouroboros? Me noticing author/Columbia statistics prof Andrew Gelman's guess that I was a Democrat, including it in my previous post (which was actually written last night, auto-posted this a.m.), and then him mentioning that post in his subsequent post?