Horner's Corner

geography

Patience (After Sebald)

by on Jan.31, 2012, under architecture, culture, environment, film, geography, history, literature, photography, places, Uncategorized

This excellent film which, like it’s subject, is genre defying, doesn’t pretend to be the ‘film of the book’. It stands as a kind of sign, or memory, or meditation on the great book The Rings of Saturn and its author, WG ‘Max’ Sebald,. Excellent music by The Caretaker, a ghostly ambience, a variety of ‘hauntology’, mingling electronic sounds  with the hiss and crackle of 78 RPM records of Schubert. This  is utterly right for the project as  book and  film present a series of linked  encounters with revenants. 

There’s been some discussion about whether the book, the walk, could have been based just anywhere. Of course, in a way it could: why not walk and write about Wiltshire, or Greater Manchester, or Saxony? But of then, it was only by being utterly local, with a  walk through a landscape that meant something to a single person at a certain  time that anything  universal and lasting could be achieved.  Reading the book, we don’t need to ‘retrace the writer’s footsteps’ etc.,  because of  this singular encounter  of imagination, place and memory that has become a written artifact, a work of art.  The Rings of Saturn  transcends the particularities of locality and personality through  a total immersion in the local and the contingent, by a great artist. For only the  concrete can  ‘express’ the universal.  Getting stuck with the particularities would result in mere travel writing, a ‘guide to walks in Suffolk’; whereas failure to engage with that part of Suffolk as a real place and time for this writer, Sebald, would generate substanceless, over generalised, ‘fine writing’.  The Rings of Saturn is neither, and so it is a permanently valuable thing. So while it couldn’t have been  ‘set’ in any place but that part of Suffolk, Suffolk is only the foundation for these strange meditations.

Thus the last thing one needs is a pilgrimage to ‘Sebald Country’ in order to find the ‘real places’. If you want those, read the book.

The writer, the book and the film are of lasting interest, and I’ll be returning to them in later posts. Try to see the film, which is on limited release. And do read, or re-read, the book.

Read the book and discover what a quincunx is..
Read the book and discover what a quincunx is..


Fast Tube by Casper

WG 'Max' Sebald
WG ‘Max’ Sebald

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The True Size of Africa

by on Oct.14, 2010, under culture, economics, geography, places, politics

true-size-of-africa.jpg 2482×1755 pixels.

Click on the link and you’ll get a bigger version.

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