Vicarious MFA
The Vicarious MFA: The Rings of Saturn, Phantom week, etc.
The Vicarious MFA!
The semester is almost over; just six class meetings left and about 47 parties. I omitted last week because I was trying to give you the “full experience” of getting an MFA. There will always be something that you weren’t around for (I missed George Saunders’s and Gary Lutz’s guest lectures last year) or some class that you were too sleep-deprived to actually understand. (Ok, actually, I was busy.)
Today in Non/Fiction we’re talking about W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Class discussion should go something like this: I liked it. It was weird. I didn’t like it. Man, he was doing a whole lot of stuff in there! Whew!
Awesome quote from The Rings of Saturn about what happens when you spend a lot of time writing:
“For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.
A summary of the phantom week is after the jump.
Topics covered in workshop submissions:
Heroin, Punk-ass thirteen year olds in New Jersey, Nuns, Aliens, Horses, Blind People, Domestic Disquiet
Last week’s books:
Varieties of Distubance by Lydia Davis (Non/Fiction) & The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon (The First Book).
Sebald, yes! yes! yes!
Sebald, yes! yes! yes!
writing as going flying to the sun, melting
writing as going flying to the sun, melting
i had to do a presentation on the rings of saturn once. i think i almost died from stress. what is there to even talk about? its like 300 pages of stream of consciousness. fuck sebald.
i had to do a presentation on the rings of saturn once. i think i almost died from stress. what is there to even talk about? its like 300 pages of stream of consciousness. fuck sebald.
I think what was interesting about The Rings of Saturn was how it was not just a stream of consciousness, but a stream of collective consciousness, of historical consciousness. There was practically no “self” in the book, in the book, which is what makes it so difficult. I like to see a “self,” usually, in a book.
I don’t think that its difficulty is a strength though, it’s more of a challenge, and at times a major weakness. There must be a way to write a book that deals with these ideas of re-processing history and negating the self that would have been also somehow entertaining or gripping or have more forward momentum.
Still, I think the idea of a book like this is interesting.
Sebald is so very German.
I think what was interesting about The Rings of Saturn was how it was not just a stream of consciousness, but a stream of collective consciousness, of historical consciousness. There was practically no “self” in the book, in the book, which is what makes it so difficult. I like to see a “self,” usually, in a book.
I don’t think that its difficulty is a strength though, it’s more of a challenge, and at times a major weakness. There must be a way to write a book that deals with these ideas of re-processing history and negating the self that would have been also somehow entertaining or gripping or have more forward momentum.
Still, I think the idea of a book like this is interesting.
Sebald is so very German.
i loved rings of saturn: and i usually hate those kinds of rambling novels. i think he does ‘visions’ and contains weird expansive histories into clear and yet still magic-laden and fever-y ‘moments’ better than most any i’ve read.
i loved rings of saturn: and i usually hate those kinds of rambling novels. i think he does ‘visions’ and contains weird expansive histories into clear and yet still magic-laden and fever-y ‘moments’ better than most any i’ve read.