I tell you this: no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn. I mean: I've been reading W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, and I tell you this: that man never found a topic that he could not digress on. I'm only a hundred pages in, but it seems that the unnamed narrator, nearly paralyzed and sitting in a hospital, spends his time recalling a walking tour of East Anglia, which for some reason has contributed to his paralysis. The sight of the landscape outside his window prompts a digression on the subject of his walking tour, which reminds him of a dead friend. This dead friend had a fondness for a particular book. The author of this book had strange ideas and may have seen the anatomical dissection depicted in Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson. The man being dissected in Rembrandt's painting was a thief. And on and on. By the end of the novel I expect to have a warped and fragmentary piece of history to add on to my accreted body of knowledge.

It's generally not a good idea to analyze a book before you're halfway through - and even after you're done, it's usually wise to keep your mouth shut¹ - but it's pretty clear that Sebald is interested in metamorphosis. As he drags his body from the bed to the window, he recalls Gregor Samsa, transformed into a giant bug, gazing out his window onto the Charlottenstra�e. What we often forget about that story is that it is not only Samsa that is changed - the street that he knew his entire life now looks like a grey wasteland. Samsa's metamorphosis is part of a greater change, of an entropic reduction to waste, and that's what Sebald seems most interested in.

So far, every town and beach that the narrator visits seems to be a monument to its own former glory, so that we are walking through a living museum. The few residents seem to take comfort in this decay and actually find their greatest pleasure in comtemplating emptiness - witness in one chapter his discussion of fishermen in little tents on a beach:

Three or four miles south of Lowestoft the coastline curves gently into the land. From the footpath that runs along the grassy dunes and low cliffs one can see, at any time of the day or night and at any time of the year, as I have often found, all manner of tent-like shelters made of poles and cordage, sailcloth and oilskin, along the pebble beach. They are srung out in a long line on the margin of the sea, at regular intervals. It is as if the last stragglers fo some nomadic people had settled there, at the outermost limit of the earth, in expectation of the miracle longed for since time immemorial, the miracle which would justify all their erstwhile privations and wanderings. In reality, however, these men camping out under the heavens have not traversed faraway lands and deserts to reach this strand. Rather, they are from the immediate neighbourhood, and have long been in the habit of fishing there and gazing out to sea as it changes before their eyes. Curious to tell, their number almost always remains more or less the same. If one strikes camp, another soon takes his place; so that over the years, or so it appears, this company of fishermen dozing by day and waking by night never changes, and indeed may go back further than memory can reach. . . . I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness. The fact is that today it is almost impossible to catch anything fishing from the beach.

IN OTHER NEWS

According to a piece in The New York Review of Books, Rob Marshall "goes for the joke" in various scenes of Chicago. I won't see this movie. I try sometimes. Sometimes I want to. But no. Ren�e Zellwegger sings, and I can't risk a thing so possibly terrible that I want to shrink in my seat, embarassed, finally, for the whole human race. I wonder how that 'Catherine Eater-Jones' lawsuit thing is going.

AND THE TRUTH IS:

The abbreviated term 'Ass't' never looks like 'assorted' to me. At best it looks like 'assisted,' which means that I have a coupon for an assisted Half Sub or Kaiser for $1.99 with Soup purchase at Robins^�. I love all the unnecessary capitals. It reminds me of German class and all the pudgy jaunty German profs I had, or perhaps of a Thomas Grey poem: Ambition works its Foot upon the Treadle/Weave, weave your Shroud, proud Burgher, evil Beadle! Etcetera etcetera. Man, if I were Thomas Grey, nobody would have ever heard of him. A friend of mine decided to do his masters on Grey's Elegy. His adviser had him reading volume after volume of Derrida. The poor bastard.

¹Warning: lines like this are examples of an easy, lazy cynicism thrown in by writers who want to lend their work more authority than it deserves and feel like they're on a par with Mark Twain. Often these injunctions to silence are hauled up from a well of self-loathing and intellectual belligerence. I read voraciously as a child and often took lines like this to heart.

²I realized when typing out 'metamorphosis' that the word does not contain the letter 'n'. Somehow this seems impossible. [Quick update: a friend of mine in Mexico paid me a high compliment today, saying that she liked my writing better than "that salmon guy".]

parode - exode