Now, just as we have poet’s poets we have poet’s novelists but I don’t mean novelists like Melville for example Woolf for example and of course Bernhard and now Sebald the novelist the poets are all talking about not by the way having yet discovered Bernhard it seems or perhaps not quite connecting with the Bernhard like they have the Sebald though I hear the Sebald is in Bernhard’s vein just as Bernhard’s in Beckett’s and Kafka’s and Musil’s vein and so forth but anyway novelists that are actually poets who write novels out of some desperate attempt to generate cash off their writing like Charles Reznikoff for example poetry being their vocation after all not some job some mere livelihood but who end up running the cas right off the set because they can’t help themselves can’t write in the straight way though of course neither died Melville Woolf Bernhard Sebald.

Tim Shaner: I Hate Fiction, New York City: Spuyten Duyvil 2018, 16f.