A Sacramental Activity: An Interview with Paul Stanbridge
‘Sebald is a massive figure for me, but the biggest influence on my writing is David Jones,’ says Stanbridge, who wrote his PhD on Jones’ Anathemata. ‘It took him 15 years to write, and he had no idea what he was doing, or where he was heading. Examining his method completely changed my attitude to writing. From then on, I wrote in disconnected fragments, generating discourse out of scraps of research data which I felt compelled to gather. Jones said art should be produced out of “what is actually loved and known,” he believed that the making of artworks is a sacramental activity: the manipulation of physical entities in order to make representation of a non-physical truth. In other words, art is praise.’
C. D. Rose interviews Paul Stanbridge about his new book, My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is.