Tag: William T. Vollmann

“I’ll be dead very soon” | Valedictory visit with William T. Vollmann

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Detail from photograph of William T. Vollmann by Alexander Sorondo

Just over a year ago, Alexander Sorondo published a long profile of William Vollmann in The Metropolitan Review. Today, at his website Big Reader Bad Grades, Sorondo has published an account of his recent visit to Vollmann out in Sacramento. Titled “We Always Leave Things Unfinished,” and ostensibly about Vollmann’s forthcoming CIA novel A Table for Fortune, Sorondo’s piece reads like a valediction to a departing hero. Vollmann, sick with cancer, laments his “chemo mind” throughout the interview — less a formal interview, really, than Sorondo taking with a brilliant and tired mind — he, Sorondo, captures in words what I think hanging out with Vollmann for a spell might feel like. Anger, sadness, and resignation weaves through the piece, but it’s leavened with moments of bright cheer (Vollmann blithely greeting everyone he passes) or deadpan humor. Consider this passage, where Vollmann recounts what has to have been the worst year of his life, beginning with the death of his daughter:

“In twenty-twenty-twooo,” like he’s climbing down into the memory, Lisa died, Viking fired me, and—for some reason I don’t understand—Ohio State fired me.” The school had been buying his manuscripts. That amounted to “ten thousand a year…less twenty percent for my manuscript dealer.”

We sit with that a moment. I’m thinking back to the profile I wrote last year. Trying to remember if he’s reciting these losses by sequence or scale.

“You got hit by a car, too, right?”

“Yeah that too.”

There’s so much pain and loss there, but the last bit of dialogue made me laugh out loud.

Perhaps the saddest bit in the interview, from a selfish reader’s perspective, is Vollmann acknowledging that he will likely not finish what is arguably his most ambitious project:

“Do you feel any pressure to finish Seven Dreams?”

“I’m not gonna touch it.” Resigned and certain. He says finishing even one of the two remaining volumes would likely take “more time than I have left.” Plus the fights it’ll prompt with his publishers. “About a quarter of the last one is completed, and then much less of the other one.”

“I don’t want it to come out looking like a piece of crap so,” he flaps a hand, hits a thigh, “just forget it.”

Check out Sorondo’s profile, “We Always Leave Things Unfinished.”

“Just because the Founders said it hardly makes it so” | William T. Vollmann rakes through “American Ephemera” in a new long essay for the US’s semiquincentennial

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Shadows of Liberty, 2016, by Titus Kaphar (b. 1976)

William T. Vollmann has published a long essay, “American Ephemera,” in the latest issue of Harper’s. The essay is larded with citations, illustrations, and other “ephemera.” Here are the opening paragraphs of Vollmann’s preamble to the essay, “An Explanation”:

What dimensions has our America? I propose to offer you this antique measuring stick, with a few of my own prejudices rudely gashed in.

Just because the Founders said it hardly makes it so. Moreover, just because I have read some of them here and there hardly proves that I understand them. Fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Supreme Court’s longest-serving chief justice expressed sour expectations of my abilities: “Those who follow us,” wrote John Marshall, “will know very little of the real transactions of our day, and will have very untrue impressions respecting men and things. Such is the lot of humanity.” Indeed it is. Picking through his relics, I uncover one such disarticulated “real transaction,” dated 1788: “He told us that the principal danger arose from a government which, if adopted, would give away the Mississippi.” Tucking that item back into its coffin of irrelevance, I rake through kindred ephemera, hoping for something to serve our day—for although Marshall could hardly foresee my real transactions, maybe it will suffice that he loved the Constitution, hoped it would endure while fearing it wouldn’t, and did his best to operate its checks and balances with impartial fairness and benevolence: “a government of laws, and not of men.”

By “men” he meant white men who ideally would be Christian property owners. He owned slaves, whose humanity he acknowledged without opening his eyes to their rights. He married his Polly, loved her until the end, trusted her advice, but never thought her fit to vote. Well, the world changes; what else can it do? “It is not for the dead to give laws to the living,” remarked John Quincy Adams. “Prospective legislation upon the most uncertain of contingencies . . . is the broken column and mutilated inscription of Eternal Rome.” But since an array of brave, well-meaning, and often divergent minds (consider the bad blood between Marshall and Thomas Jefferson, with whom John Adams also feuded) could construct a triple-walled fortress of coherence in which our freedoms could dwell, and since, in this two-hundred-fiftieth year since 1776, the house still stands, improved by amendments and, thanks to its separation of powers, only partially corrupted, then I say the Founders built awfully well, at least for me. If I were black, or a woman, I might feel less grateful. All the same, they introduced the notions of equal rights and equal representation, leaving to us, as ancestors will, the task of making their house less imperfect. They knew “the lot of humanity,” the slime within us, for it was in them also.

I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older | William T. Vollmann reviews Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket

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I’ve avoided reviews of Thomas Pynchon’s newest novel Shadow Ticket, but I couldn’t help but read William T. Vollmann’s piece on the novel at UnHerd. From Vollmann’s review:

…this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities. I cast my grin back upon Tyrone Slothrop, who was first printed in 1973, and wonder to what extent my delight in Shadow Ticket derives from nostalgia. For I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older, so which will come first, the old lion’s last roar, or my last read? Enriching the nostalgia is Pynchon’s lyrically sad and squalidly beautiful Milwaukee, a place to which I have no connection, and at a time before my parents were born, so why should I care about it? But I do, because it’s a shadow Milwaukee, all the more worth missing for being unreal.

There is a gentleness to Pynchon, and sometimes even a cynical sweetness (and so forth); then come prankish pineapples.

“The Last Untamed Writer in America,” another William T. Vollmann profile

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Photograph of William Vollmann in his studio by Ian Bates

Late last week, The Wall Street Journal published “The Last Untamed Writer in America,” a profile of William T. Vollmann. The piece begins with its author Alexander Nazaryan politely refusing breakfast scotch from Vollmann, who is hosting Nazaryan at his studio (a converted Mexican restaurant):

It was breakfast time at the Sacramento, Calif., home of the novelist William T. Vollmann, which meant time for scotch. Out came two gold-colored shot glasses, modeled after 50-caliber rounds, a gift from a relative to the gun-loving writer. Despite gentle pressure, I stuck to my coffee, so Vollmann poured himself only a perfunctory nip of the Balvenie DoubleWood 12. “This will get me buzzed up,” Vollmann said. Then he added, ruefully, “I can hardly drink at all anymore.”

The piece has some interesting quips from Vollmann, but it doesn’t really expand on Alexander Sorondo’s long essay “The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic,” from this spring–notes on Vollmann’s cancer, getting dropped by his publisher Viking, and finding a home for his epic A Table for Fortune with Skyhorse, an iffy group that has published books by RF Kennedy Jr. and Alex Jones. A lot of the notes will be familiar with those tuned into the myth of the Vollmann (guns, drugs, sex, volume, etc.), but it’s kinda sorta interesting to see how the conservative Wall Street Journal frames Vollmann. They play up Vollmann’s enthusiasm for guns and note that he is not an author to be “cowed by sensitivity readers”; they even get a quote from him decrying “people who want trigger warnings.” And yet even when Vollmann professes a tinge of patriotism, he deflates it immediately:

“I love America because it’s my homeland, and I love Americans,” Vollmann says. “What I dislike is the whole hypocritical American exceptionalism. We do all these dirty, crummy things.”

There are some cool photos by Ian Bates accompanying the article, which you can read unpaywalled here.

I knew that the American Empire in which I lived was approaching its imminent end, but I could not quite believe it | William T. Vollmann reports from Ukraine in “Drones and Decolonization”

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William T. Vollmann has a new essay in Granta. “Drones and Decolonization” is reportage from the Russia-Ukraine war, but in typically Vollmannesque fashion the essay is also about a lot of other things (Joseph Roth, Isaac Babel, language and names, food, monuments, etc. — at one point Vollmann editorializes on his own habits to let his projects swell: “all Granta had commissioned was 5,000 words, and I would exceed expectations by submitting 40,000 words, which they would only be able to cut down so much”).

Here is the opening of the essay:

Some of her was Austria once, and part of her had been Poland. Starved and tortured by Stalinists into Soviet Republichood, then raped by Hitler’s Reich, she finally became some version of herself, but then V. Putin thought to annex her back into another empire: Re-Russify her! Give it to her good and hard, then beautify the corpse with a mask of iron!

Her de-Russifiers fought back, and not only with drones and artillery: Amputate the occupier’s monuments! Ban his writers, no matter how long ago they lived; rename his streets . . . ‘Little Father is no more,’ cried that Ukrainian, Russian, Polish or maybe Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth. ‘Where is the czar? . . . What sort of world is this? A crooked world!’

I went to help her in my helpless way, with journalistic good intentions which sorrowed into love. From Berlin to Vienna I went, and then through the Czech Republic’s golden-red forests, which here and there burst into ultra-yellow blazes beneath an ever-darkening silver sky. I glimpsed long, gentle slopes of well-mown or -grazed green grass and I saw decrepit towns; then it was afternoon among Poland’s boarded-up brick buildings, with crew-cut young men lounging in packs while wearily beautiful old women dragged home heavy shopping bags. Passing through the town of Liszki I spied a church steeple graying in the twilight, and long after dark came the final border.

And I can’t help but share these lines from Vollmann’s conclusion (I do not think they constitute a so-called spoiler), which point out that our murder drones will one day come home to roost:

I knew that the American Empire in which I lived was approaching its imminent end, but I could not quite believe it. All those drones our corporations pimped out, when would they come to us to spread terror, agony and grief?

Odesa, photograph by William T. Vollmann

“The Last Contract,” a longish profile on William T. Vollmann’s difficult journey getting his novel A Table for Fortune published

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“The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic” is a nice long essay by Alexander Sorondo. First few paragraphs:

A few years ago, the novelist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis wasn’t great but he went ahead with the treatment. A length of intestine drawn out and snipped. It was awful but it worked. The cancer went into remission.

Then his daughter died.

Then he got dropped by his publisher.

Then he got hit by a car.

Then he got a pulmonary embolism.

But things are looking up.

William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.”

His publisher of thirty years.

It’s more complicated than that.

For starters, when he first turned it in, A Table for Fortune was 3,000 pages.

Read the rest of “The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic.”

“Edgy Pleasures” — William T. Vollmann

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“Edgy Pleasures”

by

William T. Vollmann

The most significant characteristic of the lovely nineteenth-century Indian daggers I collect is their blunt edges. Their purpose, in short, is to symbolize the power and authority of weapons, much like an officer’s pistol or even a policeman’s uniform. They are talismanic, like a crucifix or a Platonic form. Evidently, beauty was an absolute requirement in their crafting, since any such dagger was metonymic with the official function of a maharaja, whose life had to symbolize perfection to the rest of society. What purpose now? The maharajas are impoverished, and even such distant cousins of these daggers as bayonets are frequently used. For acts of war, we have our bombs, flying machines, crawling machines, swimming machines; for acts of legislation, the truncheon and the gun; for acts of atrocity, again the gun. Thus, these daggers are doubly removed from sharpness. It is emblematic that the little store in Udaipur that sold them (lubricated well with coconut oil, wrapped in bundles of old newspaper) was equally forward in displaying jointed silverfish made up of many small pieces more complex than bones. This made the daggers seem even more beautifully useless, metonymic still of the maharaja but only the Maharaja of Astonishment—for instance, Sawai Madho Singh I, who was reputedly seven feet tall and four feet wide.

In Jaipur, I saw his maharani’s eighteen-pound dress. “That must have been heavy,” I said. The guide smiled. “The Indian women don’t feel the weight when it’s real gold,” he said. The real gold of these daggers is, of course, their craftsmanship. The longer I handle the smooth, yellow ivory of that camel’s head or peer into the checkered gape of that flower-inlaid tiger, the more I perceive this and the more fairylike the pieces become. I have seen the maharaja’s sun emblem: It was composed of muskets raying outward from sacredness. Surely these muskets were never fired. How blasphemous it would have been to wrench off a ray from the sun! I went to another palace, whose wooden gates were forty feet high. I saw the high window where the maharani used to welcome her husband with rose flowers. I passed through green-bordered receding arches like the leaves of artichokes. Now: the Hall of Glory. The ceiling was inlaid with silvered glass in tiny, complex pieces to shimmer a million reflected flames of a single candle. Skeletons dazzled me in the perforated marble screens. But the guide said, “Before, the maharaja had elephants. Now, not a single one!” No utility anywhere. Consider the so-called tiger knife, which is shaped like the letter A with two horizontals. The hand grips one of them: The legs of the A curve inward into parallels to enclose the wrist and lock it. The tiger comes; the point of the A stabs him; he falls dead. Functional, no doubt. But many of these tiger knives—old ones gilded, damascened, tawny-striped like tigers— are for sale. A good one goes for $3,000 (less, of course, if you bargain, cash in hand). A maharaja had placed it on consignment. The maharajas sell things incognito, I heard; the maharajas are ashamed. Sometimes, to decrease the likelihood that the knives will be recognized as theirs, they sell to distant provinces, even though there’s less money that way. This is how it must be. Recently, an art connoisseur came to buy Mogul miniatures. He asked a maharaja if anything was for sale. The maharaja said no, but if the man was serious, he knew another noble who might sell. It had to be understood, however, that the connoisseur would never meet him or learn his name. What is a tiger knife without its maharaja? And, indeed, the matter is worse, much worse, for in Udaipur I saw towers alone and incongruous upon the desert hills. Sentries used to watch there for tigers, but that was when there were still forests. The trees are all burned now. What use, then, a tiger knife? No matter whether any blade is sharp.

From a 1996 Esquire feature called “My Favorite Things.” The feature also included Charles M. Schulz, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lee Roth, Wayne Gretzky, Susan Sontag, John Travolta and many other folks on their favorite thing.

This is the meat locker, where Dolores’s parts are | From Conversations with William T. Vollmann

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What’s in here?

This is the meat locker, where Dolores’s parts are. When the electrician wired it up, he asked, “What do you use this for?” I said, “Oh, that’s just where I keep my victims.” There was a long silence….She’s got her dresses here and I have my bulletproof helmet and various stuff from my journalism in there.

Have you taken many reporting trips recently?

No, that seems to being drying up. It seems that the magazines have less and less money. They’re mostly interested in domestic stuff. I don’t know whether it’s to save costs or if they really think Americans are only interested in America. I get sort of sick of it. So there are the wig heads. Whatever woman comes in here, I always say, “Now, those are your rivals.” They kind of freak out.

Do you have many visitors or is this mostly a solitary space?

I have the occasional visitor, yeah. And then let’s see. [Opens the door to the bathrooms.] I figure the men’s room and the women’s room ought to connect.

Why is that?

Well, you know male and female should always get together wherever possible. The men’s room is the toilet. The women’s room is the shower. They didn’t used to connect. It was really, really gross when I bought the place. This old restaurant—everything was all rotted out with pee.

[Bill takes me into another small room.] And then this is the books and bullets room. I put my phone in the closet most of the time, so I never have to hear it. I got all the extra copies of my books and all the bullets I’ll need for my various pistols.

Read the rest of Stephen Heyman’s 2013 interview with William Vollmann at 3:AM Magazine.

The interview is one of 29 that comprise Conversations with William T. Vollmann, a new collection edited by Daniel Lukes.

If you’re able, check out the book launch for Conversations with William T. Vollmann tonight (8 Feb. 2020) at 6:00pm at Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11238. 

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“Lunch” — William T. Vollmann

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“Lunch”

by

William T. Vollmann

Faces at lunch, oh, yes, smirking, lordly, bored or weary—here and there a flash of passion, of dreams or loving seriousness; these signs I saw, notwithstanding the sweep of a fork like a Stuka dive-bomber, stabbing down into the cringing salads, carrying them up to the death of unseen teeth between dancing wrinkled cheeks; a breadstick rose in hand, approached the purple lips in a man’s dull gray face; an oval darkness opened and shut and the breadstick was half gone! A lady in a red blazer, her face alert, patient and professionally kind like a psychoanalyst’s, stuck her fork lovingly into a tomato, smiling across the table at another woman’s face; everything she did was gentle, and it was but habit for her to hurt the tomato as little as possible; nonetheless she did not see it. Nodding and shaking her head, she ate and ate, gazing sweetly into the other woman’s face. Finally I saw one woman in sunglasses who studied her arugula as she bit it…It disappeared by jagged inches, while across the table, in her husband’s lap, the baby watched in dark-eyed astonishment. Her husband crammed an immense collage of sandwich components into his hairy cheeks. He snatched up pommes-frites and they vanished in toto. When the dessert cart came, the starched white shoulders of businessmen continued to flex and shine; the faces gazed at one another over emptiness, maybe happier now that they had eaten, unthinking of what they had wrought.

Read “The Forgetful Ghost,” a supernatural tale by William T. Vollmann

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“The Forgetful Ghost”

by

William T. Vollmann

After my father died, I began to wonder whether my turn might come sooner rather than later. What a pity! Later would have been so much more convenient! And what if my time might be even sooner than soon? Before I knew it, I would recognize death by its cold shining as of brass. Hence in those days, I do confess, I felt sometimes angry that the treasures of sunlight escaped my hands no matter how tightly I clenched them. I loved life so perfectly, at least in my own estimation, that it seemed I deserved to live forever, or at least until later rather than sooner. But just in case death disregarded my all-important judgments, I decided to seek out a ghost, in order to gain expert advice about being dead. The living learn to weigh the merits of preparation against those of spontaneity, which is why they hire investment counselors and other fortune-tellers. And since I had been born an American, I naturally believed myself entitled to any destiny I could pay for. Why shouldn’t my postmortem years stretch on like a lovely procession of stone lamps?

If you believe, as H.P. Lovecraft asserted, that all cemeteries are subterraneously connected, then it scarcely matters which one you visit; so I put one foot before the other, and within a half-hour found myself allured by the bright green moss on the pointed tops of those ancient stone columns of the third Shogun’s loyally suicided retainers. Next I found, glowing brighter than the daylight, more green moss upon the stone railings and torii enclosing these square plots whose tombstones strained upward like trees, each stone engraved with its undertenant’s postmortem Buddhist name.

The smell of moss consists of new and old together. Dead matter having decayed into clean dirt, the dirt now freshens into green. It is this becoming-alive that one smells. I remember how when my parents got old, they used to like to walk with me in a certain quiet marsh. The mud there smelled clean and chocolate-bitter. I now stood breathing this same mossy odor, and fallen cryptomeria-needles darkened their shades of green and orange while a cloud slid over the sun. Have you ever seen a lizard’s eyelid close over his yellow orb? If so, then you have entered ghostly regions, which is where I found myself upon the sun’s darkening. All the same, I had not gone perilously far: On the other side of the wall, tiny cars buzzed sweetly, bearing living skeletons to any number of premortem destinations. Reassured by the shallowness of my commitment, I approached the nearest grave. 

The instant I touched the wet moss on the railing, I fell into communication with the stern occupant, upon whose wet dark hearthstone lay so many dead cryptomeria-tips. To say he declined to come out would be less than an understatement. It was enough to make a fellow spurn the afterlife! I experienced his anger as an electric shock. To him I was nothing, a rootless alien who lacked a lord to die for. Why should he teach me?

Humiliated, I turned away, and let myself into the lower courtyard behind the temple. Here grew the more diminutive ovoid and phallic tombs of priests. Some were incised with lotus wave-patterns. One resembled a mirror or hairbrush stood on end. I considered inviting myself in, but then I thought: If that lord up there was so cross, wouldn’t a priest have even less use for me? 

So I pulled myself up to the temple’s narrow porch and sat there with my feet dangling over, watching cherry blossoms raining down on the tombs. The gnarled arms of that tree pointed toward every grave, and afternoon fell almost into dusk. 

A single white blossom sped down like a spider parachuting down his newest thread. Then my ears began to ring—death’s call. 

So I ran away. I sat down in my room and hid. Looking out my window, I spied death up boards and pouring vinegar on nails. Death killed a dog. What if I were next?

Read the rest of “The Forgetful Ghost” at VICE.

The tale is collected in Vollmann’s forthcoming book, Last Stories and Other Stories.

Three Books

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Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader by William T. Vollmann. Edited by Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson. 2004 trade paperback from Thunder’s Mouth Press/Avalon Publishing. Cover design by David Riedy; cover art by Moira Brown.

This book features an illustration of its author on the cover. It is also a book I can dip into at any time.

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Diaries by Franz Kafka. English translation by Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg (with Hannah Arendt). Trade paperback by Schocken, 1988. Cover design by Louise Fili. Cover illustration by Anthony Russo.

This book features an illustration of its author on the cover. It is also a book I can dip into at any time.

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Hawthorne’s Short Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Edited by Newton Arvin. Mass market paperback by Vintage. No designer/artist credited, and I can’t make out the signature over Hawthorne’s left shoulder. But this blog’s readers are smart and have good taste and identified the artist as Ben Shanh (I should’ve recognized the signature, after posting Shanh’s painting Peter and the Wolf on this blog a few years ago). This book is close to falling apart.

This book features an illustration of its author on the cover. It is also a book I can dip into at any time.

Three Books

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The Dead Father by Donald Barthleme. Penguin paperback, 1986. Cover design by Todd Radom; cover illustration by Lonnie Sue Johnson.

Saturn, Orpheus, Lear, Nobodaddy. A sleeping undead giant, a quest. Good angry fun. I’ll say it’s my favorite Barthelme today (answers will change in the future).

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Fathers and Crows by William T. Vollmann. Penguin paperback, 1992. (An enormous paperback—990 pages—it flops slightly on the scanner, refuses to square up neatly). Cover design by Daniel Rembert employing a detail from a painting titled Le Martyrs des missionaires Jesuites (credited to “Anonymous”).

Different fathers, maybe, than the ones celebrated today, Father’s Day, the conceit I’ve lazily tied my Three Books post to…Jesuits. Or maybe they are the fathers. How many times have I tried all of this novel? If you’re interested in Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series, start with The Ice-Shirt or The Rifles instead.

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King Lear by William Shakespeare. Edited by R.A. Foakes. Arden, 1997. Cover design by Interbrand Newell and Sorrell; illustration by the Douglas Brothers.

Lear is maybe my favorite fictional father. I don’t know why. The man is a fool, but a pitiable one. Maybe I just love the play that much—its abjection, its darkness, its insanity. Out vile jelly, etc. Happy Father’s Day!

 

 

William T. Vollmann talks sex and death; reads from Last Stories and Other Stories

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Why the hell did I buy William Vollmann’s Argall? (Book acquired, 2.12.2016)

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I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

First, I bought an ebook of William T. Vollmann’s really really long new novel The Dying Grass a few weeks ago.

I bought this ebook rather late at night, after rather many drinks, against rather better judgment—or, rather, no judgment. If I can reconstruct my thought process: I think I rationalized paying so much money for an electronic file would like, necessitate a commitment to reading The Dying Grass that I might not feel if it were, say, a review copy, or a copy obtained via store credit at my favorite local book shop. Well I’ve been reading the ebook, putting a little edent in it in little eincrements, but it’s still damn long, and our narrator William the Blind can be awfully opaque at times (not to mention the shifts in narrative).

Anyway, I’ve been reading the ebook, which does, I think (?) a nice job of preserving Vollmann’s occasional indulgence in Whitmanesque free verse (prose) style—but well, I sort of want the physical thing too. So I went by my local bookshop in the hopes of securing a copy (and also pick up some Valentine’s books for my kiddoes). No luck in the new hardback section, so they directed me to Historical Fiction, an area I rarely browsed. No luck for The Dying Grass, but there was a hardback copy of Argall there. All 736 pages of it.

Reader, I acquired it.

Why? I don’t know. I love the faux-Elizabethan prose that Pynchon deployed in Mason & Dixon (and I tolerated Barth’s in The Sot-Weed Factor)—and Vollmann’s has a different flavor that’s intriguing (and difficult). The story, the base story, is the Pocahontas story, which in Vollmann’s telling might go past the Pocahontas myth (more than Malick, more than Disney).

But when oh when am I going to get to the thing?!

I’ll close with a selection from Vollmann’s own review of his novel;  the review originally ran in the October 7, 2001 edition of The Los Angeles Times, and was later collected in Expelled from Eden:

“Argall,” whose story emblematizes a personified and of course feminine Virginia, is no better or worse than any of the other “Seven Dreams.” That is why nobody reads “Argall.” No one looks for “Argall.” No one can find “Argall.” Good riddance, say I. To quote from “Argall” itself (the reference is to a fellow who’s searching for Pocahontas’ skeleton), “had the critic found her, what would he have done? Coffined her, borne her back seaward to some brown Virginian marsh crowned by grey and yellow weeds? Locked her into his cabinet of curiosities? All he discovered was a menagerie of human and animal remnants. What power could have swallowed her so thoroughly, but ooze?”

Enough. Holding our noses, let’s try to take this menagerie of remnants on its own terms.

This book’s first sin, as you might have already gathered from the foregoing, consists in its so-called Elizabethan language, whose archaisms, variant spellings and preposterous figures of speech substantially impede the reader in any attempt to envision the ball in any uniform fashion. Here is a sentence plucked at random from the mess: “He search’d for an issue of fair water, there to make another well, for he misdoubted him not that the river they drunk from was somehow tainted with disease, yet could discover no convenient place to make his diggings.” Much time and trouble would have been saved, had this so-called novelist written what he meant: “In order to get more healthful water, he intended to dig a well, but couldn’t.” The arch apostrophe, the ignorant substitution of “drunk” for “drank,” the ink-wasting double negation, well, really all this makes me crave to spew.

Reviews and riffs of June and July, 2015 (and an unrelated owl)

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The second part of my (long) interview with Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes, editors of William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion. Chock full of all sorts of riffage: sincerity, authenticity, Vollmann’s visual art, etc. Special bonus: slightly frazzled Franzen pic.

I reread David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest in June/July. First time I’d read the whole thing since 2001. I wrote about reading the first 299 pages. I was also reading some of the essays in William H. Gass’s Fiction and the Figures of Life, and I riffed at some length on Wallace contra Gass, masscult entertainment, etc. From that riff:

…this is Wallace’s big insight in Infinite Jest, right?—that our consciousnesses, mapped in the muck, are framed in desire and reward, and we are conditioned/subjected into that system of desire/reward, so that we desire the desire, even as our consciousnesses…can sneer at something we love, can dismiss the muck that helped shape us even as we plunge into it, the muck. And—too, part of Wallace’s insight in Infinite Jest—too, the consciousness of the consciousness of the desire of desire—that that’s, like, the contemporary condition. And what Wallace…seems to want to point to is some way out of the muck of pop consciousness, a reconciliation toward a pure consciousness that doesn’t sneer—right?

I also wrote a brief note to readers new to Infinite Jest, and included a list of motifs, which (the list) may or may not be helpful.

Nell Zink’s debut novel The Wallcreeper is fucking incredible.

Loved loved loved J.G. Ballard’s degenerate debauched depraved novel High-Rise—

—but his later novel Millennium People, despite a great concept and some fascinating ideas, really isn’t so good.

Here’s that owl—with a special guest no less!

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What books does William T. Vollmann find himself returning to again and again?

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William T. Vollmann is the interviewee in the New York Times feature “By the Book” this week. It’s a fun read (he chooses Sappho to write his life story, which cracked me up). From the piece:

What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

I often reread certain parts of my Oxford Revised Standard Bible, which I recommend for the maps and footnotes. The parables of Jesus are haunting in the fashion of certain Zen koans. And the story of Jacob, Leah and Rachel, and the way it leads to young Joseph’s conceit and fall, is of gripping psychological interest. When she was very young I used to tell my daughter about the coat of many colors, and she would say: “But, why, Daddy? Why did they throw Joseph underground?” — “Because they were jealous.” — “Why were they jealous?” — “Because his father loved him more than the others.” She and I would follow the story backward and forward; its elegance was so perfect that my little child could understand it.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg always inspires me to try to be myself. Here is one of his powerful aphorisms: “I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be whatever he believes himself to be cannot be contested.”

I love that fountainhead of Norse myth and saga, the Elder Edda. It is, after all, part of my ethnocultural heritage. Its glorification of ruthless and often pointless cruelty troubles me, and I refuse to identify with that. But I can enjoy the delicate eeriness of other ghost stories without reveling in gruesome murders and wailing horrors, so why can’t I drink in the strangeness of Skirnir’s ride down to Hel on his quest to win the giant maiden? Moreover, the Norse ethos privileges steadfast endurance in the face of pain, bravery in the face of inevitable doom, and loyalty. These qualities would well become all of us mortals, and may grow more relevant once climate change really kicks in.

Topless William T. Vollmann

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William T. Vollmann photographed by Ken Miller during the, uh, adventures chronicled in Butterfly Stories. (Photo via).