'Mr. Vollmann collects pistols and likes to shoot them.'
Now this is how you start a review:
I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote seance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)
Tags: william t. vollmann
that is beautiful in too many ways to list
that is beautiful in too many ways to list
never enough vollmann more need vollmann text whores guns jungle rush meta whores cops death aids needle breathe crack crack plop plopp fizz fizzz juice
never enough vollmann more need vollmann text whores guns jungle rush meta whores cops death aids needle breathe crack crack plop plopp fizz fizzz juice
sweet
sweet
… with which I wholeheartedly agree.
“Mr. Vollmann’s editors urged him to cut, he said, and he resisted: ‘We always go round and round. They want me to cut, and I argue, so they cut my royalties, and I agree never to write a long book again.'” (Vollmann quoted by Jason Boog, July 29, 2009, http://bit.ly/1todPK)
Still, at only 1,300 pages, Vollmann does seem to have acted on his editors’ advice, compared to the 3,300 pages of “Rising up and rising down”. Perhaps he needed those royalties more than he admitted, like when he published that watered-down version of Rising up and rising down, saying he did it for the money.
… with which I wholeheartedly agree.
“Mr. Vollmann’s editors urged him to cut, he said, and he resisted: ‘We always go round and round. They want me to cut, and I argue, so they cut my royalties, and I agree never to write a long book again.'” (Vollmann quoted by Jason Boog, July 29, 2009, http://bit.ly/1todPK)
Still, at only 1,300 pages, Vollmann does seem to have acted on his editors’ advice, compared to the 3,300 pages of “Rising up and rising down”. Perhaps he needed those royalties more than he admitted, like when he published that watered-down version of Rising up and rising down, saying he did it for the money.
ahh, that is effin incredible.
ahh, that is effin incredible.