Nathan "N.R."’s Comments (group member since Oct 28, 2012)

Nathan "N.R."’s comments from the William T Vollmann Central group.

One of my favorite Book Reviews. William the Blind reviews Argall for the LA Times:

"The Stench of Corpses"
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/oct/...

Friend Jimmy Cline's interview with Bill at the time of Mask's release:

http://www.powells.com/blog/interview...

Jimmy wrote: "Just discovered this group. Many of you have probably already seen this, but I interviewed Vollmann a few years ago after he published Kissing the Mask. One of my fondest memories of that job was..."

Thanks for posting that link, Jimmy. Apologies I'd not gotten it done yet. I'm gunna cross post it also on the Mask thread.

Hadrian wrote: "WTV said he wrote a historical timeline for this one, but the publisher cut it out. Did it ever surface again, in some form?"

I've not seen it. I assume it was not included in the Expelled from Eden reader.

But I imagine that it is/will be included in his archive at Ohio State. What they have now is only from 1992-2001. I don't know if there is another Vollmann archive at another institution, or if OSU will get another batch in the future.
http://library.osu.edu/finding-aids/r...

The interview (2005) you refer to is here:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005...


Raintaxi review of Europe Central and Expelled from Eden:
http://raintaxi.com/online/2005spring...

That would be distracting.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...

Aubrey wrote: "Europe Central. I came for the WWII, and stayed for the WTV."

Nice how that happens. It seems like there are a number of WWII novels that have come to my attention recently, but fortunately I've already got the WTV bug, so his will be my WWII novel. I'm curious if I'll have an interest in another WWII novel after his. Not that he'll exhaust the topic, but wither my interests will run.

Geoff wrote: "That picture of Vollmann as a woman did nothing good for me today."

hardcore.

Pete wrote: "Oh yeah, I'm a total hypocrite when it comes to gossip. I will sneer at anyone who cares about the Lohans, and then will totally dig into any tales I can find on Franzen, DeLillo, Wallace, etc. "

We are on the same hypocritical page. "But it's about literature!" I say, self-justifyingly.

Eric wrote: "Vollmann's gone soft. That's what happens when you marry (x) and rear a daughter (y)."

You mean this, right?

"'They Just Want to Look in the Mirror'; William T. Vollmann Becomes a Woman"
http://www.vice.com/read/they-just-wa...

Pete wrote: "It's pretty strange to even think of, but apparently Vollmann and Franzen have been good friends for years."

I hadn't heard about that. I make no apologies for my interest in author-celebrity gossip. ; )

A Recipe from Our Man in the Arctic

William T. Vollmann’s Caribou, Arctic Canada style

1. Kill a caribou, butcher it, and cut the meat into handy 5- or 10-pound chunks.
2. Freeze until needed.
3. Take a hunk of the raw frozen meat and put it on a piece of cardboard on the kitchen floor.
4. Kneel down and chop off a handful of flakes and splinters, using a nice sharp hatchet.
5. Dip in inukpo (seal fat, frozen to the consistency of jelly).
6. Eat.

http://www.flavorwire.com/312606/how-...
[good gods--franzen's recipe is for "pasta with kale." i hate this man. his recipe is now my declared reason for notevernever reading his books.]

From the Max bio of DFW.

DFW & WTV at dinner:

"In person, though, Vollmann was too odd for the fundamentally bourgeois Wallace. The two had had dinner that spring in New York with Brad Morrow, and afterward Wallace reported to Moore that his counterpart was 'more than a bubble off plumb--prefers bloody venison and chocolate cake washed down with Stout for supper, speaks easily of blow-jobs and cooze while we're eating.' Franzen, the more conventional of the two and a midwesterner, was the better match for Wallace." (p130)

From the Max bio of DFW, regarding The Rainbow Stories:

"Thus, during his time in Somerville two authors had earned his intense admiration. One was William Vollmann, whose collection The Rainbow Stories Wallace had read three times that spring in galleys and thought evidence, as he wrote to Moore, of 'the best young writer going.' In that collection, the novella 'The Blue Yonder,' half expressionist nightmare, half reportage, 'simply separates sock from pod,' he reported to Franzen. Vollmann reminded Wallace of Pynchon, Coover, and William Burroughs but was 'remarkably unselfconscious' in his debts, a writer whose every word satisfied Wallace's call for fiction that subtly parried the media that saturated it in creating a new kind of art." [Franzen was the other.] (p130)

My first encounter with Vollmann was the first encounter between Europeans and Native North Americans. What I found highly valuable as background preparation was the introductory essay from The Sagas of Icelanders. I intend to begin, finally reading these Sagas in 2013. This is not a complete collection, and some of the major Sagas are not included, but easily available.

MJ wrote: "Hi. Going to read The Butterfly Stories. Do I have clearance?"

I thought we had you signed up for Rainbow Stories. I tend to confuse their titles. Please do. Clearance granted. I'll have a little head-wind knowledge when I up-take this one.

Oh ho! Rainbow readers will reallyreally wanna see this one. Even it's gotta video.

"Terrorism as art: Mark Pauline's dangerous machines--
Robots, rebellion, and the post-apocalyptic performance art of Survival Research Labs" By Jesse Hicks from The Verge.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/9/340...

William T. Vollmann, famous for chronicling SF’s underbelly, called SRL the Indigo Engineers because “they operate in the Beyond.” In his journalism-fiction (the line always blurs with Vollmann), he asks Pauline whether one can escape becoming the kind of violent, grubbing automata programmed only for Survival. He asks, "Do you have any recipe for a life that would avoid what those machines represent?"

"Well, I don't think there's any way to really avoid the bad things in the world,” the Pauline-character replies. “What you can do is, you can either choose to mete those sorta horrible things out to yourself, or you can have someone else do them to you. You can control your fate as it relates to the limited possibilities of people on earth, or you can let someone else control it. I just chose to be able to control it myself. And towards that end I had to come up with this system. That's the only way that my life would be worth living, enclosed by that world. Punishment is never so bad when you mete it out to yourself. When you let other people do it to you, then you lose your pride."

So, but this article, then, is a portrait of the artist as an old(er) man. Get the raw stuff in Rainbow.

Vollmann's art:

"A Day at William T. Vollmann’s Studio"
Interview by Terri Saul
Quarterly Conversation
http://quarterlyconversation.com/will...

For those new to Bill's books, ask here to find out what might make a good entry point for you. Also, those with a few under their belt might enquirer which would be the best next to read.

Geoff wrote: "Thanks for the good work doing this, NR!"

Let me know if and when we need some new threads. I was thinking we might need some general threads addressing topics and themes which cross and recross throughout his books. But I'll hold off on those until we get a few more members and/or discussions.

Put whatever you want in this thread. Try to keep it somewhat WTV-related. But tangential, please, lots of tangentiality.