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Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson. The Vollman Reader. 2004. I had to get over the blurbs, introduction, and reputation, otherwise I'd never discover that Vollman is mostly accessible, flawed, human. Just a guy who doesn't want people to get hurt, he seems at times. Though he wrote one of the longest books ever published about violence, I don't think he endorses or practices violence. He is pro-prostitution in word and deed, which is all most know about him. A champion of the prostitute, but also a lonely guy. Because I share (I think) much of his idealism, but little (I regret) of his adventurousness, this was an important book for me to read right now, after finishing my latest writing degree. Vollman lives. He's probably as neurotic as other writers, but he is willing to experience a degree of discomfort for his art that goes way beyond being hungover the day after the Kenny Goldsmith reception, which is about as intensely as my colleagues and I are trained to suffer. Reading Vollman, of course, because of the reputation admirers like you have built for him, is a bit scary: Do we really want to know how cowardly, pathetic, repressed, and lazy we are? There's also the problem of Vollman never having written any books as humble as The Crying of Lot 49 (which I consider humble only when compared to Pynchon's other books), meaning that, until your reader, Vollman's corpus had no convenient entrance. This collection is great, except for the screenplay, which is painful and redundant. The essay on prostitutes "The Shame of it All" doesn't go as far as it could: calling his detractors prudes is just the flip side of them calling him sleazy or sexist. But once I made it through the sex chapter the coins started pouring out of the slot. The passage from The Rifles was exactly what I wanted to read: I knew Vollman went to the Arctic to write a book that wasn't really even about him going to the Arctic, but I didn't realize that that fragment of travel memoir (what a bleak example of the genre!) existed. That may be the defining Vollman—my Vollman—but the trip up the New River was also a treasure to read (and picturing you, and having been to Borrego, made it all the more creepily vivid). "American Writing Today," like "The Shame of it all," didn't go far enough, or maybe the problem is just that I already agree with it. Good thing Vollman didn't go for an MFA, then he could have expanded that essay into another seven-volume book. But I think it's best for him just to set an example sufficiently withering to make unnecessary his attacks on empty writers. Vollman still isn't political enough. His strengths here are his traveling and his sympathy for, and attempts to immerse himself in, other cultures. My favorite Vollman remains the Alaska sequence from An Afghanistan Picture Show, but I also like the excerpt included here. When he's on, or to put it more reasonably, when he's on something I can get behind, his prose is unsurpassable. PS You left a bunch of stuff out of the timeline, like the invention of paper, to give just one example. McCaffery responds: first off, bill DOES have his equivalent of the crying of lot 49--it's his short novel, whores for gloria, which i highly recommend to anyone who finds themselves intimidated by his bigger works |