Category / Vollmann, William

by DrMabuse

Quick

Stephen Hawking is under round-the-clock suveillance. Apparently, his family fears that someone is planning to sabotage the stuff that keeps Hawking alive.

John Barth writes about university readings. (via Maud)

Just after Fahrenheit 451 was selected for an “Everyone Reads” library program, Ray Bradbury says that “the people have lost control” and that “bigger and stupider” entertainment has deadened intellectual curiosity.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced. The big surprises: Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing and William T. Vollman’s Rising Up and Rising Down. Both are very long books (and in Vollman’s case, we’re talking seven volumes). How many critics honestly read all of the nominees?

And Jack Kerouac’s On the Road manuscript, composed on an endless sheet of paper, is touring the States for the next three years. (via Moorish Girl)

by DrMabuse

Because Every Review Needs an Attention-Grabbing Sentence to Quote in Later Reviews

Looks like Sterling Clover’s going for a Tibor Fischer (for anyone with the time to read, or skip through, 3,200 pages): “But Rising Up is maddeningly real, at its worst the world’s most erudite dorm-room bullshit session given the Cicero treatment and weighed down by numbing cynicism toward belief and hope of all sorts, naive tossing-about of the ‘social contract,’ irritating misuse of the concept of reification, and an epistemological nightmare of means and ends.” (via Low Culture)

by DrMabuse

Reading Long and Reading Hard

In which our blogger marvels at the McSweeney’s commitment towards William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down

vollmann.jpegSan Francisco Chronicle: “It’s impossible to do justice in this space to the 3,299 pages of philosophic declaration, autobiography, journalism and intellectual exhibitionism in machete-sharp prose and photography.”

The new Vollmann set, Rising Up and Rising Down is $120, seven volumes, 3,299 pages, and 20 pounds. It took a year for the McSweeney’s people to fact check. Frankly, it’s astonishing that any newspaper bothered to review it.

But despite Vollmann’s prolificity, Zoetrope can’t get a new story out of him. “I love literary magazines, but they don’t pay what the big ones do.”

Vollmann on fact checking: “I told them I wanted a fact checker since some of the things that I say may be controversial and I’m not a scholar. Or not an academic, and I’m talking about so many different things. At the very least I want to make sure that I’m not making errors in my sources. And so they’ve given me four or five of them. They’re great people to work with. They’ve been looking up every single book that I cite. I don’t know how many I cite, but the bibliography is probably like 100 pages long.”

[3/22/04 UPDATE: Months later, the Vollman set received a cover story on the NYTBR. Of course, who’d expect anyone to read all those pages so quickly? I should also note that publishing such an ambitious work was one of the coolest things that the Eggers clan did.]