The Independent‘s Matt Thorne talks with William T. Vollmann and the V-Mann spills a few details about many of the projects now at the forefront. Here’s Vollmann on Imperial: “I’m trying to tell the history of the US-Mexican border from earliest times to the present. I’m looking at how a line on paper can change things. When you first look at Imperial Valley it seems hot, flat and dull, but the more you look into it the more secrets you can find. There’s a labyrinth of illegal Chinese tunnels, which was considered to be a myth. But I finally got to go into these tunnels and they’re fascinating. There’s parquet ceilings and I found this velvet nude painting, and some old Cantonese letters I had translated. Some tunnels became brothels and gambling dens and valuables were hidden down there.” (via Jeff)

William T. Vollmann appears in today’s edition of The Best of Our Knowledge, discussing violence and morality. You can listen to the show here. (Click on “06-27-23-B” RealAudio link.) Vollmann notes that the death of his journalist friend (chronicled in Rising Up and Rising Down) was an act of war and that “he has no hard feelings toward them.”

What’s particularly amusing is how the interviewer is astonished by Vollmann’s calmness. When asked about his own death, Vollmann responds, “If it happens to me, it will be…okay, I hope. That’s how you have to look at it.”

He also puts the Israel-Palestine conflict on the Moral Compass.

Frances Dinkelspiel reports that the Bancroft Library at Cal is seeking a good deal of Vollmann’s manuscripts for inclusion in its collection. Of course, Bancroft is going to have to compete with the Ohio State University over who has the bigger (and more thorough) collection.

Scott offers a defense of Vollmann: “Yes, Vollmann gives us a lot of details–Pushkin, three corpses, the offhanded remark on the German language. Perhaps we could have stripped the Pushkin reference, gotten rid of two corpses, exed out the whole bit about the Nackenschuss. We could do all that, but then what would be left of Vollmann’s original intent, of his desire to communicate the clash of cultures during the war in Central Europe? Why, without Vollmann’s details, this war could be taking place anywhere. Besides, isn’t it interesting that whereas the Soviets have slogans, the Germans have words for executing someone through the base of their skull? And how keen of Vollmann to note that these Soviet peasants, whom all the might of the Soviet state was unable to bring together, were so swiftly and brutally stripped of their individuality by the Nazis?”