James > Recent Status Updates

Trying to get over a very long reading hiatus.

Not enjoying this book much. Atmosphere is cool but compared to other Vollmann, it feels watered-down.

Maybe I’m wrong. Anyone want to point out something redeeming in this? Still early in the book I guess.

A bit too much on prejudice and how it was formed as a method of tribal survival and bla bla “wait, weren’t we taught this in elementary school?” but written for big kids, I guess.

The Balloon is a pretty cool story. Postmodern balloon.

Barthelme is a very different writer who reminds me in a way of a more condensed and abstract DFW.

“That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”

This Milton guy’s got ambitions. Wonder if this’ll be any good.

Picking this back up.

Imagine being so admired and talented you can ramble almost incoherently for 652 pages and people like me will be excited to recognize references to your own essays and such. There are really a lot of gems of passages in this work and the constant unraveling of layers of meaning in a “life in a chair” makes it strangely engaging. Like digging a tunnel or something! Hey!

Dropped this book a while ago due to life distractions but will be picking it up again soon.

Bloody as fuck and written entirely, and most impressively, in dialect. Won a bunch of rewards. Hits you like an urban Cormac McCarthy set on the Chicago south side.

Some of the best descriptive writing I’ve read in a long time. Jungles, deserts, caves intertwined with paranormal or Southern-gothic-esque hauntings of esoteric religions...

Before this the only masterfully written work is ever read that took place in a jungle was “Terra Incognita” by Nabokov. Read it many times over. Can’t believe it’s taken me over three decades to find out about Vollmann...

y so angry bro

In earnest though, the period political references in this are way over my head. Would help if he didn’t only refer to historical figures on a first name basis. Open enrollment university courses on his Exile Trilogy when?

The best kind of Vollmann dialogue:


“I'm going to rip your underpants off and rape you.
I'd like to see you try. All I have to do is look at you and it goes limp. You couldn't rape a jellyfish.
Did you ever love me?
I don't remember.”

Excerpt From
The Atlas
William T. Vollmann
This material may be protected by copyright.

Vollmann is currently retelling the story of the Siege of Masada in biblical form.

This is such a “why didn’t I or anyone else think of that before” historical fiction writing style that it hurts. What a collection.

Totally forgot that I’m even reading this—I had abandoned it months ago but just picked it back up.

I’m skeptical towards all these four and five star ratings. He’s a great essayist, but these are just Kafka-esque snippets of absurd and presumably symbolic dreams which are almost incomprehensible and usually totally meaningless.

So far this is just basic skills for improving well-being, ie. “develop personal interests and then be among those who share the same interests and you will be less lonely.” Literally:

“What if you feel isolated, alienated, unconnected to any community? Take stock of your own interests, and get involved with others with similar interests”

That’s chapter one.

Vollmann in a nutshell:

“Her labia had flushed the reddish-orange of molten copper. The empty needle hung from her like a breast sucked dry as she hunched forward, masturbating furiously.
She smiled and swayed for a long time. Then she turned to look at the man. Defiantly she said: Have you ever been in love?
No, the man said.
Oh, she said. I was just curious.”

Thing about Vollmann is his editors give him so much creative freedom that the low points of his always-lengthy works can be very bad. This part where he describes a boxing match is as embarrassing as watching a white collar father of three making his first attempt at playing metal guitar while wearing a bandana. A needless, obvious, and dorky attempt at being Hemingway.

Don’t think I’m going to fulfill my 2019 reading goal at this rate...

Anyway, it’s been a long time since I opened this book. Will be sad when I finish it. Poetic books that also force me to use Wikipedia every couple pages are rare.

Chewin’ khat with prostitutes in Kenya, boxing in Sacramento, tramping around in the Canadian wilderness, train hopping, crack smoking... ah, Vollmann. You satisfy my ADD and need for romanticized grit.

“Did I really have the power to make another person happy or unhappy? Was I ever that much alive?”

Applied stress relief for the holidays. Basic Buddhist wisdom. Skipped the intro and all that.

tl;dr romance is hard when you’re a John in Cambodia

One of those terribly boring Vollmann passages that are emotionally disappointing—but I get it, he modeled this after a Kawabata collection which presumably depicted “mysterious” geishas and love-lorn Japanese men because it’s fucking Kawabata. I don’t know if I’ve matured or become less mature to not even bother trying to give a fuck.

Already getting sick of it and feel like I’ve read this before in his other short story collections I’ve read: poverty, prostitutes, drugs, and gruesome deaths, but this time set in “exotic” places and among what I guess would be “exotic” cultures not routinely explored in American literature. Realist, heterosexual William Burroughs—but like Burroughs, creatively-written enough to keep interest.

Dropping this book at the risk of going insane.

Utterly masturbatory and filled with references to his own previous works (essays, etc.) but also utterly fucking beautiful.

Actually on page 8 after skipping the forward.

Preposition after preposition. Wish I had a professor to clarify what I’m reading. From what I gather he’s “proving” the limits of thought are parallel with the limits of logical linguistic expression.

This was written and published around the same time Joyce wrote and published Ulysses which tested the limits of language. Interesting.

Actually on page 8 after skipping the forward.

Preposition after preposition. Wish I had a professor to clarify what I’m reading. From what I gather he’s “proving” the limits of thought are parallel with the limits of logical linguistic expression.

This was written and published around the same time Joyce wrote and published Ulysses which tested the limits of language. Interesting.

Former poet laureate of the UK. Didn’t realize till after I started reading that this guy was married to Sylvia Plath.

It’s great. He writes almost exclusively about nature, specifically animal behavior. Something about the aesthetic reminds me of Cormac McCarthy or Faulkner. Okay, it’s basically Cormac McCarthy doing dramatic National Geographic Channel narratives in a poetic medium.

“A change in language,” [Whorf] says, “can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.”

Sheeeit this is just the foreword.

It’s well-written in the engaging sense. Something is lazy about his use of historical figures as examples. Sort of that uni-student-used-to-getting-As-doing-the-bare-minimum-requirements flair. Feels like he stretches to make his examples work. The philosophy is good tho. Irony of his assumption of being a role model to his audience (especially considering he was like 24 when he wrote this) has been noted.

This might be the most boring book I’ve ever read, yet it’s weirdly readable and difficult to put down. Incredibly German in the stereotypical sense that the narrator, while traveling through the US in 1883, is fixated almost exclusively on machinery: farm equipment, trains, street cars, etc. The prose is reflective of this and it’s fairly hypnotic.

Reading the Charles Martin translation and not enjoying it as much as the other translation I had in my possession a few years ago.

Can anyone recommend a good translation of this? I just remember this being more poetic. Also the one I had wasn’t broken down into stanzas—it was written as prose. ???