Ashley > Recent Status Updates

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept...

The new Goodreads interface is SO FUCKING HORRIBLE.

I think the police did this shit

Fortunately he remained true to himself, and therefore never became ‘rational’.

Let us admit the fact that it is hard for a man to read Casanova's memoirs without envy. (101)

Trash prose about a trash culture--honestly rather brilliantly done.

Having zero sympathetic characters should be prerequisite in any kind of "realist" novel.

After Ft Sumter began the war, Washington DC sat essentially unguarded as the mid-southern states joined the Deep South in treasonous rebellion. Imagine the sleepless nights in that city as just the 5th Massachussetts, some howitzers on porticos and barrels of flour stood between amassing rebel armies and a city surrounded on three sides by Virginia (slave, seceded) and on the forth by Maryland (slave, not yet gone).

Seagulls: “…pure scavengers of the empyrean. Hunters of edible stars.”

“Hugh put one foot up on the parapet and regarded his cigarette that seemed bent, like humanity, on consuming itself as quickly as possible.”

I don’t think I appreciated what a political novel this is. The looming catastrophe of WWII is so present in the first three chapters of UtV it’s borderline nauseating. The atmosphere of the 1930s almost chokes you with its melancholy dread.

Time is a fake healer anyhow.

This is absolutely terrifying.

More Los Angeles prep. Stunning prose, as vivid as Democracy but in service of a much darker theme.

Fascinating to revisit early(ish) Vollmann after spending so much time with the recent stuff. The seed of his later voice is there but it feels quite different, there's an edge to it I rather like.

The melancholy third section is redeeming the tiresome second and the ponderous first. The Sebald influence looms maybe too large. Books are made out of books, yes, but I usually don't like to see whole stolen appendages sutured onto an animated corpse. That said, Self's satiric license may justify this theft and, in any event, there have been PLENTY of images, insights and observations to justify reading.

Curious, reader? I can heartily recommend heeding Vollmann's advice to take up this book, as I did last night, in between lying down for the night and when one puts out the light. As it happens, my companion really was brushing her teeth as I scanned the opening pages of this work, delicious already. The Atlas, with its far-flung and lachrymose places delights the unwinding mind. "And so, reader, good night."

As much of a fanboy as I am, I confess to being disappointed in this so far. Kind of a Burroughs' interzone of cinema culture. The best nuggs so far have been psychogeographic. If only the proportions in the admixture were reversed...