WHAT OUGHT TO BE ON YOUR READING DESK

A list for the Spring and Summer  2012 or really any season for that matter

--From the Library of America:   

---THE CIVIL WAR The First Year

---THE CIVIL WAR The Second Year

---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1950-1962      

---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1963-1973

---DAVID GOODIS  Five Noir Novels of the 1940s &50s

And then...

-- STOLEN AIR Selected poems of Osip Mandelstam  translated by Christian Wiman. (Ecco Press)

 --A TIME FOR EVERYTHING by Karl O. Knausgaard.  Archipelago

 --MY STRUGGLE by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Archipelago

 --SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai  New Directions

 --PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas.  Farra Straus & Giroux

 --SEX AND TERROR by Pascal Quignard.   Seagull Press

 --THE ROVING SHADOWS by Pascal Quignard.  Seagull Press

 --AS CONSCIOUSESS IS HARNESSED TO FLESH  Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

    by Susan Sontag.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

 --THE HUNGER ARTIST by Herta Muller.  Metropolitan Books

 --TRANSPARENCY by Marek Bienzyk.  Dalkey Archive

 --ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS  by Ernst Junger.  New Directions  (out of print)

 --SONG BOOK.  The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba.  Yale University Press

 --ON THE BORDER OF SNOW AND MELT.  Selected Poems of Georgy Ivanov. Perceval Press

 --JAMES JOYCE.  A New Biography by Gordon Bowker.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

                     NOTICE

The American writers on the this list are all dead.  

Is that saying something? 

More, maybe than I would like to say, really: but does anyone look forward to any American writer’s newest book with the eager anticipation that the announcement of a new translation of a book by THOMAS BERNHARD or ROBERT PINGET or ERNST JUNGER or MICHEL LEIRIS would create?

(there is William T. Vollmann and then...)

INTO AMERICA: on the not reading of IMPERIAL by WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

Going into America.

Have you noticed that the reviews of William T. Vollmann's IMPERIAL have appeared and almost to a word they have been the sort of review that praises and then takes away complaining of the length, the demands placed upon the reader and never does the reviewer admit to not having really read the book?

These reviews do not send people to the reading of IMPERIAL. They allow the reader to conclude that they know enough about the book, know that it has something to do with the border of the United States, with the people who live near the border, about the complexity of a once open border, with a now closed border ( though if anyone remembers LONELY ARE THE BRAVE he or she will remember that the reason the Kirk Douglas character breaks into the jail is to try to help his friend who has been arrested for helping illegals--- and this is in 1962!!! so once again the great forgetfulness, the stupidity of journalists today who think they are telling really anything new to those of us who might still have the faculty of memory).

IMPERIAL is still the most important book of the year, the only essential book to be published this year in these United States even now as the reviews have appeared and even after one or two nice profiles of the author, again which lets people off the hook of actually reading IMPERIAL because reading the article allows them to be "well-informed"--- is this the best reason to NEVER read The New York Times? ... who would want to be well-informed if that has to include reading The New York Times?... I hope you have read Marina Tsvetayeva's precise poem "Readers of Newspapers" which includes these lines:

It crawls, the underground snake
crawls, with its load of people.
And each one has his
newspaper, his skin
disease; a twitch of chewing;
newspaper caries.
Masticators of gum,
readers of newspapers.

...

They swallow emptiness,
these readers of newspapers.

...

Grabbers of small moments
readers of newspapers.

...

It's better to go to a graveyard
than into the prurient
sickbay of scab-scratchers,
these readers of newspapers.


If Tsvetayeva was alive today she would have included the glassy eyed viewers of television "news"... if someone tells you he or she watches CNN... it like the famous dot on the forehead of an Indian woman--- according to V. S. Naipaul--- meaning, you know her head is empty.

IMPERIAL is not meant to be read in one sitting, or many sittings... it can not be so read. And that is the flaw of all the reviews I have seen. None of them confess to not having really read the book. They all pretend to having read it and here is now their considered opinion. This failure to be honest, this dishonesty by pretending to having read is something that David Foster Wallace was well aware of when he would be interviewed or meet reviewers of INFINITE JEST and well knowing that the book had not been read... of course this happened with William Gaddis's THE RECOGNITIONS as documented in Jack Green's FIRE THE BASTARD (Dalkey Archive).

IMPERIAL should be open on a person's desk. The other day Vollmann sent me to read John Steinbeck's The Vigilante in THE LONG VALLEY which I found in the Library of America's edtion of Steinbeck... Steinbeck withholds judgment on a man who has participated in a lynching... trusting his readers to... a trust that our genius well reviewed writers no longer can muster. But it is this sending and the resulting further reading that marks out IMPERIAL and no reviewer as far as I know had commented on this essential detail.. beacause to do so would mean that they could not produce the required judgment for those scab-pickers

RUSH OUT AND BUY IMPERIAL BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

If America needs, as is often said A WRITER that one writer is: WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN.

At the moment he is the only writer in America whose death I would mourn.

Vollmann is the only writer who might and might already be a genuine world writer to whom it would not be necessary to attach mention of his nationality.

No living writer in America can equal his accomplishments and of course you can go to Wikipedia or any of the other sources for all the back ground.
But I stake out my claim by listing:

THE ROYAL FAMILY
RISING UP AND RISING DOWN: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
AN AFGHANISTAN PICTURE SHOW
YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS
EUROPE CENTRAL

(and I would also mention that there are 12, yes, 12 other books that flesh out… and do not clutter…

And NOW AND NOW AND NOW::: IMPERIAL

IMPERIAL

IMPERIAL

IMPERIAL

And its companion book IMPERIAL Photograpy by William T Vollmann

((((and I well know that eventually there is always a qualification so I will put it up front but the very qualification indicates the seriousness with which I take Vollmann.

As I read Vollmann I am reminded of :

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ernst Junger.

Vollmann, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Junger: the same mixture of riveting objectivity, the same urge to document, the same unashamed emotional identification with whatever they are writing about, the same acidic intellect, the same access to a language unafraid of a genuine apprehension of an always very real possibility of a crippling silence just ahead

And now the distinctions: Solzhenitsyn was actually a prisoner in the Gulag.

Dostoevsky was stood up against a wall and fully expected to be shot for his political beliefs.

Junger fought for five years in World War One in the trenches (receiving the pour le Merite) and was again in the army in World War Two, he actually did drop LSD with Albert Hoffmann, he did do real science as a ……..

And that is the vital difference.

Vollmann has been looking and always there is that distance… things have happened to him but they are a consequence of his looking… and this leads at time to a nagging sense of self-hatred that introduces a tiny thread of distrust into this reader’s consideration of his work…

BUT that is it… so as we move to why he is so central to my understanding of his importance. He is not part of the academy, he is not off in some drearily famous college teaching creative writing or literature, he is no darling of the academy, no one looks up to him, he is not cited as a good role model… he is discovered by word of mouth by readers passing on his books.

Sadly, he does have a literary prize but I am sure he knows just how worthless that is and is appropriately embarrassed by it: the only thing you get from having any sort of literary prize is that it guarantees an obit in the NY Times…

So, IMPERIAL

1306 pages about that part of California centered upon the Imperial Valley… you know where: south of Palm Springs, north of the Mexican border, west of the Colorado River, out there east of LA… a pendant to THE ROYAL FAMILY which was located up there around SF…

You open the book: grey pages black type… white squiggly maps… WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN. IMPERIAL.
A reproduction of a death certificate for a John Doe, Unknown Mexican issued by the County of Imperial, dated 7/29/24 but the copy was issued on Oct 22, 2002.
In Memory of SERAFIN RAMIREZ HERNANDZ unknown, missing, illegal, Mexican. CONTENTS
10 pages worth. More maps drawn by WTV.

Part One

INTRODUCTIONS.

A photograph of a huge cross on a hillside in Slab City.

Chapter 1. THE GARDENS OF PARADISE (1999)

I think we all feel sorry for ‘em
---Border Patrol Officer Gloria I. Chavez, on the subject of illegal aliens.

BODY-SNATCHERS

The All-American Canal was now dark black with phosphorescent streaks where the border’s eyes stained it with yellow tears. --- These lights have been up for about two years. Officer Dan Murray said. Before that, it was generators. Before that, it was pitch black.

He was an older man, getting big in the waist, whose face had been hardened by knowledge into something legendary. For years he’d played his part in the work first begun by Eden’s angel with the flaming sword…

It is RIGHT THERE with the “flaming sword” with “Eden’s angel” that my case rests for the genius of William T. Vollmann and if you do not get it, I probably cannot convince you of it though I will try in future posts … but you should get yourself to a bookstore to get a copy of IMPERIAL. I don’t think Viking is printing up a whole lot of this book and I am sure the book of photographs by Vollmann published by Power House books will also disappear very quickly…

I well know that a new Thomas Pynchon novel is coming out next week but I do know Pynchon is reading Vollmann’s book. Pynchon is self aware enough to regret the poor timing of these two books coming out at the same time. Just one of those things.

THE TWO GREATEST WRITERS and THE UTTERLY FORGOTTEN

All of this is a gesture

1.

The two greatest living writers who happen to be American are William T. Vollmann and James McCourt. I should really have included myself in that by saying the three greatest writers… because if you are not prepared to assert this self-evaluation you might as well stop right now. I also do not like giving into mentioning that McCourt and Vollmann are American. Writing is only writing and once a writer is provided with a nationality he ceases to matter in some essential way.

But I have given in and the occasion is the forthcoming publication of Vollmann’s IMPERIAL and within the year the second volume of McCourt’s great novel , NOW VOYAGERS which joins TIME REMAINING as being his claims upon the world’s attention

Vollmann of course has been far more prolific and I won’t bother to list all his books citing only : his three thousand page seven volume RISING UP AND RISING DOWN meditation on violent death and THE ROYAL FAMILY a novel loosely centered upon northern California now joined by IMPERIAL which creates the far south of California, which will appear in the summer.

Vollmann is our Balzac, our Tolstoy--- since people like such comparisons--- though I should avoid the our since Vollmann belongs to the world as surely as does Faulkner and Beckett. Soon enough his worlds will seem a permanent part of the world’s imagination.

James McCourt creates in TIME REMAINING the existence, the fate of what it means to be homosexual in the modern world… as it journeys forth on a train from New York to the Hamptons… in NOW VOYAGERS the journey is through both time and space and imagines a world that will never pass away even as it is so obviously dead, remembering as Celine has remarked, you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny.

Happily neither Vollmann nor McCourt's work can be enlisted in any cause outside of literature.

One can well imagine Vladimir Nabokov on a rainy day in Portal, Arizona housebound and turning away from the note cards for LOLITA picking up the latest from Vollmann, remarking how heavy the bound galleys are of IMPERIAL and saying to Vera that Georgi Ivanov would have liked this book, this sordid march, this squishing of language and how anyone who reads surely remembers Nina Berberova's portrait of the Ivanov's existence in Paris that she re-counted in THE ITALICS ARE MINE

One can well imagine Nabokov as he journeyed away from Portal and stopping say in Douglas for a night at the Gadsden Hotel, squeezing it into their budget as the hotel seemed so right after that version of the Alps that they had passed through circuitously leaving Portal and finding the first volume of McCourt's NOW VOYAGERS left there by Thornton Wilder in the dream that is time, and remarking again to Vera here like that McGonigle is another writer who has learned from Andrei Bely how to be truly in a city as was Bely in PETERSBURG.


UTTERLY FORGOTTEN.

While praising these writers I was thinking of writers who I knew who seemed to be well published, even known but now… utterly forgotten…

Chad Walsh and Bink Noll were poets both nationally published, reviewed and now gone… they had stocked my life at Beloit College 1962-

I used to tell a Bink Noll story and I went to Marion, Virginia where Walsh had been a boy and a proof reader for Sherwood Anderson’s last newspaper. Another gone writer. In the public library was a folder for Chad Walsh but nothing of course recently in it.

Richard M. Elman had been a professor at Columbia. He had my fellow students write my obituary. He had been a teacher to Richard Price but then had a falling out… he published more than 20 books and all of them are gone… a book of memoir/criticism was published and is vaguely in print Sun and Moon Press has two unpublished books in its file cabinets. No one has been knocking on their door demanding they appear…

George Garrett will shortly be a year dead and he seems on the way to being forgotten… his editors are all dead, his students remember him but none of them are powerful publishers… by the of his life he had been honored, feted and now… gone. he is mostly an anecdote instead of a read writer.

Chandler Brossard: in spite of Dalkey Archive, Steve Moore and others this man who invented the beat world and who was victim of the worst instance of the malicious power of a vengeful stupid reviewer, Anatole Broyard...

BS Johnson… is nearly gone away…

James Liddy will be remembered for maybe another year.. there might be a posthumous collected poems but then… can a hole be made for him in the history of Irish poets.. is there a need for another Irish poet?

UWE Johnson will never be republished in the US… the dreariest Palestinian propagandist will be published by the new publishers of translations before they get around to this writer who found a form for precisely describing the consequences of the divison of Germany and the how of history working on a person’s mind…

Glenway Wescott will never get pushed into world literature.. he has become a regionalist writer, something he despised

John Hawkes once a required writer in nearly every introduction to literature course in American universities in the 1960s... being forced to read him destroyed many a person's interest in modern writing

Louis Bromfield...

Ellen Glasgow...

Paul Metcalf...

Francis Stuart...

Wright Morris...