It Is Doubly Difficult to Get Out

I am reading William T. Vollmann's second-latest enormous book -- "Imperial" -- and I came across this apt, wonderful, and terrible paragraph which addresses why the New River (in Mexico and California) remains so terribly polluted.

Maybe the New River wasn't anybody's fault, either. People need to defecate, and if they are poor, they cannot afford to process their sewage. People need to eat, and so they work in the maquiladoras--factories owned by foreign polluters. The polluters pollute to save money; then we buy their inexpensive and perhaps well-made tractor parts, fertilizers, pesticides. It is doubly difficult to get out. And it's all ghastly.

Sigh.

Solicitations!

Ever since I've moved away from my parent's house, I've lived either in grotty student housing, behind a controlled-access entryway, or on the other side of an inconspicuous doorway. I have rarely suffered the onslaught of door-to-door solicitation.

That just changed.

On Monday I got the "chocolate bars for kids" hard sell from a gang of precocious pre-teens. I was so entertained by their pushy ring-leader -- a little girl who yelled "SHUT UP!" at the boy who tried to muscle in on her sales pitch -- that I happily gave them my money.

Today was the "sponsor a third-world child" routine, pushed by the best salesman I've ever had the dubious fortune to meet. This is how he started:

"Hey, you're wondering why I'm standing at your front door. I'll give you $50 to punch me in the face! Seriously! No, I'm just kidding, only some guy down the street threatened to punch me in the face. Really! No, no, I'm only joking, that's not true. Anyway..."

When -- in response to a question -- I confessed that I don't watch television, he asked me who my favourite author was. "William T. Vollmann" came to mind first, and that's what I said, but by suspecting (correctly) that I had gone all highbrow capital-L Literature on him, he came back by saying:

"I'm a big fan of Vonnegut myself. Have you read any?"

"Oh...just 'Slaughterhouse Five' and 'Galapagos,' I'm reading some Nabokov right now--"

"Yeah, Vladimir! Great stuff! Anyway..."

This guy did such a fabulous tap-dance that it almost hurt to say no. But that's the thing about good salespeople...they're like fortune-tellers, instantly able to switch tracks and gloss over the subject they suspect you're most interested in. I'm sure that if I said I watched a lot of sports, he'd have been able to come up with a list of pretty obscure players.

Still, not many people can throw "Vladimir" at you.

Anyway, this makes me realize that -- for the first time -- my door will be a target for Hallowe'en trick-or-treaters. Small communities of anonymous condos must be GOLDEN for kids on Hallowe'en. But I've never handed candy out before and something about it...well...scares me.

I like the fact that I can't conveniently curl up and ignore the world in my house, but am I ready to face dozens of children? Do I know what to say to them? Do I know how much candy I'll need?

Right now I'm torn between "Hand out candy" and "Turn off the lights and read in the basement." I'm sure I'll waffle between decisions for a long time to come...

T-Minus Seven

We set the closing date for my condo to be really far in the future, because one of my RRSPs was stuck like Pooh in Piglet's door. That was cleared up surprisingly quickly, so I've just been waiting...and waiting...and waiting.

But oh thank goodness, next Saturday is the moving day! I have a truck rented, and friends who will help, and I've been stockpiling alcohol of various kinds because I think they all drink different things.

I've packed almost everything and it's strange living in an almost-empty house. Most of the musical equipment is still hooked up -- just in case I need an outlet -- and my clothes and bedding still need packing, and other than that it's just the odds and ends; pots, pans, lights, remotes, extension cords, and all the stuff that's too big for me to carry.

I'm having waves of panic, apprehension, excitement, and outright glee. People are wandering through my apartment, anxious to rent it for themselves. Zsa Zsa is adjusting surprisingly well to all her hiding spots being packed up and sent to the basement, but that's probably because the basement now has new hiding spots: rows of boxes, shelving units, and the milk crates I fortunately kept for all these years.

The vacuum is ready. The broom and feather duster are seeing heavy action. I am interrupting the long subterranean war between spiders and sowbugs in the basement; do you know how sticky a spider's egg-cocoon is?

PS: I finished reading The Young People's Library of Entertainment and Amusement, and I have to say that the Spanish-American warmongering was partly countered by statements from other anti-colonial politicians, and that Victorians really knew how to spend an evening indoors.

PPS: Then I re-read William T. Vollmann's "Whores for Gloria." It's amazing how different his prose is these days. I'd forgotten how "stream-of-consciousness" he could be. Anyway, it's an ugly book about an ugly subject, and its final statement seems to be "Don't go looking for happiness, because somebody will always find a way to make your happy times turn sour."

PPPS: So now I'm re-reading Vladimir Nabokov's "Ada or Ardor," which I remember loving many, many years ago. I'm hoping it will get me through to the end of the week.

Poor People

I've just finished reading William T. Vollmann's "Poor People." This comes at a good time, because Kitchener/Waterloo's panhandlers sprout in the springtime like daisies, and every year I wonder: who are these people, why are they here, and how do their lives relate to mine?

During the last twenty years Vollmann has been traveling the world and asking people: why are you poor? I think he'd hoped to find a "lowest common denominator" key to poverty by doing this, but as he points out at the beginning of the book, people who are uneducated, busy, uncertain, and in pain often do not have the time or means to analyze and express their circumstances. So most of the responses to this question are flippant or contradictory.

Vollmann's approach is observational and he does his best to be cross-cultural as well. One of his early stumbling blocks is that "poverty" isn't a quantifiable quality, especially when you compare hobos in North America with office cleaners in China. Poverty is hopelessly entwined with the culture of the poor person and the status of the observer.

Vollmann finally decides (with many reservations) that poverty is "wretchedness" below the specific culture's "normal" level, and he defines several elements which help to define the poverty lifestyle: invisibility, deformity, unwantedness, dependence, accident-prone-ness, pain, numbness, and estrangement. He provides case studies for each element, as well as 128 full-page pictures of the people being interviewed. The pictures deserve an entire book of their own.

The book does not offer any solutions, either for governments or individuals. Poor people generally request "more aid, better directed," but that is such a difficult thing to organize and supervise that it simply never happens.

After exploring all the facets and difficulties of poverty through the interviews, the best part of the book (as is often the case with his work) comes in the final chapters, where Vollmann describes how the poverty of others affects HIM. His family has been living for years next to an abandoned lot where transients are always sleeping, and very early he realized that he couldn't help those people and -- what's more -- that he had to "keep the door closed" against them. He candidly describes his fear of poor people in his own backyard, people who WANT something from him and have very little to lose by trying to snatch it. He also talks about his exasperation -- tempered with some understanding -- when they destroy his property or try to intimidate him, no matter how nicely he tries to relate to them.

"Poor People" is definitely his most accessible work, and I'd HIGHLY recommend it as an entry point into Vollmann's wonderful, terrible, and deadly world. But be forewarned that he doesn't have any answers, and the book is REALLY a list of questions. It won't teach you how to deal with the next person who asks you for money but it will at least make you consider why you may or may not refuse.

Sir John Franklin, Unforgettable, Dead

William T. Vollmann's novel "The Rifles" is about John Franklin's northwest passage expedition. Except that John Franklin is really the time-traveling twin of Captain Subzero, who is also sort of William T. Vollmann himself, and all of them are in love with a crazy Inuk woman named Reepah, who was part of the greater tragedy of the much-maligned 1950s relocation of Inuit families to Resolute, and everybody has been impacted by the properties of lead, you see.

The book is best when it is describing Vollmann's impressions of the far north; the shambolic yet warm settlements, the sparse beauty of endless tundra, and the sheer superpower of wind, ice, and cold.

It's also good when Vollmann writes about Reepah, a hearing-impaired, gasoline-sniffing, poverty stricken, utterly damaged woman who cheerfully ping-pongs between Subzero and Franklin, past and present, chopping blubber in the kitchen and screaming drunkenly in New York City. Her affairs with her Caucasian lovers are typically Vollmann: lopsided, crazy, impossible, doomed.

But what does all this have to do with "rifles?" I missed it the first time I read the book, but this time I took note of the introduction, in which the author tries to find the source of a river on Cornwallis Island...he keeps following it, trying to find its source, only to realize -- after an exhausting journey -- that

...these lakes were from permafrost melt; the whole island was permafrost; when you were on the island you were in a world of rivers that came from everywhere.

In his "Seven Dreams" series (of which "The Rifles" is book six) he is following tenuous paths through history, following his inspirations in directions that are symbolic and meaningful. "The Rifles" is about starvation and lead, which killed the Franklin expedition (partially through lead-contaminated food), which is killing Reepah (who sniffs gasoline), and impacted the entire north when rifles and European contact turned the ecosystem from one of sheer survival to one of fur-for-profit.

But Vollmann knows that this is a messy river to follow, and he acknowledges that this is too simplistic. The book sinks into necessarily long descriptions of starvation which make the reader understand both the protracted nature of Arctic death and the sheer emptiness of the landscape. As difficult as it is to read, and as spongy as its "permafrost" can occasionally be, "The Rifles" gives a personal glimpse of the far north as experienced by Vollmann himself.

It makes you want to go there and go very far away, all at the same time.

Immediately after this, I finally roused myself to read one of Vollmann's sources: "Frozen In Time" by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, about Beattie's own trips north to exhume the bodies of Franklin's crew.

The book is dry and clunkily sentimental, and it is so repetitive that you wonder if you aren't reading the same chapters over and over again. It's written, in fact, as though it were the awkward offspring of a research paper and a journal, which is exactly what it is.

Beattie was the man who developed and (it would seem) supported the theory that Franklin's expedition was debilitated early on by lead poisoning, mainly due to hastily-manufactured tinned food. Most of the bodies and relics from the 1840s are long gone -- scattered by the elements, lost under the ice, acquired by the Inuit -- but the bodies of three crewmen have remained buried on isolated, inhospitable Beechey Island.

So Beattie and his team went there with a portable laboratory and dug up the corpses. They were amazed to find that the 140-year-old bodies of John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine were almost perfectly preserved...and it's the gruesome pictures of the men that are the real stars of the book. Bulging hands, rubbery lips, gritted teeth, staring eyes, emaciated bodies, all dressed in period clothing and looking barely dead. The bodies are downright eerie...if you want nightmares, here are a few online shots.

That's it for me. No more Arctic stories for a while. I'm plunging into Sherlock Holmes because I much prefer reading about that smug bastard than spending another week perpetually icebound.

Fathers and Crows: Communication

Samuel de Champlain (known to the Huron -- or "Wendat" -- as "Chawain") speaks to the Huron through Étienne Brûlé, his interpreter:

He told the Savages that they were now subject to the Roy of France, at which they expressed great joy. Or, to relate the conversation more exactly:

Tell them that it's essential for them to be protected from the Hiroquois, because they make war badly and have no more freedom from error than children. Make that clear, boy! Tell them that the Roy loves them, and that if they regard him as a father and promise to obey him, then -- then he'll send armed Frenchmen to live here, and priests to instruct them in the Faith. (Thus Champlain, to his good subaltern, Monsieur Étienne Brûlé.)

Chawain says to you: You are great warriors. Our Big Stone in France desires to assist you in your wars and reap glory with you. Chawain asks you if you will permit the Iron People to live among you as your brothers. Chawain's friends are Sorcerers who will teach you to cast spells and make iron things. Is this well? (Thus tactful Brûlé, to the Wendat.)

We say to Chawain our brother: Our lodge is your lodge. We desire to learn the use of your guns. We desire to learn from your Sorcerers. Come live among us. Take our daughters in marriage. Learn from us to be hunters and strong bearers of burdens. Learn from us to shave off your foolish beards and to speak softly. You are welcome here. (Thus to Wendat, to Brûlé their nephew.)

The Huron reply to you: It is well. (Thus Brûlé, to Champlain.)

Champlain, who had been watching them narrowly, let his shoulders fall. He smiled; he laughed; he passed out hatchets and hatchets...

("Fathers and Crows," p.417-418)

Fathers and Crows: Culture Clash

"Fathers and Crows" is a rich book, but one of its greatest pleasures is watching "Savages" and Frenchmen try to understand the differences between each other's cultures. Vollmann seems to have a perfect handle on this; his explanations are convincing and often quite subtle.

In the chapter called "The Exercise of Hell," Membertou (tribal elder of the Micmac) deals playfully with a topic that the French (represented here by Lescarbot) take quite seriously (though not nearly as seriously as the Jesuits will a few years later).

Lescarbot spoke to him of christening. What a stupid bearded word! He could hardly say it!

What is christening for? he asked.

To keep your soul from getting lost.

In the woods? -- Membertou (who could grind chert-stones to bits with his teeth, who could swallow a stick two hands long) did not comprehend this answer. His soul never got lost.

No, in Hell, cried Lescarbot. His eyes gleamed.

Where is Hell? asked Membertou patiently.

Under the ground.

But we never go there!

...

To Lescarbot he said gravely: Brother, I seem to see us both in Hell together, eating much meat and laughing at the DEVILS. What do you say to that? -- for he wanted to try the man's courage.

But at this, all the Iron People shouted out against him, rudely, as if he were not in his own Country.

Membertou gazed upon them. --Brothers, learn once and for all: I speak here, even in this drafty box you've built. When I open my mouth, you must listen. I sit while others stand. It is not the custom in my Country for friends to shout against friends.

Fathers and Crows

Hot on the heels of the book on polar exploration (appropriately called "Ice"), I had a yen to re-read William T. Vollmann's "The Rifles," the sixth volume in his "seven dreams" series. I remember loving it and being moved by his descriptions of Resolute Bay and John Franklin's horrifying attempt at finding the Northwest Passage. "The Rifles" probably nurtured this tiny seed of my fascination with the Canadian north.

But no...that would mean skipping "Fathers and Crows," the second volume of the series. So I've decided to read it instead, which is a real treat because it's my favourite of his books.

I stumbled across William T. Vollmann when a University friend ("The Fantichrist") loaned me "You Bright and Risen Angels." I read it and fell in love with it, but the only other Vollmann books I could find were these strange historical fictions...and at the time, non-fiction was definitely NOT my thing.

But "Fathers and Crows" really opened my eyes. Majestic in its scope, somehow taking in the beauty of the landscape, the justifications of both the Jesuits and the Huron, the establishment of Lower Canada...this single (huge) book made me realized how much I had to learn, and how little of it I'd learn by reading Dean R. Koontz.

I've read it twice now, and when I think of it I get a little chill: scurvy, Ignatius of Loyola, political intrigue, exploration, the saving of souls, the Indians getting sick and the Jesuits being martyred. Beautiful and rambling and crazy, exactly the way it happened, and exactly what Vollmann pours heart and soul into.

Oh yes, and a sea monster.

Rising Up and Rising Down: Columbine

A magazine sent Vollmann to Littleton after the school shooting. The article he wrote is mostly about the "vultures": the media who shamelessly exploited the tragedy for ratings, and also the relgious and ideological vultures who opportunistically swooped in to convert the grief-stricken to their causes.

I do think that news media is probably the most lethal thing in the world today. It homogenizes, exploits, simplifies, and cynically manipulates. Worst of all, it usually doesn't even have an ideology...it's just acting this way so it can make more money, get bigger, and acquire more subsidiaries...and as I've said before, I think the idea that everything MUST get bigger and better is the basic root of human evil.

This case study ("Murder For Sale") is a vicious and much-deserved swipe. While watching a journalist take pictures of a weeping grandmother:

I watched that journalist for a while. The grandmother proved to be an aberration. Mainly he was taking pictures of little girls. I suppose that they were his natural prey. Just in case you wish to understand the feeding habits of this subspecies of vulture, I now refer you to my friend Noah Richler, an acute and articulate student of the world who's worked with me at BBC Radio and now runs the book review section of Canada's National Post. He put it to me like this: "In a way, the climactic moment is always being pushed forward. Twenty years ago, the shootings themselves would have been the point. But now the shootings are not good enough. You neeed the weepy hugs. And it becomes something other than news. You know, here we are at the newspaper, and we had loads of shots from Littleton of the kids hugging each other. Then the next day there was that copycat shooting here in Canada, and so we had shots of teeth biting the lips and parents hugging their kids and all that, and I found myself thinking, these kids aren't as cute as the Littleton kids-you know, prairie kids, farmer's daughters and all that. I suppose the American journalists had searched out more photogenic kids..."

Rising Up and Rising Down: Little Haiti

Having reached volume 6 of William T. Vollmann's "Rising Up and Rising Down" I find myself awfully tired. Vollmann's work usually swoops up and down between dizzying ecstacy and horrible depression, but when he's writing about violence, death, torture, and war...well, after 3000 pages it gets a bit tedious. I've started feeling like the jaded people he so often mentions in his stories about war-torn countries: these people settle into a "war attitude" where they no longer care about atrocities. They accept their inability to walk around at night or go to certain neighbourhoods as though it were perfectly normal. When writing about Colombia, Vollmann says these people have basically been flayed alive, but then stepped back into their skin again: they hide the atrocities and say everything is alright, even though it isn't, they've lost all their skin but they still LOOK okay.

So while I can't say that "Rising Up and Rising Down" has been metaphorically flaying me, I CAN certainly say it's exhausting me, and it doesn't help that Vollmann's search for meaning in violence has come down to a simple, unworkable conclusion: violence is personalized even in war, nobody can tell anybody how mass violence should proceed because all of the people involved feel violence so personally, and everybody is different and unique.

But anyway, he ends volume six with a section on "Perception and Irrationality." The case study "Nightmares, Prayers, and Ecstasies" is about voodoo and faith healing in the American south, and during a "joy ceremony" I'm finally reading one of those ecstatic, beautifully written moments that Vollmann has been unable to treat me with until now.

Watching a woman possessed by a voodoo spirit during a stifling, hours-long ceremony in Miami, he meditates on spirits and how they can be both sweet and cruel:

That was how it was with the spirits, which I had perhaps thought of as gentle watchful distant beings like Southern girls in Lafayette, standing on their white-washed porches in the evening time, leaning against railings whose pillars resembled a woman's braids artfully reproduced in white-stained wood--Southern girls who stood and leaned and faintly smiled as they watched the world go by from their houses; or spirits like the fat ghetto girls in New Orleans who sat smoking and drinking beer and talking on the extension phone out there on their stoops whose steps were as grimed and stained and crusted as lichened boulders or slaughterhouse tiles; they sat with heat oozing from their steep dark staircases and through their open doorways and between their meaty shoulderblades as they looked outward, watching nothing pass, waiting for nothing and maybe enjoying their lives Sometimes they shifted bottles or beer cans between their legs or even stood up, grabbed a hip and danced for a sticky moment, their stage a cement wall or a brick wall or the square buttock of an air conditioner which the tenant couldn't afford to run. --Some spirits were like that. Others were wild and rash and cruel. There were more of them than stars; there were millions and billions of them; who could know them all? I wanted to know some, at least...

Rising Up and Rising Down: Madagascar

After Vollmann's novellas about Cambodia (where all bad things are "just politics" and he manages to rescue a 12-year-old prostitute who turns out to be absolutely terrified of him) and the former Yugoslavia (where people constantly lie to him and he is unable to confirm anybody's stories, and where his car hits a landmine and he spends an hour in shock and fear lying behind the dead body of his childhood friend and the comatose, violently vomiting corpse-to-be of another journalist), Vollmann goes to Africa to learn more about violence and necessity. Because he hasn't learned enough, you see.

I promised myself that I'd find a nice -- but still emblematic -- excerpt to post here, but his story about Madagascar ("The Jealous Ones") is by far the most horrible one yet. He describes it as a place where the have-nots are constantly (and violently) taking from the haves, but even the haves are desperately poor...so everybody is essentially just stealing from everybody else. The anecdotes are less horrific, traumatic, and violent than those in the other stories, but the constant menace and extortion in "The Jealous Ones" is exhausting. And Vollmann is very good at describing the endless, exhausting sameness that breeds thoughtless violence.

It doesn't help that his interpreter/companion for this trip -- "O." -- is not a sympathetic character like the ones in other stories...she's 100% a product of the environment: poor, desperate, and terminally jealous. Apparently, in Madagascar, people are honest when they steal things from other people: they say they do it because they're jealous. And everybody there is jealous of everybody else, especially when somebody has a zebu.

But regardless. Here's probably the nicest emblematic statement I've read so far in "The Jealous Ones." This isn't a condemnation, it's a statement of fact:

When I think of Madagascar, I remember eroded roads and hills (they say that astronauts can see the erosion from the moon), jungle stumps with the soil between them now desert; I remember the smell of woodsmoke; I remember people's long skinny brown legs, and above all I remember dirty feet. Almost everybody goes barefoot. Beautiful women in dainty dresses think nothing of walking unshod through open sewers (or for that matter adding to them; Madagascar is one of those countries where one can excrete almost where one pleases, and people do; every day I'd see O. squat down in the middle of the street, urine slowly hissing between her bare or sandaled feet, and afterward she'd smile and say: Ah, darling, a very sweet piss!)

Rising Up and Rising Down: Beograd

By nature of the topics he writes about, William T. Vollmann rarely sustains a "happy tone" throughout his writing. His work tends to be about thoughtful people who observe things, fall in love with things, then discover the ugliness underneath them. Wonderful people can turn out to be scary, and so can nature. I'm still waiting for an uplifting Vollmann book but I'm not holding my breath.

This is my way of apologizing for these excerpts from "Rising Up and Rising Down," which all seem to be tragic, cynical, and depressing. The most striking moments are those when Vollmann tempts you with something innocent and beautiful then punches you in the stomach.

I'm reading "The War Never Came Here," written in Beograd during 1994 while NATO forces were bombing the cities. Vollmann, an American, is immediately aware of Serbian hostility toward him; people won't speak to him, they yell insults at him on the street, they won't let him buy things at their stores.

During his first few days in Beograd he grows increasingly frightened of the population. His only relief is Goran, the chief chef at the hotel. When William T. Vollmann, the terrified journalist, tells Goran about his troubles, Goran just sighs and says "Ah, Billy, Billy, Billy."

One night, Vollmann is followed back to the hotel by two ominous men who may be soldiers. Nervous, he walks into the hotel and goes to the front desk.

Ah, Billy, Billy, Billy, laughed Goran, waiting for me behind the desk when I came in.

I greeted him and took my key from the desk manager.

Billy. Billy Clinton. Billy Clinton, he sneered, and suddenly I understood that this stupid joke which he continually made was not a joke at all. That afternoon he had taken a pen and tried to write "CLINTON" on my lapel until I'd pushed his hand away, and even then I'd passed it off.

Billy Clinton, Billy Clinton, Billy Clinton, you will write bad things about us, he said in a jovially terrifying voice while the two desk men looked on, maybe understanding and maybe not since Goran and I always spoke in German, and I knew that my situation had reached a new stage.

Why do you say that? I said calmly.

You are American, Billy Clinton. You are all the same. You all write bad things about Serbs. You are no good.

I'm sorry you think that, I said.

Billy Clinton, Billy Clinton, he crooned, stepping forward.

You are not right, I said, turning my back on him and walking away.

I didn't know whether he -- and they -- would let me go, but I did know that the longer I stood there the more this man who last night had bought me vodka and sat at my table would brood upon my face and convince himself that I was evil. No doubt this was how ethnic cleansing worked, how ordinary people who knew each other slowly rejected, withdrew and demonized, slowly cauterized the arteries of friendship and then severed them with the saws of their hatred; and I was afraid. But they did let me go. I went upstairs and double-locked the door as usual. Then I wondered if they would come and do something to me. Probably not in the night, I decided. If NATO bombed Gorazde again then I would be in trouble; otherwise I could probably last another twenty-four hours before Goran and the others became more actively threatening; by then I hoped to be in Sandzak...

Then, the next day, Goran is as friendly with him as ever.

Rising Up and Rising Down: Cambodia

Before reading William T. Vollmann's "Rising Up and Rising Down," the geography and politics of the far east (Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam) has been a big muddle to me. Other than the obvious events, I viewed it as a confusing place where wars spread back and forth across mountainous borders, politicians switched sides, and lots of people keep dying in wartime fighting that mutates into new forms every generation.

Now I'm on volume five of the book, so I've started my crash course in eastern history. The book consists of several "studies in consequences," and are written in that captivating style of Vollmann-Investigative-Reporting. In this volume, Vollmann travels to war-torn regions of southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa, trying to clarify the studies in the previous four volumes: when do soldiers, politicians, and citizens in these countries feel that violence is justified?

I love the way he writes. He immerses himself in the region, and likewise immerses himself in the report: I'm not reading about Cambodia here, I'm reading about William T. Vollmann in Cambodia. What stands out in these painfully gorgeous stories is Vollmann's sense of helplessness and his guilty reliance on good-natured locals to help and protect him. This mixture goes all the way back to "An Afghanistan Picture Show, Or How I Saved the World," where he travelled to Afghanistan in 1980 to help the Mujahideen fight the Soviet invasion. He wanted to take pictures of the fighters and find out what they needed, then create an "Afghanistan Picture Show" in America to raise money to buy necessities for them. Instead he found himself a terrible burden to the Afghanis, they had to feed him and support him constantly, and they didn't give a damn about his picture show; all they wanted from him was guns (which, since he was a rich American, they felt he was horribly rude in not providing) . His Afghanistan Picture Show fund-raiser managed to raise about $100...who wants to give gun-money to a cause they don't understand? So he wrote a book about his failure and his gratitude.

This feeling of guilt and helplessness pervades "The Skulls on the Shelves," the first "study in consequences." Fifteen years after "An Afghanistan Picture Show" he has hardened himself to some simple and unpleasant realities, but he's still a liability to his new-found friends, though he buys them a lot of expensive dinners. In this story, Vollmann zig-zags between Thailand and Cambodia in a five-year attempt to interview Pol Pot, or at least a high-ranking member of the Khmer Rouge. Helping him are his friends Vanny and D., locals who spend much of their time interpreting for him, going the places he can't go, and deterring him from potentially suicidal activities.

As I read the 150-page story I became aware that much of it is really told through D.'s experiences. Though she doesn't say much about how she feels, Vollmann shows the way she responds when they meet different people from different prominent groups in Cambodian and Thai society: rich, amoral business-people like "Wall Save" and "Madam Black Eyes," the ineffectual Thai policemen (who occasionally crack down on Vollmann's activies), the Cambodian "White" soldiers (corrupt and needy) and the remnants of the Khmer Rouge (supposedly honest, but still brutal extortionists).

The people that Vollmann meets -- both Cambodian and Thai -- are shockingly sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge. They tend to make excuses for the horrible atrocities of "Pol Pot Time," blaming the Killing Fields on the Vietnamese or Chinese, or on "politics." When even D. begins to admire the Khmer Rouge, it becomes apparent that what people like about them is that they are "honest." They'll extort your money or kill you, but they tell you about it first and they are consistent in their approach.

What's more, the Reds are the enemies of the opposing "White" soldiers who are equally brutal and corrupt, but inconsistent in their approach, largely because they lack popular backing...so they can't extort enough money to make a profit.

I had learned that Thais who liked the Reds usually didn't like the Whites. The driver fell into this mold. He had once been involved in some gold business with the Reds, but the Whites kept shaking him down. The last straw came when he was doing a dinnerplate business with the Whites and then the border suddenly closed at a time when he happened to owe the Whites money. They took it out on his sister.

Vollmann keeps asking Khmer Rouge admirers if the Khmer Rouge are "Communist." The admirers always say no. Showing his many years of experience in journalism, Vollmann presses them to explain what Communism IS. Nobody knows, not even the Khmer Rouge members he eventually meets. To them, Communism is simply a rigid, hard way of doing things. Even "General X," who turns out to be one of the top-ranking Khmer generals, says this when Vollmann asks him who Karl Marx was (as translated by D.):

He don't know too much, but he know. Marx-Lenin system is very strong and strict. If they tell you do, then you must do, dead or alive. About the rule of Karl Marx they always make the tough rule. If they want you to go you have to go; if they tell you to stop you have to stop, tell you to turn right and you have to turn right; you can't say no. If you say no they are going to punish you.

Though Vollmann doesn't have enough of a sample to make a statement about this, the implication is that -- during "Pol Pot Time" -- the Khmer Rouge were torturing and murdering Cambodian undesireables without ever knowing the reasons behind it. It was just "politics." Which opened my eyes a little bit...we tend to such people as motivated by deep political ideals and convictions, as opposed to some mixture of compulsion, expediency, sadism, and basic class hatred.

Vollmann never does find Pol Pot, but the story is really about the people he meets along the way, and the way D. gradually degenerates into cynical boredom. If 1.5 million people in the killing fields can be excused as "just politics," and if the never-ending stream of disfigured land mine victims are no longer even noticed by the people who live there, how can you pick a side?

Easy: forget about their brutality, extortion, and illegitimacy. Just pick the group that is more honest. D. literally BEAMS when she hears stories about Khmer Rouge honesty. It all comes down to that.

Here are the last lines of the story, which (to me) is a collection of most of the themes rolled into a single paragraph:

Leaving behind me the spies and the lolling shop-ladies in their folding chairs, I looked across the frontier to Poipet, and then I looked across the street at the Thai immigration checkpoint, where the usual gaggle of submissive Thai journalists sat waiting to be told the news (like me, they were not allowed to cross the border; D. said that while I'd been in Phnom Penh she'd called some journalist friends of hers together for lunch and asked them if they had any leads on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge; they told her that they could never even think of writing a story like that, because if they did they'd lose their jobs at the very least, and probably much, much worse); and just then I heard the dull sound of a big gun ten kilometers away; the police general said that that was White artillery; and I heard another shot and then another.

Rising Up and Rising Down (Volume III)

For the last month or so I've been quickly -- but diligently -- making my way through William T. Vollmann's seven-volume opus, "Rising Up and Rising Down." It's an analysis of justifications for defense, looked at from many different angles and since the beginning of recorded history. Now that I'm midway through the third volume -- and almost at the spot where I gave up the last time -- I guess I can say a few things about this beautiful and maddening work.

Vollmann spent twenty years writing this, and it shows. The research is meticulous and his depth of understanding for so many topics is probably unmatched. At the same time, and in an attempt at making his analyses as comprehensive as possible, it can be difficult to follow the convoluted path of his thinking: he justifies carefully thought-out positions, then destroys them, then rebuilds them with new caveats and conditions that are sometimes surprisingly logical and elegant, but at other times totally useless. And he's the first one to tell you when he fails to come up with a practical section in his "moral calculus."

Rather than try to do this book justice, here are a few pointers to anybody considering tackling it (I understand the complete set is long out of print, but there's a "condensed" version available now).

The first volume is difficult to get into. It begins with "Three Meditations on Death" which don't have much to do with the book itself; this is typical of Vollmann, he seems to have trouble beginning his books, so the first chunk tends to be "warming up to the topic," a sort of mental purge so he can get to business. The following two sections show another annoying Vollmann trait: they're essential, but he's given them esoteric titles that only serve to throw the reader off the trail. "The Days of the Niblungs" is an advanced apology about how difficult the book will be to read and how subjective much of it needs to be.

The next ridiculously-titled-but-hugely-important section is "Definitions for Lonely Atoms." Since much of the book is about complex issues generally tackled by groups of people acting against other groups of people, this section is simply an analysis of the rights of the INDIVIDUAL; what are a person's basic offensive and defensive rights? He gets somewhat sidetracked on the issue of weaponry but I think Vollmann scores with his conclusions, which he reaches by analyzing countless historical precedents and by imagining the beginning of the human social contract:

1. To violently defend yourself, or not.
2. To violently defend another, or not.
3. To destroy yourself or preserve yourself.
4. To violently destroy another who would be better off dead
5. To violently defend your property, or not.

All of these points (and all other points I might reference here) are usually qualified with caveats -- for instance, point 3 specifies that suicide is permissible whenever uncoerced, but most noble as an act of assertion in defense of a right.

The next 3 volumes explore various types of self-defense, and try to codify when self-defense is justified. This is done by carefully defining the terms involved (for example, "inner honor" versus "outer honor"), giving huge amounts of historical detail as case studies, giving continuums of opinion on the subject from the writings of others, and -- most importantly -- defining a set of rules and conditions which make a particularly type of self-defense justified or unjustified.

I've worked my way through his analyses of violent defense of honor (the first, longest, and most complex topic), class, authority, race & culture, creed, war aims, homeland, ground, the earth, and animals. Each section is slightly different in its approach; some are more anectodal (Vollmann's experiences in Bosnia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Nunuvut), others are careful retellings of historical events (the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, Napoleon, Caesar vs. Pompey, Joan of Arc, World War One and Two), and others rely a lot on personal interviews with today's activists.

I find the chapters on defense of Earth and defense of animals to be most interesting, because it's there where Vollmann really struggles. In most cases (so far) he's tackled issues that have been explored for centuries and experimented upon by other grand civilizations, but when it comes to Eco-terrorism or the Animal Liberation Front, not only are they relatively NEW (and as yet relatively undefined) issues, but the violent actions tend to be perpetrated by people who seem to be acting on compassionate grounds (never mind that they don't necessarily have compassion for their opponents, but the PETA folks certainly seem to care more for animals than -- for example -- Trotsky seemed to care for the proles).

In his chapter on defense of Earth -- involving the spiking of trees to prevent logging, and any sort of violent uprising to prevent pollution or global warming -- he constructs an elaborate and clever concept: a private army called "Same Day Liberations." It sounds great until you begin to realize that Vollmann is REALLY wallowing in despair; he knows the idea won't work. People are too easily bought off, disinformation is too easily spread by rich and powerful authorities, human beings are too short-sighted. All he can really suggest is that we become our own experts and be critical of where our information comes from.

The most interesting point he raises, though, is Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the commons," which is so depressing that I'll just quote Vollmann's paraphrase:

Problem: What is my utility in adding one more animal to my herd on a common pasture?

Solution: Buy another animal, let it overgrazed, and be damned to everybody else

On a related note he mentions what he calls "The Crocodile's Maxim," which boils down to a general way of thinking that things MUST get better/bigger/easier, and if they don't then we're doing something wrong. But it's unlikely that things can increase in this way indefinitely; how many people can the earth support? How big can a company get? I think this is a very important and awful part of human nature and I wish I could express it better. Every time I see a report that a company is achieving record stock prices, I think jeez, how can anybody believe that will continue forever, and what's wrong with a stock staying at the same price (I know what a stockholder would say, at least).

When it comes to defense of animals, Vollmann is even more uncertain, mainly because nobody can settle on a threshold at which violence against animals must stop (monkeys, dogs, rabbits, mice, flies, flatworms, bacteria?), and how useful violence against animals actually is (medical research, hunter/gathering societies, animal attacks, community rituals).

Vollmann is never more interesting than when he's writing about the Inuit, as far as I'm concern. He's the first to say that he is perhaps unreasonably romantic about their lifestyle, but his descriptions of seal hunts -- and subsequent family dinners of raw frozen meat -- are eye-opening. When an animal-rights activists tells him that the Inuit would stop hunting for meat if they were provided with enough other types of food (disregarding the cost of getting the food to them, since agriculture just isn't feasible up there), he delivers a stunning comparison: this is exactly what Cortes said about the Aztecs, it's the placement of one group's ethos over another's, and the disgusting assumption that the other group will gleefully embrace your own values because they're naturally "better."

My favourite moment, though, is when Vollmann spends several pages writing about how wonderful his sealskin kamiks (moccasins) are, how important they've been to him in his travels up north, and how synthetic boots can't match his kamiks in certain situations. After waxing romantic about his kamiks for four pages gives an animal activist named Lizzy her own chapter to respond. She says simply:

"I just wonder how that seal felt when he was killed so some guy could take his skin and go up to the Magnetic Pole to think."

The Right Book For an Overturned Life

During these overturned weeks, immersed in moving and holidays and endless work stuff, I've been plowing through a few books to help keep myself centered.

I started out with Gulliver's Travels which -- excuse me -- is mostly just annoying. Yes I recognize that literature has changed an awful lot in 250 years, and I also understand that it was conceived as a social satire and not an adventure story. But yikes, Jonathan Swift simply cannot make a point and then move on...he needs to bludgeon you with a single idea for five or six pages, slyly winking at you in the meantime -- "Get it? Get it?" -- before he moves on.

I suppose my mistake was approaching it as a novel -- with, say, a plot and at least one interesting character -- while it's really more of an upside down essay. "Our European government is wacky," sez Swift, "and so are people in general!" Well, no kidding. I know that. But I'm having to FORCE myself to finish the damn book.

In the meantime, during my first few nights at my new place, I found myself craving a COMFORTING book. A book that doesn't ANNOY me. So I retreated to the basement and dug through the boxes that I previously kept squirreled away in my storage locker, boxes containing hundreds of short horror anthologies...and a few scary novels as well.

The one I settled upon is a book I find myself re-reading every five years or so: Shadowland, by Peter Straub. It has been part of my imagination since I was very young and it never fails to amaze me: an ambitious (but not particularly long) combination coming of age story, fairy tale, adventure serial, philosophical treatise, and absolute nightmare, with an ending that STILL shocks me and fills me with deep sorrow.

On reflection I realize now that the book is, like many of Peter Straub's books, incredibly sloppy -- basically a collection of great ideas and set pieces. Shadowland only "works" because it never tries to resolve itself. It's an early example of the "Metahorror" field that would briefly eclipse the straight-forward hacks like Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz: the reader drifts along with a plot that keeps unexpectedly diving off the path, into a 1950s prep school, a train ride through the midwest, a scary house in Vermont, field hospitals in WWI, England during the 1920s, Los Angeles in the 1980s. My more critical mind recognizes, now, that a convoluted path does not automatically make a coherent or meaningful novel, and much of the dialog that seemed deep and inscrutable to me in the past now seems to be what it REALLY is: random, random, random.

But I love the book regardless. The ideas don't gel, but they're wonderful ideas. The characters are perfectly fleshed, and I think that "The Collector" -- a homicidal rubber bodyguard with "blowtorched features" that hides in the bathroom mirror -- is still one of the scariest things around. While kids are so Harry Potter mad, why doesn't somebody turn it into the great movie it could someday be?

While looking for heavy books to help me soundproof my bedroom wall, I came face-to-face with William T. Vollmann's seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down. I tried to read it a few years ago and ended up totally confused. I vowed to learn a bit more about Caesar, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Trotsky before trying it again.

Halfway through the first volume I'm recognizing my crucial problem. Vollmann is an unconventional storyteller who -- I believe -- doesn't care much that other people don't perceive things exactly the way he does. When he writes a novel this isn't a problem; it's all part of the strange world (AKA "Vollmann's head") that you step into when you pick up his books. But when he writes a 3,500 page essay covering all facets and permutations of human violence...well, the reader wants to UNDERSTAND what Vollmann is saying. But Vollmann, full of digressions and poetry and personal obsessions, doesn't try to conform to what we expect in an essay. His chapter headings are obscure, his references scattershot, his digressions just plain confusing.

Fortunately I realize this now. The book must be read S-L-O-W-L-Y, without any skimming. I also realize that he has a horrible tendency to refer back to complex ideas -- ideas that he never presented as being particularly important at the time -- using a personal shorthand that's really freaking annoying. We have the "Machiavellian Caveat," for instance, which Vollmann paraphrases as "Never turn the other cheek or they'll take your head off." He talks about "the Asian woman" and "the tortured woman" as though we should remember who they are. When he keeps making offhand references to people, events and philosophies -- in a book that is JAM PACKED with such things -- and he doesn't bother to refresh your memory, you wind up getting lost in outrageous paragraph excerpts like this:

We heard Hobbes insisting that since my great-grandfather once agreed to form a commonwealth, I thereby agreed and will always agree to every new act of government; hence "no Law can be Unjust;" but I cannot remember giving my consent to anything so sweeping, and if Hobbes did it, I beg him to bind only himself, not me, nor my comrades who are likewise discontented; like Ivan Karamazov, who found himself dissatisfied with an order of divine providence under which any child on this earth might be tortured, we must be able to announce that we reject our entrance ticket; like the pseudonymous commanders of an insurgent group in Mexico, we must be able to say whenever and to whomever we will: "Our objectives are for the people, with the people, and against the government. We are ready for anything." By the Machiavellian Caveat, mostly we are not. "No government can exist for a single moment without the cooperation of the people," says Gandhi, but he then adds the bitterly necessary qualification, "voluntary or forced." Force may partake of outright violence, craft or mutual obfuscation. Possessing all little power in their popular assemblies, the Roman plebians, for instance, knew not how to reject the whole ticket, although by means of riots an ill-omened corner of it might get torn away, and they could shout demands at gladiatorial shows...

YARGH! To make a single point -- that governments exist because people are either afraid of governments or because governments and pundits tell us we're part in a pre-birth binding contract with them -- Vollmann referenced Hobbes, Dostoevsky, Mexican insurgents, Machiavelli, Gandhi, and Roman plebians. This wouldn't be so bad if the next paragraph didn't reference ANOTHER bunch of groups and individuals, and so on, and so on. Vollmann is suffering a wealth of information, and he doesn't seem to notice that the REST of us aren't as familiar as HE is with his sources.

Knowing this makes the book easier to understand, however. I realize now that the KEY to understanding "Rising Up and Rising Down" is by paying close attention to the "mini-chapter" headings, and keeping them in mind while reading the chapter itself, so I'll gradually figure out which direction he's heading in and arrive there with him. Then, when he finally makes his point (more or less clearly) I'll also better understand how he got there.

You might ask "why bother?" Other than not being able to admit defeat after conquering all his OTHER books, it's because his insights ARE very interesting, and needing to WORK to understand them makes them that much more fascinating. I don't necessarily agree with all his points so far -- I've always been a bit nervous about his gun fetish, for instance -- but it's still cool to see how HE arrived at his conclusions, and he's nothing if not rigorous in explaining his methods (that's the whole point of the book, in fact). And besides that, his experiences and interviews make great reading, the unpretentious photographs from his travels have a way of grabbing your head, and the historical information is welcome too.

Will I manage to finish the whole thing? Maybe not. But at least it's making me think about things: what do *I* stand for? Why would I ever "rise up?" In defense of self, homeland, earth, animals? Hmmmmm...

Psst...Part 4

Surprise! No internet. Bell says it SHOULD be fixed tomorrow sometime, but the person I spoke to was quick to say there were no guarantees.

This is frustrating primarily because it's a piece of unfinished business, and because it's delaying the release of the UPhold CD, and because I haven't been able to update the Daily Muffy in ages...but in some ways I'm getting a nice "reality check" by not having DSL. I'm enjoying sitting at home and reading (William T. Vollmann's "Rising Up and Rising Down," best laid plans and all that) and I'm leisurely contemplating home improvement projects: baseboards, weather-stripping, scouring the bathtub with sulphuric acid, getting Ronnie O'Vera a new pot.

So I guess this is an "internet holiday." But I DO kind of want to get back to work, y'know?

Hope your vacations were wonderful, if you got them.

Frosty

On Friday night -- hearing that I would be without heat until at least Monday -- Vanilla took me on a whirlwind tour of the city's foremost hardware stores. My apartment is drafty so I decided it would be futile to buy something that gently radiates heat...I needed something that blows like a hurricane and is really frigging hot.

We found it: the Honeywell Utility Heater, which I've nicknamed Big Red. In the picture below, Zsa Zsa and I thaw our frostbitten features before a night on the town:


Whenever I get cold I think of William T. Vollman's novel "The Rifles." To research the book he took a solo trip to Isachsen, as close to the north magnetic pole as possible. He did this in March when the temperature hovered between -30 and -40 degrees. Every piece of equipment he brought with him broke down during the first day; his sleeping bag froze solid, his radio received only static, the metal pump for his cooking stove snapped off.

He spent a feverish week waiting for the plane to come back and get him, frost-bitten, hallucinating, shambling through the abandoned weather station trying to stay alive. Reading about his experience makes you feel very cold indeed. Here's a few excerpts, but you should really go ahead and just read the whole thing for yourself.

The sound of something creepy coming down the hall was only the sound of his stove pressurizing. Likewise the sound of police sirens. The sound of bells was the sound of his frozen zippers clinking together when he walked...

Every night now he wondered if he would live until morning. He'd read in Stefansson that there was no danger in sleeping when it was cold, that one would wake up when one was chilled, and that was exactly true. But it was still unnerving, to lie down shivering, on the near edge of a dark night, and to know that he'd only get colder and colder. Lying still in the darkness, waiting for the next shiver, he did his best to thrust beyond notice the collar of iron around his neck, the helmet of iron on his face, and the frozen hood behind his head. After awhile, the first drop of ice-cold water ran down the mask and across his nose. The iron collar began to limpen, and water ran down his back. Meanwhile, inside his clothes, the opposite was happening. The sweat on back and buttocks and belly turned to ice...

That night again he thought that he might not survive. The pad of the sleeping bag felt like ice, and probably was. The down was clumped into frozen pebbles whose sharp edges had worried holes in the nylon shell of the bag. He closed his eyes, and saw a fire in a fireplace, with andirons; he dreamed of a warm woman hugging him. When he woke up, he'd slept three hours. The collar of his sleeping bag, thick and white with frost, stuck painfully to his throat. He was suffocating in his own breath-ice. In the darkness he could not feel hs arms and legs. His back and buttocks ached sharply with cold, and he was shivering. He was cold deep inside his belly.

He put on his boots and went outside and walked a mile until he was warm enough to think...

There was a mountain straight ahead of him, soft, white and saddle-shaped. Its base was shaded in snow as in a fog. Above it, nary a cloud. He decided to walk toward it. He'd never have the chance again. The new-exposed strata of snow were hard and off-white like gypsum. There were lemming-tracks in the snow. He followed them. They paused in a wide and shallow hole in which the animal had left urine and a few specks of excrement like sunflower seeds, and then they went on and then a fox track joined them and then both tracks ended suddenly in the new-blown snow. As he walked toward the beautiful mountain, he was suddenly filled with pity for everything in the world, and he cried.

So I'm not THAT cold. But just in case I ever AM, I keep his three big tips in mind:

1. Never wear an inner glove too thick to brush ice from your eyelashes and also pick your nose.
2. Keep your crotch unzipped in the sleeping bag to warm your hands. (Masturbation at low temperatures, however, is most unrewarding.)
3. It's better to wipe your ass with chunks of snow than to fumble with unmitted fingers for toilet paper.

Saturday night I returned from the bar, turned on Big Red, popped a treat in the microwave, and the power in my kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom went out. I clattered into the basement to try to find the breakers or fuses, couldn't find anything that looked definite, and got myself a nasty shock. The next day the landlords were amazed to discover that I've lived here six years without ever noticing the breaker box above my stove, but here's me finishing off "The Name of the Rose" during that dreadful night:

Sleep tight!