Europe Central

I read Rainbow Stories when I was in college, pretty interesting stuff. He seems a weird mixture of gonzo journalism and "maximalist" prose in the vein of Pynchon/DeLilo/DFW. Give it a shot.

legitimately, unironically what does he mean by this?

Using history as a cheap backdrop to personal stories is very annoying.

I really enjoy his non-fiction and the prostitute trilogy he wrote.

helped me come to terms with using escorts for sexual gratification.

Europe Central is a great book, really worthwhile and captures the cacophony of WWII. As other anons have said, his Seven Dream series are great, Ive only read the Ice Shirt (#1) and The Rifles (#4) and both were pretty good. Looking forward to the Dying Grass

Literally wrote a book called the Book of Dolores, his female alter ego, and to explore his feminine side. But he doesn't identify as trans or anything of that sort

close. it's a euphemism for 'tl;dr'

>Literally wrote a book called the Book of Dolores
"he" only figuratively wrote that book

closest thing to a mad genius in contemporary literature. the type of writer that makes life worth living just to see what's next.

Some of his paragraphs hold as many ideas as whole novels by inferior writers. He can be difficult and obtuse, but he can also be brilliant and truly beautiful.

That's not Vollmann

Who was the bigger genius? Vollmann or the unabomber?

Is Rising Up and Down worth reading?

How does this in any way apply? Did you make this comment for the sole purpose of letting everyone know you didn't read the book?

is vollman good? read one story of his ages ago, dont recall it now, but it seemed shit at the time

This is a good book, but can be hard to get through due to length and density overall. I know a guy who was friends with Vollmann, cool guy apparently, will go out drinking with you after a reading if you ask.

Unabomber because they never caught him.

At his best, he's one of the finest American authors alive today. He writes a lot so there are some dips in quality. Sometimes he'll write an awkward sentence or leave in things that an editor would have cut, but overall he's incredible.

if you can find it

God damn! When does this guy not write?

he's nearly 60...8 books isnt that prolific

He has written more books than that.

I have both the abridged version and the unabridged version.

The shorter is vastly inferior, the longer doesn't need to be so long and nor is it worth the $1k you'll probably spend.

Vollmann clearly wanted to write a big, important, multi-volume work, and has allowed his material to get the better of him. McSweeneys got excited by the idea of being serious - their "oral history" of the work shows that. 3.5 k pages doesn't necessitate seven volumes. New oxford Shakespeare is five hundred pages longer that RUARD and yet is a single volume. The difference is that it doesn't need to insist in its own importance by making a land grab for my shelf space.

Its good. An enjoyable time spent with a garralous adventurer with whom I frequently disagreed. Not a major work, not the significant meditation on violence that it claims to be, but the moral calculus is interesting.

More pleasure to be had than enlightenment. Is this helpful? Happy to answer any questions.

Yes it is.

How long did it take you to complete the full set? Also, could you give me the skinny on what his moral calculus is and if it can be classified within one of the major schools of normative ethics (i.e. virtue, deontological, consequentialism, pragmatic etc.).

bump

please scan a page of it post it .
There isnt an epub nor a pdf of it any where on the internet

>The Dying Grass
Possibly his best work IMO.

Will respond in an hour or so, just posting so we don't lose the thread

Not any terrible length of time. Seven volumes sounds like a lot but, as I said above, these are 450-page volumes. Some people have a great desire for this to be a more serious work than it I believe it to be, and another way that this desire shows itself is in declaring the work to be difficult -- again, see the mcsweeney's oral history, I'll post a link shortly. The result of this is that we're looking at somewhere between 60 and 70 hours spent reading volumes I-VI, plus some time spent toting around the MC volume.

A brief aside: I ordered a copy of the seven volume set and received only the MC volume; I complained and was given a refund and allowed to keep the volume, so I have two copies of this one volume in the set, which contains the bibliography, index, annotated contents, and 'moral calculus'.

Of the moral calculus: It is printed in full in the abridged version (as is, bizarrely, the annotated contents of the unabridged version). We wil need to come back to the general structure of the work as a whole as well, but I am keen to answer your question first:

His calculus is built entirely around the assumption of the sovereignty of self, and that expression and homeland, class and creed, etc, are parts of or contain that self.

more to come

apologies for taking a break, real life will be interrupting this sequence of posts.

.... so there are questions about in what circumstance and to what extent violence is justified. This is the stated purpose of the entire work.

So in short, pre-emptive self defense in the face of an imminent threat even by the use of lethal force, is justified. Questions on the nature of imminence follow, and are given no answers -- as such, I am trying to describe the nature of the work rather than give you a wrong answer. In a word, however, pragmatic -- he recognises that the processes of moral evaluation are usually only possible after the fact, and there is an emphatic pragmatist and individualist bent to his writing, here and elsewhere, that affords a moral right to taking action (e.g. proactive defense by lethal force) that would be legitimate if the actor had correct information, but is sadly misinformed

Although the book bears the subtitle ‘some thoughts on violence, freedom, and urgent means’, the MC has a sort of epigraph in a page given over the printing the question: ‘when is violence justified’. The book as a whole is less an effort to answer this in perfect terms, and states that simple and clear-cut systems of ethics are often pretty bad. Vollmann himself describes RURD as a work 'ornately descriptive ethics'. This is a useful label, insofar as he is not in the business of dictating values or even coming to conclusions. Instead, this is a book that attempts thoughtful provocation in the hopes of improving the moral processes or calculi of his readers.

‘ornately descriptive’ is also an account of volumes V and VI. The work is structured as follows:

I: This volume opens with ‘three meditations on death’, in catacombs, at an autopsy, and in a war zone. This definitely sets the scene for the rest of the work, giving effective descriptions of some stuff, which help focus the reader on life and the ways in which it can end. Indirect, but useful and brief. After twenty pages of this we have an introduction which gives definitions, spending time dwelling on the loveliness of various weapons and so on.
II: Justifications for violence: honour, class, authority, race and culture, creed
III: Justifications for violence: war aims, homeland, ground, earth, animals, gender, traitors, revolution
IV: Justifications for violence: deterrence, punishment, loyalty, sadism, ‘moral yellowness’, and inevitability; this is followed by some evaluations.

V and VI are ‘studies in consequences’, and despite the sprawling nature of the four volumes you have read by this point, these last thousand pages are where Vollmann really began waving his pandictic maximalism in my face. Scale has no correlation with importance. Tell your friends. Church Dogmatics is not important because of its size. RURD isn’t even that big.
In these volumes William collects up some stories from his time as a ‘ ‘ ‘ journalist ’ ’ ’ and prints them in full, with no real revision except to restore passages that were cut. No effort towards conforming to style across the work as a whole, etc. Now, there are certainly reasons for gestures like this, including authenticity of the document as it was produced in a specific circumstance and moment. I suspect Vollmann of loving to spew, and I am sorry to say so. I regard many aspects of his work in general, and this work in particular, but he quite clearly seems to derive joy from increasing wordcount.
The first-hand accounts in volumes V and VI do contribute to the work as a whole: they make Vollmann a more credible authority, and they often are a pleasure to read. The make no direct contribution to addressing the first question asked by the book.

Then there is the volume labelled ‘MC’, a kind of companion that draws maxims and calculi from the first four volumes, accompanied by some apparatus. I will have this volume to hand shortly, and will post a couple of pages. If you would like more information or pictures from vols 1-6, ask away and I’ll fix that up later today when I get home.

The abridgement is wack and disrespectful. In the preface Vollmann makes the hilarious claim that the full thing took 23 (?) years to write, and the abridgement took half an hour. He is an arrogant man and fond of furthering his own myth, but this is not far from the truth.

It contains a decent amount of vols. 1-4 in excerpted form, then the moral calculus, then a handful of ‘studies in consequences’, then the annotated consequences of the full version.

There is little integrity to this work, which could have been a vast improvement on the first. There was so much to improve on! But Vollmann prefers not to improve. He has his money, and the ‘joke’ that ‘at least someone might now read it’ is ill made. I am glad to have looked seriously at the work, and will return to it, but just like the seven dreams Vollmann is demanding that we take him seriously and then betraying our serious interest.

I think it is clear that I took RURD seriously – I am writing this from memory. I was optimistic about the contents, and found the book interesting. The full work is engaged and engaged, at least enjoyable if not argumentative or novel; the abridgement is inferior.

>One of the greatest American authors of all time

Lol, he's fucking serious.

Thx, man. I love Vollmann. Colud you please post your text in a blog so it doesn't get lost forever/hard to find?

Thx.

btw, Can you please take pics of the interior of the volumes? Does it have images or pictures?

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This is four pages from the moral calculus.else where there are many pictures,some sections given fully over to photographs taken by Volkmann,and frequent little illustrations, e.g. picture of john brown, of a vaginal pear, of de Sade. All black and white

You sound like a swell guy

theyre nice editions, whos the publisher?

McSweeneys.
mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-oral-history-of-william-vollmanns-rising-up-and-rising-down

They are in general makers of nice books, and some if their issues are beautiful.

They are also excessively new yorky and have an over all attitude that hurts them IMO. The organization selects people who fit with it and pays its price - creative writing MFAs are not equipped for scholarship, and the oral history I link is an embarrassing read in places

Then again, they're doing consistently interesting stuff for little profit and I admire it. I like the work, but know that I am not their kind of person

Thanks for the effort in this post. Really good summary. People like you make this board a better place.