William T. Vollmann thread

What do you think of his work, Veeky Forums? I'm alternating between The Rainbow Stories and Europe Central right now and I'm just so fascinated by his range of subjects in his writing.

he went to that neat school. i won't ever read anything of his because i don't care enough to put myself through the tens of thousands of pages he's shit out.

there must be something wrong with his cracker if the butter had to be spread that thin.

fugly mofo that cant stop talking about hoes

bump. he's one of the most interesting writers working today.

I don't like his prose. Doesn't seem relevant at the moment. Trashman.

hey

except to see me on the next part of the spiral :~)

He is admittedly one of the most physically hideous writers who has ever lived, but ultimately that's irrelevant apropos his writing, I think

Can anyone give an example of him writing something that doesn't read like the literary version of glass being chewed? Is he at all capable of forming smooth-sounding sentences or is my minimal experience with Vollmann off here?

I want to like him, but his writing makes me feel like I'm operating clunky machinery.

This is from The Ghost of Magnetism out of his Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs

Now for Number Five, and everything is empty like Satoko's bed in the Tenderloin beneath which the dust grows higher on the gigantic heart of barbed wire which one of Painter Ben's girlfriends made for him (the night before Satoko left for Japan he brought it by as a farewell gift, and she said thank you and abandoned it)

I was interested in his work Poor People, but then I heard he paid the interviewees money which creates a COI.

Thanks, he's definitely a good writer. Just been hard for me to get into him, I suppose.

crunchy as fuck. sand in my urethra.

What does that even mean
I've only read The Ice-Shirt, Whores for Gloria, and Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs (which The Ghost of Magnetism is from). I think he's good but I don't love him. I do think his prose can be exceptional at times but it can also be bad. In short, he's very uneven, especially his early stuff.

where does this meme come from that vollmann has bad prose? it's baroque, sure, but it isn't clunky or "crunchy"

has anyone read rising up and rising down abridged?

>he doesn't assign texture to art in a synaesthetic manner
pleb

>not crunchy af
the guy himself even speaks of taking a sentence and filling it until it's bursting like popcorn, and what's popcorn? crunchy. fucking plebs, i swear.

In an interview with the Paris Review, he described his writing process for this book as follows:
When I was writing the first few books, what I would do is write a bunch of sentences and then go back and expand and explode those sentences, pack as much into them as I could, so they’d kind of be like popcorn kernels popping . . . all this stuff in there to make the writing dense, and beautiful for its density.

>these faggots don't know what pure crunchiness is

absolute asstrash. complete garbage

but, he does live the literary lifestyle for fucksure.

plebs.

What should I start with? I don't want to go off the deep end.

This reads like migraine. Is this postmodernism? Either way, what a sad mistake.

Inconsequential

This, mostly. Despite all the failed attempts at memeing him here he's palpably a very minor writer.