THE ATLAS SHRUGGEDWays of Gazing"He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune." But evidently this is the nature of the world in which the author/narrator construct attempts to find himself, while gazing at first world lakes and mountains and grass, freebasing with pimps and whores galore, and rescuing vulnerable third world women/girls in the name of lurve. The style fluctuates from the mundane to a frequently inept parody of sub-MFA pretension and over-description. Just when you think it's done, it repeats itself. Like some indigestive (re-)flux.Trashing the AestheticVollmann manages to trash two favoured aesthetics in this compendium - that of the encyclopaedia and the atlas.He strips the encyclopaedia of all significance (e.g., a digest of diverse knowledge and insight) and leaves us with a rump of maximalist offcuts (i.e., where it is enough that the work be big and fat, unedited and undigested, upsized and unappetising). The reader is left to ask: is this all there is? Does it get any better than this? Could he try a little harder, or are we meant to be satisfied with his first draft? Enough of the typing. Where is the writing? Where is the rewriting? Whoops, Vollmann has already moved on. And on and on.Equally, the atlas is just a wall label upon which to peg Vollmann's one-dimensional landscapes and self-portraits from diverse locations around the world, united only by their origin in the indulgent mind of the author/narrator construct seated at his Schreibtisch in some comfortable Californian study or studio, bar fridge close by and ready to hand.Tales of VollmannFor all the geographical diversity of this omnibus of disparable tales, for all the worship of the "mystery called motion", the one unifying factor is that we see the world through the eyes of a contemporary narcissistic American journal-keeper, working away in darkness and in gloom, convinced that every word he has typed about his latest vacation is not just a private record, but is literature of the order of Hemingway, Steinbeck or Dos Passos. He's self-consciously trying to join a tradition, for which, if it won't welcome him, he'll construct a substitute, a balm for an army of followers who are seeking a source of differentiation from their antecedents.Perhaps one of the women, a lover, a wife (but that is just somebody he has had sex with), has the greatest insight into the narrator. She protests his "exhibitionist possessiveness or territorialism, like a dog marking ownership by means of pungent liquid irrelevancies."This captures how I've increasingly begun to feel about Vollmann's writing. He marks ownership and builds empires with his words. The more words, the larger the books, the greater the literary imperialism. Occasionally, there are moments of lonely, desperate tenderness, but even these can be (and are) interpreted as "imperialist intimacy". He's rarely managed to convince me of his sincerity or his authenticity. His loving hands too often become the "filthy love claws" of possession. (As a lover, he would scare the shit out of me.)Not in the Palm of Your HandVollmann asks a lot of the relationhip with the reader. Frequently it's just too much. There's too little payout for time spent, too little return on investment. It's like living with a junky artist or musician. How much should we endure in order to experience a few occasional, fleeting moments of beauty? And it's not as if the other options lack beauty.After a while, the travelogue/slide show becomes repetitive, the colourful descriptors empty of effort, meaning and elegance, the scope of the project reveals itself as ambitious without necessarily being accomplished, the presenter renders himself as just another ugly American sex tourist ("I see that you like Oriental women") pretending to reveal his sensitive side. If only Graham Greene could have lived long enough to invent or describe this character. If only there was more to life than pimps and johns and hangers on. If only these "palm of the hand stories" didn't try so hard (or hard enough) to define some new autoerotic norm, some new jizz standard.But perhaps we should let the author/narrator construct speak for himself. You will know soon enough whether he is your cup of verbal tea.A SAMPLER OF VOLLMANN MAGIC AT ITS BEST:[More Songs about Blue Crystal Skies, Participular Trees and Brownish-Greenish Grass] "'Sno Country like Snow Country"IOnce life had beenAs mysteriousAs a Sierra lakeAt dawn.The sky was a ceilingOf blue crystal held upWith white pillars of birchCarpeted so richlyWith evening ferns.Passing down the deep Brown railroad ties,They reachedThe forest's end.Wet fields of pale greenWith trees between the rows,Trees as woolly As German participles,Pale green.IIDead trees among the live ones,Long blonde grassOn the knollsBetween the pools.The ground was paleWith lichened tussocks.The atlas openedAs he enteredThat morningOf birds.IIIIn a field of gray pondsAnd grass-haired water,He sawThree little ducks.Then the train was vibratingAcross a flatnessOf dark brownish-greenish grassUnder a dark slate skyWith power towersMaking tall black skeletonsOf interlocking trianglesAnd a radio tower flashingLike lightning far awayUnder the night's thunderhead.IVThey came into Churchill,Where the land wasSpongy brown and green,With so many indigo Swiss cheese holes,With flat olive-colored treesAlong the river's bank,Ocher sand-islands,Small infrequent Patches of snowLike crusty flakes of drynessIn the soggy boggy ground,And ahead the sharp Cracked white iceOf the bay forestWith patches of bogEaten out of them.The atlas closed. He was in the snow country Now.VThe snow country wasFor Kawabata's protagonistThe end of this worldAnd the beginningOf another,The country of pure mountainsOf sunset crystalWhich all tunnelsAre supposed to lead to,The zone of thatUncanny whitenessHymned by Poe and Melville,The pole of transcendence.VI From the long tunnelThe train pulled out,Across the borderInto the snow country.VIILife lay outside the windows;It throve onlyWhere the sunset's raysStruck snowdrifts,Everywhere nowhere everywhere.VIIIHe got off the train.IXWhat then?XHis penis burst out of The crown of her skullThe bone of herSnowy like a birch.She screamed.He held herMore tightlyAnd kissed her;How could he disturb Or disappoint her nowWhen she was coming?XIAnd now he wanted to shout:What lesson am I to learnFrom these screams?XII This was the soul of it.XIIIHe lay at the centerFrom which the worldRotated roundAnd round and round.XIVPresently the snowBegan to fall.The tussocks on the hillBecame white fairy mushrooms.XV I'm alive; I'm alive.
The Vollmann Atlas, circa 1996 (unauthorized abridgment)Mount Aetna, SicilyAfghanistanAgra, IndiaAlgonquin Provincial Park, OntarioAllan Water, OntarioMadagascarAvignonBangkokPhrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, ThailandBattambang City, CambodiaBattle Rock, OregonBeogradBerkley, CABerlinBig Bend, CABolognaBoot Hill, NebraskaBoston, USABudapestCairoCaliforniaCapri, ItaliaCharlevoix, QuébecChaing Mai, ThailandChurchill, ManitobaSouthampton, Northwest TerritoriesCornwall, OntarioDelhiDiesel Bend, UtahElma, ManitobaEllesmere Island, Northwest TerritoriesFrankfurt am mainGoa, IndiaGrand Central Station, NYCGreat Western Desert, AustraliaGuildwood, OntarioHanover, NHHerculaneumHighway 88 & 395, CAHo Mong, Shan State, Burma (Myanmar)HomeHong KongInterstate 80, CAInukjuakJaipur ProvinceJapanJerusualmJoshua Tree National MonumentKarenni State, Burma (Myanmar)Key WestDistrito Federal, MexicoLimboLALutton, OKMadagascarMae Hong Song, ThailandMauritiusMalachi, OntarioMarakooper Cave, TasmaniaMasadaMendocino, CAMexicaliMexicoits cityMission-Sainte-Marie, Midland, OntarioMobile, ALMogadishuMont-Pellerin, SwitzerlandMontréalNairobiNapoliNevadaNew OrleansNew South WalesNYC&SThe NileNorth AmericaOmaha, NebraskaOrillia, OntarioOttermere, OntarioPacific Palisades, CaliforniaParisPhiladelphiaPhnom PenhPickering, OntarioPolandPompeiiPond Inlet, Baffin IslandPot Hope, OntarioPuako Bay, HawaiiReddit, OntarioRedfern, Sydney, New South WalesResolute Bay, Cornwallis IslandRice Lake, ManitobaDeep Springs Valley, CARomaSacramentoSamuel H. Boardman State Park, ORSan Bruno, Diego & Francisco, all CASan Ignacio, BelizeSarajevoSavant Lake, OntarioSioux Lookout, also OntarioThe Slidre River, Ellesmere IslandThe Sphere of StarsSplitState of Vatican CitySudbury, OntarioSydneyTamatave, MadagascarTaxco, Guerrero, MexicoThailandThe Pas, ManitobaTokyo to OsakaTorontoVirginia BeachWailea, MauiWashago, OntarioWinnipegYangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma)Yukon TerritoryZagrebAlternately his atlas is a series of palm-of-the-hand stories ; a stack of short-stories, simpliciter ; multiple moments of meditation ; tableaux of persons and places ; a novel, organized and unified thematically, palindromically ; a soporific for your drowsing and dreaming.
What do You think about The Atlas (1997)?
Sweet Reader,Allow me to corral this stampede of kittens. One Blind Billy was so in love. Then his "wife" left him. There wasn't a ceremony as such, he just knew it. This was love for Lifetime movie Network, it lasted as long as he bought her drinks and paid for the hotel room. She was gone. Blind Billy then had horrific heartache in his penis. He had to win her back. Traveling through more time zones than a Jim Jarmusch film, Blind Billy discovered some indelible truths. Clean water and being exempt from shellfire are overrated. The quest isn't too bad when carrying hard currency. Prostitutes are wonderful creatures, dreamily lost and not suffering any issues from prior trauma or violation. Blind Billy also finds opportunities to digest and extrapolate history. He interweaves such with bad poetry about whimpering sunsets and ocher teardrops.
—Jonfaith
Some of the most magnificent prose I've ever read -- short, staggering pieces assembled from long, beautiful sentences, like poetry without stanzas. Truly incredible. Bill does have an over-the-top obsession with prostitutes -- and I, knowing this reputation, thinking that he was just upset about the nature of the sex trade, had no idea that he was a frequent customer. Vollman himself reminds me, to a certain degree, of that really annoying indie rocker who's partied with all the great bands and loves to talk about it, but in that removed, I-don't-really-care-but-listen-to-me-anyway manner that can drive other people crazy. Still, his apparent death wish (traveling to Sarajevo, Mogadishu, Cambodia and the like) makes for gripping stories about the world's most horrifying circumstances. I admire Vollman greatly, though I doubt we'd make good company for each other.
—Robertisenberg
this collection of short tales that take place all over the world is enjoyable story to story, but check this out, vollmann writes in the intro:'for those who require games and calculations in order to drowse, i should state that this collection is arranged palindromically: the motif in the first story is taken up again in the last; the second story finds its echo in the second to last, and so on.'it's taking me a while to get through it because with each story i keep jumping to the correlated story, trying to figure out how they relate. i should mention there are 52 stories in all, and the relationship between the pairs are sometimes very difficult to see. it takes a lot of work, but so far it's great.
—Mito Habe-Evans
