Avant-Garde artist you should check out

The avant-garde hasn't had a performer like Margaret Leng Tan in years. She's one of those rare pianists whose performance style takes equal billing with the music.

-Village Voice, New York

The first woman to graduate with a Doctor of Music from Juilliard, Margaret Leng Tan has since evolved a radically individual performance style fusing sound, choreography and drama. Hailed as "the world's premiere string piano virtuoso" and "the diva of avant-garde pianism" (New York Times), she is known for her performances of Asian and American music that defy the conventional boundaries of the instrument. She is closely identified with the work of John Cage. The New Republic called her "the leading exponent of Cage's music today." She has performed his music throughout the world and has recorded it for audio as well as film releases. Her Whitney Museum appearance at the Jasper Johns Exhibition was hailed as one of the most memorable performances of 1991 by the New York Times. She performed for the opening of the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, selecting a music tribute to John Cage. Her several recordings have received critical acclaim. She has appeared at major festivals around the world including Ravinia, Spoleto USA, New Music America, Bang on a Can, MANCA (France), Inventionen (Berlin) and Lincoln Center Out-of Doors Serious Fun. Born in Singapore, Ms. Tan made her debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1991.

Margaret Leng Tan's website is located at http://www.margaretlengtan.com/.

SMOKE

Homeless Youth Project

This is a work in progress.

Baghdad Burning

If you don't know about Baghdad Burning you should. An amazing blog by a young Iraqi girl who documents what life is like since the U.S. invasion of her country.
Current excerpt below.

There is also a book with the first few years of her blog that documents the moments when the U.S. Invaded.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/



Thursday, September 06, 2007

Leaving Home...
Two months ago, the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed.

Packing that suitcase was one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do. It was Mission Impossible: Your mission, R., should you choose to accept it is to go through the items you’ve accumulated over nearly three decades and decide which ones you cannot do without. The difficulty of your mission, R., is that you must contain these items in a space totaling 1 m by 0.7 m by 0.4 m. This, of course, includes the clothes you will be wearing for the next months, as well as any personal memorabilia- photos, diaries, stuffed animals, CDs and the like.

I packed and unpacked it four times. Each time I unpacked it, I swore I’d eliminate some of the items that were not absolutely necessary. Each time I packed it again, I would add more ‘stuff’ than the time before. E. finally came in a month and a half later and insisted we zip up the bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to update its contents constantly.

The decision that we would each take one suitcase was made by my father. He took one look at the box of assorted memories we were beginning to prepare and it was final: Four large identical suitcases were purchased- one for each member of the family and a fifth smaller one was dug out of a closet for the documentation we’d collectively need- graduation certificates, personal identification papers, etc.

We waited… and waited… and waited. It was decided we would leave mid to late June- examinations would be over and as we were planning to leave with my aunt and her two children- that was the time considered most convenient for all involved. The day we finally appointed as THE DAY, we woke up to an explosion not 2 km away and a curfew. The trip was postponed a week. The night before we were scheduled to travel, the driver who owned the GMC that would take us to the border excused himself from the trip- his brother had been killed in a shooting. Once again, it was postponed.

There was one point, during the final days of June, where I simply sat on my packed suitcase and cried. By early July, I was convinced we would never leave. I was sure the Iraqi border was as far away, for me, as the borders of Alaska. It had taken us well over two months to decide to leave by car instead of by plane. It had taken us yet another month to settle on Syria as opposed to Jordan. How long would it take us to reschedule leaving?

It happened almost overnight. My aunt called with the exciting news that one of her neighbors was going to leave for Syria in 48 hours because their son was being threatened and they wanted another family on the road with them in another car- like gazelles in the jungle, it’s safer to travel in groups. It was a flurry of activity for two days. We checked to make sure everything we could possibly need was prepared and packed. We arranged for a distant cousin of my moms who was to stay in our house with his family to come the night before we left (we can’t leave the house empty because someone might take it).

It was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn morning and I’d been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry. You won’t cry, I kept saying, because you’re coming back. You won’t cry because it’s just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul or Basrah before the war. In spite of my assurances to myself of a safe and happy return, I spent several hours before leaving with a huge lump lodged firmly in my throat. My eyes burned and my nose ran in spite of me. I told myself it was an allergy.

We didn’t sleep the night before we had to leave because there seemed to be so many little things to do… It helped that there was no electricity at all- the area generator wasn’t working and ‘national electricity’ was hopeless. There just wasn’t time to sleep.

The last few hours in the house were a blur. It was time to go and I went from room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to my desk- the one I’d used all through high school and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair E. and I broke when we were younger. I said goodbye to the big table over which we’d gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the framed pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long since been taken down and stored away- but I knew just what hung where. I said goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought over- the Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart to throw away.

I knew then as I know now that these were all just items- people are so much more important. Still, a house is like a museum in that it tells a certain history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a chapter of memories opens up before your very eyes. It suddenly hit me that I wanted to leave so much less than I thought I did.

Six AM finally came. The GMC waited outside while we gathered the necessities- a thermos of hot tea, biscuits, juice, olives (olives?!) which my dad insisted we take with us in the car, etc. My aunt and uncle watched us sorrowfully. There’s no other word to describe it. It was the same look I got in my eyes when I watched other relatives and friends prepare to leave. It was a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, tinged with anger. Why did the good people have to go?

I cried as we left- in spite of promises not to. The aunt cried… the uncle cried. My parents tried to be stoic but there were tears in their voices as they said their goodbyes. The worst part is saying goodbye and wondering if you’re ever going to see these people again. My uncle tightened the shawl I’d thrown over my hair and advised me firmly to ‘keep it on until you get to the border’. The aunt rushed out behind us as the car pulled out of the garage and dumped a bowl of water on the ground, which is a tradition- its to wish the travelers a safe return… eventually.

The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I’ve learned that the best technique is to avoid eye-contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves.

The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I’ve learned that the best technique is to avoid eye-contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves.

Syria is the only country, other than Jordan, that was allowing people in without a visa. The Jordanians are being horrible with refugees. Families risk being turned back at the Jordanian border, or denied entry at Amman Airport. It’s too high a risk for most families.

We waited for hours, in spite of the fact that the driver we were with had ‘connections’, which meant he’d been to Syria and back so many times, he knew all the right people to bribe for a safe passage through the borders. I sat nervously at the border. The tears had stopped about an hour after we’d left Baghdad. Just seeing the dirty streets, the ruins of buildings and houses, the smoke-filled horizon all helped me realize how fortunate I was to have a chance for something safer.

By the time we were out of Baghdad, my heart was no longer aching as it had been while we were still leaving it. The cars around us on the border were making me nervous. I hated being in the middle of so many possibly explosive vehicles. A part of me wanted to study the faces of the people around me, mostly families, and the other part of me, the one that’s been trained to stay out of trouble the last four years, told me to keep my eyes to myself- it was almost over.

It was finally our turn. I sat stiffly in the car and waited as money passed hands; our passports were looked over and finally stamped. We were ushered along and the driver smiled with satisfaction, “It’s been an easy trip, Alhamdulillah,” he said cheerfully.

As we crossed the border and saw the last of the Iraqi flags, the tears began again. The car was silent except for the prattling of the driver who was telling us stories of escapades he had while crossing the border. I sneaked a look at my mother sitting beside me and her tears were flowing as well. There was simply nothing to say as we left Iraq. I wanted to sob, but I didn’t want to seem like a baby. I didn’t want the driver to think I was ungrateful for the chance to leave what had become a hellish place over the last four and a half years.

The Syrian border was almost equally packed, but the environment was more relaxed. People were getting out of their cars and stretching. Some of them recognized each other and waved or shared woeful stories or comments through the windows of the cars. Most importantly, we were all equal. Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds… we were all equal in front of the Syrian border personnel.

We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees all look the same- there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.

The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?

How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.

I wonder at how the windows don’t rattle as the planes pass overhead. I’m trying to rid myself of the expectation that armed people in black will break through the door and into our lives. I’m trying to let my eyes grow accustomed to streets free of road blocks, hummers and pictures of Muqtada and the rest…

How is it that all of this lies a short car ride away?

A Day at Vollmann's Studio - By Terri Saul

William T. Vollmann appears at the door just as I turn in to his driveway. It's raining, so he helps me carry my camera bags in. I offer up a Christmas cactus and a box of tangerines. Vollmann has a Christmas cactus story, and after he first checks that I've locked my car, he tells it: as a child he saved one segment of a Christmas cactus, and it lived, soon to germinate in his rooftop garden.

Although Vollmann is best known for his writing, I am here to see his visual artwork. I'm prepared to talk art all day long, but with Vollmann the divide between the arts is always fluid: our conversation ranges from Noh theater to contemporary music to his novels and everything in between.

Once inside Vollmann's studio I'm confronted with walls that are covered, salon style, with art. Just past women's and men's restrooms painted in rough strokes of bold color (in the restrooms hang longtime Vollmann collaborator Ken Miller's prostitute photos) there's a dark bedroom/library complete with Vollmann's oft-mentioned meat-locker closet. After that an art-lined corridor where art hangs on blonde wood runners, ready to be critiqued. Over the studio entrance is a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. It appears that Vollmann's prodigious writings are matched by his capacity to produce and collect visual art.

Inside the studio there's art equipment everywhere, much of it looking like art itself--vintage, accordion-shaped view cameras, vacuum powered printing machines, an ultraviolet cyanotype exposure unit, darkroom trays, an enlarger, baker's trays lined with drying prints, and a work bench as long as a strip mall parking lot.

Vollmann says everything should be displayed in the studio. "I figure, if you don't see things, all the things that you have, all your watercolors together, your engraving tools and everything else together, you're not going to use them all. When they're all out there, you can get inspired and say, 'oh, I'd like to do this right now.'"

It's an embattled sense of art one is tempted to link to his gun collection. If it's not used regularly, ink will dry up, watercolors will crack, wood cuts will gather dust. Vollmann has even made his workbench modular so that if he were ever forced to downsize he could take smaller pieces of it along with him.

His daughter has her own drawing space in the main room, her notes to daddy and sketches pinned up near low-lying tables. Vollmann tells me that he's struggling with the creative parent's dilemma, how to have the freedom of a studio, a place where his individual (often explicit) work can germinate unhampered, without shame, but also provide a place for his daughter to grow up, where her friends and their parents will feel comfortable. How would it feel to be the daughter of William T. Vollmann? The conservative parents in his area aren't necessarily fond of his photos of prostitutes, even though in most of the photos the prostitutes are not acting particularly risqu�, sometimes wearing everyday clothing, or simply posed facing the camera straight-on. Still, the subject matter is taboo. He's a good father, he says. Having a child has been the most fulfilling part of his life. He enjoys having her around in the studio.

As an artist Vollmann is completely self-taught. He's never taken a class in printmaking or photography. Everything he does with paper and images he's learned about in books. A purist who never considers his audience, he makes the art for himself only; he says he doesn't care about showing his work in galleries. His interactions with his daughter's classmates and their families may be the only time he's really had to weigh how his work might be perceived.

Once we're in the studio, Vollmann shows me around, starting with a row of Oak Park photos he took while following Sacramento prostitutes. Most are platinum, but others are gum over cyanotype. I'm struck by one haunting portrait.




WTVWTV: This is a palladium-toned printing-out-paper print, and it's been sitting out here for a couple of years without any change, so the palladium seems to really make it pretty stable. This is gum over platinum, and this is just straight gum. The gum is really, really hard. I don't know if you understand the process. It's one of the first photographic processes. Basically you take Gum Arabic, with watercolor in it, and you make it photosensitive, and so it's as permanent as the watercolor itself. Artist's grade watercolors will last for hundreds of years, presumably. But, each time you print it, you get a very, very thin print. So you have to print over and over. So, this has about 12 or 13 printings in register on it. So you get this special kind of look to it. You can't get great detail with gum. It's just more of a moody thing.

TS: It looks like a ghost.

WTV: Yeah it does. And, she is a ghost. She's dead now.

We stand in the hallway silently staring at the photo of a ghost, together admiring her strong visage. He tells me about another prostitute friend of his, a grandmother, who used his tube of Cadmium red paint as lipstick. Cadmium is used to get the most brilliant hues of red, but is a heavy metal, highly toxic, even in minute doses.

WTV: When she was posing for me here she was talking about one of her customers who was really, really nice to her and she said she didn't know what she would do if he died. And then I was told later that she was strangled. I haven't seen her since. But I knew her for probably about three years, and every time I would get a hotel room and I would see her, I would say, "you know, you can come in, and you can sleep here." Sometimes she would. If I wasn't around she would steal my cadmium red watercolor and use it for lipstick. I said, "you know, that's kind of bad for you." But, seeing as how she died from being strangled, well, I guess it didn't do her any harm. Poor thing.

TS: You've really gotten to see a different side of prostitutes.

WTV: There's another. This was a very, very nice woman. Usually, they say, "Oh, can you give me a little bit of money to 'get well' before I pose for you?" And, you know, maybe 25 percent of the time they just run away when they have the money. But, I always think, that's ok.

So, this woman went, and got her crack, and she really wanted to share it with me. You know, she wanted to be really nice. I thought that was so generous, it was giving me the thing that she most valued.

He shows me more platinum, more gum. We look at photographs of prostitutes posing any way they want, more of the women Vollmann met in Oak Park, and then at another set of photos. There seems to be no end to Vollmann's photo collection. He tells me that he's working hard to make lots of prints from his--you guessed it--prodigious negative archive, taken around the world over many years.

WTV: These I'm just flattening. I just printed them yesterday. This one is 35mm. It's from Columbia from about 1999. This is a child prostitute. I think this is her mother, the procuress. I said, "Well, how about instead of paying for sex, how about if I pay for a picture?"

We view another Columbia photo. Two besieged policeman sit apprehensively in their station.

WTV: These two police had one machine pistol between them, but they felt relatively safe in their police station because they had a picture of Christ. I will say, they didn't really want to get in trouble with the criminals, so they tried to stay in their police stations. It was very bad for them, Terri.

I notice that Vollmann uses a medieval-looking soapstone WTV stamp as his signature, with the W on the right side, the V on the left side, and the T in the middle. At that point, Vollmann offers me some tea. Putting on some Tchaikovsky, he takes some kind of medicinal tea from a metal tin box he'd decorated with one of his etchings of a grasshopper. The incised metal is rubbed over with printer's ink.

TS: Do you live here in the studio?

WTV: Sometimes, yeah. It all depends on my mood, but I also have a home, and I spend some time there. It's unclear which space I'll spend more time in, in the future.

TS: Where do you do most of your writing?

WTV: It depends on what I'm working on. I do a lot of poetry and stuff here, and if there's some current fiction or non-fiction then I tend to work in the other house for that because it's my preference to have no phone here. No one can reach me here at all, so I can get a lot done and have a lot of peace. But a lot of the time I need to be near the phone, so the other place, where there's a phone, is a good place to be when I'm working on some of the books with deadlines.

I point to a door-sized table filled with hefty, upright, over-sized books, balanced like a domino rally and covered in plastic sheeting.

TS: Tell me about this.

WTV: It's called The Book of Candles and it's a folio. There are 10 of them. Let's see, I started it in 1995, and I've finished most of them this year. I finally sent one off to my dealer [Priscilla Juvelis] and one off to the Lilly Library.

Priscilla Juvelis's rare books site describes The Book of Candles as

A suite of eight religious and blasphemous love-poems to prostitutes . . . housed in a sailcloth-covered basswood clamshell box which the artist/author has painted, collaged with hand-painted woodblock prints, and suitably adorned with gewgaws. . . .

The woodcut image on the underside of each box is different. Four Japanese "doughnut hold" [sic] coins have been screwed in to the underside of the box to comprise protective feet. Inside each box, a narrow channel, collaged with painted paper, runs around three edges, leaving the spine side open. Within this are set two wooden corner blocks mounted with selenium-splotched flower-engraved brass plates, a strip of painted walnut engraved with a print of a female nude, two engraved beeswax candles on engraved brass supports wrapped round with brass wire. Even the brass screws of these assemblies are engraved and rubbed with oil-based ink.

On the inside of the spine are one engraved and inked aluminum plate and one engraved and inked brass plate which is signed and numbered.

Vollmann unwraps some boxes and books covered with more plastic sheeting. It's used, he tells me, to protect the art from his leaky roof. The box is a folio edition of The Book of Candles, hand engraved on two blocks of wood. Inside a hinged door is a set of loose prints.

WTV: There are the candles that I've engraved. See, even the screws I've engraved, and these little things. Each one of these is different. I decided not to bind them, but just to present them in a box. You can flip through if you want.

TS: Do you think the sentiments in your letter, "Crabbed Cautions of a Bleeding-hearted Un-deleter," would apply to your art too?

WTV; With the visual art, I'm probably a little more selective. Actually, you know, I do throw away. I don't use a lot of the stuff that I write--I might keep it, but I don't use it, necessarily. And with the visual art, often I'll produce a print or an image, and I'll realize it's just not good enough.

TS: Do your works show in a gallery space before being sold?

WTV: Usually they go straight to collectors. The editions are really small, and I'm not sure that it really makes sense to have shows. I could change my mind on that, but it seems like if you do that you spend a lot of money, probably more than you're going to get.

TS: On airfare, hotels, framing . . .

WTV: Yeah, that's right, Terri. And, I'm not really a vain person--I couldn't care less if people look at my stuff--I'm just happy to make it and if I can sell enough visual art and writing to get by and do more, that's all I care about.

Vollmann takes me to his fully stocked wood engraving area where I see a block of wood covered with a breathtaking sketch of a snow-capped mountain.



WTV: Back in February or March, I spent about an hour and a half in one place, standing in the snow on top of this truck, drawing this--the mountain. Here's a bunch of pine trees, and so on and so forth. I've just started engraving this sketch.

TS: Those illustrations in your novels, like in the Seven Dreams series, are they engravings?

WTV: Most of those are pen and ink drawings, but sometimes I'll use them as masters for engravings. So, in Butterfly Stories for instance, I did a bunch of drawings, which I then made into magnesium plates that I printed by hand.

TS: Do you prefer printmaking or your drawings with pen, where you're drawing the figure more loosely?

WTV: Well Terri, I think, probably, if I had to choose, I would choose printmaking because I love the crispness of the line, and then it's great to watercolor afterwards. But what you gain with a print you loose in spontaneity. And with a drawing it's really nice if someone is posing for you, and you can just go to town with a handful of watercolors. That's very, very relaxing.

Vollmann shows me how the engraver works. It's hooked up to a very loud air compressor, so he pulls me over to him and places some headphones over my ears. I turn off the recorder while he engraves. After the motor whirs to a stop, we take off for the island of tables in the center of the studio.

WTV: I was in Norway and did some illustrations of some of the Norse Eddas. The ancient Norse myths are best preserved in the Eddas, so they found me some professional models and cut me some Norwegian pine wood, to get it just right.

TS: Norwegian wood.

WTV: That's right. This is one of them, the goddess, Freya. It says her name in Runes--carved backwards obviously so it'll be right-reading--and then there were these petroglyphs that my editor showed me from the Sami people, the Laplanders. So, I did some drawings of some of those and put these ancient petroglyphs in too.

This woman [Freya in the engraving] is actually an anthropologist who was excavating some Norse stuff at the time that she modeled for me. I just drew her. This woman was like the perfect woman for it. She could actually recite some of this poem, the seeress's sayings to Odin, you know, in Old Norse. I did a bunch of drawings of her.

We move on to a set of prints Vollmann is doing in conjunction with a book he's writing on Japanese Noh theater. He shows me one. As I inspect a gum print of Yoroboshi, the blind priest's song, I ask him who his favorite artists are.

WTV: I like William Blake very much.

TS: His work is really ecstatic, the blue and yellow . . .

WTV: Yeah, it's beautiful. Absolutely. Then there are overlooked artists, like Andrew Wyeth, passed over because he wants to paint every pine needle, or every single blade of grass.

TS: I wanted to ask you about the Shostakovich passages in the "Palm Tree of Deborah" from Europe Central. I read them over and over again.

WTV: Oh, you like Shostakovich?

TS: I like Shostakovich. But I liked more the metaphors about the chromatic scale, the "transgressive harmonies of the chromatic scale."

WTV: Oh, that was fun. Yeah. I really, really enjoy listening to Shostakovich now. It was a little hard for him to live the life he did. Actually, it took me a lot of work to get to the point where I could understand him a little bit. It wasn't natural for me to appreciate those harmonies. I'm sure it isn't for most people. It was a good stretch of self-improvement.

TS: Do you think that's what people need to do when they see your work, or when they read your work, that they need to be open to the transgressive harmonies?

WTV: If they want to, but I think that if they don't like my work, or don't want to ever study it, or enjoy it, that's okay with me. That doesn't hurt my feelings.

Our time up, Vollmann asks me to shuttle him from Sacramento to Berkeley. Before we step out into the pouring rain, however, Vollmann turns the tables and asks me a question.

WTV: So, if I were going to draw you, how would you want to be drawn?

TS: I think I'd let you decide, since you're the artist.

WTV: Oh, that sounds good.

TS: How would you want to draw me?

WTV: It depends on whether you'd want to be drawn with or without clothes.

TS: I could think about being a model. Would you pay me anything?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Driving to Berkeley through water that covers my windshield in sheets, we talk about parenting, and then about criminal justice. Vollmann is passionate about the need to have a more lenient judicial system in place; he thinks that that the overly harsh punishment of criminals--the stretching of the three-strikes law and lengthy prison stays for drug crimes--is taking away the basic rights of people who require at most a slap on the wrist for petty crimes. He tells me about the research he's doing on a book about the court system's response to men accused of rape.

Hydroplaning in my Cutter on Interstate 80 in a flood zone, I learn that the old standby of removing pressure from the gas and the brakes, while not attempting to steer, works wonders and impresses a veteran of foreign wars.

Before we pull in to Berkeley Vollmann tells me that, like his anti-hero from The Royal Family, he's taken to hopping freight trains on weekends. He's even discovered an atlas, originating in Portland, for freight train hoppers. I recommend the photo journalism of the Polaroid Kid, and he offers me the chance to be a box-car warmer, or to arrive via train on my next visit. When we reach Berkeley Vollmann says I'm a good driver, because we're still alive. He is indeed a genius.

© 2006 Scott Esposito
Photos © Terri Saul

A writer to know about

William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer and essayist. He lives in Sacramento, California with his wife and daughter. Vollmann studied at Deep Springs College and earned a B.A., summa cum laude, in comparative literature at Cornell University.

After graduation, Vollmann worked odd jobs, including as a secretary at an insurance company, and saved up enough money to go to Afghanistan in 1982. His experiences traveling with the mujahideen formed the basis of his first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World which was published in 1987. Upon his return to the USA he briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley as a graduate student but dropped out after one year. He then worked as a computer programmer, despite having virtually no experience with computers. According to a New York Times Magazine profile by novelist Madison Smartt Bell, he spent the better part of a year there writing his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, after hours on office computers, subsisting on candy bars from vending machines and hiding from the janitorial staff.

He has written for Harper's, Spin Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, Gear, Granta, and sometimes contributes to The New York Times Book Review among other publications. Vollmann has called himself a "former hack journalist" and his travel writing and reportage often inform his fiction, giving it a hybridized and journalistic feel.

In early 2004 (after many delays) McSweeney's published Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, heavily illustrated, seven-volume treatise on violence which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A single-volume condensed version was published at the end of the year by Ecco Press, an abridgment he justified by saying, "I did it for the money."[1] Rising Up and Rising Down represents over 20 years of work and attempts to establish a moral calculus to consider the causes, effects, and ethics of violence. Much of it consists of Vollmann's own reporting from places wracked by violence, among them Cambodia, Somalia, and Iraq.

Vollmann's other works often deal with the settlement of North America (as in Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, a cycle of seven novels), or stories of people (often prostitutes) on the margins of war, poverty, and hope. His 2005 novel Europe Central follows the trajectories of a wide range of characters (including Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich) caught up in the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union, and won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction.

Vollmann's papers were acquired by the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of Ohio State University

For more info on Vollmann check this site out.
http://www.edrants.com/wtv/


bio info from wikipedia

The Ethic

An old bum on Grant Street could not sense an entire Columbus Day parade of dragons and monsters and drum-beaters and yellow-clad Chinese girls standing in the backs of pickup trucks, clashing cymbals; he just sat on the edge of a tree box and his head was on his trembling hands; and he shook it whenever there was a concussion of drumbeats or firecrackers in the street beside him, not understanding this loud night world of cheers and Chinese families waving Taiwanese and American flags and child-orchestras and marching woman; he was blinded in himself- but when I gave him twenty-two cents he looked up, and although he could not see me or acknowledge me, he began counting the money very rapidly and practically. We are all anchored by something. Most of us are anchored by money.

Excerpt from "The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann