FEATURES
Interview with William T. Vollmann
/ Ben Bush
05.18.06
Q: I’ve heard these legends of you firing blanks at literary readings. What prompted you to do that and what sort of reactions did you get?
V: Let’s say that writing is the score and the public reading is the performance of the score. If you’re trying to distill a 1000 page book into a thirty or forty minute reading, you take different sections. You’re going to pick sections that possibly contrast with each other or reflect on each other somehow. Since they’re pulled out of context they’re going to create a different impression than if you read them all the way through in a book. Sometimes in the course of abridging and isolating things you want to increase the dramatic tension or you want to punctuate what you’ve done, particularly if the pieces have to do with something suspenseful or violent or whatever. It’s entirely appropriate, I think. There’s this one piece that I used to read called “The Back of my Head” from The Atlas. It was about an experience that I had in Sarajevo where I was constantly being shot at, as was everyone else, going through sniper fire and this and that and I went to the morgue and saw all these awful things––people who had been shot. At one point I was outside, near the front line with a friend of mine and suddenly I felt a very sharp impact on the back of my head. I was sure that I’d been shot. I reached up and I touched the back of my head and my hand came away all wet and I thought, “Oh, this is really bad.” Then I saw that actually the stickiness wasn’t red and I realized finally that someone from a tall apartment nearby had thrown a peach pit down at the back of my head.
When I read the story I often pull the trigger when there are shots. There’s a loud bang from the blank and so on and then for that last experience when I describe that sudden impact, I pick up the pistol and I cock it and people are kind of bracing for the shot and so forth. When I read the part about the peach pit, it turns out nothing happened and I put the gun down and I don’t fire it. So that’s one example of how I think the gun can be effective and helpful to magnify the perception that I’m trying to convey, but for a lot of the books, like for the Copernicus book, there’s no reason to shoot off the gun.
Q: Get an astrolabe out in front of the audience instead?
V: And smash it to bits.
V: Let’s say that writing is the score and the public reading is the performance of the score. If you’re trying to distill a 1000 page book into a thirty or forty minute reading, you take different sections. You’re going to pick sections that possibly contrast with each other or reflect on each other somehow. Since they’re pulled out of context they’re going to create a different impression than if you read them all the way through in a book. Sometimes in the course of abridging and isolating things you want to increase the dramatic tension or you want to punctuate what you’ve done, particularly if the pieces have to do with something suspenseful or violent or whatever. It’s entirely appropriate, I think. There’s this one piece that I used to read called “The Back of my Head” from The Atlas. It was about an experience that I had in Sarajevo where I was constantly being shot at, as was everyone else, going through sniper fire and this and that and I went to the morgue and saw all these awful things––people who had been shot. At one point I was outside, near the front line with a friend of mine and suddenly I felt a very sharp impact on the back of my head. I was sure that I’d been shot. I reached up and I touched the back of my head and my hand came away all wet and I thought, “Oh, this is really bad.” Then I saw that actually the stickiness wasn’t red and I realized finally that someone from a tall apartment nearby had thrown a peach pit down at the back of my head.
When I read the story I often pull the trigger when there are shots. There’s a loud bang from the blank and so on and then for that last experience when I describe that sudden impact, I pick up the pistol and I cock it and people are kind of bracing for the shot and so forth. When I read the part about the peach pit, it turns out nothing happened and I put the gun down and I don’t fire it. So that’s one example of how I think the gun can be effective and helpful to magnify the perception that I’m trying to convey, but for a lot of the books, like for the Copernicus book, there’s no reason to shoot off the gun.
Q: Get an astrolabe out in front of the audience instead?
V: And smash it to bits.
