William T Vollmann: What's the meat locker for, Bill?

[Ya Sam]

SIPB (my abbreviation, means: sorry if posted before ;)

Conducting a telephone interview with William T Vollmann, the author of 
eight novels, three collections of stories, a memoir and a seven-volume 
history of violence seems appropriate, given that the telephone plays such 
an important part in his new novel. In Europe Central, which recently won 
the National Book Award in America, he describes the telephone as an 
octopus, a malignantly complex brain that turns Europe into a blank zone of 
black icons. It's an evil force, to be treated with suspicion, like the car 
and television, two other technologies Vollmann mistrusts. But the author is 
warm, open and unsuspicious [...]

He's currently working on a number of new projects. One is a non-fiction 
book about his experiences hopping freight trains across America. "It's 
really fun to think about the connections with the Beats, rereading Jack 
Kerouac, but also Jack London and Mark Twain, travelling fast through the 
country, that solitary, wild American experience."

Another forthcoming book is about Imperial Valley. "I've been working on it 
for ten years," he told me. "I'm trying to tell the history of the 
US-Mexican border from earliest times to the present. I'm looking at how a 
line on paper can change things. When you first look at Imperial Valley it 
seems hot, flat and dull, but the more you look into it the more secrets you 
can find. There's a labyrinth of illegal Chinese tunnels, which was 
considered to be a myth. But I finally got to go into these tunnels and 
they're fascinating. There's parquet ceilings and I found this velvet nude 
painting, and some old Cantonese letters I had translated. Some tunnels 
became brothels and gambling dens and valuables were hidden down there."
[...]



http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article1220550.ece

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