NP - NYT Review of Volman's new release "Imperial"

[Bruce Appelbaum]

not a review of the book, just a Vollmann profile.  He's not looking  
good in the photo.  His fast life seems to be catching up to him.


Bruce

> "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to  
> worry about answers."

        --- Thomas Pynchon





On Jul 29, 2009, at 9:33 AM, David Morris wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/books/29vollman.html?_r=1&ref=arts
>
> Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the  
> Viking Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so  
> heavy, he observed recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a  
> toe. A companion volume, to be published next month by powerHouse  
> Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on  
> “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to  
> infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down  
> the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the  
> most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like  
> the Salk polio vaccine.
>
> [...]
>
> “Imperial,” which is about Imperial County in California, the vast,  
> flat and arid region in the southeastern part of the state,  
> bordering Mexico, is an extreme Vollmann production: brilliant in  
> places, practically unreadable in others. There are lyrical  
> passages, and others edging over into magenta (“And change came;  
> just as the urine of dehydrated people is turbid and dark, failing  
> in transparency, so the evening sunlight, as if heated to exhaustion  
> by and with itself, now lost the glaring whiteness which had  
> characterized it since early morning, and it oozed down upon the  
> pavement to stain it with gold”), along with scientific chapters,  
> complete with graphs, on salinization and agricultural productivity,  
> and 175 pages of notes. A page early on has a title warning of  
> “Impending Aridity.”

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20090729/c41132d6/attachment-0001.html>