"I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s *The Power Broker,*” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s *City of Quartz.*” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: *Imperial* is like Robert Caro’s *The Power Broker* with the attitude of Mike Davis’s *City of Quartz,* if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange."
On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > What work? A good friend of mine from college came out of the Calexico
> aristocracy (i.e., her grandfather named the place, along with Mexicali, and
> ran a private army for the Chandler family in Baja). Can't believe what a
> godforsaken place it is - the air stinks of ag chemicals, you can't drink
> the water (or even brush your teeth with it) because of all the toxic
> runoff, and it's always like 105 degrees. Always interested in hearing more.
>
> William Vollmann can tell you more. Lots more, 1100 pages more
> <http://www.amazon.com/Imperial-William-T-Vollmann/dp/0670020613>.
>
> I checked it out from the library a couple months ago and have been
> using it as my bathroom book -- don't check it out after me! -- but
> I've barely made a dent. His narrative chapters are kind of annoying
> -- mostly because of his style and their magazine gloss -- but he
> pulls up some fascinating records and artifacts. Even though his
> approach isn't remotely Marxist, he is mostly concerned with the
> material: economics, business, labor, migration, etc., which makes it
> pretty interesting. But 1100 pages. Jeez.
>
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319