In this ongoing series, we revisit some of our most memorable moments with SPIN’s journalists, photographers, and editors.
To our knowledge, William T. Vollmman is the only alumni of SPIN’s revolving madhouse of journalists whom the FBI deemed a “viable suspect” in the Unabomber case.
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Following a tip that our intrepid reporter might be America’s pre-eminent Luddite philosopher-terrorist of the late 20th Century, murdering three and injuring 23 in a decades-long bombing campaign which overlapped with his time at SPIN, Vollmann was closely read by the feds.
Suspect S-2047, as the FBI labeled Vollmann, was declared “armed and dangerous” (reportedly even owning a flamethrower along with all his guns), a crackhead, placed under surveillance, and warranted a file of almost 800 pages.
That’s our Bill! Not for us the people-pleasing puff-piecing ’content creators’ who could be replaced overnight by AI and no one would fucking know or care. We hate music like that and we hate writing like that. Our first question when vetting prospective journalists is: where’s your flamethrower, crackhead?
Hence Vollmann, with his pre-SPIN resume highlight of getting the runs with the mujahadeen, fit the bill.
Nonetheless, while the man who recruited the intrepid Vollmann for SPIN—founder Bob Guccione Jr.—most certainly did not rat on Vollmann to the FBI, he privately wondered at the time if Bill was the mad bomber.
Was SPIN’s star writer cheating on the magazine with Penthouse?
“The thought did cross my mind,” says Guccione (whose father, Robert Guccione, was in 1995 negotiating with the Unabomber about writing a column for his magazine, Penthouse). Vollmann and the Luddite extremist, says Bob, were “not a million miles away ideologically.”
Nor in terms of filing hefty copy, Exhibit A being the Unabomber’s 35,000-word treatise, “Industrial Society and its Future,” which the Washington Post published with the terrorist still at large, and Exhibit B being Vollmann’s drafts.
Taxonomy of terror: a diagram from the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” as published unedited by the Washington Post. (Credit: Evan Agostini/Liaison via Getty Images)
Guccione explains: “It wasn’t an email you’d get. It wasn’t a story in a Google doc. This was a story in a brown manila envelope—a thick envelope—and it’d be 20,000, 30,000 words. And handwritten. We’d have to type it up. Once it was 80,000 words, and I said to him: ‘I’m not even going to read this.’”
Back in the 1990s, when SPIN was low-tech even for its time, the sheer length of Vollmann’s dispatches made for a hell of a lot of wrangling to get them onto the page.
“It was all done by hand and the process was primitive,” says Bob. “I’d have to get them typed up and then the editing was done with a pen on a printed sheet. You’d X out things you didn’t want and write questions you had in red. And post it back. And then when the stories come back again you’re still dealing with that many thousands of words that you can have problems fitting it all because of line breaks, paragraph breaks, dialogue, and all that. It’s not like online where you can just make things fit,” Bob says. “We’d have to go in and sometimes edit it with a scalpel—physically cutting out words to make it fit the layout.”
The feds figured Bill might be their boy, not only because of his dodgy travels (sorry, Bill, for the eyebrow-raising assignments), love of hand-crafting objects (as the bombs were), or his “strong physical resemblance to UNABOMBER composites,” but due to what they gleaned from his writing. Vollmann’s oeuvre, wrote an FBI agent, is an expression of “anti-progress, anti-industrialist themes/beliefs/value systems.”
It’s debatable, I guess, whether an enthusiasm for flamethrowers is pro or anti-industrial, but one thing Bill most certainly was at SPIN, however, was anti-bullshit. Or, to put it another way, anti group-think.
So in 1994 when Bob sent Bill and, at Vollmann’s request, his Serbo-Croatian speaking schoolmate-and-college-mate-turned-photographer Francis Tomasic to the war in the former Yugoslavia, they did not come back with some rinse-and-repeat, fixer-programmed, write-by-numbers piece that any hack with a visa and PRESS vest could have churned out.
Francis, heartbreakingly, didn’t come back at all.
Bad news as reported in the Vincennes Sun-Commercial, May 3, 1994.
The SPIN duo were driving through a Bosnian-government held area near Mostar with another American, Bryan Brinton, in a rented Peugeot, when, according to the U.N., they triggered a landmine, while Vollmann asserts that gunmen opened up on them. From his subsequent SPIN article:
The first explosion smashed through the windshield. . . . I can no longer remember whether the second explosion came just before or just after Francis’s two screams, short and shrill and horrible with what I took at that moment to be only panic … I heard soldiers shouting something from the Muslim side, and then there was laughter.
Vollmann, who doesn’t drive due to being too visually impaired, had been dozing in the back seat. He woke as the sole survivor, with Tomasic dead at 36; Brinton, who’d served as a medic in Vietnam and now wanted to be a war photographer, at 44. The pair were the 67 and 68th journalists killed in the conflict, according to the BBC.
“I had asked him not to bring Francis,” says Guccione. “He wanted to bring him from America as an interpreter and I said don’t do that—find someone locally who knows the lay of the land. It’ll be safer for both of you. But Bill said, ‘Oh no, no, it’s okay.’ And in the end I gave Bill what he wanted, because that was the spirit of our relationship,” says Guccione.
“I don’t know if it would have made a difference because they just drove over a mine, but I didn’t want him to bring that kid. I always feel very bad about that. I feel very, very sad about it to this day.”
After the lethal mishap, Guccione told Vollmann to come home, but Vollmann—distraught as he was—wanted to stay and finish the job. Which he did.
I have a very, very strong hatred for authority.
Vollmann
And in the astonishing story that he filed, “The Way Never Came Here,” the horrendous event Bill survived just happens, and it does so thousands of words into the article without any laborious setting up or foreshadowing. Much like anyone else’s killing in those years—it just happens.
As recounted in the story (published in the November ‘94 issue), after Bill gets his nerve up to deal with the militiamen who surround the stricken car, and then eventually gets evacuated by Spanish peacekeepers, he continues his exploration, and from that point in the article, the personal disaster, the killing of his comrades, both does and does not dominate the article as a whole.
“I’d known from the very first that my two friends had died for nothing because this war had not been theirs, and […] whatever had killed them, did so really by ‘mistake’,” Vollmann writes later in the piece. “But more and more I started thinking everyone else had died for nothing, too.”
And in the narrative, he thinks this in the company of Serbs—the American government’s and much of the press’ designated villains. For in general, regardless of their ways and walks, their complicity or circumstance, Bill is about opening to people, listening to people, drinking with them (even doing crack with them or buying sex from them), and respecting readers’ ability to think for themselves, rather than being about ignoring or concealing his subjects’ reality, their human mess, by pasting over it two-dimensional masks issued by U.S. Central Casting or anyone else.
Post-SPIN, in 2002 as the U.S. war machine set its sights on Iraq, Vollmann gives a speech titled: “Some Thoughts on the Value of Writing During Wartime.” In it, Bill says that he was not necessarily opposed to the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq—a country he had visited as a journalist—but that to endorse it he would need a more convincing narrative than the U.S. government had so far supplied.
To Vollmann, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis were being presented to Americans as “flat characters”—like villains and victims in crime fiction. Vollmann’s complaint is that crime fiction is a genre which does not aim to capture the unpredictable, unresolvable, often counter-intuitive nature of reality, but instead seeks to slot people in to serve the plot—like governments and their lackeys in the press uninterested in the mess and nuance of life and history, but very interested in moving the story toward a predetermined result.
Bill at SPIN was into the mess—into the rugged topography of the human spirit. And it was mess—whether captured by Bill in his reportage or by our music writers in their decidedly non PR-mindful coverage of a routinely, obscenely, boringly airbrushed industry—that made SPIN great.
“For his first article for us,” recalls Guccione, “he suggested going to Thailand to free a sex slave. He might not have thought I’d go for it, but I went for it in a heartbeat. I said, ‘Brilliant idea. Good luck. Keep your head down.’ And that began that fantastic, wonderful adventure together which lasted several years.”
Coverage of SPIN’s liberation mission in the Tampa Tribune, November 20, 1993.
That first story of Vollmann’s, “Sex Slave,” in which he buys an underage girl from a horrible brothel in Ranong province, on Myanmar’s southern border, before delivering her to a women’s refuge and training center in Bangkok, made a splash when it hit the stands in the December ‘93 issue.
And in that late, great decade of print, back before the internet hit magazine and newspaper revenue and staffing as hard as Ted Bundy on a sorority house, SPIN was selling upwards of half a million copies per issue. Guccione’s upstart mag had won the devoted readership of young and freethinking pop culture lovers who wanted not only to be informed, but challenged, surprised, shocked, even at times—oh my lord—affronted!, but never taken for granted nor pandered to.
“Our advertising revenue was in the millions—millions per month,” says Guccione, with the expenses for Vollmann’s stories running up to $30,000 apiece. “It was massive money, because he’d be gone for a month. He never lived high on the hog—he’d stay in $6 a night hotels and eat $2 meals—but he did buy a prostitute. He did bribe people all the time. We spent whatever he needed. We gave him the money and freedom to do whatever he wanted. It was limitless,” Guccione says. “But Bill never took advantage. He was honest.” The accounting side gave the office back in New York some chuckles: “My CFO would come walking into my office and go, ‘I’ve got another expense from Bill.’ It would literally say: ‘Prostitute, $25.’ His were the only expense reports I ever saw that listed prostitutes as a legitimate expense. And it wasn’t just that one story—he had a thing for prostitutes.”
Vollmann’s journalistic endeavors were not the costliest, though. For “Inside the IRA,” SPIN-reporter Rory Nugent’s account of clandestinely meeting in Northern Ireland the insurgent group’s Sergeant-at-Arms, Guccione says he laid out between $40,000 and $50,000.
“That era of journalism is gone. We were the last great magazine,” says Bob. “After us there were no more magazines doing this kind of work, or wanting to do this kind of work, although I’d like to bring some of that back.”
It’s now 30 years since Vollmann returned alone from Bosnia, and 27 since Guccione (who has returned as a consultant) sold SPIN, with the buyers and some subsequent owners more into tidiness than Bill and Bob.
A Bosnian runs the gauntlet of sniper fire in 1994 across a makeshift bridge to collect water in East Mostar, where Vollmann and his friends had been before meeting their fate. (Credit: Kevin Weaver via Getty Images)
Vollmann went on to establish himself as one of America’s great writers, beating out E.L. Doctorow, Mary Gaitskill, and others to win the 2005 National Book Award with Europe Central, his extraordinary, singular novel of World War II’s vast and vastly brutal eastern theater. What’s more, music lovers, a solid chunk of that phat tome is from the viewpoint of Dmitri Shostakovich, including while the sometimes persecuted, sometimes celebrated Russian composer writes his 7th Symphony in bomb shelters of Leningrad amidst the German-Finnish siege, in which the Axis’ deliberate starvation of the inhabitants kills an estimated one million Russians (with shelling and assaults killing hundreds of thousands more).
Bill’s two-volume autodidactic, experiential, philosophical grappling with what we’re doing to the planet, Carbon Ideologies, published in 2018, was described by the Atlantic as “the most honest book about climate change yet.” My favorite of his many books, however, is his slimmest, Riding Toward Everywhere, a 2008 reflective account of his time hopping freight trains. So as a writer, Vollmann’s done splendidly post-SPIN—writing up a storm for decades and doing so in ways no one else can or would.
Yet, Bill could now be likened to Job: beset by torment, trial, and tragedy. In recent years he has lost much of his intestines to colon cancer; his publisher of almost four decades dropped him in 2022 over his refusal to be edited (a protected status he had previously secured in exchange for reduced royalties, but Viking insisted with a new anchor-weight fiction manuscript), and that same year his daughter’s “protracted dying”—as he describes the wretched state into which she had descended as an alcoholic—finished. Dead in her mid-20s. Bill writes how he then spent a year or so “in bed, staring at the wall.”
For what it’s worth, talking to Vollmann took me more than a decade to arrange. I first asked back in 2008 when I was doing a doctorate (much of which was on Vollmann’s nonfiction). I wrote him a cringey letter asking for an interview.
Vollmann didn’t answer, but many years later I discovered that item 4, folder 62, box 7 of the William T. Vollmann archive at Ohio State University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library in Columbus is listed as “Correspondence from Matthew Thompson to WTV, December 31, 2008.”
As part of my doctoral research in 2009 I went to that library in Columbus and scoured those archives, but I don’t think my letter was there at the time. Seems he included it in a later tranche of bumf that OSU has acquired for scholars, obsessives, and posterity. Made me want to write another, somewhat spicier, letter to him, but he probably would have just sold that, too.
His were the only expense reports I ever saw that listed prostitutes as a legitimate expense.
Bob Guccione Jr.
A lifetime later, however—my doctorate long completed and my Vollmann obsession having waned into a more sober appreciation of certain aspects of his work—he’s ready to talk. I learn this one midnight when a mutual contact tells me that Vollmann will accept a call in six hours. Bill does not use email, digital media, the internet, or cell phones, but he has a landline locked in a closet with an answering machine attached. At daybreak tomorrow my time, he will unlock the closet and actually pick up the phone when it rings.
Last word before we get into the interview goes to Bob Guccione Jr. “Bottom line,” he says, “is that Bill Vollmann was the greatest writer SPIN has ever published and I was so happy to publish him. I’m very proud to be part of his trajectory.”
(P.S. The real Unabomber, MK-ULTRA alumni Theodore Kaczynski, was caught in 1996 after publication of his manifesto led to his brother recognizing his writing style and contacting the law. Last year Kaczynski killed himself in prison.)
American militias took Vollmann’s interest for the September, 1995 issue.
SPIN: Looking back through your writing on prostitution, I came across a kind of sexual reverence for women that a lot of [cis, binary, heterosexual, and perhaps even toxically masculine] men might have an aversion to as misshapen or scarred, and see as ugly. Have you always found yourself sexually aroused by women damaged by the grind and damage of poverty and with all kinds of body shapes?
William T. Vollmann: Yeah, sure. Although sometimes the arousal is attenuated. If you go to the Vatican, and you see some old marble statue of a beautiful goddess, and you think, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s very beautiful, very harmonious. I enjoy looking at the shape.’ Let’s call that sexual arousal. So if I see some maimed old woman covered with abscesses, but she looks at me with her big, beautiful dark eyes full of pain, I’m gonna see her as beautiful. That doesn’t mean that I necessarily want to have sex with her right then, but she is beautiful and attractive to me.
So it’s not always hard-edge, tumescent sexuality?
That would get old if a man felt that about every woman, and there might be a lot of frustration for him.
So the prostitution thing is also the time you spend with people you see as amazing and who embody hard, lived, lives?
A lot of them have been my sisters and teachers and friends. And a lot of them have also been my charity cases, and I’m very proud of that fact.
Bob wanted me to cover the OJ trial, and I said, “I just don’t give a shit about it.”
Vollmann
How, in the early ‘90s, did you become this correspondent at SPIN given such amazing scope and budget to experience and write whatever you liked?
I had worked for very few magazines. Probably the biggest break I’d had before SPIN in the magazine world was Esquire where my editor, Will Blythe, was really great to me, and that lasted for a while. Then Will lost his job, and they got tired of me. That’s how things go. You’re next week or last week’s flavor of the month, so you just have to accept it.
SPIN had an editor who knew somebody at Viking [the publisher of the avant-garde, mainly fiction books which he’d released prior to joining SPIN]. That editor [Elizabeth Mitchell] and I ended up being friends, then Bob [Guccione Jr.] got in touch with me and we clicked right away.
I hadn’t had a lot of experience [with reportage]—Esquire didn’t have the budget—but suddenly I could do pretty much what I wanted. And he didn’t force me to do things that I didn’t want to do. Bob wanted me to cover the OJ trial, and I said, “I just don’t give a shit about it,” and he didn’t make me. Often he would say, “You know, Bill, this story that you wrote—I completely disagree with your political opinions, but I’m letting you say it.” So I still have a lot of respect and fondness for Bob.
Bob liked me and trusted me, and he gave me a lot of freedom. He was very, very good to me for a long time. There were a couple things that could be a little annoying. I don’t know whether it was Bob or someone else, but he would take some stupid title and recycle it, so I think that at least two of my pieces became “Heart of Darkness.” Things like this. But I’m pretty good at smiling and keeping quiet, and I have nothing but gratitude about all that time. It was a very good relationship for a number of years.
Bob Guccione Jr. in his office, 1995. (Credit: Misha Erwitt/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
Some of your magazine work brings to mind American reportage going back as far as Francis Parkman Jr’s wonderfully grungy The Oregon Trail [serialized by Knickerbocker in the late 1840s and then compiled into a book in 1849].
He had a way of making his work almost cinematic. He’s beautiful at describing things.
Sure is: from the feral trappers and their squalid, drunken camps to stunning moments like when an entire encampment of Native people on the plains picks everything up and everyone starts moving.
It’s pretty cool. If you haven’t read the Library of America’s two-volume France and England in North America, it’s quite worth it. He’s describing stuff back as early as the Spanish foundation of St. Augustine in the 1500’s, and he makes you feel as if you’re there. Some of the details have to be wrong because we know more now than then, but so what.
What about more recent magazine writing. Do you see yourself in any contemporary tradition?
It depends on how far you want to go back. I like some of the journalism of John Reed (an eyewitness to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, among much else), who was wandering around. On the other hand, I gather that he was not averse to making things up, and I don’t do that. But for me journalism is fundamentally constraining. It’s a form of somewhat gratifying—and therefore consensual—prostitution.
When I wrote the story about the Taliban for the New Yorker, I just let the New Yorker edit it. It was quite a bit longer in Rising Up and Rising Down [Vollmann’s 3,352-page, seven-volume autodidactic, taxonomical wrangling with violence, which includes numerous ‘author’s cuts’ of previously published articles]. Then there was a Spanish magazine which wanted to reprint it. And I said, “Why don’t you just reprint the original?” So they looked at it and said, “No, we like the New Yorker version better.” So I said, “Well then, why don’t you just not print it.”
One of the things that I really liked about working for Bob, and to a lesser extent, Harper’s, is that if there was something that I wanted to learn or to find out, or occasionally something they proposed to me, I would go and write my heart out and know that it would come out my way in a book eventually.
With Bosnia I wrote something very similar to what appeared in Rising Up and Rising Down, because that was the version I wanted. Then I turned it over to Bob and let his people cut it down—any way they wanted. It was not my business or my problem.
So, you know, let Bob call it “Heart of Darkness” if he wants and butcher it—I don’t care. And he was generous. He sent me to those places, and it got to be my way eventually: the basic point that I wanted to make was in it. If it wasn’t too distorted then I felt like it was a win-win.
So the article I read in SPIN as a youngster in Tasmania all those years ago was a cut-up version.
They’re all cut-up versions. Every single one.
When I reviewed a book for the NY Times they cut that up. So in periodical publications my goal is to be an honest hack. I don’t have any ego when they’re doing it, and a lot of people are astounded by that: “Bill, you have a reputation for being difficult, but you’re so easy to work with.” Oftentimes I don’t even tell them that I don’t read what they publish.
You don’t read your own articles?
No.
Deep in the Golden Triangle for SPIN, June, 1994.
But do you sense a pattern across publications to what editors do to your work—what people want to turn your writing into?
There’s no ‘they.’ There are a series of entities and forces, and maybe a few people who think that they’re doing something. Sometimes with Esquire, for instance, I would turn something in, they would cut it, and then they’d say, “Oh, we just got another ad, so now we can make it another page longer. So could you write something new to fill the gap?” Then, “Oh, now we have to cut it here because something else came in.” It’s important to be a good sport about it. As would any prostitute. You can’t take it very seriously.
What I really liked about working for Bob was that even though my pieces [for SPIN] were massively cut, by the standards of the time they were reasonably impressive [in length]. And by current standards it was amazing. You can’t get that stuff anymore. So you have to think why? Are things getting better or worse? And of course, like any of us, I am an egotist and I remember when I was young and could go all over the place and make a bunch of money. So of course I say that things are getting worse.
But a lot of the young people don’t think so. A lot of the people I work with, even in publishing, are not especially literate by my standards, and that’s not not a problem for them. So if things are more visual and less verbal, that’s just how it is. The only worry is, are they still going to be capable of thought—of making judgements? Like who’s right and who’s wrong in Ukraine? If everyone here just starts saying “Putin,” then they’re only telling half the story.
How did you prepare for going to Bosnia as a war correspondent for SPIN? Was it a big process of making contacts, planning what to do, how, where, and budgeting?
No.
More fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants?
Yeah—that’s a lot better. I always try to live by what Thoreau said, which is that it’s very important not to let your knowledge get in the way of what’s more important—which is your ignorance. As long as I know that I’m ignorant, I can learn something.
I remember on several occasions being in the media center in Beograd [Belgrade], and there were all these western journalists who had made up their minds that the Serbs were the villains. And so they were talking about the Serbs in that way—right in front of them. It was quite ugly, and especially when they needed them to find an interpreter or driver or whatever. If I had tried to establish some kind of support network before I’d gone there, then I’d end up with people like that—liabilities; biased.
There are times when you want to speak to someone high in the command structure and then it’s always a good idea to have a press letter and make it look as fancy as you can if you talk to a private, he may not know very much of the big picture but he’s not gonna lie to you about the way things are right there. When you talk to the general, all you get is the big picture, and most of it is either a lie or a mistake.
“I try to write from the heart,” says Vollmann.
Your major war story in SPIN, “The War Never Came Here,” confounds many expectations and structures of journalism. You don’t do the standard foreshadowing of the disaster, you don’t look into things that an average journalist would, and you don’t seek clarification or confirmation of what you hear. But you do include a scene where you’re back in Belgrade after the killings with your hands being held by a woman calling on Jesus to rain his sacred blood on you and you liken it to a time you felt your hands had sprouted a million clitorises after you took ecstasy with a woman you loved. It’s anti-journalistic in many ways, and kind of mind-blowing. How did you sit down and tackle that article? Did you make conscious decisions, or did it just flood out the way it is?
I try to write from my heart—sincerely—and that means to do it as soon as possible after the experience, when I still can really describe those feelings. And I take a lot of notes when I go to places like that, and I take a lot of photographs. The notebook and the film frame both remember things, or even perceive things, that I don’t get a chance to perceive at the time. So I use that stuff later to fill in the details.
What about structure?
That essay is basically chronological, but if I’m talking about the Ustasha, for example, then I might have to digress a little bit. And then mentioning that in one place makes me think, “Oh yeah, when this other guy was talking about that, it might have been an indirect reference to Pavelić [founder of the Ustasha and head of the Nazi-allied state of Croatia].” So now we have to drop that in and then that might add some other connection, and we have to compare that to what the Muslims are doing, and so forth. It’s a question of following the logic and the associations, as well as the chronology of the piece, and then trying to weave some sort of web that’s coherent and has some kind of radial symmetry.
In the anti-journalistic way you raise things but then say that we can’t know the truth, or, say there’s all these competing claims of what’s going on and why and who did what, I suppose that you nail the essence of the absolutely confused, contested, crazy nature of a country’s disintegration. Which, on another level, is the essence of so much else in humanity—including a lot of normal life.
Probably starting with Virginia Woolf and stream of consciousness, and getting into Freud and Jung and thinking about dreams, we’ve started realizing that consciousness is probably very shallow, hollow, pro forma, and incomplete. We might wish that it wasn’t that way, but it is. So if, for instance, you could see a movie of a dream that I had of Australia, you might say, “Look, Bill doesn’t have the desert right, or the hills. I know this kind of tree so well, and it’s all goofed up in Bill’s movie—it doesn’t look like that. Then you might remember that Bill doesn’t have the greatest eyes, he’s not from Australia, and so all he can do is his feeble best.
There are times, I hope and believe, when consciousness is much more rich than that. Some of it, of course, is what seems to be a memory, but you’re probably bringing in associations after the fact. You know, you probably have woken up sometimes from a morning dream, and when you wake you realize it was a very, very brief dream. But as you’re waking, your consciousness is already trying to make meaning out of it by adding some sort of a backstory that you might even tell people if you were recounting the dream—that X, Y, and Z happened. But actually, in the dream, only the last part, Z, happened.
With the Bosnia story, I remember very, very clearly a shot into each of my friends. But it was played up as a mine trap, and it is possible that I was in shock and didn’t remember correctly. I took pictures of their bodies because I thought that that might be needed for forensics or who knows what. When I had to identify them in the morgue, and when I went to look at the car a week or so later, they and the car were much more full of holes than I saw, or as they were in my photographs.
Consciousness is probably very shallow, hollow, pro forma, and incomplete. We might wish that it wasn’t that way, but it is.
Vollmann
So you photographed some of the same areas, like you could clearly see that one has a certain hole later on, but it does not in a photo you took at the time.
Yeah, that’s right.
Really?
My thought is that those poor guys [the Bosnian militiamen] made a mistake [by shooting at a press car] and they didn’t want it to be an international incident, so they made it into: “This was just a mine trap.”
My friends are just as dead.
It’s so easy to be uncertain about your own eyes and therefore, if you’re going to be honest, you have to write about the uncertainty.
Do you wonder much about your blind spots, your blockages—how your own psychology gets in the way of seeing things how they are?
Of course. We’re all very limited, and we’re excluded from most of the universe as a result of our own mortality and finitude. We each have to be blind to most of the universe, right?
I try to remember my ignorance—which is like my blindness—and say, “This is the best I can do. This is all that I see right now, and it really surprised me because I couldn’t have imagined this, so I feel like my comprehension of reality has expanded a little bit, and I’m hoping yours does too.”
That’s really all we can do.
At the Ohio archive of your materials, I saw your notes about that incident. They include a mathematical table where you are trying to allocate percentages of responsibility for what happened. Whether you are 10 or 20 percent responsible, compared to how much each of your friends were responsible, and so on. This kind of taxonomy happens through your work—you try to apportion; to put things into tables. What is this? Is it trying to force, or to convert, uncertainty into certainty? Into accountable reality?
We always understand less than we want to and think we do, but we have to believe that it’s always possible to understand more. One of the best ways to understand things is to break them up into small pieces and then compare those pieces.
Did you have much emotional turmoil after the deaths of your friends?
I was just grateful to be alive. That’s all. But we can’t make too much of those things. The people who were stuck in Bosnia and got killed—their deaths are more of a tragedy, right? We chose to go there. That was our job. We took that risk, and it gives me the right and the freedom to say what I truly believe, whatever anyone else thinks, but also the obligation to not whine too much if something happens to me.
Did you have, did you dream about it or dream about those guys?
Not so much. No.
Vollmann explores Santeria for SPIN’s April 1995, issue.
Is there a shamanistic quality to your writing? I’m partly thinking of how Carbon Ideologies is addressed to people of the future—written for don’t exist to get a sense of our vanity and carelessness, explaining how even in sunblazed desert cities we built huge glass buildings that took huge amounts of carbon-burning, future-eating energy to create and maintain because we considered them aesthetically pleasing. I ask this remembering an afternoon in the Colombian Andes when I emerged from an unbearably brutal medicine ceremony and sat with the shaman, who said that this waking life was the lesser world, and that my pain had been so great because the dead, those in the beyond into which he had temporarily hurled me, feel and comprehend infinitely more than we. Do you see the here and now, or Bosnia then, as existing in a kind of lower world that you are visiting in order to pass messages to other times—other worlds?
Everything that ever has existed always will exist, which is a nicer way to put it than how Odin did in the Eddas where he said that the only thing that never dies is the doom over each one of us who is dead. Kind of a grim way of putting it. But in Last Stories (Bill’s 2014 collection of ghost tales) there’s a story I wrote called “Listening to the Shells.” I was in Sarajevo during the siege, and then I went back there 20 odd years later. I was older and people were trying to forget about the siege and yet, at the same time, once they knew that I had been there for a part of it we had this connection. And it was a very, very sad connection because I remember saying in ‘92 how urgent it all felt, how the whole world, as it seemed—at least the media literate world—was focusing on Sarajevo.
Now no one could care less.
That’s how things always go. It’s like if you pick up For Whom the Bell Tolls or Homage to Catalonia, the fact that the Spanish Civil War was decided, that it was lost, doesn’t mean that we can’t still identify with that struggle. Or that Under the Volcano isn’t still a great book for that reason, you know? Would that be shamanistic? I don’t know. I’m not gonna say that I do or don’t think that the dead are aware of me.
For me probably the most spiritual experience would be sexuality, and having spent a lot of time with prostitutes and seeing how some of them really are like goddesses and some are like sacrificial animals, all the kinds of ways in which they interact and take away people’s pain and loneliness—maybe not unlike the old Welsh sin eaters. I find that sort of thing very powerful.
But I would imagine, particularly, that a lot of the horror and misery that I have seen and tried to describe are going to be very, very unimpressive to people in the future. Because the whole world is going down. We’re going to die a long, ugly death. So, who’s going to care about a book like Poor People [Bill’s 2007 account of asking folk in a variety of countries why they are poor] when people are dying of hunger and rioting and getting killed by killer methane storms and all the rest of it?
They may think, “Oh, well look, this is how good Bill had it. This is the worst that he can talk about: some things in Colombia, and Bosnia, and September 11th. We have that every day now. So what do we care?”
Volume one of Vollmann’s 2018 missive to the future.
What’s with your aversion to the digital world and all its comms and gear?
I feel sorry for everybody else who is constantly interrupted. Instant communication is vile communication.
When I went to Congo for Men’s Journal, they told me I should really get a cell phone for when I was over there, and I said, “Why?” And they said, “In case we want to change the plan.” I said, “If you want to change the plan when I am in the middle of some crummy assignment then I would just as soon not know till I got back, so I’m not getting a cell phone.”
They could always send someone down the river for you, right?
Yeah, with an ax.
I didn’t get the cell phone and they didn’t run the story, but it got to be in Rising Up and Rising Down as “Special Tax,” so what do I care?
The simple solution is to get rid of 80% of the human race.
Vollmann
How does your libertarianism coexist with your dismay over what you say people are doing to the planet via energy-intensive convenience, and with a major increase in state regulation being the only chance for slamming the brakes on the greenhouse effect?
I’m in favor of the least amount of regulation that will get the job done. Lincoln, in his thoughts on government, said that the purpose of government is to do for people what people can’t do for themselves. When you read the Icelandic sagas—there were no police, so they could get people outlawed. Sometimes it was corrupt that they would or wouldn’t be outlawed. And then it was contingent on so-and-so to kill that person once he was outlawed, or to chase him out of the country. That was one kind of system. But most of us would not want to be in that system. I feel sad sometimes that I cannot really count on the police to protect me, so I’m grateful when I have a gun that I can pull out if someone’s trying to break into my place in the middle of the night and the police won’t come.
But where libertarianism really fails in my opinion is anything to do with the environment, and anything to do with the un-level playing field—strong versus the weak, the corporation versus the individual. If General Motors and I each have the same rights, guess who’s always gonna win? Not me.
It’s really tricky and we certainly do not want to regulate everybody to death. I have a very, very strong hatred for authority. The most sensible solution to our problems, which no one really wants to hear, would be a massive population reduction.
If people don’t wanna be nickeled and dimed on what’s the most efficient way for their country to produce nitric acid and how efficient their solar collectors should be, and all this kind of stuff, the simple solution is to get rid of 80% of the human race. To say, “All right, here’s the deal. We’re gonna be authoritarian in this way. People are just not allowed to have children except for some kind of a lottery—until we can get the population down, give the planet a chance to recover, and then people can be a lot more free.
If there were just one person left in the world, theoretically he could have fun dumping dioxide into the ocean all day.
What is your visual impairment? How do things look to you?
Untreated infant strabismus. Everything looks like a photograph. You see in three dimensions, and so you see the flatness of a photograph. I don’t. A photograph looks like everything else.
William Vollmann in Lyon, central eastern France, 2012. (Credit: Philippe Merle/AFP via GettyImages)
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