Tim Horvath
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading and why. One Note 008: Tim Horvath, William T. Vollmann, 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Tim Horvath.
Today I am reading Vollmann, this time his 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs. My relationship with Vollmann is volatile. I regularly seek solace in The Atlas, which still manages to jolt me out of my one life and place with its many; it sweeps me from Agra to the Yukon to Omaha more quickly and consummately than Google Earth ever could. I’ve set out to read The Ice Shirt numerous times to no avail—I get mired in the floes of its language, the frigid, detached sensibility that goes hand in hand with the fidelity to the sagas it emulates. Europe Central is another non-starter for me. But 13 Stories—this is the Atlas-minded Vollman I can’t get too much of. From its opening, “The Ghost of Magnetism,” I am spinning: “Before I had even gone away, I started polishing San Francisco as if it were a pair of glasses to look through and every new thing dust and dandruff”; he goes on to plot four imagined escapes, one in each compass direction. As with a film that pounds on its coffin and springs back to life during the credits, Vollmann will make sure you never again brush over a copyright page, for fear of missing items such as: “’The Happy Girls’ first appeared in a hand-printed artist’s edition of thirteen copies, complete with photographs, underwear, mirror-glass, peephole, buzzer, electric red light, and bra straps”; another of the mighty thirteen was originally illustrated with “the most poisonous pigments available.” And throughout, one finds this brazen, chaotic energy. Energy—do we really know what it is—in literature, beyond? I mean, it’s the core concept of our contemporary condition, from the environmental disasters that have us on the edge of our seats right now to the drink I’m drinking that’s working syncopations on my private palpitations. I heard on public radio the other day a neuroscientist talking about how in Parkinson’s, neurons fire in too orderly a fashion, contributing to its robotic gestures. One remedy, then, is actually to induce chaos in the brain. 13/13 is the stuff of palpitation.
Tim Horvath is the author of Circulation and has stories in Conjunctions, Fiction, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Chester College of New England.
