Recent Stories with tag kissing the mask

This is what William T. Vollmann tells me about death and getting the story. We are at the bar at Sazerac downtown, and are just wrapping up a long talk over the Scotch he generously ordered (Highland Park, him; Laphroaig, me):

One of the great things, I think, about death, is that as we get closer to death we start to sense our own aloneness, and so, whatever the story is, even if we want to hide it from ourselves, it has to come up. So it's always great to talk to dying people, too. 

William T. Vollmann

Just past 50, Vollmann is no longer a have-gun-will-travel enfant terrible--but most except the enfant still applies. (When we spoke for this interview,his hazard-pay-worthy travels in Iraqi Kurdistan article had just appeared in Harper's, and he'd just finished writing another piece for Harper's on policy advances in suicide, with stops in Oregon and Switzerland.) His granite block of a head is topped by a buzz-cut stubble, his face weathered, and he couldn't have been a more agreeable former National Book Critics Circle Award-winner, telling me to call him "Bill."

Violence and Vollmann go together, not least because of his idiosyncratic, magisterial Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, 7-volume examination of humanity's "moral calculus" as it applies to violence that more or less exhausted McSweeney's Books entire publishing budget that year. His first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World grew out of a youthful, action-seeking sojourn to Afghanistan in 1982.

If you mention trips you regret not taking, he says things like, "I went to Iraq in '98 for Saddam's birthday, and I wish I had taken the trouble to go to Babylon. He had it rebuilt and each brick was stamped with his name. I would have enjoyed seeing that." Your story was about study abroad, and you shut up and sip your Scotch.

So it might surprise you to learn that his latest book centers on esoteric Noh theater. Anyone familiar with Vollmann's prolixity will smile along with his his tripartite title: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater: with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines.

He's not kidding, of course. The list underscores that omnivorous Vollmann appetite for empathetic connection. In conversation, when cites someone else's opinion, he habitually takes up their voice and quotes them. It may be a paraphrase, but it's not derisive. He mentions several times how "alien" Noh is, and I hear, in part, a gratitude for the challenge of it. 

As a classical Japanese art form, Noh theater doesn't seem to have a Western equivalent. Vollmann and I talked about whether opera is similar, but I got the feeling that, in terms of accessibility, our opera is more like Kabuki. ("Noh is for the warrior," a Kabuki actor told Vollmann. "Kabuki is for the general public." To which Vollmann later appends: "Noh's violence has most often to do with the severance of ties.")

You have to imagine an alternate universe where opera split at the time of Monteverdi, and a branch that distilled opera to its essence grew. Noh is music drama: it has a canon of plays; men play the parts of men and women, with masks and costumes; and its performance is ritualized and highly demanding of both performers and audience.

The book touches on many things besides, but its general preoccupations are with how we see and represent the feminine, the transience of life and the immortality of art, and empathy. Knowing of his 20-year construction of Rising Up, I asked how long Kissing the Mask had been germinating, and he told me, "I guess you can say I've been working on the book since, you know, 1975." ...

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• Author William T. Vollmann talks about his exploration of Noh drama and femininity, Kissing the Mask, at the Northwest African American Museum at 7 p.m. tonight; tomorrow he's at Third Place Books.

William T. Vollmann, author, gun owner

There are two kinds of readers in this world: those that know of William T. Vollmann, and those that can't handle the truth. You could argue there's a third group of people who know of him, but can't keep up with his output. He's written 21 books in 23 years, which includes Rising Up and Rising Down, a 7-volume exploration of humanity's rationales for violence. You can't find that one anywhere, it's sold out. Hobos, prostitutes, illegal immigrants, and terrorists have captured his attention. He's been a war correspondent, and burned off his eyebrows on a trip to the North Pole.

I'm halfway through his latest, with its duffel-bag-sized title of Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater with Some Thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries, and Venus Figurines. At 200 pages in, it's been mostly Noh, through the recollections, interviews, and research of an enthusiast (not an expert, as Vollmann is careful to emphasize). Though he has just hung out with a 60-something geisha.

Reading Vollmann may be an uneasy experience--he has a talent for putting himself into comprising situations, and for speaking his mind while in them--but this book is filled with an unusual passion and sincerity. Along with copious footnotes--you could dismiss Vollmann as a "holy fool," but for the knowledge he possesses, which (let's face it) few of us would go through such trouble to get firsthand.

The combination of his perverse/idiosyncratic lines of inquiry with the academic rigor of his observation often yields a bittersweet, bite-of-the-apple result: you're wiser, but the world is weirder than you thought.