Recent Stories with tag suicide

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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Courtesy WSDOT

California has two bridges that are magnets for jumpers, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, and the Coronado in San Diego. Seattle's Aurora Bridge may be second or third in this tragic popularity contest, says the Los Angeles Times, but it has its own distinction in that so many miss the water:

That dubious honor ["despairing jumpers in danger of becoming deadly missiles"] is reserved for Seattle, where the 78-year-old Aurora Bridge runs 167 feet above the west end of Lake Union--half of it over land.

The story, "In Seattle, a suicide barrier for a deadly bridge," charts the difficult process of the city getting around to doing something about a bridge where over 230 have ended their lives. Since 1995 alone, Kim Murphy notes, there have been almost 50 jumpers, with over half hitting the ground outside of Fremont offices. Seattle FRIENDS says on average, there is a suicide every three months.

After more than a decade of discussion--how about banning pedestrians? How about building a caged walkway?--the utility of a suicide barrier finally overcame the barrier of aesthetics. For $4.6 million, "a series of thin, closely spaced vertical posts 8 feet, 9 inches high" is being installed, which we're getting at almost 50 percent off, thanks to the recession.

Gig Harbor's Massana Construction will be installing the fence this summer, and finish by fall. Lane closures (double lanes at night, single lanes during rush hour) will occur, but WSDOT thinks there may be fewer than they estimated.

Lots of people read (or attempted to read) David Foster Wallace's 1079-page epic this summer, the year after he killed himself.

John Moe did not. Why? He explains on Infinite Summer:

The thing is, when someone decides not to go to work one day and instead puts a bullet in their head, everything else they do is a prologue to that act. So every camping trip anecdote, every story told by a trucking company co-worker about Rick’s penchant for adopting injured animals, every joke shared by a fellow volunteer at the sobriety hotline where he dedicated his time, it all leads up to what he did and that’s how you understand it. Their lives read like a suicide note. The howl Kurt Cobain produces on “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” from the Unplugged in New York album is terrifying to me, or would be if I could listen to Nirvana anymore. I picture every Wallace book I see on a shelf as being soaked in tears.

Rick is Moe's brother, who killed himself in 2007. Read the whole sad and beautiful essay...

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