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Title: Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
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| Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means by Certainly Posessed of Genius | | I have the revised edition (which is availble remaindered at the Barnes and Nobles in my areas for ten bucks), and I can see from the progress I have made in it that it is an extremely important work and might unlock some of Vollman's other work. However, I have some reservations; the abridgement does not seem like it was what Vollman wanted, and some of the cuts leave a disjointed feeling. I have found that I can skip around in the book without losing the meaning, and the arguments do not seem to develop from the first page to the last, but gradually throughout the book. I am reluctant to invest in the seven volume set, but I would like to see an abridgement that is more considered and smooth. Vollman states that he abridged "for money"...when he does it for love of or respect for his readers I think this will be his masterpiece. As is, it is very very good but somehow lack cohesion. | | Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means by The 7 Volume Set | | Vollmann's work is expensive, sprawling, beautiful, and sterilizingly heavy. It's historical analysis, personal anecdote, philosophical inquiry, ethical manifesto, war journalism (his), photography and drawings (mostly his), and thumbnail illustrations. And it's worth the price to get one of the few remaining sets. You'll become intimately acquainted with Trotsky, Cortes, Lincoln, Plato, John Brown, Stalin, Leonidas, Gandhi, the Unabomber, de Sade, Hitler, Montezuma, the Ik, Napoleon, and Mikhail Bakunin, among others. Will you run across an occasional typo or forced metaphor? Sure. But considering the product, who cares? It's brilliant and very, very readable. Two things particularly please me about this work. First, Vollmann never pretends to objectivity. RURD is an "essay" in the original sense of the word, and provokes plenty of discussion. Second, McSweeney's typography and binding are breathtaking, so that each volume is a pleasure to see and hold, much less read. If you enjoy the abridgment, the set is worth all 50,000+ pennies, or whatever the last sets are going for. | | Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means by His Life's work, abridged, a worthwhile pursuit for him | Vollmann has called this his life's work, and it shows, the book distills his original heart and soul, tearing through readable passages of objective reasoning, making circuitous and interesting routes towards his moral abstract for violence. The reading is passionate and well-reasoned, even if flawed at times. For me, it has exposed me to more historical figures and recent phiolospophical thinking that has escaped modern culture (or at least my Western one). I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes to observe history (like fans of Robert Conquest) through the lens of modern philospy.
| | Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means by The abyss gazeth also into thee... | The philosophy of war has always been unsatisfying. Abstract "moral calculus" -the term deployed by Vollman to refer to the ethical analysis of violence - is clearly necessary, but the biological realities of violence always seem to render the sterile rationality of philosophers irrelevant. Determining when violence is and is not morally justified is such a difficult task that it is tempting to just dispose of the question, taking refuge in absolutist positions like pacifism or Kissingerian realism. As a result, worthwhile contributions to the practical ethics of war are few and far between.
This is the best attempt to reason through the moral problems of violence since Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars" and it improves on that flawed work in every way. Vollman's analysis is not limited to nation-states, he distinguishes between just and unjust regimes, he does not assume that there must be a binary moral value to every act of violence, and he knows when to conclude that a moral problem is insoluable.
Vollman passes judgment confidently when it is called for, but he has a healthy respect the lesser of two evils, the exigencies of war, and the pressures of decisionmaking in violent situations. He makes objective moral judgments, but they are clearly informed by his own subjective encounters with violence and death.
That said, this book has a lot of problems. First off, Vollman is clearly a thrill-seeker. When he talks about packing a handgun in Golden Gate Park or smoking crack cocaine, he reveals a very unusual attitude toward death. We should be suspicious of the moral handwringing of anyone who has deliberately seeks out violence. When he recounts the deaths of his colleagues while he was a reporter in the Balkans, I find myself wondering if this was not another "limit experience" that he actively chased. The experience of an aspiring novelist-DETERMINED to find abysses to gaze into-is just not comparable to that of the Somali and Sarajevan civilians who had no choice but to passively endure extreme violence.
The other big problem with this book is the lack of structure and logical rigor. If you have read any of his fiction, you know that this is just how Vollman's (brilliant) mind works, but this book suffers for it. It's a sustained meditation on violence, not a work to which the reader can refer for moral guidance in a specific situation. But it's still the best contemporary work in an otherwise empty field and very much worth reading. | | Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means by Vanquishing Personal Demons | In writing Rising Up and Rising Down, William T. Vollmann has forgotten that the primary purpose of writing a book is communication. To this end, one would expect the author to use a consistent style to aid the reader's progress, rather than arguing:
Should I have standardized these inconsistencies? I recall Lawrence of Arabia's comments to the proofreader who warned him that he had spelled the name of this favorite camel every which way in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence replied simply, "She was a splendid beast." (p. 534.)
One would also expect the writer to express his ideas, not only completely, but also concisely. Even in the abridged version, arguments are stated one on top of the other, separated from the information that supports them. As the book progresses, earlier arguments are often referred to by number, forcing the reader to flip through the pages to recall the passages cited.
Near the beginning of the book, Vollmann writes:
I had a gun . . . and right then I did not feel comforted . . . The books that I read and the things that I saw while writing this book affected me more than I wanted them to . . . Near the end of the twenty years that I spent writing this book, I began to suffer from frequent nightmares of violence . . . They were not normal sights that I'd seen-or were they all too normal?-and these were not normal thoughts, and I knew this and sought to dampen the vibrations of my paranoia . . . (pp. 78-79)
I submit that Mr. Vollmann wrote this book, not to inform his readers, but to vanquish his own demons. In reading Rising Up and Rising Down, I was sometimes informed, sometimes confused and often numbed. Further revision and editing might make this book into a useful study in violence, or, perhaps it was never more than the author's self-therapy.
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