Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Mondo 2000/William-Vollman

Text File | 1993-01-01 | 33KB | 563 lines

William Vollmann

INTERVIEW BY LARRY MCCAFFERY

[INTRO]

MONDO 2000: I'd like to begin by having you talk about your new
book, The Ice Shirt, and how it fits into the sequence of seven dream
novels that you plan to publish over the next few years.

WILLIAM VOLLMANN: The Ice Shirts is the first book in a
septology of what I'm calling "dream-novels."  My idea for this
sequence came about in a complicated way.  When I went to
Afghanistan in 1982, I was lured there by the thought of this unknown
exotic experience-or by a whole bunch of exotic experiences. I guess
what I wanted was to confront this foreign "other." Later on, I began
to realized that's it pretty hard to know yourself and harder still to
know the other. And hardest of all to know something which is really
foreign. So my book on Afghanistan ended up being basically about
the unknowability of their experience.  That made me want to focus
my interest more and more on things closer to home and that was one
of the connecting threads underlying the different sorts of things you
find in The Rainbow Stories' . The simplest way to put it is that in The
Rainbow Stories I wanted to understand what America's like. There
was still this element of my fascination with the exotic experience--I
wanted to look at lost souls and marginal people, with the hope that
maybe by understanding them I could help them somehow, as I had
done with the Afghans. The experience of writing The Rainbow
Stories lead me to realize that I still didn't really understand anything
about America and that I probably never would. But it occurred to me
that one way of starting to understand would be to see where we as
Americans have come from and how we've changed. So it seemed like
a nice idea to go back to the Indians--in fact, go back as far I could,
which is to the first recorded contact with Indians--and describe
everything which has happened since then in a series of books that
winds up covering roughly a thousand year period. The first people
that we know of to come to this continent after the Indians were the
Norse, who came here around 1000 AD. The Ice Shirt', which is the
first in the series, describes how they came and how they tried to stay
but weren't able to. I've always been very interested Ovid's
Metamorphoses , and from Ovid I got the idea that there had been a
series of different ages on our continent, with each age being a little bit
inferior to the age that preceded it. So, for poetic or didactic purposes
I decided that there would seven dreams and therefore seven ages. In
the first dream of The Ice Shirt the Norse begin this process of
degradation by introducing ice into "Vinland" (which is what they
called North America). In the Norse sagas they talk about how there
was no ice during the winter when they came. Of course, maybe they
were exaggerating (because they came from Greenland, what they
thought of as "ice" or an "icy" landscape might be different from what
we do), but it was nice to suppose that there really wasn't ice here
when they landed. In which case, one can imagine that perhaps they
brought the ice with them--in their hearts somehow.  Maybe winter
was the first curse that came to Vinland. The other dreams will carry
on different aspects of this motif until we end up at the present when
everything was sort of concreted over.

M2: Your earlier work displays a similar fascination with change and
metamorphosis--it was obvious, for example, in You Bright and Risen
Angels' where you depict the same kinds of literalized interaction
between people, plants, animals, and nature. What lies behind your
decision to depict these kinds of interactions that seem so fantastic
from a realistic standpoint?

WV: Metamorphosis is one of the main activities of human beings.
We're always trying to transform ourselves into things that we are not
yet--and may not ever become. We do this either because we're bored
or unhappy with what we are, or because we're satiated, or because we
want to improve ourselves. But whatever underlying motivations there
are behind this, it's a central activity. A lot of creation myths,
probably all creation myths, deal with this. In a way, history is
basically a description of metamorphosis. As we go from myth to
history, people lose a lot of their powers. Suddenly they're not able
anymore to change themselves into birds, or to gain superhuman
powers (or they can do these things only very rarely) but they're still
are to change themselves from one kind of person to another. In The
Ice Shirt I talk a lot about that particular barrier between myth and
history. In the old days people could change into bears (at least men
could), and then suddenly that doesn't become possible anymore. We
actually get into the ken of memory and history. People can imagine
that there was such a thing, but whether or not it ever really happen
we will never know.

M2: From the very beginning, American mythology has always had
to do precisely with the notion of being able to change what you are
(orwho you are) simply by moving, changing your environment.  Have
we lost the belief that getting on the river or the road and getting the
hell out of some place will allow us to change our lives, change
ourselves?

WV: I think we have. Most of the transformation which has occurred
on this continent is over with. What remains can be extrapolated from
forces that are now already in place.  I'm not trying to make some
Hegelian argument that history is coming to end, or suggest that I
know what's going to happen in the future. Things will continue to
change in this country, and perhaps very radically so.  But my sense
is that the other massive and violent transformations which are going
to impinge on us (as they always will, because history is like that) are
probably going to come from some outside source.

M2: What sort of thing are you thinking about?

WV: Well, for instance, perhaps the possibility that the global balance
of power will shift in such a way that we become a very backward sort
of country that gets broken up into smaller republics. Or let's suppose
that environmental problems, which we brought about ourselves very
directly, continue to operate and cause a lot of death and suffering and
transform the country that way.

M2: We see some of this happening right now with something like the
multinationals--they're already manipulating different aspects of our
country (our economy, our relationship to our natural environment,
etc.) in ways that aren't tied to our national identity or anything.

WV: That's right. A lot of the horrible ecological things that both we
and the Japanese continue to do are outgrowths of very predictable
technological decisions. That's another thing which the books inSeven
Dreams are going to take up in different ways. Each time there's a new
icon or fetish introduced in the way it was in The Ice Shirts it's going
to have a rather baleful effect.

M2: Like the ax in The Ice Shirt . . .

WV: Right--the iron ax which the Norsemen bring with them and
which the Native Americans reject. But in dream number six, for
instance, which involves the destruction of the Arctic, the icon is now
the repeating rifle which the Native Americans don't reject .  And as
a result there is mass starvation when the caribou are wiped out.

M2: The moment in The Ice Shirt' when the Indian picks up the ax
after killing one of the Norsemen with it, and then looks at it and
decides to throw it back into the

water reminded me of the scene in 2001: a Space Odyssey , where the
cave man throws the bone up in the air and the bone is transformed
into a space station--both your scene and Kubrick's seem to be
describing one of those absolutely pivotal moments in history where
technology is being introduced. Only in your scene, the Native
Americans at least temporarily reject what's being presented to them.

WV: I wasn't specifically thinking of the movie analogy, but the way
you're describing it is reasonable. I see that moment in The Ice Shirt
as being the beginning of American history.  What's happened is that
the Norse--with their characteristic combination of courage,
ruthlessness, and arrogance--had decided they are going to take over
this territory.  The way their mind set works is that these Indians are
outlaws and can therefore be killed at will. The Indians, of course,
don't see it that way at all, so there's a battle and the Indians with
their stone axes almost lose to the iron axes. In fact, they do lose that
battle.  But they don't lose in the long run because they're so
numerous and the Norse technological superiority is not so much
greater that they can hope to be safe there. And so, the Norse
eventually leave.  But in one of the battles, one of the Norse axes has
killed one of the Indians, and another Indian picks it up and kills
somebody else with it. He understands how sharp and strong it is, but
he throws it away anyway. This really happens in one of the Norse
sagas, and when I came across it, I thought it was a really odd and
extraordinary moment. I had the feeling that here was the first
confrontation between a native, established way of life and this new
power which the natives had never seen before.  That ice was the
beginning of this new power which was going to transform the
landscape and pretty much ruin them--and pretty much ruin us, as
well. It was interesting that they chose to reject that power, an act
which you can call the opening of American history.  The scene with
the acceptance of the rifles by the Eskimos many years later is sort of
the close of the whole process.

M2: The whole notion of creating this seven volume saga strikes me
as an astonishingly ambitious and confident undertaking for a writer
of your age, and where you are in your career.  Could you talk about
how the concept of this project evolved? Did you know from the
outset that it was going to require so many novels?  And, having now
planned this project and gotten it underway, don't you have qualms
about committing yourself to something this huge?

WV: When I started I wanted to do something more or less along the
lines of Metamorphoses and I thought I could do it in about the same
length. It seemed like it would be really interesting to have the entire
thousand year period told, vividly and poetically, in one volume.  But
once I started working on the first part of it, I realized pretty soon that
there was no way that the thing could fit into one volume. Then, since
I had already planned on calling the book Seven Dreams , I figured I
might as well do the thing in seven volumes.  So that's how I arrived
at the overall conception. As far as starting on this when I'm so
young, it's going to take at least ten years to finish. Maybe longer.
And lot of the research involves traveling to places that require
physical hardship.  When I go to the Arctic, for instance, I live in a
tent and carry all of my food and other equipment on my back--110
or 120 pounds of stuff. Twenty years from now that may be hard. So,
if I want to do this thing at all, I have to do it now. My only real
concern is whether I'll be able to continue making money from my
writing in a way that allows me to travel to the places I need to. As
long as that basic precondition is met, I don't have any qualms.

M2: A book like You Bright and Risen Angels is clearly a long,
difficult, obsessive work. Were you at all aware when you were writing
it that it was going to be difficult for this book to attract a large
audience? Or do you just write the way the way you feel compelled to
write and not concern yourself with the question of "audience" at all?

WV: I just make the best book that I can. I like most individuals I
meet, but I have a pretty low opinion of people in general. If I were to
write for people in general, I would have to drastically lower my
estimation of the intelligence of my reader, so I don't. I write the way
it seems to me a book has to appear.  If that means that the book
won't sell or that a publisher won't buy it, then that's my problem. I'll
suffer for that, but I won't let the book suffer for it.

M2: Obviously there are a lot of differences between The Rainbow
Stories and You Bright and Risen Angels , not so much thematic
differences but in the manner of exposition, which seems somewhat
more straightforward in  The Rainbow Stories.  Was that a conscious
shift--to try your hand at writing in more traditional, expository ways?


WV: Somewhat so, yes. In Rainbow Stories I was aware of not
wanting to use the pyrotechnics when they weren't
appropriate,whereas in Angels, particularly in the first half,
pyrotechnics was the whole purpose of the book. I wrote Angels to
enjoy myself by inventing all of these weird things, by letting myself go
and invent whatever I could come up with. I had a real good time
doing that. That pyrotechnical or improvisational approach created
the book's own structure, in effect--although, of course, once I let
things loose, I would then go back and try and impose some kind of
a story structure on it. But with Rainbow most of the time I was was
working at something which had a predefined structure, not just
something that was creating its own. For instance, the documentary

pieces (which for some reason the reviews have generally focused on):
when you're working from a structure of fact then you want to present
the fact in certain way; you can't take such liberties as to obscure the
fact. And even the non-documentary stories were also more focused
and limited simply because they were stories. The reason I wanted to
write The Rainbow Stories after Angels was partly a matter of my
wanting to create these discreet artifacts as opposed to something like
Angels , which used a sort of "writing-by- the-yard" approach and
could easily have been 10 thousand pages longer.

M2: What sorts of research was involved in writing The Ice Shirt ? I
gather from your elaborate list of acknowledgments that you went
around and looked up original materials. Were a lot of these
translations of this original Norse material--the sagas, and so on?

WV: Right. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any real professional
help for The Ice Shirt on the Norse side. That's been very frustrating
for me and I'm sure there are some errors in my portrayal of the
Norse. I've been interested in the sagas for a very long time-- a good
twelve to fifteen years. I have a bunch of them in translations that I
know fairly well, so it was easy for me to sit down and work with
them. Visiting some of the places in Iceland and Greenland helped
bring them alive for me in ways that just reading about them never
could. But I've always felt that when an original text I'm using says
something, then I have no right to say the opposite. So, say, if there is
a recorded speech somewhere, then I'll try and use that speech in my
novel, although I may change it just a little bit.  When working with
original texts, novelists are always walking this tight rope between
self-indulgence (if you don't try and do something "original" with this
material) and plagiarism--if you go too far the other way, in the
direction of "slavish accuracy" as I say in my source notes. My own
feeling is that I have the right to work from these other sources, but
that I should never try to distort them. I should be aiming at
embellishing or collaborating with this stuff--which is my right as a
novelist who has an imagination.

M2: What sorts of "embellishments" are involved? For example, with
the two main women characters in The Ice Shirt, Gudrid and Freydis
--how much information did you have about them, and then how
much did you supply?

WV: They were actual characters who appear in "The Vinland Sagas,"
which have been translated by Penguin in a very slender paperback of
probably fifty pages or less of big print. It's very taciturn. The sagas
don't tell you much about the motivation of characters.  Gudrid is the
real heroine of the two sagas, although, in one of the sagas Freydis
comes across as worse than the others (that is, in one of the sagas
Freydis murders people and in the other one she doesn't). But in both
versions Gudrid is this steadfast women who is beautiful and fortunate
and marries well. Everyone admires her and she is really good--or at
least she seems to be. That was how I originally wanted to portray her.
But the more I read over the sagas the more irritated with Gudrid I
started to get after a while because she seemed too much like a
goody-goody. And then I started seeing that all these things that she
was doing were really to her advantage. Actually, to my mind she was
probably worse than Freydis. I respect a villain who is an honest
villain. So the character of Gundrid in the sagas was transformed in
that way. I'm sure that if the anonymous authors of the two sagas
could read what I have written, they'd feel I had very stubbornly and
wrong- headedly distorted the character of this virtuous women who
they admired. But I myself feel that everything I've done with them
was implicit in the tale.

M2: In your acknowledgments to The Ice Shirt you specifically
mention Ms. Andrea Juneau, the coeditor of Re/Search as serving as
model for the form of Gudrid, and the transvestites Miss J and Miss
Gidding for, "a complete presentation of man to woman
transformations" on which you based a scene in your novel. Most
fiction writers don't present this sort of direct acknowledgement of
specific autobiographical basis of a scene or episode, because they're
worried this might either make their works sound "derivative" or
destroy the illusion of the reality of the fiction. But all along you've
never seemed much interested in erecting that illusion--or in
maintaining that distinction between fiction and non-fiction.

WV: That's definitely true. I'm a very visually oriented writer. I have
some painter friends who tell me that it's much easier for them to read
my work and then draw a picture of what it would look like than it is
with most writers. The reason for that is because I'm always taking
care whenever I can--particularly in something like The Ice Shirt or
The Rainbow Stories , where it isn't just a work of the imagination--to
try and see real things which then I can describe accurately. To do
anything otherwise is an act of disrespect, I think (again, that wasn't
so much the case in You Bright and Risen Angels because there my
purpose was to use my imagination solely).  To me it's just as
important and valuable to have a chance to go to Greenland's
Landsmuseum and handle a polar bear skull as to talk to my
transvestite friends and see how they do what they're doing. I didn't
feel any compunction about putting in the scene with the transvestites
because that was the scene I had best access to that could enable me
to describe a transformation from a man into a woman. It's pretty
hard to find spirit women these days who'll go around touching men
and making them turn into women. So this was the best I could do.

M2: In all three of your books you transport readers fluidly from
different worlds, times, and reality zones. It's almost as if you want
readers to recognize that their own worlds are more open ended and
more fluid, temporally and spatially, than they realize--that they're not
just sealed off.

WV: People would be much better off if they realized that their own
particular world was not privileged. Everyone's world is no more and
no less important than everyone else's.  So to have as many worlds as
possible, each invested with some kind of interest or meaning, is a way
of making that point. I've gradually begun to see that I can use even
my footnotes and glossaries and other sorts of materials to create
some of this sense.

M2: This idea of forcing people to recognize that their worlds aren't
the only ones-- and of creating contexts that bring together different
perspectives and world views-- seems like one of the underlying
impulse behind The Rainbow Stories, where nearly all the stories deal
with people who have been radically marginalized in one way or
another (prostitutes, homeless alcoholics, murderers, underground
guerilla artists like Mark Pauline and the Survival Research Lab, and
so on).

WV: Very definitely. I wanted to create a context so that people in
these different worlds could see each other. Originally I'd hoped that
somehow maybe if I described them well enough that then a few
people reading these stories would say, "Oh, they're people and maybe
I should even talk to them."  But I don't really have that belief or hope
anymore. I don't think that any work of literature can do that, no
matter how well it is written.

M2: What made you change your mind?

WV: Getting a bit more experienced. Seeing the way people treat each
other. Especially people who are a little bit younger like to hope that
maybe somehow that they can change the world--and not just change
it in the sense of moving it from one random state to another (which
is what is always going to happen) but somehow to make the world
better.  But at a certain point you see more clearly that obviously the
world is no better now than it ever was. And my current thinking is
that literature isn't enough to bring people together or produce some
real understanding of one another. Some sort of action is required, but
right now I don't know what that action might be, how it would work;
in fact, I'm pretty sure that it'll never be any better than it is now.
Given that, all anyone can ever hope to do is either change a few
specific things in a few specific ways (which will probably change
again after you finish tinkering with them, after you die or whatever),
or else you can hope to help yourself and other people to accept the
fundamental viciousness and inertia of things. That's something
religion does, for example. It's also something literature can do.

M2: Even if literature can't really change the situations you're
describing--or even produce a deep understanding between
people--isn't there some real value in simply opening a window on
these other worlds?

WV: If literature is valuable in and of itself (which is something I'm
not sure of) then I'd say that opening those sorts of windows or
communication channels is one of the most valuable things that
literature can do.

M2: But of course, these are just any worlds you've chosen to open
windows onto-- most of these realms are going to strike your readers
as being particularly grotesque, repellant, violent, disturbing. Do you
think there's something particular useful about confronting readers
with things that aren't just unfamiliar to them but which will likely
seem ugly or disturbing?

WV: Absolutely, because you're raising the stakes. Just getting people
to accept anything  that's different without being disturbed is a step
forward. But it's a far braver step to accept the presence of dignity and
beauty and most of all likeness or kinship in something which is ugly.
If more people could do that the world would be a better place.

M2: You describe J.G. Ballard's work somewhere as being, "Just
mythological permutations of accidents and destructions with no
message except there is nothing to say or feel anymore." There is a way
in which that description applies to the creations of Mark Pauline and
his Survival Research Lab, whom you devote a chapter to in The
Rainbow Stories.  But don't you feel that when people watch those
things by Mark Pauline that they do actually evoke fairly complicated
responses from the audience?

WV: No question about it. Part of what SRL does is very good and
very much in keeping with what they say they're doing--which is to
educate people about the extremely violent world we live in, and to
help them get in touch with these vicious empty mechanical feelings
and understand them. Part of what they do is also very self-serving
because people like to watch that stuff for the same reason they like to
watch horror movies. Not because they're going to learn how to avoid
it, but because they like to rub they're own noses in it.  I don't
know--It may well be that seeing those things makes people more
violent .

M2: There's something about this spectacle of machines crashing into
one another that's very powerful to me, emotionally. It's like the
response people get to car crashes, airplane crashes, or any machine
malfunction. You get a kind of empathy or thrill watching machines
being destroyed--the empathy of horror of watching this machine's
"body" malfunction. And part of it may have to do with feeling that
sense we're living in this mechanical world, that there's a kind of
private glee of liberation when we're watching the machines malfunctioning.

WV: The world we live in now is for most of us an immense trap or
even some kind of torture chamber. Outside it there's just this
vacuum, everything else has been destroyed by the torturers. So we
take joy when we see that the torturers are malfunctioning. But at the
same time we know that if we were to really exert ourselves and
destroy this thing we live in, then all the air would come rushing out
and we'd suffocate. That would be the end.  That's why violence is a
very tricky issue, both for artists and ordinary people. We all share all
these violent impulses, but we have ambivalent feelings about these
feelings.

M2: There seems to be an interesting feeling of ambivalence in your
writing about violence. On the one hand, there's a sense that you're
work is anti-violence, that you're satirizing or commenting upon the
violent world we live in; but there's a sense that you empathize with
this violence--almost like you're enjoying it.

WV: I'm sure there's a sadistic undercurrent in my work, just as there
is in almost anything which chooses violent subjects. At the same time,
I feel it's also clear that I think that violence is wrong and I'd be very
happy if none of it was left. So, for instance, in "The Blue Yonder," it's
my job to empathize with all my characters. That's what I'm after in
all my work. And "The Blue Yonder" is partly about acts of violence.
If I wanted to I could have tried not to empathize at all with this mass
murderer, the Zombie. In that way I could have stayed righteous and
pure, and the Zombie would have just been this two dimensional
character. Instead, I had to get inside the Zombie's head as well as the
victim's head. The Zombie obviously enjoys killing other people in
horrible ways and so if I'm doing my job, that enjoyment has to
appear in the writing. So in a sense that enjoyment is definitely in the
work. Whether or not that enjoyment is actually within me is
something I don't know how to answer.

M2: Beginning with You Bright and Risen Angels and continuing
right up through many of the pieces in The Rainbow Stories and then
in The Ice Shirt the violence you presents usually seems to be a twisted
response to love, or lack of love , or love with the wrong kind of thing.


WV: That's right: it does. I think this kind of thing has happened in
most violent people.  They had feelings of yearning, or longing, or
love, or whatever you want to call it, which couldn't be realized for
some reason. So that love either becomes frustrated and they become
violent in a certain way, or maybe the love is just completely burned
out of them, so they don't care what they do to people. The other
possibility (which is probably the most dangerous of all) is when these
feeling of love become manipulated by someone who's suffered one of
those other two things--someone who can then use that love for his
own end.  Someone who is a damaged soul, like Eichmann, would be
an example. If Eichman hadn't happen to have lived in Germany at a
certain time, he would have died unknown. He was a puttet of his
setting. What he wound up doing wasn't completely his fault--he
wanted somebody to love and then Hitler came along to fill that need;
so Eichmann had to do what his puppet master made him do.

M2: You said in that LA Times book review piece something like, 'I
admire writers that combine verbal and visual elements." And all your
books, as physical objects, have a fairly complex design component
that suggests that you're interested something more than just the book
as medium for print. So what is your background in painting and
drawing?

WV: I have no formal training. Painting or drawing for me is just an
additional way of expressing that visual element that I think is so
important in my work. Just as a series of words is more than a random
series of letters, a book should be more than a container for the words.
So, when I'm able to, I design my own books and build them with help
from others because I like to collaborate. At the very least I like to
have my books illustrated. I do the illustrations.

M2: A minute ago you were saying something to the effect that
sometimes the extreme case helps dramatize the general one. I'm
reminded of you epigraph to Angels , "Only the expert will realize that
your exaggerations are really true."

WV: There's a lot of truth to that. If there's any meaning or backbone
to something, a lot of times the way to get at it is to keep forcing it
into a more exaggerated caricature of itself.  Eventually you'll reach
some kind of limit where nothing is left but the exaggerated essence of
the thing. Then you can see what the thing really is because everything
is in sharper relief. That surface "realism" of ordinary life (and of most
fiction) covers up a lot of important things that artists need to recover
for people,whereas sometimes distortions help us look at things more
closely. If, for instance, in You Bright and Risen Angels I was talking
about Capitalist and Communists or white people and black people
instead of bugs and electricity, most Capitalist, Communists, white
people, and black people wouldn't be able to read it and get the point
because everyone would be already emotionally or intellectually
involved in their own particular side of things.

M2: You problematize all sorts of distinctions that people used to
make between fiction and autobiography, or between "realism" and
fantasy or science fiction. You seem very comfortable with the notion
that all these different worlds or perspectives co-exist and provide
"windows" into each other. And in fact, it seems to me that your
generation takes a lot of this for granted in ways that, say, the 60s
generation of experimental writers couldn't.

WV: That's probably true. And at this point, it's true throughout the
culture, not just in the arts. You see it in advertising, in television, in
shop windows, anything. The gain from

that is obvious: greater freedom in every way, more available options.
The loss from it is a sense of disorientation, plus when it's done
sloppily (the way it often is) there's no thought given to context. I
honestly believe that most people nowadays, including writers, know
less of the body of facts, and aesthetics--the basic core of information
about the work and culture and so forth, that makes up our
heritage--than people did earlier. That's very unfortunate because it
make it impossible to place these new options or combinations within
any context that means anything.

M2: The writing of several of your books has required you to put
yourself into a situation of personal danger or physical challenge,
adventure--entering into Afghanistan with your first book, hanging
out with skinheads and street people in Rainbow , traveling to the
Arctic wilderness in The Ice Shirt , and so on.  Do you find these
situations interesting from an aesthetic standpoint (because you think
they'll produce good writing) or mainly from a personal
standpoint--because you find these situations exciting or challenging?

WV: Every dog likes his own little corner that he can mark with his
own piss. For me one of the ways I can mark my own corner is by
going off to someplace where a lot of other writers wouldn't dare to
go. That way I don't have to worry about the competition writing
better things than I could. I guess I also feel attracted to the extreme
because I feel like frequently the extreme case will illustrate the general
case--and that it can sometimes do this more forcefully and
memorably than just dealing with the general or the ordinary.  But the
other thing is, sure, I'm still fascinated by exotic things. I suppose I
always will be.  And very often, if you want some kind of direct
contact with exotic things, you find yourself in a dangerous situation,
almost by definition. If there isn't some barrier between you and the
exotic, then usually it's not exotic. And what creates this barrier has
to be either danger or difficulty. When I have time and I'm feeling like
a coward I take the difficult things; when I need to get things done
quicker, I do the dangerous things.