A Snippet

Tue, Dec 7, 2004

“People who sing create the thing that causes cowardice. And when a person spends his time in singing he loses his time.” (qtd. in William Vollmann’s “Across the Divide: What do the Afghan people think of the Taliban?” New Yorker, 5/15/2000).

I should also note that Vollmann, in his preface to Rising Up and Rising Down notes that he wrote a commissioned piece for the New Yorker datelined 9/11/02 from Yemen which “was turned down for not being political enough.”