Permanent Exhibit

by Matthew Vollmer

Overview

Matthew Volmer fuses the insight of extended meditation with the immediacy of social media in his new collection Permanent Exhibit. These collage-style essays experiment with stream-of-conscious musings as Vollmer opens a browser window into his own mind: letting his thoughts wander through a fast-forward montage of flying snakes, mass shootings, emojis, pop stars, stargazing, ghosts, circuses, and a hundred other things. Full of keen observations and unexpected insights, Permanent Exhibit reclaims the art of letting one’s mind wander in the age of the status update.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683681
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	09/11/2018
Series:	American Reader , #31
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 5.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Matthew Vollmer was born in Asheville, North Carolina and grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina. A graduate of the Universityof North Carolina, he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the Universityof Iowa. He is the author of two collections of short fiction—Gateway to Paradise (Persea, 2015) and Future Missionaries of America (MacAdam/Cage, 2009; Salt Publishing, 2010)—as well as a collection of essays: inscriptions for headstones (Outpost19, 2012). His work has appeared in Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Ecotone, New England Review, The Sun, Best American Essays, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. With David Shields, he co-edited FAKES: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (W. W. Norton, 2012), and he served as editor for The Book of Uncommon Prayer, an anthology of everyday invocations featuring the work of over 60 writers. A winner of a 2010 NEA grant for literature, he teaches in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where he is an Associate Professor, and lives in Blacksburg with his wife and son.

Read an Excerpt

HATCHLING

Today, I watched a video of a black man who had been shot by a white police officer with the volume down because I didn’t want my son to see the black man’s blood-soaked shirt. I didn’t want to see it, either, but I kept watching. I didn’t turn the volume up when my son left the room, and I didn’t listen to a press conference given by the mother of another black man who had been shot dead by a white policeman. I didn’t read any comments. I wondered if words could change any mind that wasn’t already disposed to changing, and remembered that Lao Tzu had once written, “Those who are stiff and rigid are the disciples of death. Those who are soft and yielding are the disciples of life.” I picked up my phone, checked Instagram. I added words to a manuscript and wondered why anyone in their right mind—or wrong—would ever read it. I went upstairs to get a power strip and came back downstairs with something else, went back upstairs and then down again empty-handed, and imagined a future where I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I remembered to put ointment on the bumps on my arms caused by a mild skin condition I am just vain enough to halfheartedly manage. I read something about a presidential candidate who, according to an “insider,” never wanted to be president, but wanted to finish at a solid second place, so as to increase his popularity. I thought about this guy who lives in my neighborhood, a retired financial analyst who challenged me to find anything about him at all on the Internet because it just isn’t there, and who claims that there’s an impending economic collapse because banks are playing with pretend money and soon the billionaires will be buying up land like crazy and jacking up the prices, which means that nonbillionaires need to band together and buy land so that when the meltdown comes they can manage local foods/agriculture. I looked out my kitchen window at my neighbor’s lush garden, for which she won’t accept compliments, due to the amount of weeds she’s neglected to pull, and acknowledged to myself how it’s been so long since I’ve grown anything, and how there are zucchinis from that neighbor’s garden in my fridge, and how they’ll probably go bad because honestly I can’t say that I’m that big a fan of squash no matter how roasted and/or cheese-coated. Then, when my wife finished a string of texts by sending me, inexplicably, a chicken emoji, I did the only thing I could do: I filled up the whole text box with a square halo of rooster heads orbiting a line of baby chicks with their wings out, sitting in the bottom halves of their broken, just-hatched eggs.

Table of Contents

Status Update
Hatchling
Last Blood
Robocall
Can’t Feel My Face
33rd Balloon
Fool’s Gold
Top Secret
Holy Hours
Bring Me the Head of Geraldo Rivera
Well of Souls
Out of Lives
Land of Enchantment
Note for the Annual Report
Signs of the Times
Stay Woke
Trick-or-Treat
Night Thoughts
Hands Up
Sinkhole
Spoiler Alert
Observatorium
Precious Metals
Permanent Exhibit
Treasure Box
Blood Soup
Stormbox
Gong Bang Cleanse
Brain Bank
Game Day
Eye of the Storm
Source Material
Cult Hymn
The Subordinate Fragment
We All Go into the Dark
Black Magic
Inferno
Fat Kid
Heron
The New You
Liftoff

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Captivating journeys with a playful, winsome guide." —Kirkus Reviews

“Who else but Matthew Vollmer would travel in status faux-updates from Justin Bieber to embalming fluids, from a presidential execution order to an Amazon order for cutlery? A thrilling, hilarious book about the difference between privacy and publicity, between exhibition and excavation, between ephemera and art (hint: the saving grace of life on earth is human consciousness).” —David Shields

Editorial Reviews

"Captivating journeys with a playful, winsome guide." —Kirkus Reviews

“Who else but Matthew Vollmer would travel in status faux-updates from Justin Bieber to embalming fluids, from a presidential execution order to an Amazon order for cutlery? A thrilling, hilarious book about the difference between privacy and publicity, between exhibition and excavation, between ephemera and art (hint: the saving grace of life on earth is human consciousness).” —David Shields

“Becoming conscious of the process by which we are produced may be the only available step to enabling our status as players rather than simply played, though it is no exit from the game itself. And that, to me, is what makes Matthew Vollmer’s fiction compelling at a much deeper level than the play of wit, sensibility, and intelligence in his craft.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“Irresistible” —The New York Times

"Vollmer's writing is my new favorite example of what it must be like to see a life flash before your eyes." —Fiction Advocate

From the Publisher

2018-06-18
Endearingly tender essays reveal the quirky flights of a curious mind.Fatherhood, anxiety, the delights of playing video games, and transient moments of epiphany emerge as themes in these brief essays by Vollmer (English/Virginia Tech; Gateway to Paradise: Stories, 2015, etc.). His musings on nature recall the sensibility of poet Mary Oliver; his reflections on family, David Sedaris. Unexpected juxtapositions yield pleasurable surprises. In "Sinkhole," for example, he recounts beginning his day checking his phone for news and noticing a video on how to prepare a one-pot spaghetti meal, which leads him to ruminate about red meat and heart attacks, crashing while biking, a fond recollection of a certain yellow lab that lived for years after being diagnosed with a deadly illness, playing the video game "No Man's Sky," in which he happily explores a virtual planet, and his overwhelming feeling of "gratefulness for being alive…causing me to acknowledge that I've done nothing to earn a life as good as the one I have." The author's happiness, though, is tinged with anxiety, as if "there must be something lying in wait, just beyond the reaches of what I can perceive." In "Stormbox," he confesses that faced with thunder, lightning, or existential turbulence, "the need for human contact" impels him to wrap his arm around his son's chest, reassured by the "rhythmic and steady beat" of the boy's heart. Keenly attentive to the landscape through which he bikes and walks his dog, Vollmer notes a spider's web glistening like "a net upon which droplets of dew had been strewn like jewels"; a dry creek bed, "its boulders chalky with dust"; and the sun rising above "a field of wheatlike grass and pale blue mountains [that] resemble frozen blue waves." Theosophy, YouTube videos, the ambitions of Elon Musk, the strange emergence of menacing clowns in a South Carolina town, politics, his students, and various family members all pop up in fresh and surprising ruminations.Captivating journeys with a playful, winsome guide.

Kirkus Reviews