Román Leão

Author: Román Leão

  • A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never Do Again—David Foster Wallace

    While some authors make you feel stupid for even trying to read them, I’m looking at you, James Joyce, others seem to immediately give the ol’ noggin a boost. While working through this collection of “essays and arguments” by the late David Foster Wallace—sometimes referred to as our generation’s Joyce for his long and obtuse novel Infinite Jest—I made a list of 20 words I had been lamentably unaware of, as well as two that, apparently, he made up: ablated, anaclitic, appurtenance, belletristic, commissure, decoct, enfilade, erumpent, espial, exergue, frottage, hieratic, lalations, otiose, preterite, sedulous, threnody, titivation, ventricose, weltschmerz

    Of those 20 words, I have to say that the most amusing discovery for me was frottage, which I’m sure that some of you already know means, “the act of obtaining sexual stimulation by rubbing against a person or object.” I’m not here to judge; I’m just sayin’. Erumpent is also pretty fun to say, and could actually be onomatopoetic if you were to listen very, very closely.

    As for the two Wallacisms that don’t seem to exist in the English language, some DFW obsessives have pointed out that katexic could be derived from Freud’s katexis referring to “the process by means of which libido energy is tied or placed into the mental representation of a personality, idea, or thing.” In this respect, Wallace’s writing in toto could be viewed as katexic. The energy that must have gone into building such a vocabulary and the means to swing it around as effectively as he did—the creation and subsequent projection of “David Foster Wallace” as a literary force—could easily be imagined as a gloriously sublimated primal urge.

    Plumeocide is another matter. Wordnik member vbogard22 has postulated that “plumeo- could come from the Latin pluma, which means feather or pen [when] added to -cide (Latin, kill) would come to mean something along the lines of ‘death of the pen.’”

    Given Wallace’s tragic end by his own hand, the fact that he may have coined a word for the silencing of a writer is a bit prescient, although I am buoyed by the acknowledgment that the only way to get a writer to shut the hell up is by resorting to plumeocide.

    I was also beguiled, beleaguered, and besotted by Wallace’s use of language, often all at the same time. In much the same way that Wallace thought he was a decent tennis player until he got the opportunity to view the pros in action, I thought that I could, on occasion, craft a clever line. Now I’m reminded that there are players out there operating on a whole different plane.

    I almost forgot to mention that the book is really funny. Cheers to you, DFW, wherever you are.

    Now, about that Goddamned Jest…

    Back Bay Books

  • These Children Who Come at You with Knives, and Other Fairy Tales: Stories—Jim Knipfel

    Everything you need to know about Jim Knipfel is right there on the last page of his latest book: “Jim Knipfel lives in Brooklyn, where he is not welcome in family-friendly establishments.” Knipfel’s collection of short stories, These Children Who Come at You With Knives, goes a long way toward explaining why.

    For a child of the ’70s who grew up on the Twisted Fairy Tales that were the highlight of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, this compendium of cracked morality tales reads like a lost season had the cartoon been moved to late night cable and been written by Rod Serling, Jim Thompson, and Hubert Selby, Jr.

    Although there isn’t any redemption to be found in these fairy tales, those looking for nuggets of good advice could easily mine this book for gold: 


    1. Don’t trust princesses.

    2. Don’t piss off a gnome.

    3. Plants ain’t no good. (As we learn in the cleverly titled, Plants Ain’t No Good.)

    4. Don’t let talking horses buy firearms (or frequent hookers).

    5. No, seriously, don’t piss off a gnome.

    Simon & Schuster

    Also by this author:
    The Buzzing

  • Pendulum Flashing [poema]

    You and I
    Wander Telegraph
    Looking for frankincense
    And myth
    While the homeless man six doors
    Down
    Shakes a cup of coins
    (silver against tin)
    To the secret pulse
    (the jingle of bells)
    Six doors down
    (the taste of copper)
    In the focused heat of autumn
    We both know
    A sudden change of direction
    Leaves ripples in the air
    As thick as ropes
    And just as binding

  • (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions—Steve Almond


    I picked up this collection of essays from Boston writer (and Bay Area native) Steve Almond on a total whim and found it to be one of the explosively funny books I’ve read since Ozzy’s autobiography. Almond is just nuts—and honest to a fault—which may or may not be a product of his insanity.

    Not that You Asked is organized thematically with the chapter entitled About My Sexual Failure (Not that You Asked) being the most cringe-worthy of the bunch. In the extended piece Shame On Me (Why My Adolescence Sucked Donkey Cock), we are regaled with tales of his late-blooming sexuality via the water jets in the Almond family hot tub; hand jobs con sharp, inexperienced, fingernails; the family dog’s rooting out of a used condom from the trash and subsequent tug-of-war with Almond’s mother leading to predictable, but no less horrifying results; and getting publicly busted for shoplifting condoms and Sta-Hard gel from Longs Drugs.

    Chestfro Agoniste and My First Fake Tits reveal waxing and breast implants to both be somewhat less wonderful than advertised, the former resulting in this conversation painfully recounted by Almond. “Me: Ow! Please. Please, don’t—Fuck! Her: It’s almost out. Me: You have to do it faster, really—No! Ow! Fuck! Please move to another—that part really—Owwww! Her: Stop being a baby. Me: Please, sweetie. Please, I’m not joking. Her: Lie still. Just fucking lie still and let me— Me: Owwwww! You fucking bitch! You mean fucking bitch!”

    For every writer who has attempted to wince his or her way through a sex scene, Almond offers a 12-step program that lays out some pretty good (and common sense) advice, such as, Step 5 (Real people do not talk in porn clichés): “Most of the time, real people say all kinds of weird, funny things during sex, such as ‘I think I’m losing circulation,’ and ‘I’ve got a cramp in my foot,’ and ‘Oh, sorry!’”

    Given my utter lack of interest in the sport of baseball, it took me awhile to battle my way through one of the longer essays in the collection, Red Sox Anti-Christ, which ended up having some interesting and insightful things to say about sport and its place in a war-loving society such as our own. He equates the coverage of the kick off to the invasion of Iraq with a major sporting event. “Nightly highlight reels charted the day’s major offensive drives. Correspondents offered sand swept on-the-field interviews with our burly combatants, while generals served up bromides fit for a head coach.”

    Almond goes further and takes part of the blame for the unnecessary war onto his own shoulders. “As a fan, I had helped foster a culture governed by the sports mentality, in which winning mattered above all else, and the application of violence was seen as a necessary means to that end rather than a betrayal of our democratic standards.”

    In a chapter entitled In Tribute to My Republican Homeys, Almond turns on the vitriol. Demagogue Days, Or How the Right-Wing Hateocracy Chewed Me Up and Spat Me Out spins the story of how Almond, an adjunct professor at Boston College at the time, resigns over the school’s invitation of Condoleezza Rice to give the commencement speech. Almond uses the format of Dante’s descent into hell to map out all of the insidious devils of punditry that all wanted a piece of him for a brief, terrifying moment.

    With the ability to ride out ridiculous situations with the artistry of a Mavericks surfer (see How Reality TV Ate My Life), one starts to wonder just what would really get to Almond, what would crack his smooth, white chocolate exterior and let the creamy nougat pour forth?

    That force majeure comes in the form of a baby girl, the arrival of whom is hilariously recounted in 10 Ways I Killed My Infant Daughter in Her First 72 Hours of Life. It is this window into the hopes and fears that people have shared from time immemorial, that saves Not That You Asked from being simple a collection of ravings from another smart ass cynic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

    Random House

    Also by this author:
    Which Brings Me to You

  • The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America—Don Lattin

    While undertaking a course on the psychology of religious conversion at the Graduate Theological Union, Bay Area religion writer Don Lattin cast back in his memory for his own “personal conversion narrative.” Like many of his generation, Lattin had experimented with psychedelics with—in retrospect, predictably—polarized results. What this reflection led Lattin to consider was that his encounters with LSD, both good and bad, were the beginning of a long process of spiritual awakening. A process closer, perhaps, to the journey of Huston Smith (who Lattin personifies as The Teacher), than the more convoluted roads that Timothy Leary (The Trickster), Ram Dass né Richard Alpert (The Seeker), and Andrew Weil (The Healer) traveled.

    Originally called in to help Smith finish his biography, Tales of Wonder, Lattin was approached to tell this story, a fascinating tale of an incredible time in human history. The editors at HarperOne realized they had inadvertently found just the right guy to do it justice. With a subtitle of How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil killed the fifties and ushered in a new age for America, the uninitiated may have the impression that the four men worked in consort toward that goal, however, the interesting push and pull of these four strong and very distinct personalities is what gives this story its legs.

    Weil’s betrayal of Leary and Alpert that resulted in their expulsion from Harvard was the most shocking revelation of the early years of the quartet’s transformation. It is surprising, even with the hindsight that the two men had to leave the confines of the institution—one way or another—to become what they ultimately became, that an enlightened person like Ram Dass could not forgive the young Weil, a man that arguably no longer exists.

    The Harvard Psychedelic Club is a fast-paced read, with faces both famous and infamous popping up throughout the entire ride. The men independently show up with almost Zelig regularity at every important moment that collectively led to a shattering of the calcified paradigm of post-war American culture.

    While Weil was busy becoming the guru of the organic health movement, and Leary was spending a good deal of time and effort staying one step ahead of the law, Smith and Dass explored the Far East, found affirmation and enlightenment in India and Japan, and ultimately brought those lessons and attitudes back to a United States hungry for deeper meaning.

    It is these spiritual ramifications of the psychedelic experience that Lattin considers important, and, like many at the time, he discounts Leary’s messianic tendencies as being antithetical to the possibility of positive change through inner exploration. Leary’s surviving cohorts seem to hold him responsible for the unfortunate cessation of serious scientific research into the use of these drugs at the same time they realize that, as an archetypal “trickster,” he was playing as inevitable a part in the passion play as they had been.

    Lattin sums up the quartet’s tumultuous history in his conclusion as such: “All four of these characters played a role in the social and spiritual changes that made the sixties such a pivotal decade in recent American history. They stirred up the water and then rode a wave of social change. The difference is that Timothy Leary never found… the stability needed to bring those changes into his life in a positive, long-lasting way. Instead of finding an anchor, Leary tried to walk on the water.”

    He then addresses a generation that, for a large part, has turned its back on the lessons learned in the era of questioning “the materialist, consumerist mind-set into which we were raised.” Lattin points out that, “Now more than ever, we need to remember the lessons of that idealistic era. It’s time, once again, to find new ways to live together with equality, justice, and compassion.” Amen, brother.

    HarperOne

  • Failure to Appear [poema]

    Wednesday, the Sun forgot to come out
    As two million acres goes up in flames
    Smoke scatters the wavelengths of blue light

    From Plumas and Butte, suspended in the fog
    The ghosts of Berry Creek and Feather Falls
    Hang foreboding in a persimmon-colored sky

  • The Romantic Dogs—Roberto Bolaño

    By the time an English translation of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives was finally released in 2007, he had already passed like a glowing comet, having succumbed to a failing liver in 2003. Bolaño’s novel followed every drunken debauch and whim of a group of young Mexico City poets calling themselves visceral realists, but while the prose was beautifully crafted, the book was starkly short on actual poems.

    His biographers make a point of saying that Bolaño’s first love was poetry. Supposedly he only turned to writing novels at the age of 40 after the birth of his son forced him to give up a more bohemian lifestyle. This collection spans his career from 1980 through 1998, the year The Savage Detectives was first published.

    There are many allusions to the novel and, as in much of his work, some of the same territories are traveled, making this a good companion piece to the novel, or visa versa. Several poems deal with the enigmatic figure of a detective, questioning but never solving the seemingly random and unending violence of South America.

    I dreamt of frozen detectives; Latin American detectives who were trying to keep their eyes open in the middle of the dream. I dreamt of hideous crimes and of careful guys who were wary not to step in pools of blood while taking in the crime scene with a single sweeping glance.

    His fascination with forensics would find full flower in 2666, by many accounts, his crowning achievement. At nearly 900 pages, the book is a mammoth project that Bolaño struggled to finish before he died. It is rumored that he even went as far as to postpone a much-needed liver transplant so as to not break stride on his defining work. This struggle is reflected in one of the most moving poems near the end of The Romantic Dogs.

    Muse, wherever you might go I go. I follow your radiant trail across the long night. Not caring about years or sickness. Not caring about the pain or the effort I must make to follow you.

    New Directions

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Return
    Savage Detectives: A Novel

  • History Lesson [poema]

    In this narrow valley
    We are surrounded
    Smokestacks stand like Indians
    An assembly of whisperers
    Their stories stated and immediately stolen 
    Taken by the relentless wind

    Through the heart of it
    The lifeblood of the land
    Runs out westward to mingle
    Once again with Mother Ocean
    To be subsumed
    To be welcomed home

    Across the straits
    The hills stand silent much as they did
    One hundred years ago
    A thousand?
    Twenty thousand?
    Surely not a million

    On these shores
    The shell mounds of the Karkin are lost
    Covered by condominiums, the latest in a parade of indignities
    From here you could walk out on the water a fair distance
    Keeping those hills in sight, but I wouldn’t
    At least not barefoot

    Was it always like this?
    Do we stand on the mired remains
    Of gentle granite giants
    Washed down from the interior
    Or are we merely caught in an eddy
    Of slack tide and time?

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • Heebie Jeebies [haicai]

    I don’t hear voices
    But sometimes when it’s quiet
    I hear faint swing jazz

    A radio plays
    Benny Goodman and Chick Webb
    In another room

    A haunting refrain
    A particular madness
    I don’t hear voices

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel—Michael Chabon

    I always feel a little sad upon finishing one of Michael Chabon’s novels. The Berkeley author weaves such wonderfully detailed tapestries of language and imagery that a feeling of loss is inevitable once the Big Finish has come and gone.

    That same feeling pervades The Yiddish Policemen’s Union from the jump as the world the characters have inhabited for 60 years is about to be flung on the trash heap of history. The alternative-history conceit is as follows: after the horror of World War II, and a collapse of the stillborn State of Israel, Jewish refugees were settled in an American Federal District hastily carved out of the Alaskan wilderness—and now the lease is up.

    As alcoholic policeman Meyer Landsman begins the search for who may have killed a fellow tenant of his own down-at-the-heels hotel, he heads toward the basement and this throw-away bit of narration: “[Landsman] checks behind the hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with scraps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.” The metaphor could be stretched to represent Landsman himself and his ex-wife/new-supervisor Bina Gelbfish who has been sent to tidy up all the loose ends at Sitka Central, and Landman’s investigation is one big throbbing nerve of a loose end.

    Drowning in the machinations of the District’s Hasidic mafia and a cold ocean of slivovitz, Landsman is haunted by a complex chess problem left by the dead tenant. Is it a clue? Is it just a reflection of his own hang-up caused by his chess champion father’s disappointment in him and resultant suicide? Chabon has explored these themes before. He revels in the arcane details of modern Judaica, and I was waiting past the 200-page mark for his patented Big Gay Character to show (he does, although posthumously).

    As Chabon has repeatedly shown—in his on-going bid to become a one-man Coen Brothers of the literary world, chewing up and spitting out genre after genre—it’s not the materials, plot points, or archetypes you start with, it’s how you play the familiar pieces that wins the game.

    Harper Perennial

    Also by this author:
    Gentleman of the Road: A Tale of Adventure